Glare – 3.3

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“You want a game plan?” Tristan said.  “Do you mean for here or for the big picture?”

I was thinking big picture, I thought, I have doubts right now and a plan would help.

Without voicing that, I said, “Here, but I’m open to hearing about either.  If you have something in mind.”

“I want to wait on the big picture stuff so we can include Rain into the discussion.  He and I chat regularly, and he’s heard some, but Ashley and I were talking while we waited for you and there’s bits to discuss.  Comfort levels.”

“Okay,” I said.  “We’ll focus on this for now.”

“I’m in charge, then?” Tristan asked.

“If Sveta is okay with it, you can give it a shot.”

“I’m okay with it,” Sveta said.

He made a small amused sound, his face obscured by his helmet, his hands busy adjusting the fit of his armor as he paced.  “There was a time I thought I might end up being in charge of Reach.  Things fell through before then.  I don’t know if my current mindset works for it, but let’s give this a try.”

I had my own bag, which I’d brought with me.  My computer, masks, and the flags, one red and one blue.  I fished out the flags, holding both in one hand, and put on one of the masks.

“Victoria, you and I are on defense, then,” he said.  “Ashley is going to go hard offense, that’s who she is, and I don’t see Chris holding back.  Sveta, you’re going on the attack.  You loop around, go the long way if you have to.  You might have to dodge Kenzie, but I think you can manage that okay.  It’s only her hook thing and flash gun.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Sveta said.

“Alright,” I said.

“I think the benefit here is that we all have some experience,” he said.

“Kind of,” Sveta said.

“They’re young.  Ashley too, in a weird way.  They’re led by Ashley and we know how she thinks.  I can put my confidence in you, Sveta, if you’re going for their flag.”

“I hope I deserve it.”

“I’m confident in myself and my ability to hold up against a two-person rush, assuming that’s what they do, and I know you’ve got a background, Victoria.”

“Yeah.  Confidence goes before the fall, though.  I think one of the things I regret most in the past is my overconfidence.”

“This is just an exercise.  If I’m wrong on this, I’ll own it.  Let me plant our flag and get my stuff to adjust my armor, I’ll be right with you.”

As he said it, another wall materialized behind us.  A fort with ten foot walls was slowly forming.  Tristan wasn’t even focusing that much on the construction, attention-wise.  He took the flag before walking off.

I had intentionally chosen a less level area.  We were on a hill, playing on a bit of a slope, roughly a ten degree decline with taller grass, weeds, and some pebbly dirt covering the area.  Some trees and rocks dotted the space between where their group would set up and where we would.

I had a few reasons for choosing the area.  Part of it played off something I had experienced with New Wave.  The team had always been split between the fliers and the people on the ground.  Me, Aunt Sarah, Crystal and Eric had all been airborne, while my Uncle Neil, Mom, and Dad had all been landbound.  It created a dilemma in logistics, and this slightly sloped ground and uneven terrain emphasized that logistics in a way that having to go through and around buildings might in the city.

Sveta functionally had a mover ability, I wasn’t sure about Chris’ capabilities, and Damsel and Rain both had some capabilities in that realm.  Supposedly.  I wanted to see how the more mobile members of the group worked in coordination with the others.

It was interesting that Tristan had picked both Sveta and me.  We were both mobile and Tristan wasn’t.  Ashley’s team had three people on foot.

Another reason for this particular location was Rain’s power.  It helped him keep his balance, and that was supposedly the extent of it.  When he arrived, I wanted to see if it factored in here.

Finally, there was the fact that it put us out of the way.  No bystanders, no property to damage.

Kenzie had her head down, her attention on her phone.  Ashley and Chris were both smiling.  All three were talking.  I waited a short bit for them to finish.

“I’m so unbelievably nervous,” Sveta said.

I glanced at her, and confirmed that Tristan had stepped away, rummaging in his bag.  He was out of earshot.

“I definitely hear you on that,” I said.

“I really want this exercise to work somehow, like Tristan said, but for different reasons.  The way you were brought in, you might have come in looking for the bad, and it’s… it’s not all bad.  Really.  I always wanted a team and the idea of finding one and fitting myself to that team with all of my problems, it seemed impossible or far away.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “You talked about it in the hospital.  That you’d talked to Mrs. Yamada and other people about how, putting aside all your issues, you wanted to be a hero.”

“And I wanted a boyfriend, and I wanted to be functional again, and I wanted friends,” she said, staring off at the other three.  “And I have almost all of it, but I feel like it could slip out of my grasp if things go wrong.  If this goes wrong.  I don’t know what I can do if that happens.  I’m worried this is going to be a disaster, and that’s making me so anxious.”

“What can I do?” I asked.  “I don’t want you to be unhappy.”

“Like I said before, I really want you to believe in us here.  I want you to give us a chance.  Even if this is bad to start.”

“Okay,” I said.

“And- I’m sorry if this is pushing a line or if you have reasons, but don’t be so stiff?”

She sounded so uncertain as she said it.  I drew in a deep breath and smiled at her.

“I’m the one with a prosthetic body.  We’re friends, right?”  She smiled, uncertain, and I smiled at her.  “So I don’t want you tense around me.”

“I’m nervous in my own way, and I think that’s how it shows,” I said.  “It’s not you.  Can I give you a bit of a hug, here, emotional support?”

“Please.”

I put one arm around her shoulders and squeezed.  Sveta moved her head in my direction, I moved mine in her direction, knocking heads with her a bit.

Off in the distance, even though she was more than a hundred feet away, I could hear Kenzie cooing and ‘aww’ing over the hug, as she looked at us.

“What did I miss?” Tristan asked.

“I’m anxious,” Sveta said.

“Me too,” Tristan said.  “Your control gets bad when you’re nervous, right?  You have more reflexive movements?”

“It gets so fucking shitty,” Sveta said.  “I’m sorry.  I’m worried I’ll be terrible because I’m all over the place inside here.  I don’t know if you can hear it, but I keep fumbling because I’ll reflexively reach out to grab something off in the distance and hit the wall of the suit instead, and then I have to reach for the right control ring again.”

“Do the best you can,” Tristan said.

“This isn’t about grading you as an individual,” I said.

“It’s about the team,” Sveta said.  “I don’t want to let the team down.  Can we start?  I’ll get more nervous if we wait.”

“Sure,” I said.

The other three weren’t wrapped up in their discussion anymore.  I called out, “You guys want your flag?”

“Here,” Sveta said.  She held out her hand.  I passed her the blue flag.

She passed it to the others, hand and forearm gripping the flag, tendrils pushing the hand and forearm.  She stopped short, relying on only the momentum so it only punched Chris lightly in the man-boob.  He caught her hand and arm in one large hand, plucking the flag free before releasing her hand.  He smiled as he held it up, then he reached low to hand it to Kenzie.  The two of them went to plant it, with Chris picking up a fallen tree on the way.

It seemed Chris and Kenzie got along better like this.

Ashley didn’t join them.  Instead, she started walking toward us, picking her way through weeds and grass.  She still had a partial smile on her face from before.

I flew to meet her partway.

“Ground rules?” she asked, when I was closer.

“Place your flag.  You grab ours and bring it to yours, or vice-versa.  Whoever has both flags at their starting point wins.  Try to avoid hurting the trees.  No personal injuries that aren’t going to heal in a day.  Bruises and scrapes are inevitable, but let’s avoid them if we can.”

“Understood.”  She turned to walk away, one hand raised to give me an over-the-shoulder salute as she did.

Tristan began altering the battlefield behind her, drawing out fifty little sparks to move along the surface of our side of the hill.

The other team was just on the other side of a trio of trees.  The nervousness we all felt was apparent as Kenzie’s cube lit up, making a deep beep sound.

All three faces of the cube that I could see had lit up.  Numbers were apparent.  ’10’…  ‘9’…  ‘8’…

“It’s worth remembering that she can remotely control the cube,” Tristan said.  “Hm.”

“Just the flashlight gun and the eyehook, right?” Sveta asked, giving Tristan a look.

Tristan moved his hand, and finalized his alteration to the slope between our fort and the halfway point of the battlefield.  Uneven ground, raised segments and lowered ones.  Most of it was flat, the spikes sticking out of the sides or toward the ground at an angle.  The material was solid, white with orange-red in the crevices, running through it like ore in rock.

The timer continued.  ‘3’…  ‘2’…  ‘1’…  ‘Go’.

They came out of the trees.  As Tristan had suggested, Ashley’s plan was to go on the attack.

All three of them.  Kenzie had changed, overalls gone, replaced with a skintight suit that mirrored her outfit in color and where it changed from black to pink to red.  Chris had his head turned, and he was using one hand to cram the last few feet of the dead tree into his mouth.

Ashley was on foot.  White eyes were wide open behind her mask, the pupils not visible from this distance.

“This is fine.  Same plan,” Tristan said, not sounding bothered in the least.

Two versus three, while Sveta grabs their flag.

Sveta reached for a tree and found her grip, hauling herself away.

Tristan began creating barricades and obstructions, aimed at being knee-height, to slow them down.

Ashley hurdled the first two.  Chris trampled his way through the three that had been put in his way.

Kenzie turned, aimed, and fired her flash gun in Sveta’s direction.  She missed, aimed again, and fired.  The second shot caught Sveta in its area.

“You take Chris and Kenzie, I’ll work on Ashley,” Tristan said.  He sounded confident.  “Keep an eye on Kenzie, make sure she doesn’t fall.”

I flew to intercept.  Chris had one hand full with the tree, mouth distended with a fat tongue sticking out, apparently to keep the tree from rubbing against his lower row of teeth; his hand served to protect the other teeth.

I was put in mind of the man I’d seen during the broken trigger, who’d had a tree come out the other direction.

Chris laughed, deep and booming, tree digested.  He lowered his chin, mouth closed, hands and arms up to protect his face and guard Kenzie.

I could deal with big and strong.  I flew closer- saw Kenzie turn, aiming her gun at me, and changed course, covering my face and head, my forcefield up.

Even turned partially away, my arms up, the momentary flash of light blinded me.  A full second passed, and my sight didn’t return.  I could hear Chris’ laugh, Kenzie’s amusement.  My forcefield hadn’t helped.

I felt the forcefield meet resistance, and I forced it to shut off before Chris’ hand could close around me.  I pushed out with my aura to try to throw him off balance and buy myself a second, and changed course.  I felt his fingers graze my back, dragging against cloth and not finding enough slack to get a grip.

Blindness was disorienting.  Blindness when flying made it hard to tell which way was up and which way was down, and I knew it would get worse before it got better.

I flew away and at the ground, forcefield up, and landed hard.  I felt Tristan’s creation shatter under and around me as my power absorbed the hit, fragments bouncing off of me, dust collecting on me.

“Are you okay!?” I heard Kenzie call out.

“I’m fine!” I replied.

“Don’t give away your position if you’ve blinded them!” I heard Ashley.

I heard a noise, and at first I thought it was Chris dismantling the fort.  It sounded like someone was tearing the world’s largest sheet of paper, nails on a blackboard, an alien’s scream from a science fiction movie that echoed far more than it should, a sharp explosion, and any number of other things, all overlapping and working against one another.

I opened my eyes and tried to make out the surroundings despite the spots of light that were exploding against the backs of my eyeballs.

Chris was large enough for me to make out his general shape.  I could make out Ashley and Tristan’s positions, but the only reason I could distinguish the two was because Ashley dressed in black and Tristan had more color to his costume.

Right.  I had a few tricks up my sleeve I’d been considering.  This was an opportunity to try one.

I took off, and I activated my forcefield momentarily as I did it, pushing out at the cracked chunks of stonelike ground, sending pieces rolling and sliding in the wake of my takeoff.  I needed their attention.  I saw Chris slow momentarily, mid-stride as he walked toward the fort.

I didn’t fly straight for them, but around, circling closer to the fort.  I paused, giving them time to see me, and then flew straight for Chris’ face, full speed.

I stopped only a few feet short, hitting him with my aura instead of my fist.  Full-strength, point-blank, a hit to the emotional rather than the physical.

The reaction was much the same as if I’d punched him.  Forward movement stopped, reversed, an off-balance stumble backward.

“Holy fuck,” I could hear Tristan.

I heard Damsel’s response, but I had other focuses than making out the words.  It might have been ‘pay attention to your opponent’ or ‘pay attention to who you’re fighting’.

I was busy flying around Chris, one hand extended so it maintained contact with him, let me gently push him, all while helping me to navigate while still partially blind.  Before he fully had his balance, I caught him by the shoulders and pulled him back and down toward the ground.

He walked backward rather than topple, helped by the fact that his head was small, his shoulders and neck narrow relative to his lower body.  It was part of why his center of balance was low to the ground, with his weight gathered around gut, butt, and legs.

Kenzie’s pincer-claw grabbed for my arm, then pulled my arm away from Chris.  I let it, grabbing the prehensile length of it between Kenzie and me.   Not a huge factor.  One hand still on Chris’ shoulder, I activated my forcefield, using the added strength to pull at Chris.  He continued his backward walk until he stumbled into one of Tristan’s sections of raised ground.

He toppled, and I shifted my position to guide his fall for the first half of the way.  The focus on the latter half of the way was letting my forcefield down and catching Kenzie.

Chris fell flat on his back.  Kenzie wriggled momentarily, and I deposited her on Chris’ chest, to make getting to his feet just a little bit harder.  The claw slipped free of my arm.

My vision was clearing enough for me to see vague expressions, without precise detail.  Chris was grinning, shaking with a laugh or chuckle.

“Come on, get up, get up!” Kenzie goaded him.

“Get off me then!” Chris boomed.

Orange motes were starting to surround them.

“Victoria!” Tristan called out.  “Switch with me!”

The words were barely out of his mouth when Ashley used her power again.  It was noisy to the point I worried my ears would be ringing an hour after this exercise.    I could see it as a visible blur of shadow aimed behind her and toward the ground.  She used the recoil to launch herself off to one side, to help her get around and past Tristan.  More orange motes appeared in the direction she was going.

She used her power again, changing course to fly straight for Tristan.  She planted one foot on his shoulder, stepped down so her back grazed against his, her long hair draping over his head and shoulders, aimed forward with both hands, and used her power a third time just as she touched ground, her back to his.

A power-augmented body-check.  The recoil of her power pushed her in the opposite direction she fired, but because she was in contact with Tristan, she pushed him too.  She stumbled, but he sprawled to the ground, his armor striking the hard platform he’d created on the slope, metal screeching and clashing against stone.

The orange motes that had started to appear around Chris and Kenzie came to life around them, an especially spiky, irregular outcropping with a thin ridge extending out to the growth he’d been making in front of Ashley’s original course, which became its own vaguely pineapple-shaped formation.

He’d wanted me to deal with Ashley.  Okay.  She was rolling her shoulders, rubbing at one, while she stalked toward the fort.

I could see better, so I could possibly pull this technique off better.  I flew at her, and she barely seemed to pay me any mind.

My feet touched ground, helping to stop me as I reversed my direction of flight to cancel out my forward movement.  I’d wanted to avoid all physical contact, but I did bump my shoulder into hers as I went from flying at near-top speed to a full stop, my face a couple of inches from hers, well inside her personal space.

As with Chris, I used my emotion aura.

As had been the case with Chris, the effect was immediate and profound.  She stumbled back much as if I’d flown into her and given her a strong shove, her eyes wide.

I’d barely found my own footing when she found hers.  Another blast, jarring for my ears.  My vision was already suffering, and it was made worse by the plume of dust and debris around and to one side of her.  She used the blast and a push of her legs to throw herself at the wall.

The moment she made contact with it, she used her power again, flinging herself out into empty space, hair and dress fluttering.

My first instinct was that she was going to have a rough landing, that I might need to catch her.  Before I’d even figured out how I might do it, she used her power once more.  She was aiming up at an angle, so that meant she was pushed down by the recoil.

It wasn’t a mere drop-kick or a fall, but a spearing plunge.  I did much as she’d done, pushing out with my legs in conjunction with a use of my power, my flight, to get out of her way.

With the speed and general profile of a pickaxe head driven into the ground, she landed on hard ground, in the same spot I’d been standing.  There was a second where she stood there, hair draping down, hands out at her sides with fingers splayed, and then one of her legs wobbled and she dropped to one knee.

“Are you-” I started.  I thought I saw her move and paused.  “Are you okay?  That landing looks like it hurt.”

She raised her face and looked up at me.  White eyes behind a black mask, behind white hair.

She used her power again.  Cords, columns, and shaped explosions of lensing, bending, and darkening within the roughly cone-shaped area, over the one or two seconds that she was creating each blast.  She didn’t even rise from her kneeling position.  She threw herself at me, and this time she caught me entirely off guard.  Her knees hit my shoulders, at least one of her arms caught me around the head, the fabric of her dress pulling against my face as she tried to fold herself around my head.

Holy shit, was my first thought.  She was not letting up.  Every time she acted, it was with the energy of a sprinter taking off from their starting position, except her power gave her more of a push, and the jarring noises only magnified the surprise of it.

My second thought was that she had seized my head.  She wanted to take me down to the ground, much as I’d toppled Chris.  There were two ways I could go.  To roll with the movement and use it, or to fight against it.

My instinct was to fight against it.  I used my flight, going up when she wanted to take me down.  I used my aura, which was more effective when people were close, and she was wrapped around my head.  I used my forcefield, only for one moment, while reaching up, putting my forearm against her ribs, and pried her off of me.

She used her power in the same instant she was pried off- fast enough that I was left with the feeling she had expected to use it while still holding onto me.  Her landing looked like a rough one, sprawling, one shin, one foot, one hand bracing against the ground as she skidded.

I saw her slowly clench and unclench her hands, rolling one shoulder.  She didn’t stand.

“Hoo,” I said.  My heart was pounding, and I fanned myself a bit with my hand.  “You do remember this is a training exercise, right?”

“You do realize my team is going to win this?” she retorted.  Her hands shifted position slightly.

Her face gave away nothing, I realized.  It didn’t help that with the dust, her hair across her face, and the last remaining spots of light in my vision, I couldn’t make out her pupils.  Her hands and where they were pointing were one of her tells.  Her shoulders another.  She was thin, but especially as she crouched there, hands slightly behind her and at her sides, shoulders pointing forward, I could see the muscles underneath the skin around her shoulder and shoulder blade.

Was there power or Manton protection there, keeping her from dislocating her shoulders when she used the recoil to move around like that?  Was it just strength and practice?

I’d relied on instinct to respond to her, and I didn’t love that I’d relied on that instinct.  I wanted to be careful and thoughtful about the moves I made and Ashley’s approach allowed absolutely none of that.  I was left to digest that I’d reacted to her by fighting, going the opposite direction instead of the Judo-like approach of using the enemy’s strength against them.

Was I okay with that?  If I had to rationalize my choice, I’d fought her because I could only use the enemy’s momentum against them if I knew which way they were going, and Ashley was hard to predict.

Well, just a bit less difficult now, as I stopped looking for more obvious tells.  She had stopped rolling her shoulder.  I saw the muscles tense.

“Victoria!”

The shout interrupted both of us, as she planned her next move and I readied my response.  It was Tristan calling.  Ashley and I both looked.

“Come and help!” he called out.

I flew back and away, out of Ashley’s reach, looking.

Chris, legs embedded in spiky rock, was using both hands to haul what looked like a long, thin rod out of his throat.  He’d swallowed the length of the dead tree like a sword-swallower swallowed a blade, and now he was drawing it back out, changed.

Narrower, thinner, smoother, and slick with fluids.

Chris, it seemed, wasn’t just the kind of changer who could adapt his form.  He was the kind of changer who gained new sorts of powers while in an alternate form.

He hauled the last of the tree free of his mouth.  Fifteen feet long, thicker at the end he had just removed than at the end he held, now that he was turning it around to get it in a position he could wield it.  Too long to be a proper club, not quite a rod either.

Kenzie had her flash gun out.  Tristan had thrown up a short wall, just tall and wide enough that he could hide behind it.  Kenzie’s eyehook extended from her belt, through one of her hands, and out to Tristan, with a grip on his leg.  She was simultaneously trying to circle around to get at an angle where she could shoot and blind Tristan and she was using the claw at the end of the prehensile arm to try and drag him out of the cover, helped by tugs with her hand.

Kenzie’s efforts left Chris entirely unmolested as he brought his weapon down, shattering Tristan’s created ground, freeing his legs.

“Leave her!” Tristan ordered.  “We’ll let her get the flag, deal with these two, and catch her on her return trip!”

I flew a little further away.

Sveta- I looked off in the direction of the enemy’s camp.

Little blue flags decorated the landscape on their side of the playing field.  They were situated on every rock, in every crevice, on every flat expanse of ground, on every tree branch.  Sveta was perched on a rock in the midst of it all.

I looked at Kenzie’s cube.  One face of it was glowing.  The projector.

That would be why they had been smiling, then.

I started my flight toward toward Tristan.

“You’ll regret ignoring me,” Ashley said, behind me.

Pride, respect, they were key factors here.  I could remember the meeting, the narrowing of the eyes.  I knew Tristan was in a tough spot, but I paused, turning around in the air.  I had to raise my voice to be heard with the distance between Ashley and me, as I said, “We’re not ignoring you.  We’re dealing with you two against one.”

I left her to limp toward the wall while I flew to Tristan’s side.  I landed beside Kenzie, hard, pushing out with my aura.

She twisted around, gun in hand, and I caught the gun, snatching it out of her hand.

“Hey,” she said.  She reached out with her hand, and I pulled the gun away.  She let go of Tristan and reached out for the gun with the eye-hook.  I grabbed the eye-hook, and then wrapped the length of the prehensile arm around her upper body, tying her up with it.

“Hey!” she said, again.  She laughed.  “Chris help!”

I didn’t need to ask, and I liked that I didn’t need to ask.  Orange motes began to surround Kenzie.

“No, no, no, no!” Kenzie said.  “Chris, Chris, Chris, Chris!”

The head of the long club was poked out between Kenzie and me, separating us.  Kenzie started to back away, and the orange motes became solid rock, encapsulating her legs.  Tristan lunged forward to catch her before her upper body came down and her head cracked down against his rocky terrain.

I flew up a little ways, putting myself between them and Chris.  Chris drew the fat end of the club back, and then smacked it against his palm.  He laughed, deep and low, and pointed at Kenzie.

“Stop laughing at me and help, you doofus!”

I had Kenzie’s gun in hand, I could have shot Chris, but I had my deep reservations about using a tinker’s stuff, even a nonlethal gun that temporarily blinded.

Ashley used her power.  I could hear the sound of it, and I saw the wall break.

“By the way,” Tristan said, looking in that direction.  “We’re not catching her on the return trip.”

He blurred, and with that blurring, the rock blurred too.  White with orange-red veins became clear water, reflecting the blue of the sky and the green of the trees above and grass below.  The front wall of the fort that Ashley had just penetrated and the platform that Kenzie and Chris were standing on became frothing water.

With the slope, that water flowed downhill, carrying Ashley and Kenzie down to the base of the hill, amid branches, mud, and sticks.  Ashley used her power at the start and toward the end, to little effect.

Chris brought his rod down, stabbing it deep into the ground, and held onto it for leverage.  It had to be sturdier than the dead tree had been, because it didn’t bend and it didn’t break.  Condensed down, maybe, shaped to be hard.

He reared back, and he blew.  He’d broken down and processed more of the dead tree than what he’d used to condense it into a giant club-staff.  He exhaled a cloud of wet sawdust.

I didn’t want to put up my forcefield if it would catch the sawdust, so I endured it, flew closer, and used my forcefield for only as long as it took to kick the stick he was holding onto with all of my strength.

It broke, and with it breaking, Chris fell down the hill, rolling over wet grass and weeds, until he came to a stop against a cluster of two trees that had grown next to one another.

He began to pick himself up, working his way up the hill, stabbing down to pierce the ground with his half-stick and plant it there like an ice-climber might use a piton.  The slope was just a little steeper at the base of the hill, and the water had become rock again, smooth and with the spikes all pointed downward, not good grips.

He swallowed hard, giving me a suspicion about what he was about to do.  He spat out a ball of wood pulp and phlegm, and I flew to one side, letting it sail past me.

I was put in mind of Crawler – the changer power, the spitting, the joyful monster.  Crawler had laughed too.

Crawler had critically injured me with his acid spit, and that had let Amy get her hands on me the second time.

It was a dark, unpleasant thought.

Tristan was focused on a point off to the side.  I turned to look, and I saw that he was creating orange motes around the projector box.

The motes solidified, and the box was encased in a thorny encasement of rock.

I turned to look, keeping one eye on Chris, and I saw the flags were still there.

“Nope!  That’s not going to work!  Good luck finding our flag!” Kenzie called out.  She loosed an over the top, mocking laugh.

Tristan turned the encasement to water.

“I said it was waterproofed before!  That’s not going to do anything!” Kenzie called out, before doing her level best to laugh harder, even though she had already been laughing at her limit.

“It doesn’t matter,” Tristan said, loud enough for them to hear.

Sveta made her way back in three moves, from the other team’s camp to a rock, rock to tree, tree to our camp.

She hauled herself up to the top of one of Tristan’s walls and she held up the two flags.

Ashley and Chris, who were making their way up the hill, stopped climbing.

“Yes!  Yes!  That was so great, that was fun, we have to do this again!”

From what Kenzie was saying, she didn’t seem to mind losing much.  She practically bounced with excitement.

Tristan created stairs on the slope.

Sveta joined Tristan and me as the others climbed the stairs.  Tristan put out one gauntlet, and she tapped her prosthetic hand against it.  I offered my own fist to her, and she tapped her fist against it, before wrapping her arms around me in a brief hug.

A stoic Ashley had Kenzie clinging to her as she reached the top.

“-were so cool, it was like how you were in the videos-”

“Ease up, Kenzie,” Tristan said.

Kenzie let go of Ashley, bouncing on the spot before reaching up to her lens-mask and pulling it off.  With the mask’s removal, her costume flickered in places, like an image that had been badly compressed, with heavy artifacting.

“This was everything I wanted it to be and more,” Kenzie said.  “I can’t believe you found the flag.”

“I-” Sveta started.

“Waitwaitwaitwait,” Kenzie said.  “Wait.  Um.  Okay.  I have this covered.”

“Okay,” Sveta said.

Kenzie pulled out her smartphone.

The projector made a sound, and then images streaked the hill, before correcting.  Ghostly images of all of us, life-size.  The images included the constructions Tristan had made.

It looked like where we had all been standing earlier in the match, when I had been facing down Ashley.

The images zipped around as Kenzie changed the time, blurring and streaking before correcting into their proper shapes.

“I saved everything, so we can look back and watch how things played out or compare notes,” Kenzie said.  “So we can do stuff like this…”

The images blurred and moved, then shifted, so the scenes that were projected no longer lined up on the battlefield.

It was Sveta, perched on a branch, flag in hand.  Another blur, moving the clock back.

Sveta removed one of her prosthetic hands.  Fifty or more tendrils snapped out.

“You grabbed every flag,” Tristan said.

“I grabbed at every flag,” Sveta said.  “I had to reposition a few times, so I probably grabbed at some fake ones several times.  It didn’t help that I couldn’t see that well after being shot.”

Kenzie cackled.  Chris smothered her cackling with a large hand.  Kenzie fought back, trying to get out from under Chris’ hand, and she did a pretty poor job of it.

It was weird and good to see her finally acting like an actual kid.  Too much excitement in her system, but that wasn’t a bad thing.

Once Kenzie had settled down more, we walked through the entire fight, focusing on each person.  Sveta was first, easy enough.

Tristan was next, and he made mention of the platform, and how he’d wanted to make sure nobody had footing when the rock turned to water, so he’d raised the ground some.  He had obviously plotted the trap from early on.

“Kenzie?  Do you want to report what you were doing?” Tristan asked, once he was done explaining what he’d done to Sveta.

“Wait,” Kenzie said.  “Rain’s here.  I’ll point the way.”

It took a couple of minutes before Rain and Kenzie’s camera-drone arrived at the base of the hill.

Chris was half the size he had been, and his proportions were returning to normal.  As he shrank, he rearranged the voluminous shorts he’d been wearing, ensuring his modesty was protected.  His old outfit was contained within a pocket on the inside of the shorts, and he gathered it together, folded up, the clothes piled on his lap, along with what looked like a pencil case.

Even though he was returning to the person he’d been, physically, his smile lingered.

“Rainnn!” Kenzie called out, while Rain was still making his way to us.  “Did you bring tinker stuff!?”

“Yeah!” Rain responded.

“Yusss,” Kenzie said.  “This is the best day.”

“You could have waited twenty seconds for Rain to show up and asked him in a normal volume,” Chris said.

“I wanted to know now.”

Chris groaned at her, putting his face closer to hers.

Kenzie groaned louder, exaggerated, putting her face closer to his.

Chris groaned even louder, guttural, using some of the residual transformation to play up the sound.  His forehead pressed against hers, hard enough she had to push back to avoid being pushed over.

Rather than try to top it, Kenzie sat back down.  “I like you when you’re like this.”

“Naked?” Chris asked.

No!” Kenzie said.  “Geez.”

“Why does it feel like every time I enter a conversation, it’s a weird topic?” Rain asked, joining us where we sat on Tristan-created seats and benches.

“I like you when you’re happy,” Kenzie said.  She fussed with her hair, looking down.  “I like you a lot like this.”

I was put in mind of her comments about Chris before she’d gotten in Erin’s car, after leaving the group meeting.  Like she didn’t have the worldly experience to know people didn’t say stuff like that in such an unguarded, dead obvious way.

“I still think you’re annoying as shit,” Chris said.

Sveta kicked him.

Kenzie snorted, smiling as she looked up at him.  “I know.”

“Nah.  I’m joking.  You’re fine.  I think we did pretty good.”

“I think we did too.  It would have worked except Tristan and Byron are strong and Victoria is oof and Sveta was the best counter to what we were doing.  We should fill Rain in.”

“That would be nice,” Rain said.  “It was you two and…”

He turned to look around the group, saw Ashley, and didn’t finish the sentence.

“And me,” Ashley said.

“Here, I can show you the replay,” Kenzie said.  “But I want to see your tinker arms too, before we run out of time.”

“There’s plenty of time,” Tristan said.

“Wait, here, you take the remote, and Rain, you can hand me the arm, I won’t break anything, I promise.”

Rain rummaged in his backpack, “I wouldn’t blame you if you did, it’s fragile and shitty.  You think it would help your eyehook?”

“It might!  But I’m really interested in the interface.  You like to have multiple arms, you said?”

“Yeah.  For what little it’s worth.”

“And you control it with your brain, once it’s plugged in?” Kenzie asked.  When Rain nodded, she asked, “How does the brain know how to control it?”

“I map the brain patterns for input and output and the panel here, between the attachment and the actual arm, it acts like an extension of the brain.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Sveta said.

Tristan was fiddling with the remote, and seemed to be having trouble with the progression of time, with images jumping all over the place.  Sveta, Kenzie, and Rain were all focused on the arm, with Ashley periodically joining in when prodded.

Chris was sitting on the bench, cloth around him as he shrunk down to a more ordinary size.  He was smiling more than before as he rummaged for his headphones and a chocolate bar.

“Your mood seems better,” I said to him.

The smile dropped away.  He looked at me and shrugged.  “It’s different.  I feel more human, mentally and emotionally.”

The change hadn’t seemed to make any difference in how he looked, either.  Were the changes subtle?

“I’m not sure I grasped it all,” I told him.  “Once you change, it’s…?”

I trailed off.

“It’s like a hit of a drug,” he said.  “Focus, surprise, sadness, appreciation, disgust, fear, anger, and then this one.”

“Joy?”

“I call this particular flavor of it Wan Indulgence,” he said.  He bit down on the chocolate bar, then closed his eyes, clearly enjoying it.  He talked with his mouth full, “Can be enjoyment.  I’ll feel it more normally for a few days now that I’ve changed.”

“Oh my god,” Kenzie said.  “Tristan, give that back, you suck at it.”

Tristan was still fiddling with Kenzie’s remote for the projector box.

“It doesn’t make any sense.  Why isn’t it easier to move forward and back in time?”

“Because the box doesn’t perceive time, you dummy.  It perceives images.”

“Why not have it perceive things like time, so you can go backward and forward in time without doing… whatever arcane thing you’re doing right now?”

“Because if it perceived time,” Kenzie said, patiently, her focus on the smartphone remote, “Then it wouldn’t perceive images.  And that would be a dumb thing for a projector box that works with images.  Dummy.”

“You can stop calling me a dummy now.”

“I will if you stop being dumb.  This stuff is obvious.”

“It’s really not,” Chris said.

Kenzie sighed, very dramatically.  “Who are we following next?”

“It’d be nice to show Rain the entire thing,” Tristan said.

“It works best with a point of view,” Kenzie said.  She looked at Tristan and rolled her eyes a little.

“If you keep that up, you’re going to see orange lights swirling over your head.  Then a rock is going to fall on you or, more likely, I’ll swap out and you’ll get a spray of cold water.”

Kenzie stuck out her tongue at Tristan.

I was aware that Ashley hadn’t participated enthusiastically in the conversation.  I suspected why.  I hesitated, then ventured, “I’d really like to see how Ashley approached things.”

“Why?” Ashley asked.

My suspicions were stronger.  I went on, “Frankly, I hope this isn’t taken the wrong way, but you’re really intimidating to go up against.”

“It’s fine,” she said.  “It’s the intention.”

“A big part of the reason I swapped out with Victoria is that I had no idea what to do,” Tristan said.  “I couldn’t catch you with my power, and you’re faster than me on foot.”

Kenzie was changing the perspective.  She created a projection of the hillside and shrank things down, then created more projections, showing an image off to one side of our gathering, showing a zoomed in portion of what the little diorama-sized projection was showing as a whole.  The focus started with the three emerging from the trees, trampling through and hurdling the barriers Tristan created.

She jumped to Tristan trying to deal with Ashley.

“Those blasts are as scary as shit,” Tristan said.  “Every time you used one, even if you were five feet away and you weren’t aiming at me, I was flinching.  I saw what it was doing to my powerstuff, and I did not want that to happen to my bodystuff.”

He’d realized what I was doing, and why, I realized.  Ashley was dejected at losing and we could give her a bit of a morale boost.  She seemed to like being scary.

I wasn’t wholly sure it was good to feed her ego on that front, but I wasn’t sure I liked the alternative, either.

“I have better control than that.  I’m not an idiot,” Ashley said.

“I’m not saying you are,” Tristan said.

“It’s obvious you have control,” I said.  “Kenzie, can you show the walljump?”

“There are two.”

“The one with me,” I said.

Kenzie jumped to the scene.  Ashley leaping off of the wall with one foot, her power just starting to explode out from her hands.  The power looked more solid in projection than it did in reality.

“For the record,” Kenzie said.  “If I was moving through this recording in time and not space, then I’d have to fast forward and rewind and skip around to find this, but I don’t, so I hope people are realizing why this is better.”

“I’m fully in support of dumping water on Kenzie’s head,” Chris said.

“The walljump,” I said.  “The sequences of blasts to maneuver and the whole-body coordination it must take.  That, to me, says control.”

“All for nothing,” she said.

“It was not for nothing,” I said.  “I got to see and experience what you do, I respect the spatial awareness.  The instinct-”

“I fell for a trap,” she said.  “I knew there would be water and I thought I could avoid it if I used my power in time, I didn’t expect there to be so much.”

“We’ve never seen each other’s powers in action,” Tristan said.  “Surprises are inevitable.  You surprised the shit out of me, many times, and I got one good surprise off.  When we do it again, we’ll know each other’s powers better.  It’s part of why we’re doing the exercises in the first place.”

“I failed,” Ashley said.  She stood up, and she rubbed one shoulder.  “I was tested and I failed.”

“Right from the start,” Sveta said, jumping into the conversation  “When we were standing around figuring out what we’d do, Victoria told me that this wasn’t a test of us as individuals.  It’s a test of our coordination as a team.”

“I can find that on the recording,” Kenzie said.  “It’ll be hard to find, though.”

“Hah,” Chris said.  Kenzie pushed his shoulder.

“My team failed,” Ashley said, oblivious to the pair.  “No.  My team was set up to fail.”

“Wait, woah,” Tristan said.

Ashley clenched one hand into a fist.  “You realize if I hadn’t been holding back, I could have annihilated each and every one of you?”

Woah,” Tristan said, with emphasis.  “Ashley-”

She whirled on him, pointing, and he flinched, going silent.  I stood from my seat.

“Ashley,” I said, because I wanted her attention off of Tristan.

“I’m not Ashley,” she said, her voice hard.  “Nobody has called me that in a long, long time.  I’m only Ashley because the therapists insisted and the others needed an actual name to put on the paperwork.  I’m Damsel of Distress!

“Okay,” I said.  “Can we-”

I was spoken over.  “I was a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine.  They selected me.  They had me kill and maim people.  I didn’t mind doing it then, and I could do it here without blinking.”

“I don’t believe you,” Sveta said.

“I’ve died and I came back with only the vicious parts of me intact!  All of the warmth, the good memories, the family, they’re just a fuzzy, indistinct dream.  Those memories have no hold on me.  The killing?  Taking people’s arms and legs and watching them bleed out?  That’s clear as anything.  I could do the same to any of you.”

I wanted the younger and more vulnerable members of the team to back away, to get clear of trouble, but I worried that if I tried to indicate that, it might provoke her.  Everyone was still, and nobody, myself included, was really breathing.

“This was an idiotic game, and I.  Don’t.  Play.  Games.”

“Count down from ten,” Rain said.

Ashley whirled on him.  I left the ground, flying closer, stopping when things didn’t escalate further.

“Count down from ten,” Rain said.  “That’s what Mrs. Yamada says, isn’t it?  When you’re wound up.”

“It’s fine when she says it.”

“It should be fine when any of us say it,” Rain said.  “Count.”

Ashley tensed.  I could see it in her shoulders and the way the tendons stood out in her hands.

Everyone was silent.

I waited.  Ten seconds passed.  Then the fifteenth, then the twentieth.

“Feel better?” Sveta ventured.

Ashley turned, staring Sveta down.  “No.”

“Count down from a hundred,” Rain said.

“I’m not going to-”

“Count,” Rain said, his voice soft.  “Please.  You’ve said before, when you get like this, there’s a part of you that’s saying you don’t want to act this way, and you can’t listen to it.  So listen to the numbers first, then listen to that part of you.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“It’s-”

“It’s not that easy,” she said.  “And I’m going to walk away.  You do your thing.  Let me do mine.”

“Okay,” Rain said.

She limped away, hands in fists at her side.  We were silent as we watched her go.

She walked up the hill, found a rock, and leaned against it, her back to us, and I let my feet touch ground.

“We knew it was coming sooner or later,” Chris said.

“Spooky,” Sveta said.”I expected a small outburst to start with.  That was-”

“Medium-small,” Tristan said.

Kenzie stood up, gathering her things.

“Stay, Kenzie,” Sveta said.

“It’s fine.”

“She wants to be left alone.”

“This thing?” Kenzie asked.  “It’s not you guys being the adults and me as the kid, listening to what adults say.  We’re all equal members of this team.  And this is what I’m going to do, and if I get hurt that’s fine, but this is right for me.  You can tell me what to do with some other stuff but not this stuff.”

“It’s dangerous,” I said.  “Leave her be.”

“No,” Kenzie said, voice firm.  She put her hand on her flash gun.  She looked at all of us, then said, softer, “No.”

“Okay, Kenzie,” Sveta said.  “Go.  Be careful.”

“You’re sure?” Tristan asked Sveta.

But Kenzie was already jogging off in Ashley’s direction.

When Kenzie was out of earshot, but before she had reached Ashley, Sveta raised one hand and said, voice quiet, “If there’s a problem, I’ll haul her back.”

“That takes a second or two,” I said.  “Sparring with Ashley, I gotta say she moves faster than that.”

“And your grip isn’t a hundred percent,” Tristan said.

Sveta set her jaw, hand pointed at Kenzie.

Kenzie reached Ashley, and with Ashley’s movement, we all tensed, preparing to act.

Ashley turned back to look out at the distance, and Kenzie climbed up on the rock Ashley was leaning against.

A moment later, Kenzie had her headphones out of a pocket.  She plugged it into her phone, reached down, and put an earbud in Ashley’s ear, then put another in her ear, before lying down on the rock.

Slowly, Sveta lowered her hand.

“Why?” I asked.

“I gave my reasons before, so did Rain, so did Kenzie,” Sveta said.  “We’ve had this discussion.  This isn’t news.”

“It’s one thing to know it and see it in therapy, it’s another to experience it in the wild,” Rain said.

“Why?” I asked, again.  “You can’t- I understand reaching out to people, but can you really reach out to people who aren’t reaching back?  Can you give forgiveness and understanding to someone who isn’t looking for it?”

“I think she is,” Sveta said.

Tristan said, “I don’t know what you guys talked about, but I discussed this with the others, and I have an idea what they probably said.  Do you know how many appointments and meetings she goes to?”

“It came up,” Rain said.

“Okay, good.  But did you talk about why?

“Because she needs careful handling?” I asked.

“Because,” Tristan said, “She’s a special case.  She’s not the original Ashley, I’m not sure if you picked up on that.”

“I got the gist of it.”

“Like she said, her memories aren’t hers.  She was cloned, they took her and they made up composite memories, but they had no reason to give her those fuzzy memories of other, nonconfrontational stuff.  That wasn’t Bonesaw’s work.  It’s the agent.”

I drew in a breath and I sighed.

“The world ended, and it ended because of them.  We can’t have a sit-down talk with Scion because we killed him.  We have a shitton of questions and the only kinds of people who can answer them are the people who got really close to the agents, like Bonesaw, who made Ashley-”

I felt a chill.

“-and the people like this.  Who are very little of the human, shadows of the human, and a lot of the agent.  All of us have problems, and a big part of those problems are the agents, handling their side of things.  I know I’ve talked to Rain about this, I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but when I’m talking to her I’m also talking to the agent that’s very close to the surface.  I feel like if I can get along with that agent, I can get along with mine.”

“Yeah,” Rain said.

“I want to get along with the human,” Sveta said.  “I don’t want to define her as the monstrous half.”

“That’s fair too,” Tristan said.

I folded my arms.  I looked down at Chris, and I saw that he was half-asleep.

He saw me looking, and he said, “The world was invaded by aliens.  People don’t know it, we don’t like to think about it, but they’re here, they’re a part of things.  Getting along with the most accessible of them makes sense.”

I didn’t like it, but I wasn’t sure how to articulate it.  My own agent had a hand in my life.  It was the wretch, the sapience behind the forcefield.  I had seen what Amy’s had done to her.

Thinking too hard about it stirred up countless ugly feelings, and those feelings choked out and clouded the words I wanted to articulate.

“Let’s leave them be,” Rain said.  “Let’s assume we’re not going to have our second exercise, and walk me through how things went.”

“Alright,” Tristan said.

As the discussion continued, I didn’t take my eyes off the pair in the distance.

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103 thoughts on “Glare – 3.3”

  1. I was so curious as to how Ashley would use her powers during this little game, destructive and lethal as they seemed to be, and damn was I not disappointed. Leaping around with recoil like Bakugou from MHA and stuff.

    Overall I thought the chapter was fantastic. I love seeing superpower games like this in fiction.

    1. Bakugo’s power seems like it would fit perfectly into Ward, considering how it would work in any universe where anime physics isn’t in effect.
      “I’M GONNA KILL YOU, DEKU!”
      *thrusts arm downwards and sets off an explosion between his legs to get some lift*
      *spends weeks in the hospital and months in therapy dealing with the physical and emotional consequences of setting off an explosion between his legs*

      1. Anime physics IS in effect, though. Or comic book physics, if there’s a difference. That’s what the Manton effect is all about. The powers all come with training wheels that stop you from hurting yourself with them, and it frequently extends to other people as well.

      2. Zion~ All For One (+Buu?)
        Ashley ~ Bakugo
        Grue ~ Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach
        Sveta ~ Clumsy Luffy
        Skitter ~ Antihero Aquaman
        Glory Girl ~ Haki +flight
        >Would love to see Worm get animated.
        >What does this mean about powers in other universes?

        1. Animated Worm, the thing we want and need, but not what we deserve, then it turns out like Netflix’s Teen Titans, then we may or may not deserve it.

        1. In TF2 it’s the soldier who rocket jumps, and he carries a Shovel at stock, not a baseball bat (the scout carries a baseball bat).

          Also, rocket jumping predates TF2. It’s origin is unclear, but it dates back at least to Quake, which was released in 1996.

          1. If Ashley runs around with a fire axe with a Nine Inch Nails soundtrack then that’s fine with me too

            (Yes Quake is the game where rocket jumping became a thing, especially in low gravity maps)

  2. TYPOS!

    “if you have something in mind.””
    If should be capitalized

    “I didn’t fly straight for the, but… ”

    That “the” should either have another word after it or get turned into a “them”

    “Another blast, jarring for my ears, and my vision was already affected, and it produced a plume of dust and debris around and to one side of her.”

    The first “and” shouldn’t be there I think? The sentence as a whole is kinda confusing to me.

    “How does the brain now how to control it?”

    Now should be know

    1. “Tristan had picked both Sveta and me”

      Should be “both Sveta and I.” (Reasoning behind this grammar rule: “picked me” doesn’t work because it shouldn’t be an object.)

      This grammar error happens several times in this chapter. (Unless Wildbow was intentionally having Victoria make this mistake?

      1. No, what the hell, you have it exactly backwards taulover.

        The “and I” construction is if anything used too often wrongly by Wildbow, when 90% of the time it should be “and me”. And it always irks me but I stay silent, becsuse I don’t want to be annoying, so please please don’t “correct” him, when he gets it right

        Please, please don’t ever again tell anyone to use “and I” when you clearly don’t understand when each form is appropriate.

        “I” should be used when it’s the subject of the sentence, “me” when it’s the object. Here it’s the object. Remove the ” and” portion and reread it to see if “me” or “I” fits or not.

        1. Haha I feel and have felt exactly the same, Aris. Typo threads are annoying, not least because they have so many inaccuracies. A better fiction publishing system would make it easy to send patches, and ban typo reports in the comments.

          1. No, I like the crowdsourced copyediting. I’d certainly appreciate it if I ever post a serial. A better system might offer the option to ban typo correction, but by telling people instead of trying to filter the comments directly – language recognition software simply isn’t reliable enough for that. (If it was, copyediting software should already render the topic moot.)

        2. I just came back to see if the typo “and I” was fixed, and… what happened to my comment?

          I distinctly remember pointing out the “and I” error, and suggesting the fix to change it to “and me.”

          I’m seriously questioning my sanity here, how did I get the correct and wrong version mixed up so stupidly? (Unless someone is messing with me here by editing my comment, but I doubt that anyone here would do that.)

          At least there isn’t a typo now in the chapter (if there ever was one).

    2. Not exactly a typo, but I am having a very hard time following the conversation that starts with:
      “It came up,” Rain said.

      “Okay, good. But did you talk about why?”

      I can’t tell who is saying what.

    3. “Spooky,” Sveta said.”I expected a small outburst to start with. That was-”

      Flipped quotation mark.

  3. Really loving the little romance between Chris and Kenzie, I definitely hadn’t expected it. Ashley is the one to watch out for, if anyone is going to have some sort of psychotic episode it’s going to be her (leaving out any unforeseen surprises). Chris seems a lot more powerful than I had originally thought, I had assumed it would just be his physical and mental stats being moved around, not that he would get different powers too. Victoria’s decision to not block all of the sawdust with her forcefield broke my heart, she really doesn’t want to see her wretch-self outlined.

    1. I didn’t even think of that.

      My thought was she didn’t want sawdust sticking to the forcefield and blocking her vision, but what you mentioned makes a lot more sense.

  4. > “Hoo,” I said. My heart was pounding, and I fanned myself a bit with my hand.

    Let me just say that, that few second scuffle was so intense that this actually got me to relax by laughing, cause it’s exactly how I felt.

    *****

    > “Count down from ten,” Rain said.

    > Ashley whirled on him. I left the ground, flying closer, stopping when things didn’t escalate further.

    > “Count down from ten,” Rain said. “That’s what Mrs. Yamada says, isn’t it? When you’re wound up.”

    > “It’s fine when she says it.”

    > “It should be fine when any of us say it,” Rain said. “Count.”

    > Ashley tensed. I could see it in her shoulders and the way the tendons stood out in her hands.

    > Everyone was silent.

    > I waited. Ten seconds passed. Then the fifteenth, then the twentieth.

    Later:

    > “Count down from a hundred,” Rain said.

    > “I’m not going to-”

    > “Count,” Rain said, his voice soft. “Please. You’ve said before, when you get like this, there’s a part of you that’s saying you don’t want to act this way, and you can’t listen to it. So listen to the numbers first, then listen to that part of you.”

    > “It’s not that easy.”

    > “It’s-”

    > “It’s not that easy,” she said. “And I’m going to walk away. You do your thing. Let me do mine.”

    > “Okay,” Rain said.

    > She limped away, hands in fists at her side. We were silent as we watched her go.

    SHIPPING GOGGLES ENGAGED

      1. And let’s not forget that there might be another Damsel out there. I’m sure they’ll have some sort of confrontation in the future.
        “Look at you. Playing hero. How pathetic.”
        “Please. I’ve got a team, I’ve got a minion, and I’ve got a boyfriend. And thanks to my minion I’ve got a sex tape that’s the third most popular sex tape on the internet.”

  5. Tristan is a bit of a badass. He’s like a smaller scale Labyrinth, with more control but less speed/range. And whenever things get too rough he can just flip the table and summon tons of water.

    Kenzie emphasized that her machine recorded images, the box cast a bunch of holograms, she uses a flash/blind gun, and her prehensile whip device has a spy function. Does her tinker specialization revolve around visual stuff? Not sure how that would mesh with the boxes though, so maybe not.

    Also, Sveta and Ashley both have the potential to be really heavy hitters. Ashley due to her save or die AOE, Sveta because she’s apparently capable of sending out fifty tentacles to fifty different targets simultaneously. Just imagine if those were people.

    1. Her specialties, between the prequel and all we’ve seen up to her now, seem to mostly require emplacements and have a focus on cameras or visuals of some sort.

      1. An evil version of Kenzie feels like excellent nightmare fuel. Her abilities would be perfect for a horror movie’s stalker villain.
        Ceiling Kenzie is watching you sleep…

        1. It just occured to me. Worm ended up reffering to Scion being the big bad, due to his true form. So if Ward ends up referring the the big bad, well Kenzie was a Ward…

          1. “Worm” referred to both the protagonist and the antagonist. That’s what Cherish called Taylor. The way it usually works is that the title will end up meaning three or four different things before the story’s over.

  6. I felt a chill.

    Is this because Victoria is not the real Glory Girl? Wasn’t her original form eaten too? Can someone point me to the Worm Chapter were this happens? Also what happened to all the Cloned Heroes/Villains? Is there another Skitter/grue or Regent out there?

    1. I assumed that the chill was because the besides Bonesaw the closest thing there is to an agent expert is Panacea.

          1. Valkyrie understands the shards seemingly more in a personal way than in a scientific way, even if she does call them faerie. Not only that, but with Broadcast, Administrator, and Eidolon shards out of the picture, she has arguably the most powerful known remaining passenger.

          2. I think Thrice meant would eclipse them as “Agent Experts” not as a any of their abilities in how they can manipulate those agents through biology manipulation. I agree, since Valkyrie seems to be the only one who really truly understands the shards, their role in the cycle, why they exist, etc. She even seems to know more of the ins and outs of peoples powers than they themselves do sometimes.

          3. Valkyrie was the only non-Cauldron parahuman who knew what was up prior to Golden Morning, in addition to literally telling Eidolon what his power was.

      1. I had thought that the chill was just her having seen first hand what bonesaw was capable of from her experience with the 9. Just hearing about bonesaw might be enough to send chills down just about anyone’s spine.

          1. Bonesaw would direct Vicky’s thoughts to Amy as the next closest expert. and closer than either of them in the end was possibly Khepri where I think Wildbow was writing the agent telling the story as it and Taylor became one for a while.

            Off topic, Whilst faffing about with silly ideas, I thought how DC capes and worm capes would interact. Long story short, I found myself contemplating Bitch using her power on superman;s dog, Krypto…

            Eep.

    2. If you’re talking about the Echidna clones, that was well after S9. Like two days after, at least. Victoria was out of commission by then, so we at least know she doesn’t have any evil twins running around.

      As for the others, I think they were all killed. There was a brief interlude where some clones escaped, led by a Tattletale clone, but Wildbow rewrote that, and given how none of the clones that might have survived off-panel never resurfaced, it’s a pretty safe bet there aren’t any.

      1. Those were the Echidna clones, Ashley is one of the S9k. There are others of those still running around.

    3. She’s as close as one can get to the original. She was hurt by Crawler’s acid spit, fucked up by Amy, kept that way for 2 years, then changed back by Amy after Gold Morning. You could ask whether, having been changed that drastically two times,she is entirely back to where she started, physically. But she never interacted with Echidna, and isn’t a clone.

      As for possible clones of the Undersiders, I’d make that a pretty solid no. All of the clones were dealt with in a permanent way, and even if one survived somehow, it would have to have laid low for two years and somehow survive GM (and not get swept up by Khepri).

  7. “Like she said, her memories aren’t hers. She was cloned, they took her and they made up composite memories, but they had no reason to give her those fuzzy memories of other, nonconfrontational stuff. That wasn’t Bonesaw’s work. It’s the agent.”

    I think Ashley’s tragedy is fairly sad. I kinda find the whole s9k a little sad. They’re worse off than the Echidna clones, because they don’t even have their complete life.

    Just the worst things they did, or had did to them.

    Also a lot of her have been killed. (One child Damsel, seven for the s9k , unborn clones killed by Bonesaw, newborn clones killed by Defiant.)

    1. Everything remotely related to Bonesaw is utterly screwed up.

      The flashback to Bonesaw’s trigger event is one of the only things that’s ever actually horrified me. Like the entire horror genre is wasted on me, but that damn chapter…

        1. I always put it this way. Bonesaw is a monster that needs to be put down. Riley is a little girl who needs to be saved.

          1. The whole ”Be a good girl” last words and how that reflects on her opinions on cursing. It fucking broke my heart.

        2. I think she’s getting there. She’s not free, and probably closely watched, but she’s able to take off the Bonesaw mask for the first time in so long that she’d nearly forgotten who Riley was, as I recall. In the Cauldron meetings she didn’t want to be identified as Slaughterhouse 9, either, though I’m not that far on my reread so I could be misremembering.

          And she’s probably helping Valkyrie and Nilbog in reincarnating the hundreds of ghosts Valkyrie’s collected over her surprisingly long life.

  8. It’s amazing to see how much work Wildbow puts into this. These chapters seems to be getting longer and longer, and I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but god, there’s so much visible effort that goes into his work. Wildbow works a full-time job doing this, and he deserves a raise.

  9. You know what got me most? That speech at the end.

    Someone actually acknowledging the fact that ‘we got invaded by aliens,they’ve made themselves a part of us… And maybe we can find some way to reach out to them and get along.’

    This more than anything else in this BADASS chapter put a smile on my face.

    1. And once more we see how de-escalation in progress with Kenzie and Ashley, and the bit about reaching an accord with alien invaders.
      The bit about forgiveness and refusing to give or take forgiveness seems like a hint at Victoria’s own, completely understandable, mentality with Amy.

      Now, maybe Amy too is trying to find forgiveness and forgive herself but will not allow it until Victoria can forgive her and setting that as her own obsessive benchmark.

      I’m calling it, that the last and vital piece of coming to an accord with the ‘invaders’ is the final De escalation between Vicky and Amy. probably over two to three arcs.

      And something somehow to do with Tattletale. Imagine the three of them in the same place at the same time, at this moment in the story, eh?

  10. Wow, this fight scene was really great! I really underestimated the powers of Chris and Capricorn! I can’t wait to see them fighting as a team against a serious enemy!

    1. Yeah, Capricorn is much more Shakery than I was expecting. He/they can make his stuff on a larger scale than their original demonstration last chapter. However, what I really want to know is what their powers were before they changed into their current form. We’ve got an indicator that Cap’s power is much broader than we’ve seen so far.

  11. Not sure why Chris’ form here is making me think of Flopsy, Bumi’s pet in Avatar.

    We’ll done with the fake out during Ashley’s loss scene, where you made us, in turn, fear that the team was more damaged and incapable of uniting than we’d realized, and then respect how much more the team cares for each other than we know.

    Compelling stuff, emotional stuff, cape stuff; what a chapter. I can feel the coming of Tuesday in my bones.

  12. The fight scene was great, but the scene afterwards was the highlight of the chapter for me. Rachel’s character arc in Worm gives me hope for Ashley. It would be great to see her and Victoria get close.

  13. “[…] the only kinds of people who can answer them are the people who got really close to the agents, like Bonesaw, who made Ashley-”

    Me: or like a certain cape-controlling insect queen…

    I felt a chill.

    Me: You’re thinking it too, aren’t you?! Come ooooon, say it! 😀

    “-and the people like this. Who are very little of the human, shadows of the human, and a lot of the agent.”

    Me: *hype evaporated* god damn it. T_T

    That being said, that training fight was epic! I can’t stress it enough, there is soooooo much potential in this team! Potential for doom and glory both… If only this story was finished already, I REALLY want to binge read it right about now 😡

    1. You noticed it too, then? Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s always been “my sister,” and once “her” out loud and pretty upset. We haven’t seen that name come up in Victoria’s voice at all, whether out loud or internally.

      In the immortal words of what’s-his-name, “this means something.”

      1. She thinks Amy’s name in the first arc when she’s thinking about Gallant, and cuts herself off mid-thought, mid-sentence.

  14. Those of you who mentioned Bakugo from MHA seem spot on. Ashley really reminds me of him. Especially her hatred of losing.

  15. It’s really interesting that Victoria is handicapping herself, it helps to soldify to the audience that she’s an underdog when we know she’s powerful and experienced. Even without her forcefield she carried her team, I have no doubt that if she was more comfortable with the wretch she could have single-handedly won.

    1. She stops thinking of it as the Wretch, I suspect it’ll stop looking like that. I could see Vicky getting a force field that can freely alter it’s form, and that’d be pretty strong.

      1. The window fog scene completely changed my headcanon about her power. It’s not a damn forcefield – it’s an invisible body double.
        She doesn’t have super-strength or invincibility – she merely used to punch, pull and lift things with four arms (two of them belonging to her actually strong double) instead of two; and was covered in it so it took damage instead of her.
        I doubt it will ever revert shape, unless she gets her corona tweaked again. It’s much closer to Manton’s power than Alexandria’s, although Siberian was strong enough not to fade away when hit.

        There’s just too many ways to misunderstand a shard’s real workings, like when we saw Battery’s power from her point of view instead of the external result.

        1. That’s an interesting interpretation! Personally, I think the Siberian’s strength came from constant, rolling, almost-point-blank teleports, while Victoria’s forcefield is an actual forcefield. But there are some interesting similarities, like both being ridiculously durable (apparently, Victoria could briefly tank a shot from Zion if she tried it), and both having strong Master influence in their triggers. Granted, I think Manton was a Jacker (because it seemed like he could share senses with his minion) while Victoria is clearly a Puppeter, so that comparison isn’t perfect.
          Compared to my previous understanding of Victoria’s forcefield as a Breaker power, it being a very close range minion makes an awful lot of sense. That simplifies her profile quite a lot, because instead of three-way split between Breaker, Puppeter, and Floater, she’s actually a Puppeter primary and Floater secondary. Thanks!

  16. I was a little sad that team Sveta/Victoria/Tristan won with Tristan in charge. It makes sense, but I kinda wanted to see Sveta running things and becoming the young lady she wants to be. Baby steps for now, I guess.

    1. Sveta solved the hundreds-of-decoy-flags problem by herself, and she is probably the only person on the team other than Kenzie who could have done that. Tristan’s “Sveta, you’re going on the attack,” seems like fairly hands-off leadership?

  17. The tinkers bickering over who had a better idea of how Kenzie’s UI should have been designed amused me.
    I like how Kenzie tried to reach out to Ashley when she was at her darkest. She reminds me a bit of Steven Universe, in a good way.
    Of course, the conversation turns to the Entities. I wonder how long it will take people to understand what we omniscient viewers do…and if they’ll discover insights we hadn’t come to yet. Who knows, they might even figure out Parian’s true power!

    And I’ve caught up. Here’s hoping I can keep up this time. (Computer, don’t crap out on me again…)

  18. I was surprised how strong everyone was (Ashley excepted as we knew she was). Even Kenzie’s light thing seems to blind anyone in its field regardless of whether your eyes are open or covered.

    Still, I feel like they are just strong enough to get into big trouble and unstable enough to be sure if trouble doesn’t happen to them, they will make it themselves.

    This is going to be interesting.

  19. I want to know what Rain can do to Ashley’s prosthetics. Prosthetics are literally his specialty, and hers are both power-related and very high quality, having been built by either Bonesaw or Dragon-using-Bonesaw’s-designs. They should be pretty excellent as far as inspiration goes, and he should at least be able to fix them if necessary. But I also want to see if he can mod them, and I want to see him make himself weapon-limbs based on Ashley’s power. Both would be a lot of fun to see.

  20. Making friends with the shards is most absurdly optimistic idea anyone has ever had, and I so so hope they manage it.

    also I recognise that “agent” is probably the most appropriate word because it emphasises the, um, agency of them, as opposed to shard which makes them sound like inanimate objects, but for some reason I hate it.

  21. Valkyrie probably has more power and capability, but Bonesaw based upon what her primary course of research was would have hard numbers and superior understanding of how they actually work. So superior expertise, but less practical ability.

  22. I really enjoyed the action in this chapter. I’ve often had a bit of difficulty following WildeBeest’s combat scenes, partly because my brain works a bit differently, but also I think because Blake/Sy often fought in close combat.

    With Victoria’s ability to move around, it makes for a clearer setup of the field of play, and so I’m able to follow what’s going on more easily.

    Enjoying the recurring theme of dealing with damage and demons. Ashley’s plight was something I wasn’t expecting and it’s a lovely grey-area touch. As is Tristan’s hope for rehabilitation. Great job!

  23. this chapter is awesome on so many levels…. so much thought into the powers/the exercise, and that last scene, damn. Chris’ line about the aliens, and the image of Kenzie’s act of kindness…. wow the feels are everywhere this is fantastic

  24. Wow, Ashley has Issues! But I liked how the others were good at handling conflict, assertive without being passive or aggressive. Really great work from Team Therapy. I am curious to get more depth from Kenzie’s endless positivity and empathy, mostly curious about its source and the potential for burnout (don’t let her be the sole provider of emotional work).

    It’s also interesting to see how people are coming to terms with the “invaded by aliens” reality of their powers, and so curious about what role the Worms will have in this story.

  25. I want to say “awwwwe, poor Ashley,” but she’d probably cut me across the face if I ever said that in person. It gets kind of shocking the extent these people will go for one another, which is both refreshing and at the same time horrifying since it feels like the people are all stacked on a house of cards. I’m wondering how Victoria will be able to fit herself into the team.

  26. This chapter gave me a theory: Damsel’s history of incompetence resulted from a personality conflict with her agent (much like L33t’s problem). She actually has one of the most peaceful shards, a waste disposal function (or a “5D God-Colon” if you want to talk it up), and someday she will have an extremely fulfilling career as a hazmat disposal expert.

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