A funny thing that Americans not four decades ago might find strange was that bus lines in this day in age were a lot more active. Even into the wee hours of the night, public transportation was a constant. Turns out having the entire world flipped on your head gives you room to install improvements in otherwise neglected or stagnant areas.

One of the fancy high-tech buses rolled up to its regular stop in the residential area, the driver taking a moment to flick through his Metawatch, browsing through his messages. He was so focused that it took him a moment to register the purple translucent woman walk-slithering up the stairs.

Nova could keep her top-half relatively solid by now, enough to keep up the shape of a human, but below the thighs it really just melted together out of laziness. The passengers were unnerved to see her slip onto the bus, but a slimegirl wasn’t the weirdest thing they’d ever seen, and no one wanted to be rude. Some Empowerments could change a person’s body, and commenting on someone’s appearance was not very nice.

“Um,” mumbled the bus driver, “You have to pay with your watch, ma’am.”

Nova stared at the blinking screen, placing her wrist against it. It took a few tries to get the right angle, but it registered the transaction to pay the small bus fare.

According to Marc’s phone, she would have to wait a while for the bus to reach the right stop. The other passengers were trying to avoid eye contact with her for the most part to hopefully not provoke the obvious Empowered, so Nova took the chance to observe each of them, as few as they were.

The first was a woman in slacks, a working man’s coat, and a newsboy’s cap. A digital mask adorned her face to obscure her features, with only a stylized white eye displayed on its screen. It blinked occasionally as if it were real. She sat nonchalantly, looking out the window and spacing out.

A second was a well-dressed man with a suit, tie, dress pants, and most importantly, a CCTV camera for a head. A little red light blinked on the camera’s shell. The white camera was staring directly at her, recording her every movement. Despite this his body language was polite, legs crossed and patiently awaiting to be brought to his destination.

The third was an old grandma, gray hair with an old wooden cane. On closer inspection, the wood of the cane was a facade, hiding a myriad of technological marvels under its outer shell. The only thing setting her apart from your typical grandmother was the witch’s hat adorning her head, seemingly humming with unknown power to Nova’s senses.

The fourth appeared to be an old, archaic robot design. Rather than gunning for an accurately humanoid look, it was intentionally sharp edges and a geometric form that was more reminiscent of the aged boxes of nuts and bolts that people used to think of. It was just a gray metal box with a second one for a head and cylindrical piping for legs and limbs.

The fifth was a clear druggie. Gaunt and pale skin pulled itself tightly over worn bones, weakened by substance abuse. Hair fell out of the man’s skull, leaving a patchy blonde forest of oily strands. He trembled constantly, looking around like the cops were going to detain him at any moment.

----------------------------------------

Nova sidled over to the camerahead, tapping on the lens. It startled him enough for her to grab him by one hand, pulling him out of his seat. She yanked him over to the other side of the bus, by where the newsgirl sat. She turned, the white eye on her mask curiously searching the two.

“Hey, what’s the big idea?” said the cameraman.

Nova saw nothing wrong with her actions. “Ffffriends…?”

“What?”

“It takes a ladies’ grace,” said the newsgirl, “to understand the soul of a woman. You’re asking if we’re friends, right?”

Nova shook her head and pointed at herself.

The camerahead spoke with a slightly artificial tonation that indicated he was talking through a speaker. “She wants to be friends with me, Deadline. I suppose your name also refers to how you jump to conclusions?”

“Only if the name ‘Surveil’ references how you never do anything besides watch,” she retorted.

Now that there were names to put to faces, Nova grabbed both of them with one strong arm each, forcing them to sit on either side of her on the bus seat.

Surveil crossed his arms and looked away. “You know, if you want to be friends with me, you should really drop Deadline. She’s always in a hurry to tell the next story and she’ll meddle in your business until you’re sick of it.”

Deadline rolled her singular digital eye. “Yeah, listen to him if you want a deadweight around your ankles. He’s more passive than a mouse. The only thing that’ll make him take a stand is a pay cut.”

Being a slime, Nova paid no attention to their stupid spat. She was more concerned with the mission she’d been assigned.

“Help… town? Get stuff. Deliver.”

The broken English was hard to parse but the two rival reporters understood the essence of her words.

“Sorry,” said Deadline. “I’m looking for my next big scoop, so I’ve got places to be.”

“You lack the connections I do. I’ve got a tip about a good story east of here. Maybe you should try being as consistent as me in output,” said Surveil.

“No, I prefer quality over quantity. Say, what’s your name?”

“No-vah.”

“Nice to meet you, but what exactly are you delivering that you need help with directions? You should be given those by default.”

Nova stared into the newsgirl’s mask while thinking of a response.

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“Mmm… deliver drugs.”

The two perked up at the mention of illicit drug trades, like any good reporter did when they smelled the delicious scent of a front page story. The underworld of Sunside City was not easy to break into, especially for nosey do-gooders with a hunger for exposing valuable trade secrets of black organizations. It was an unspoken rule amongst the smugglers and the sellers to stonewall any prying eyes that could bring attention to their trade. Empowerments could easily frustrate the authorities, but there was no shortage of wannabe heroes eager to join the state-sanctioned police force to enforce justice across the metropolis.

Deadline’s one digital eye sparkled. “On second thought, maybe I can clear a timeslot for you. I’d be happy to guide you around, uh, Nova!”

Surveil shoved her away to grab Nova by both hands.

“Don’t listen to her, she just wants to mess with your drug deal. Take me, I know this city like the back of my hand!”

“Hey, asshole. I was here first.”

“Actually, she grabbed MY hand first. So it’s first come first serve.”

Nova checks her shotgun. It’s a little beaten from use, but should work fine, though it might need to be cleaned soon. She counts the ammunition.

[SHELLS REMAINING: 7]

[SLUGS REMAINING: 9]

Best to conserve them as much as possible. Spitting acid at people was an okay substitute, even if it didn’t have the same precision, range, or punch that a gun had.

The other people on the bus pretended not to hear, even as they listened in. The driver himself was having a little trouble keeping his eyes on the road as it competed with the urge to turn around and see what was happening.

The two rivals turned to Nova all of a sudden, expectant looks on their faces.

“You’ll take me, right?” said Deadline.

“Only a true gentleman should be allowed to escort this fair lady,” said Surveil.

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Nova took both of them by the hand like a naive child latching onto both of their parents. Their inclination to complain was met with the bubbly enthusiasm of a woman without restraint or social intuition. The fire of their tongues sputtered out, nothing but smoldering embers falling from their lips.

“I guess if you want to I don’t mind working with this blockhead,” said Deadline.

“I suppose I should stick around to make sure she doesn’t fuck with you,” said Surveil.

They clearly did not get along in any sense of the word, but Nova cared not for complicated things like “social dynamics” or “etiquette”. She cared about getting where she needed to go.

[DEADLINE JOINS THE PARTY]!

[SURVEIL JOINS THE PARTY]!

[PARTY LEADER: NOVA]

As the bus rolled through the city, Nova peered out the window at the streets she passed by. Drones flew over the heads of pedestrians stumbling out of bars drunk off their ass and many a man or woman sat in small groups on the street, needles strewn about. A legion of cleaner bots tried to keep the streets clean; a Sisyphean task they would never be able to complete.

Various stores advertised themselves with bright neon signs, all manner of strange names written across them. Shops like Trinket Central and Kyna had streams of people coming in and out all the time, whereas others like Pumpboost and Scrapper’s Haven had almost none. It was interesting to see how the market’s ebb and flow uplifted some and crushed others.

Of course, nights in Sunside City were never not interesting.

“Stop right there, Slipster!”

A man in a latex black suit slid over the asphalt of the sidewalk, practically ice skating as he zipped away. Behind him, a mage with a staff flew over the road, trying to strike him with a variety of magical missiles. They landed all around him, cracking the pavement. Somehow he outsped the projectiles, weaving between them like a ballerina. He placed one hand to the ground when he slid into the street, and the bus’s wheels suddenly lost traction on the road.

The bus barreled forward at speed towards an incoming intersection, everyone inside bracing for impact. Only Nova was too slow to do so, so when concrete barriers sprung up to stop the bus from sliding into the middle of the intersection Nova went head over heels and half-splattered across the seats.

Deadline was gobsmacked at the ‘gore’. “Oh my god, Nova, are you okay?”

She pulled herself back together fast enough. It’s not like she was turned into a puddle, merely bent over the cushions from the force of impact. She gave Deadline a thumbs up, which seemed to assuage her worries.

“Christ,” said Surveil, “Another clash. Happens every other night basically. We should get out of here, the bus isn’t going anywhere.”

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“Waa, waats going awn…?” said Nova. “Ion geddit.”

Surveil gave her a weird look. “You live here, don’t you? You should know about this kind of thing.”

“You would question a lady in need? Shameful…” said Deadline. “Don’t worry, I’ll tell you about it.”

She pointed outside to where the two were fighting.

“Empowerments mean there’s a lot of villains running around from time to time, and so there’s always hero-types running around stopping them. The police are usually pretty hands-off until it gets out of control.”

The Slipster doubled back around, using the bus as cover against the magic man casting spells. Multiple magic missiles shattered windows, the projectiles coming out the other side to clip the Slipster in the torso. Each missile burst on his body, flinging him backwards. Still, he kept his balance, circling the bus to make it harder to target him, even sliding under it.

“You evil villain! Surrender at once or I will have to use lethal force to stop you from hiding behind these civilians!”

“Okaywegottago!” said Deadline. She grabbed Nova by the slimy hand, dragging her out the door and into the street, Surveil close behind. Unfortunately, the Slipster quickly slid over and grabbed Deadline by the arm, using her like a human shield. It was enough to force the mage to abort his attack immediately, for fear of killing a citizen.

“You wouldn’t want a civvy getting hurt, would you, Missileer?” he chortled, holding onto his struggling hostage.

Deadline wasn’t really all too strong, so she could only wriggle in his arms. “Hey! Don’t touch me, asshole!”

“Just cooperate and it’ll be all over soon! Unless you want to end up worse…”

She stopped struggling, a pleading look in her singular digital eye.

“I just got a camera for a head, don’t look at me,” said Surveil, the pussy-ass coward too scared to do anything.

Deadline turned to Nova, but the Slipster glared at her as well.

“Don’t get any ideas, now,” he said.”

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Nova pointed at him like an over-eager prosecutor.

“Why???”

“Can’t get caught here kid,” he said, “Gotta give the ‘ol man the slip.”

Nova leapt at him, intending to subdue him…

ABILITY CHECK: 10

ROLL: 17

SUCCESS!

The hostage was no issue for her. Being made of slime meant she contorted around Deadline easily, wrapping around the Slipster in a suffocating chokehold. Before he could slip out of her grasp, spikes of chitin pierced his suit and sank into his skin, holding him in place. The only part of her not deformed was her “head”, where she still kept her brain and eyes.

“I got him,” she said.

The civilians nearby backed away, even Surveil and the Missileer staring at her gobsmacked. Deadline stumbled away from her captor as he cried out in pain, the many barbs hooking into his skin and keeping him immobile.

Deadline looked a little scared, honestly. “Nova… you’re human, right?”

“Uhm-- ya. Mm hoomin.”

It took the edge off of her violent expurgation of the threat at hand, but everyone else was still wary of her. The mage in the air spoke with uncertainty, trying not to offend.

“You there, the slime-girl, could you pass him over to me? I must bring this sordid villain to justice for his crimes at the police station…”

The barbs cut deeper into the Slipster’s skin, causing him to writhe in agony. Nova looked over to her two new friends for approval. Deadline didn’t meet her eyes, and Surveil was motioning for her to drop him, so she did. The man fell to the ground in a heap, unable to stand when Nova tore out all the barbs without a second thought. Skin and even some muscle ripped in two. The mage straightforwardly slung the groaning body over his shoulder and slowly flew away, waving at Nova with his staff.

“Many thanks, brave bystander! I shall remember! This favor!”

She barely paid him any attention, looking around on the ground for-- ah, her phone! She’d dropped it in the chaos. Thankfully it was quite sturdy, unlike the phones of yesteryear, so it survived intact. The shotgun had been expelled as well when she subsumed the guy with her body, so she had to recover that too, taking a second to insert slugs into the chamber.

According to Marc’s phone, the site was still a good distance away. She would have to run the rest of the way or get a cab. Racked by indecision, she turned to ask her new friends (tentatively).

“Far from here. Run, or cab???”

Surveil rubbed his camera skull. “Do you usually use cabs for your deals? I figured you’d be more easily spotted.”

“It’d be better,” said Deadline, “Cars aren’t that obvious if you have the right driver. How would she be able to carry the, uh, bag, anyway?”

Briefly. Nova checked her watch. 11:40 PM. 6 hours and 20 minutes 'til 6 AM.

----------------------------------------

It would probably be best for everyone if they got there earlier rather than later, so that there was ample time to return. Best not to dilly dally, at the risk of failing to deliver on time.

“How cab?” said Nova.

“Have you been living under a rock your whole life?” said Surveil.

“Ya.”

“Just open the app on your phone with the picture of a cab on it. Comes packaged with every phone nowadays.”

He was right. She tapped on the phone and opened the application, watching the bright colors coalesce into the company logo: LANSIERRE TAXIS! There are a lot of buttons, and menu navigation was never her strong suit, so it took a few minutes to actually order a cab. After she did it was a lot smoother sailing. It took not even five minutes for the car to arrive.

They piled into the vehicle, Nova sitting in the passenger seat. The driver did not bother to turn to look at her, so she took the chance to record his appearance in her mind. A striped tailored shirt complemented matching pants and a fedora, face shaded by the brim of his hat. He was smoking a cigar with one hand, the other on the wheel as he stared out the windshield.

Deadline leaned in to Surveil in the backseat as they drove, Nova pointing out which way she believed she had to go.

“Just because you’re coming with doesn’t mean you’re top dog here, got it? Company or no, this is my territory.”

“No such thing as territory,” he shot back, “you’re just jealous I dig up better stories than you do for the paper.”

She rolled her eye, turning to Nova.

“Can we be dropped off a little ways before the destination you have in mind? I think it would be helpful for a few reasons.”

----------------------------------------

“Why do that? Get there faster this way.”

“Well, I just thought it would be nice to canvas the place before we went in…” said Deadline. Unfortunately, Nova was tuning all of that out. She was not listening to allat. Instead, she stared outside of the windows, watching the city go by. It was an endless source of stimulation to her, one she was wholly unfamiliar with. Unlike the indifferent wrath of nature, the rational chill of human artifice flipped the strange and peculiar shapes of life with the harsh edges and corners of clinical calculation.

When they did get there, it was around midnight, with plenty of time to spare. The taxi pulled up in one of the quieter parts of town, by a dive bar called “Town’s Gazelle”. A seedy place to be sure, but pedestrians were few, and a variety of apartments and older buildings surrounded it on all sides. Perfect place for a drug deal. Nova paid for the ride with her Metawatch and slid out of the seat, followed by her two compatriots.

The driver tipped his fedora to her before driving off. Gentlemanly!

“This is the place, huh?” Surveil looked unimpressed with the location. Small, cramped, and dirty, this was barely above a nightclub when it came to drop sites.

Deadline tugged on the rim of her newsboy cap. “Looks like it. We take this lowkey, got it? Just heading in for a drink.”

Nova pushed open the door, letting it swing shut behind her. The interior was not much better than the old, grimy exterior; virtually everything appeared to be worn, from the TV screens to the stools everyone sat on. It was quite the popular bar despite this, with various colorful characters chattering with each other or ordering from the bartender. This was the place on Marc’s phone, but Nova didn’t really see anyone who would obviously be the carrier she was supposed to meet.

“Do you actually know who we’re meeting?” said Deadline.

“Nnnnnnn…” Nova activated dunno-shit mode to express how lost she was. Surely one of the people here would approach her…?

Surveil adjusted his clothes. “I’ll get to picking up the local subculture. Someone here has to set a foundation, it seems.”

“Yeah? I’ll help Nova find who she’s looking for. Hell of a lot more useful than you,” Deadline shot back.

Looking over the potential people Nova could talk to, she saw several. There was a group of inhumans in the corner, animatedly chittering. One was a skeleton with flames in their eye sockets. Another was a harpy, great wings replacing her arms. A third appeared to be a suit of armor, moving by some mysterious force. A fourth appeared more like a living tree shaped into a person.

By the countertop, there was the bartender, a mustached man of impeccable skill, serving customers at a rate that would put real machines to shame. He seemed to dance across the hardwood floors, filling beer glasses and wiping down dishware with the practiced ease of a master at work. In front of him were a few stools with several different people.

The first had what appeared to be a teen in a hoodie, no older than 15. Despite that he drank from his glass with the vigor of a Dust-coated veteran. A second was a literal pose mannequin, propped up on the counter on its wooden arms. It moved jerkily, like it was controlled by some puppetmaster somewhere else. A third seemed to be a solid sandstone statue shaped into the visage of a man, gruff and unyielding.

----------------------------------------

Nova chose to sidle up to the bartop, watching the bartender go about his work. She leaned back just in time for a beer glass to slide along the counter into the hand of a waiting customer, who knocked back the alcohol like he was in the middle of the Sahara-- at least, before the Dust.

“Umm…”

“How can I help you, ma’am? A new face I see. Brandy? Cocktail? Pina Colada?”

Nova stared down at her phone, reading through the messages to try and remember what exactly she had to do.

“Where-- Nate?” she asked.

The bartender’s cheery smile drew into a thin line as he was wiping down one of the glasses. His eyes searched the building, scanning for anyone listening in. Almost immediately he locked onto the two very out of place reporters. Surveil was trying and failing to gain a rapport with the inhumans, who looked upon him as a traitor. Here was a man who fit in fine among humans, trying to appease them. Why don’t you run back to your human friends, they thought, brushing him off. Deadline just stood behind Nova, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.

“The back,” he said, “empty warehouse behind the building. There.”

Nova walked off, leaving Deadline to give the man a short bow before following her. The patrons paid her no attention. Stuff like this was run-of-the-mill. For the moment they left Surveil behind in the bar, futilely trying to curry favor with the locals. Past the dumpsters and over an empty lot there was a large warehouse structure, dilapidated and sad, sitting dejectedly on its own, surrounded by a chain link fence. Instead of climbing over it Nova walked into it, standing inside of the chains until her acid dissolved them and she could easily walk through. Deadline hurried ducked through the gap, afraid of brushing against the remnant acid.

Shelves with empty boxes lined the warehouse, some overturned, others moved around to create a kind of maze within the walls. Before they could even enter there was the click of shoes on concrete and two well-armed men stepped around the corner to point their rifles directly at the two. Deadline put her hands up. Nova just stood still, idling.

“I don’t know how you found this place but fuck off. Tell the cops to stay out,” says one of them, finger on the trigger.

Deadline leans in, whispering. “Let me handle this.”

----------------------------------------

Nova placed a hand over her mask in a gesture of ‘I got this’. The reporter looked very uncertain, but she relented. Both guards seemed ready to fire at any time as the slime took a step closer, placing one hand over her chest.

“I-- business. Friend,” she said. Her enunciation was surprisingly intelligible, but she halted on every word trying to express her alien thoughts.

They were still unconvinced. “One of the bosses businessfriends, are ya? What kind?”

“Aaaaa… benefit.”

The two looked at each other, doubt sowed in their minds. “That’s you? Well… come on in, I suppose. He’s been waiting for you.”

As both guards led the way, Deadline elbowed Nova in the side.

“How’d you do that?” she asked.

“Remember… somewhere…”

Bouncing around in her brain was the faint memory of a conversation, a line of dialogue shared between a bossman and his subordinate. She couldn’t quite see their faces, but she could catch a flicker of the words: want, businessfriend, benefits, woman. There was no full understanding, but it got her foot in the door, or as an effective bluff. Coming past the walls of random boxes and shelving and shit, they arrived at a non-descript door to some smaller office in the warehouse. There were no windows and the door itself had no markings. One might mistake it as leading to some storage closet.

“Go on in. We have to stay out here.”

Both guards planted themselves outside while Nova and Deadline entered. The interior was sparsely decorated. A large plastic table and some cheap plastic chairs served as a break room, with various crates shoved to the walls or corners. Before the two, stood Nate, an imposing boulder of a man-- specifically, in size, weight, and shape. He was definitely overweight as well as tall.Two more goons wearing shades sat by him, playing cards. A small pile of cash indicated that Goon No. 2 was winning their game of poker by a significant margin.

Nate shot up and stared the pair down as the door closed. “Hey! Who the fuck are you? You’re not the one I’m meeting.”

Nova presented to him Marc’s phone, the two goons pointing guns at her for the second time tonight. She pointed at it aggressively trying to explain.

“Here, drugs! For Coyn. Take.”

Seeing the messages between her and Coyn mollified the drug dealer. He sat back down with a sigh.

“Whatever,” he said, “not my business who she sends to pick shit up, but a slimegirl? She could do better.”

He retrieved a box of cigarettes, pulling one out and lighting it. He put it to his lips while he talked.

“So who’s this lass with ya?”

Nova and Deadline shared an awkward glance.

----------------------------------------

Nova looked away, unsure of what to say. Deadline could do nothing but pick up the slack.

“I was just interested in the trade! Since my friend was doing the delivery I was gonna tag along… you know… to learn about dealing drugs.”

There was a large puff of smoke as Nate breathed out, eyes squinted in suspicion.

“You have to understand,” he said, “We don’t appreciate prying eyes in this line of work.”

The reporter looked a lot more meek, shrinking inwards while trying to explain herself.

“Prying? No, I--”

There was a shout from outside. The guards outside shouted at someone to freeze, followed by the unmistakable stereo sound filter that told Nova it was Surveil outside. Nate nodded to his two goons to open the door, but Nova was way ahead of them. She poked her head outside much to her friend’s relief.

“Good, you’re here! We’ve got to run!” said Surveil.

Nova didn’t understand him at all. “Mmmm? Whyee??”

“The Italians! They’re here!”

As dark clouds gathered above, the bartender looked up to see some familiar faces strolling into the bar. Well-dressed groomsmen entered through the door, all of them carrying some kind of weapon. Immediately the mood grew tense, the patrons knowing all too well who’d just arrived.

The mafia.

Even after the end of the world and the birth of a new one, some institutions could not be stamped out. The gangs of the American metropolises were one. The Italian Mafia was another. Above the megacorporations fought for dominance, while below criminal organizations tangled for turf. For months there’d been no serious skirmish, but that would all change today.

“Scan this place top to bottom,” said one. “You’re sure it’s here?”

“Yup,” said the taxi driver. “I dropped ‘em off right here.”

“Good. We’re breaking this base of operations. It’ll push this month’s profits up by a lot.”

A few of the bar’s customers reached for their pistols, blades, whatever they had on hand. Even the bartender had his hand on a spiked metal bat when one of the men pointed a kickblaster at him. The over-engineered shotgun looked almost comical, but what it lacked in range it made up for in deleting whatever was in front of it.

The bartender kept a straight face. “What can I help you with, sir?”

“Heard y’all are running a racket here. Howzabout you show us where and we’ll let you off the hook?”

Nova shook her head no and Surveil bent over in exasperation. She couldn’t just leave, she had a job to do! Get the drugs, leave! But what to do about the Italians? She couldn’t let these people stop her from making the delivery.

----------------------------------------

She swiftly expelled the shotgun from her slimy mass, a slug in the chamber. Before she could really get going, though, Surveil caught her shoulder.

“You can’t just run in there! You’ll be shot to bits!”

Oh, right. Being shot in the human gray-matter organ would be detrimental, and it wasn’t a fun experience being splattered across a floor or wall, no matter how easy it was to regenerate. Nate had other ideas. He gestured for his four goons to get it going, heading to the bar’s back entrance.

“Sorry, you two,” he said. “Goods are in one of the crates back there. Take ‘em and go. I’ve got people I want to protect.”

Nova shook her head. She couldn’t risk these Italians or whatever taking her package. Plus, she might get another body to eat. She could always use more of those. Nate seemed a little taken aback by the gesture.

“You’d take on the mafia? You must be brave… or a dumbass. I appreciate the help.”

Deadline appeared behind them with a small crate of glassware in her arms. She hefted it up to her chin to try to get a better grip on the wood, wincing at a splinter.

“I found the crate. We can leave anytime, you know,” she said.

Nova wouldn’t have it. No, she wouldn’t have her hunger denied. Nate rubbed his chin in thought.

“Can’t just go in there or we’ll be shot to pieces, he said, “We’ve got to take them by surprise somehow. Hey, slimegirl, what’s your name?”

“It’s Nova,” said Deadline.

“Alright, Nova, why don’t you come in the back door and distract them? We’ll circle around and hit them from the front.”

She looked to Surveil for some kind of guidance and he shrugged. “It’s your call, not mine. You can try shooting them yourself if you’re confident.”

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Nova felt no need for tricks. She had her gun and her powers and that was all she needed. She marched forward, unheeding of Nate’s warnings. He was baffled by her seeming “bravery”.

“What the fuck are you doing…? Ah hell, whatever. Go round the front, lads. Us or them.”

Nate pulled out his own submachine gun, a modified Thompson-type, following right behind his goons. When she came to the back door, she realized briefly she did not know who the Italians were, or what they looked like. She bulled through the door, chitin forming over her slime, and lifted her shotgun, looking around for someone to point it at. Immediately the stylized outfits of the Italians caught her eye, luxurious and refined compared to the informal and colorful clothes of the bar’s patrons.

She pulled the trigger. The sound of the blast filled the room and snapped all heads to her direction, but it was ineffective. The slug crumpled on impact with an azure energy shield, and the Italians were quick to retaliate with a volley of gunfire.

“The slime one, over there! She’s with them!”

Bullets saturated her location, but she was already leaping behind a short section of wall that split up the bar into multiple sections. Miraculously, her chitin had eaten some of the small arms fire; dents indicated areas where lead had crumpled or bounced off the hard material. What few shots hit her dead on punctured her armor and ended up floating around in her slime. She could afford to take a few shots, but taking it all would be a quick death.

All the customers had long since hit the deck. Some of them returned fire with concealed firearms, but the energy shield prevented any meaningful retaliation. On both sides, anyone with a melee weapon was hiding behind cover, waiting for the situation to unfold. The guns tapered off into silence as many waited for their hearing to return.

“Give it up and no one has to die, miss.”

The group slowly began shuffling to her position. She could hear it. She couldn’t hurt them until that shield of theirs went down, but there was no way she could win in a head-to-head battle. She’d have to be clever.

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Under the cover of the short wall, she spat a big glob of acid up and over the barrier. The sound of the splash was drowned out by the exclamations of disgust and panic as it began eating a hole into the floor.

“Careful! We move around it!”

Nova expelled more and more acid, converting biomass into some kind of dangerous acidic compound that could eat through everything. With enough spraying she coated some of their energy shield with the substance, eating away at its integrity. The Italians were not happy to have their vision obscured by the green substance.

One of them gestured for the others to back up. “We can’t push up like this! Regroup!”

In their temporary vulnerability the folks who had firearms fired them at the shield, which lit up in a brilliant triangular blue to absorb the shots. As powerful as it was, the bullets bouncing off of it and the acid covering swathes of the bubble shield ate away at its integrity. The resulting return fire was inaccurate, but voluminous. No one could hear anything over the gunfire in every direction that clipped a few of those who peeked out with their weapons.

“LIGHT ‘EM UP!” cried Nate.

Immediately the windows shattered as Nate and his four goons loosed their weapons into the bar. The mafia, caught off-guard, swirled around to retaliate, only to find the gang members taking cover behind the concrete walls. Barraged on all sides the shield flickered, giving out in seconds. That was a wrap for the Italians…

“MEN OF IRON,” roared one of the men, “STEEL YOURSELVES!”

The heavy Italian accent didn’t hide the sudden transformation as the whole group suddenly became hard as steel, maybe more. The recoil of the bullet hitting them remained, but no bullet could penetrate their skin. A laser focused on the heads of one of them, but gratuitous return fire silenced that quickly. In the seconds that the beam of heat was focused on someone’s face, said man dropped his weapon and grabbed at his eyes, screaming. It seemed that not their entire body was metal; weak points still remained in some areas.

The Italians squinted as they tried to aim at targets behind cover. They were too afraid of letting a bullet strike them in the eye to have them wide open. One or two of the men not holding a gun charged with a metal bat in hand and began bashing in the heads of the patrons holding firearms. Two more ran outside, prompting Nate and his goons to start fleeing the scene. Being quite large, Nate was the slowest, and in seconds he would be caught. Nova watched the chaos unfold, peering around the barrier; puddles of acid joined bullet casings all over the floor while patrons tried to subdue Italians within melee distance, all the while the deafening sounds of gunfire back and forth rattled everyone’s rationality. Through the mayhem she could see Nate on the verge of being caught. She had only a split second to make a choice.

----------------------------------------

Nova took her chances. One fortunate well-placed shot from her shotgun and the slug slammed into the Italian so hard the iron of his head was dented from impact, sent sprawling to the pavement. Nate managed to yell “Thanks for the save!” between gasps for air, but it was mostly drowned out by the noise of gunfire. He stepped on the man’s head, and despite his metal nature he could not achieve the force to lift Nate’s prodigious weight.

Of course some of the mafia tried to shoot her back as she exposed herself, She’d already moved her brain to the bottom of her body to avoid risking it, so any bullets found no purchase in her slime. She was just going to go back to spitting acid when a massive boom shook the bar, a bright flash of light turning the exterior to daytime for a second. A bolt of lightning had struck the other Italian that was chasing the goons around, and the sheer electricity had scorched his flesh insides and short-circuited his brain.

The night grew darker as torrential rainfall fell upon the city, sirens blaring. Instantly this interruption coincided with a lull in the battle. Realization dawned upon each of them rather rapidly. Surveil stuck his camera head through the backdoor to call out to Nova.

“We’ve got to go, now! The Dust is here!”

She wasn’t really sure what that was, but the Italians definitely seemed concerned. One of them called out to the others.

“Abort,” he said, “We can’t take both!”

They retreated to the threshold of the front entrance under fire, and already howls could be heard in the distance, unnerving all the patrons. Many of them were drawing together into groups, hoping to brave the incoming storm outside and make it home. Nate and his goons disappeared into the darkness of the rain, circling around to the backdoor.

“They’re on their way out,” he said, “Now we just gotta get out of this second mess.”

Deadline shifted her grip on the crate of drugs. “I can’t really fight, so if some new mutation shows up I don’t know if I can handle it.”

“Join one of the other groups in the bar and you might have a better chance. I’m going back to base; good luck,” said Nate. He motioned to the goons and they shadowed him as he ran off and ducked into an alleyway. Surveil pulled Deadline under the bar’s overhang out of the bulk of the rain, and Nova pushed the back door open to say hi to them and show she’d come out alright.

“I guess that worked out. We have to get out of the storm, though,” Surveil murmured.

Deadline shrugged. “What do you think, Nova? Do you want to team up with some other people or go alone? We’ll have to travel more to get everyone home with a team but it’ll be safer.”

Nova checked her weapon. 7 shells, 7 slugs. Marc’s watch told her the time was 12:30 AM. Five and a half hours left…

----------------------------------------

In the end, it looked like teaming up was a foregone conclusion. Braving the dark dangers as the only fighter would mean no one would be there to cover her flank, and in such unappealing conditions a moment of weakness could mean death. Thankfully, she already had an idea of who to team up with.

The trio took refuge in the building out of the rain. The people in the bar were altogether disoriented, picking themselves up after the fight. The injured were dragged to the corner, where the concerned pooled whatever items they had to heal them. Civilian heal pens were enough, if a little underpowered, but military-grade heal pens were more difficult for the average person to get their hands on. Only criminals were in the business of smuggling around unlicensed pens, and the patrons weren’t criminals, even if they were benefactors of some.

The mannequin man stood hunched over the body of the teen, wooden hands trying to stop the bleeding from a pierced leg. Try as it might, wood palms were not flexible enough to wrap around the wound completely. There were no heal pens left; all the others were used to attend to the more seriously hurt. That fact didn’t really avail the teenager.

“Fuck-- ain’t no one here got any more?”

The mannequin bowed in apology. “I am sorry. There is no one else.”

Nova wrapped her hands around the wound with the memory of what she did with Marc when she found him. The shock was immediate, and the boy wriggled in response to the sudden pain in his leg, but he was mollified as the wound closed in a minute. The mannequin nodded to her in thanks.

“Team up… go?” said Nova.

“If you desire it, sure. Who else?” asked the mannequin.

----------------------------------------

Nova bravely decided to talk to the group of inhumans while the mannequin elaborated on his situation.

“I must admit, I am a little interested to see how this will go,” he vibrated. “This is not my true body, so I risk nothing.”

“Okay, thank you,” said Nova. She was honestly more focused on how to approach the four inhumans. Thankfully it turned out to be unnecessary; the skeleton motioned her over when he saw her staring.

“You, the slimegirl! C’mon over!”

She strolled over to stand next to the four sitting around the overturned tables they had been hiding behind earlier. The harpy and the treewoman were both lying across the seats, decompressing.

The suit of armor rumbled. “Good work out there, miss. Nice to see a Changed doing so well for once. Showed them, huh?”

She looked confused at him. “Wha? Changed?”

“That’s the word we use to describe people who stop being human, like me and Steel over here,” said the skeleton, gesturing to his armored companion.

Steel crossed his hollow metal gauntlet arms. “I’d say we’re still human on the inside. Everyone else thinks they’re so much better just cause they’re still human on the outside. So what if I’m half-bird, or half-dog, or a tree, or a suit of armor? I’m still a person, aren’t I?”

The harpy waved one beige wing. “Let’s just be glad we lived. Things could’ve really gotten bad. We’re lucky we didn’t get shot.”

Skeleton shook his head. “I took some glancing hits. I know Steel over here took some like a champion, and Phylla might’ve chunked a few bullets.”

“Yeah… I did…” murmured the treewoman. “It didn’t hurt that much, but I feel kind of tired…”

“That’s the regeneration penalty. At least you can regenerate, I can’t even take a hit,” said the harpy. She looked particularly fowl, the birdish transformation not only turning her legs into bird legs and her arms into wings, but even her face into the beaked abomination that earned her scorn from a fair few of her fellow humans. Even her hair was more a flowing fan of feathers.

Nova stared at them uncertainly to ask “Me friends go… home. You come-- help?”

The skeleton nodded. “Speech impairment, I see. Not uncommon in fellow Changed. We’d love to help, but… we have to find our own place. Not many places want us, and this is the only bar we can meet and be comfortable. I’d rather ride out the storm here than get into a fight with some blockhead.”

The treewoman corroborated him. “Most people don’t judge, but the ones who do… it’s not pretty. I agree, we should stay unless there’s somewhere better for us to go.”

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The Dust is a phenomenon we’ll probably never hope to understand. To our limited senses, the black mist that appears overhead does so suddenly and with little warning. Space seems to destabilize for a moment as darkness seeps through cracks in the world above. From dust comes rain, and with the rain comes a storm. It’s not fully understood where the creatures made of Dust come from, but they generally seem to appear in places with low light, preferring less civilized areas.

Why do they not appear spontaneously within cities? Why do they only attack people? It seems to me there is some mastermind acting as the driving force behind these ephemeral beings, but without solid proof or evidence of a central intelligence pulling the strings, researchers like me can only wonder; who, or what is behind this decades-old calamity?

-Excerpt of an interview with Pewter

Somewhere to go? Nova knew somewhere to go! That ‘somewhere’ was somewhere down below! Somewhere in the sewer a day or two ago! Her mind may churn a little bit slow, but she remembered Sewer City at least, so…

“I know-- place under. City below. Sewers,” said Nova.

The skeleton eyed her warily. “A city down there? Like it’d fit. I’m not so sure.”

“She doesn’t seem to me the conniving type,” said Steel. “Give her a chance.”

“I just don’t want to be led into another dead end…”

Despite his skeletal nature, a weariness seeped from his bones that kind of dragged down the atmosphere all around. The harpy placed one wing on his collarbone.

“It’ll be okay, Tibi. We can handle ourselves. What’s one more disappointment, huh?”

His skull contorted into a toothy smile. “Thanks. You guys mean a lot to me.”

‘Tibi’ turned back to Nova. “We’ll help, under the condition that this Sewer City accepts us.”

The leader seemed pretty accepting of her, so she didn’t see how these people would be any different, giving them a thumbs up.

The treewoman sat up in her seat. “So are we going?”

----------------------------------------

Nova shook her head. “One more thing.”

She ambled over to the sandstone statue, who was picking bullets out of his body. He’d been caught in the crossfire, though the damage dealt to him was slowly regenerating as he tossed bits of broken lead to the ground. A pistol hung by his hip, freshly used.

“Come? Danger outside, return home. Protection?” she asked.

He waved her away, gesturing for the bartender to bring him another shot of Nodka, an even more concentrated variant of alcohol brewed by some hotshot Empowered. The men and women in the business did not appreciate a freshie tossing up the stable industry, but they had to admit that Nodka was one hell of a gutpunch. Definitely a fan favorite among the inhuman.

“Can’t do it,” he said, “It’s city policy to remain in place during lockdowns. I might be made of sandstone but I’m not a brickhead.”

He shuddered at the thought of what was to come.

“Had a buddy disappear into the rain, once. Never saw him again. No walls across the ocean side so the boats can leave the port, but that means a hell of a lotta walkin’ tumors around the city. You really don’t wanna go outside.”

Wasn’t he made of sandstone? Surely someone like him could take the abuse.

“But you are rocks?”

“In numbers I’ve seen them tear robots limb from limb. I doubt I’d fare better.”

It was a shame she couldn’t take him, but then again, she had the assistance of the puppet and the four inhumans already, and that was probably enough. Nova peered out of the windows to search for enemies, ready to leave.

“Friend we are go!” she said.

“My name is Surveil, and you have to work on your grammar. Who are you even dragging with us, anyway?” said Mr. I-Could-Not-Even-Get-Them-To-Talk-To-Me-Earlier.

“Help, probably. Maybe you should carry this crate, the syringes get heavy. Make yourself useful and participate,” said Deadline.

“And why’s that? Is it because I’m a man?”

“It’s because you’re a lazy piece of shit with the moral standard of a politician, just take the fucking crate!”

He took the crate from her. She made a point of rolling her shoulders and squeezing them to iron out the soreness before throwing an arm around Nova’s “neck”.

“We probably shouldn’t go yet, y’know… we’ve got time for introductions, don’t we? Better to know what everyone can do rather than rush outside and die.”

Well… it was still only about 12:40 AM or so. Over five hours to get back would surely be enough, right?

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Yeah, it’s probably fine. If she ran really fast she could probably make it back in under an hour, though the need to bring others with did slow her down significantly… but Nova was never one for “strategy”, “tactics”, or “thinking ahead”. When faced with a threat so nebulous and ephemeral as a deadline she assumed would be easy to meet, procrastination kicked in like a bitch. Even Empowered were not immune to the aimless whims of more mortal men.

So she rolled her eyes around in her slimy head in the imitation of a human (though very much more exaggerated) and stared at the floor tiles as she said “Okaaaaaaaay…”

“Great!” declared Deadline. “I think I have a notepad somewhere around here, lemme just get a pen…”

Likely explanation was that she just wanted to include the locals in her next report on the struggles of the drug trade. At least Nova would have something interesting to listen to while she practiced being more human, just like Suvert had said. And several other people as well.

A bolt of lightning struck a lamppost outside at the same time Deadline clapped her hands together. “Let’s get to know each other, everyone! Better if we can all work together as a team, right?”

She was met with mildly disinterested murmurs of “yeah” and “I guess so”, which she took as a resounding yes. Surveil sighed and put down the crate of goods gently on the table. It drew eyes, but the people here knew better than to ask about what was inside.

“Hello, everyone. I’m Surveil, but I already mentioned my name to you guys earlier. My Empowerment is [Smile!] and it lets me record anything and everything I see on video to my head. Good for being a reporter, but I can’t do much in a fight.”

“I’m a puppeteer.” The wooden mannequin bowed with a shocking amount of grace and tact. “My Empowerment is [Strings Attached], and it lets me move things I own with magic strings from anywhere, pretty much.”

The skeleton blinked, and by blinked, he let the fires of his eye holes vanish for a split second. “I’m Tibi. I do a lot of reading in my spare time, and my Empowerment [Death Missed] turned me into a skeleton. I can’t feel sensations any more, but at least I’m basically immortal. My bones can self-repair, so unless I’m vaporized I can keep reanimating.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“I got turned into… Well, steel. Which is why I’m called Steel. Being a living suit of armor because of [Strong Front] has its benefits. Like being able to kind of levitate my armor pieces around somewhat.” Steel demonstrates this by letting his gauntlets drift away from his main torso, his head rising a few inches into the air. His arms and head spin around in a full 360 degrees of motion. “Pretty similar to skeleboy over here, to be honest. No self-repair, though, I have to get manual repairs or see an Empowered healer of some kind.”

The harpy waved one feathered wing. “I’m Zuri. [Spread Your Wings] turned me completely into a harpy… more than other similar cases. I can fly, but it’ll be hard in the storm. Maybe I could glide through the sewers if the tunnels are big enough. I guess I could use my talons to attack things? I don’t know how well that would go.”

“I’m Phylla… and I have [Canopy’s Splendor]. If you look you’ll notice it makes me kind of a tree. I’m a lot slower, but I can eat sunlight and water and I’m made of wood. I have some limited shapeshifting too, but only between different plants.”

Deadline seemed delighted at the forthcomingness of her guests in divulging their power sets. As for her, she raised a finger to where her mouth would be in a shushing motion, her digital monocular eye cheerfully curved downward.

“I’m Deadline… and my Empowerment? Secret~!”

They all stared at her strange quirkiness.

----------------------------------------

Nova punched her in the face. She didn’t bother solidifying her hand, so the soft slime went splat across her mask which made the reporter flinch and lean back. She scrabbled at the mask’s surface to try and scrub off all the slime.

“Hey! What’s that for?”

“Tell power all us. No annoying.”

A bit hard to understand but it was pretty clear what Nova was saying. Deadline crossed her arms and pouted under the facial veil.

“You’re no fun… my Empowerment is [Right Place, Right Time]. I just kind of stumble in and out of major events without getting hurt, usually. It’s not perfect, but I have a better track record of dangerous deep dives in journalism than most.”

The puppet bowed in a jerky manner. “Should we not be going by now? The storm will only grow worse, no telling what kind of things we may encounter.”

“Okay!” said Nova. “We go!”

Everyone else sitting had to get up from their seat to follow her to the door, where torrential rain bombarded the asphalt of the street like an endless attack on civilized society. The harpy seemed kind of hesitant to leave.

“The rain will ruin my wings,” said Zuri, “and I won’t be able to move fast like that.”

“We’ll just have to make a break for it,” said Deadline. “We get to the sewers as fast as we can and we’re good.”

Surveil pointed upward with one finger. “I’m pretty sure there’s a manhole cover at the corner of the block. If we run there we can make it in 30 seconds, easily.”

Deadline turned to him in surprise. “Your camera is waterproof?”

“Yeah, it’s a CCTV model. You think outdoor cameras wouldn’t be able to handle some rain?”

Nova led the charge through the front doors, out into the rain. Everyone else had to follow in a rough line, trying not to slip on the thin sheen of water that was covering the ground practically everywhere. The slime easily found said sewer entrance and pulled the metal disc out of its place to slip into the tunnels, allowing everyone else entry as well. Deadline and Zuri were shivering by the time they dropped down, though, clothes soaked through and through.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have worn such a thin shirt,” said Surveil.

“And maybe you should start recording the stone walls instead of me,” said Deadline. “Look at me and I’ll shatter your lens.”

Down in the sewers the normally slow flow of sewage was now a raging river that frothed at the edges of the walkways, threatening to overspill. It would likely overflow soon, maybe sweeping them all away. Now Nova had to pick a direction to move in: left or right? Reaching the city as fast as possible was important, but she didn’t know which way was the right way. Time to guess.

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Eenie meenie minie moe, who even cares let's just go. Nova walked down the LEFT path, merely guessing at what lay beyond.

“We go this way! I think.”

Tibi crossed his bony arms. “You think? You should be sure. I don’t wanna get lost down here during a storm, especially with how much water’s coming down.”

“Uh… she’s just like that,” said Deadline, “I’m sure she knows where she’s going.”

As she led the way forward, the winding pathways split into more pathways leading to sewer treatment plants. By happenstance, Nova tumbled upon one of the sloping sewer tunnels that led deeper into the ground. It was hard for her to remember if this was the way they took before or not, as she didn’t have a brain at the time, but her instincts told her it was the correct path.

“Down here!”

Phylla looked a little nervous. The most likely cause was because she was going deep underground, where the sunlight couldn’t reach.

“Umm, do you guys hear something?” she said.

The second most likely cause was the sound of scittering coming from behind the group. They had just enough time to turn around while walking down the slope to see several massive ants, made entirely out of the storm’s black dust rounding the corner. Upon spotting the people, they screeched in unison, calling for backup.

Zuri looked about ready to take flight and zip away. “What? How did they get down here?!”

Steel readied himself for a fight. “Must have come through the sewer manhole we left open. No time for thinking, let’s take them out before they chase us and tire the less sturdy among us out.”

“We should run!” said Zuri. “If we make it to the city, they might be able to help us fight these off.”

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Nova shook her head, chitin armor growing across her slimy surface.

“Fight here. Maybe city not like them.”

Some of the ants more closely resembled scorpions on closer inspection. No time to stop and stare, as the people-sized bugs rushed forward like a wave of their own on the unfortunate team. Being on a slope did place them at a disadvantage as the first bodies crashed into the frontline. Steel was heavy from being made of armor, so he wrestled with one of the ants as others sought to chop him in half with their mandibles. Try as they might, the mouthparts could not break past his iron defense.

Nova had more trouble than him with her armor being less effective. Bugs knew a lot about fighting chitinous enemies, as they fought each other, so they surrounded her in a bid to grab her limbs and pull her apart. Her ability to freely transform let her weave between their unwieldy mandibles, but they still clipped her in the side on occasion due to her imperfect dodging. Each hit drained a little bit more mass, which was infuriating for a creature that lived off of it.

It was in this environment that the wooden puppet thrived. With a shocking amount of grace, he leapt over the heads of the dumbfounded Dust beasts and kicked one in the head. Being wood lended force to every punch and kick, and it was one the mannequin took great advantage of while he kneed ants in the mouth and punched others in the eyes. His jerky movements were gone, replaced by a flawless dance of brawling fury.

Phylla bravely stepped forward, her bark spontaneously growing spines. These were far sturdier than Nova’s attempts at thorns, and could pierce through the ants’ exoskeleton easily. Against her the monsters could only play cautiously, wary of getting too close and becoming a pincushion in a crushing hug.

Still they were being beaten through sheer quantity, which they could not kill fast enough. The impromptu battle carried them down the slope to flat ground again, both reporters, Tibi, and Zuri backing up to give them space.

One of the scorpion types rushed past Steel as he was pounding in the head of an ant in a bid to hit the backline. Tibi rushed forward with a silent cry, pounding at its head with the kind of endless stamina only a skeleton could muster. Despite his best efforts, the scorpion grabbed his arms in both pincers, attempting to spear him through with its tail. For now he was lucky enough for the stinger to slip through the holes between his bones, but soon the powerful pincers would snap his arms off, leaving him defenseless.

“Steel! Help!” he cried.

The moment he tried to disengage several more ants piled on him, desperate to keep him down. Buried under the bodies he could only say “I can’t move!”

Zuri flew over its head close to the ceiling to try and scratch at it with her talons, but its tail kept lunging for her torso to knock her out of the air. Restrained by the low roof, it was taking her all she had to turn sharply and avoid being hit. Nova watched it all go down as she dissolved another ant with acid.

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Not wanting to compromise the frontline, she could only spit acid in the scorpion’s general direction. Unfortunately the shot came up short, uselessly splashing across the stone floor as it crawled away, shoving Tibi backwards. Then there was a sudden snap, and both of his ulna and radius bones broke in two. The pieces clattered against the concrete at the same time the scorpion tried to crush his skull with its pincers.

Nova tackled the thing from behind with a crash. Her relatively normal, even thin at times human proportions belied her sheer mass. The giant bug suddenly found a massive weight strapped to the base of its tail, unable to sting it or turn around to grab it. Zuri grabbed Tibi by the collarbone to drag him away with a flap of her wings and the firm grip of her talons. In a rather short time Nova latched on to the thing’s back with chitin spines and secreted enough acid from her body to nearly sever it in half, the large corpse dropping to the ground with a wet thud.

The creature promptly evaporated in its entirety, black dust dissipating into the air. While she’d managed to save someone, there was the bigger problem of the ants rushing forward the moment she abandoned her position holding the bugs back. Steel threw off the ants clambering over his armor in a sudden upsurge of anger, charging through multiple more to reconnect with his posse.

“DUDE! YOU OKAY?”

Tibi waved his stumps of arms. “Fuck no! This is gonna be a pain to grow back!”

The puppet quickly caught up, skipping over every enemy with its nimbleness to rejoin everyone. “Perhaps it’s best to retreat for now?”

“Guys, wait up!” said Phylla.

While she was the most difficult to injure, she was also the slowest among them, beating even the relatively normal reporters. Nova was actually among the fastest due to being able to run on all fours with slightly lengthened arms. Unfortunately, a treeperson was the slowest by her very nature of being plantlike. This was especially evident as the slope became flat ground again and she showed clear signs of lagging behind. Being made of wood made her hard to hurt, at least. The Dust beasts nipped at her ankles and sides, only to meet bark or get stabbed by thorns.

But for every failed attack there was one that scored a hit. Even unable to get a grip on her they still scraped away at her bark every time they threw themselves forward to try to bite her. If she had to fight the swarm alone, she would surely die buried beneath a hundred bodies.

Internally Nova was annoyed by her inability to keep up and the fact that eating the monsters gave her no mass, as they would immediately evaporate on death. Using her gun wouldn’t work, she had barely any ammo left and there were well in excess of another hundred bearing down on them. Would it be better to just keep running rather than fall back and try to save her?

----------------------------------------

A stupid question. Just do both! With a bit of concentration she solidified considerably, the strange feeling of compacting herself into a specific shape giving a kind of tingling feeling she was unused to. Slowing down, she swept Phylla up in two arms, even growing a second pair of arms to hold her more effectively. It looked very strange to see a four-armed slime woman running with a woman-shaped tree in a princess carry, but it worked out somehow.

What wasn’t good was the exertion; unlike every other instance of exercise until now she actually felt strained trying to run at top speed with a burden like Phylla in her arms. Solidifying took effort, and to somehow maintain this rigidity while trying to hold up a heavy person was shockingly taxing. It would’ve been worse if wood wasn’t lighter than human flesh for an equivalent amount of volume.

“How did you even-- I’m not even gonna ask,” said Tibi.

After turning a corner, the sight of wooden buildings came into view in the distance, with a couple of guards standing around to maintain the perimeter. Immediately they caught site of the weird group coming and raised their weapons.

“HEY! IDENTIFY YOURSELVES!”

“WE’RE SOON TO BE STATISTICS,” cried Deadline, “WE’RE GONNA DIE!!!!”

The guard thought that was a weird thing to say but he kept his mouth shut when he saw the veritable tide of black pouring around the corner. In this tight hallway where the sewage didn’t run, it felt a little bit like shooting fish in a barrel. The moment everyone was past the city edge the patrol leader raised his hand over the horrible sound of scratching mandibles echoing all through the concrete tunnel.

“FIRE!”

They shredded their mags like their lives depended on it, which they kind of did. The bulletstorm tore through several, causing them to fall to the ground and dissipate while their brothers climbed over them and kept running. Other guards hearing the commotion flooded in to see what was going on, supporting their teammates with more fire down the hall. Those with backup pistols took those out and kept firing after their rifles ran dry in their haste to eliminate the threat rather than waste a precious few seconds reloading.

The patrol captain executed the last scorpion personally with a clean cut across the neck, watching it vanish. His eyes turned to the disorganized group behind him, consisting of two reporters, a wooden puppet, a walking slime, a skeleton without arms, a thorny tree, a suit of armor, and a very tired harpy.

“I hope you all have a really good explanation for…” He gestured to the dust in the tunnel.

----------------------------------------

Without the need to carry anything heavy Nova let her two extra arms be reabsorbed by her main mass, gesturing with her normal arms to try and get her point across.

“Storm, just start, hide here. Black things follow.”

“Any more of them?”

“Don’t know.”

The captain gestured to his men to remain at this entrance before curling his finger towards himself.

“You all come with me. I don’t deal in foreign affairs so I’m passing you along to the boss.”

Tibi leaned in to whisper with clattering jaws: “Nova, do you know their boss?”

She didn’t have a human brain at that time, so she could only shake her head no. This did little to assuage the skeleton’s fears that this venture was doomed to fail. The guards left behind arranged themselves in a line, reloading to prepare for possible future assault. The group followed the lead of their guide as he took a winding path that took them through thin alleyways and over rickety fences, across main roads and under archways. The main office space where “the boss” resided was not as flashy as everyone thought, it turned out. A small wooden staircase led up the side of an unassuming building in the rough city center, where a flimsy door with a small window had its shades pulled down to cover the glass.

The patrol captain rapped on the door with his knuckles. “Jams, more newcomers. Open up.”

It opened to reveal that familiar unkempt ashen hair and silver irises that tickled Nova’s mind. Yes, now this was familiar.

“Eight of you, I see. Alright, all of you come inside.”

The office’s interior was quite bland as places went, especially for the de-facto leader of the sewer city. File cabinets were pushed to a corner with a printer sitting on top, a table with a mug filled with pens resting atop scattered papers. Worn armchairs grouped up by the wall with a laptop dutifully standing vigil on a folding table in front of them. Nova took the time to liberally look around in every direction, heading swiveling in a very inhuman way like an owl.

“Ew,” said Deadline, “Don’t do that. It probably doesn’t hurt since you’re a slime but its creepy, girl.”

Surveil placed the crate of drugs he’d been carrying on one of the armchairs, clasping his hands together. “Unfortunately, it seems we agree on this one thing at least.”

Jams sat down in his chair with a huff, glancing over everyone. “Who are these people, exactly?”

“They’re from a side tunnel on the far wall.” The guard captain pointed to a map of the city pinned to the wall. “Brought a whole bunch of ants and scorpion-types down with them we had to handle.”

“I see. What’s their purpose for coming here?”

Tibi stepped forward, waving his stumps of arms. “Nova claimed we could find safe refuge here, since the people up there aren’t big fans of Changed like us.”

Jams leaned forward to stare at Nova. “Have we met before? Actually, you look kind of like that slime the other day… same shade of purple and everything. Are you Marc’s pet?”

She nodded yes in an exaggerated manner. “Mhm. I be human now.”

“What do you mean, ‘pet’? I thought she was always a human,” said Deadline.

“She’s definitely shaped like a woman now, but the last time I saw her she was a slime, just a blob yeay big.” He spread his arms a bit to try to estimate Nova’s previous size to the room. “Back on topic, though, I don’t mind accepting new immigrants. Just follow the rules and you’ll be fine.”

“I’m not so sure,” said the captain, “They dragged their own outside problems all the way down here and made us waste quite a bit of ammo. I’d appreciate some recompense. For the trouble, of course.”

Nova checked her watch. 1:30 AM, or four-and-a-half hours remaining.

----------------------------------------

“But I save ‘ammo’ last time,” she says. “I help fight yellow man.”

The captain is dumbfounded. “Who the fuck are you talking about?”

Jams holds up one hand. “I believe she’s talking about the mercenary. The radioactive one.”

The patrol leader is mildly mollified by the realization. “Oh… if that’s true I suppose that’s fine. It’s a miracle casualties weren’t higher with the scale of that raid.”

“Well, that’s no objections heard, then! Welcome, all of you, and I hope you all find your own place in our little city. It’s not much, but it’s honest work,” says Jams.

The puppet bows. “Not I. I merely tag along to see how things go.”

“I already have a place to live,” says Deadline.

“I work for a big company so I can’t stay down here,” says Surveil.

Jams turns to Nova, who nods. It’s clear she’s already claimed by Marc, so there’s no way the hunched man could keep the slime as a city guardian. A shame, but he’s always been the type of guy to bounce back from setbacks.

“Ah, that’s quite alright. So, for you four, what’re you all here for?”

“Nothing in particular,” says the wooden puppet. “This isn’t my true body so I’m merely interested in seeing how this motley group does.”

Surveil raises a hand. “I’m here to get footage of the criminal underworld of Sunside City. It’s quite difficult to convince them to do interviews, and our friend Nova here was conducting a trade…”

Deadline slaps a hand over his camera, which does nothing to stop him from talking, but stuns him into silence for a second. “And I’m the one who got him through the door in the first place. Don’t trust his reporting, it’s always biased. He’s a ‘nothing-ever-happens’ type of guy.”

“Defamation.”

“It’s true.”

Jams sighs at their pointless bickering. “If you four need anything more you can ask, but it sounds like you’ve got your own priorities. I’m happy to lend you a favor on account of Nova’s contributions, as long as you pay it back later.

----------------------------------------

“It ok!” said Nova. “We go now. No time.”

“That’s fine. Captain, could you see these fine folk off? I’ll take care of these four.”

Jams led the four inhumans off to who-knows-where, likely to introduce them to the ins and outs of living underground. The patrol captain saluted to his superior as he left, turning back to the visitors left behind.

“Well, you heard him. Let’s get going.”

Only when they started walking did Nova realize she had no idea which direction they were currently heading in. The belowcity was like a maze in some respects, which proved to be quite troublesome when it came to navigation, especially for someone who didn’t live there.

“Ghh… which way is house?”

The captain stared at her like she was stupid, which was true.

“What the hell is ‘house’?”

Nova took out her phone to show him a map downloaded to the device. It took a little scrolling but the man eventually understood where she wanted to go.

“It’s down the right-side tunnel,” he said. “Just go that way and wherever you want to go is in that general direction.

The wooden puppet stopped her by the shoulder as they were departing.

“That was remarkably easy. There’s a fork in the road ahead, though. Which way? Forward or to the right?”

The lack of signage with directions was starting to get really annoying. Down the tunnel there was a ladder and a manhole cover above leading back to the surface, where it would be ostensibly easier to navigate without getting lost. Otherwise they risked severe timeloss. What she would do for a map…

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She pointed up to the exit, the puppet’s face following her fingers. It was a strange movement for a guy without eyes.

“Go up. No more lost.”

“I dunno,” said Deadline. “We’ll probably be attacked?”

“Sucks that all public transportation is closed. We’ll have to walk,” Surveil murmured.

The puppet tapped its chin. “Why not just steal a car?”

The three of them stared at him. Five minutes later, the manhole cover was lying against the wall of a building as Nova fiddled with some wires inside a fancy Trailblazer X. The window on the passenger’s side was entirely corroded, the rain wetting the seat on that side. The alarm that had been set off was quickly silenced with some crossed wires, but now the wooden puppet and Nova were arguing over what to do.

“Which one?!” cried Nova.

“I’m just a puppet master, how would I know? It can’t be that hard, just cross the right wires or whatever.”

Deadline popped a head out of the sewers to cheer Nova on. “Uh, try the green and blue ones!”

“There ARE no green or blue ones!” said the puppet.

Surveil buried his camera lens in his hands. “God put me with the stupid ones…”

Nova wrapped two wires around each other. “I not see YOU TRY!”

At that moment the car sprang to life, ignited somehow. No one was gonna question how that worked at all, they were just happy to see the car functioning. The puppet opened the doors with a click, gesturing for the other two to get in. They clambered out of the dingy sewers in the pouring rain, soaked in the brief interim it took for them to pile into the stolen car. It was a temperature Deadline was not handling well.

“C-c-c-cold…”

“Alright, now move over. I’m gonna drive,” Surveil said.

The puppet looked peeved at the suggestion despite having no face. “What? No. It was my idea.”

“Men are a-a-ass drivers anyway,” said Deadline, “I should d-drive.”

----------------------------------------

Nova confidently took the wheel, sitting her ass down in the driver’s seat and staring down at the two pedals.

“Ok. How drive?”

Deadline leaned forward in her chair to try to lay her claim over the wheel. “You don’t know how? Just swap places with me--”

Their argument was interrupted by the sight of a giant black crab made entirely out of Dust scuttling into view of the rearview mirror. There was only a moment to be shocked before the crab started crab-walking towards them, followed by a flood of spiders. Surveil made sure to capture a lot of footage of it while the puppet slammed one wooden fist on the dashboard.

“To hell with it just step on the one on the right and GO!”

Nova slammed one slimy foot on the thin pedal and was unprepared for the car to buck forward, screaming down the road as ingrained habits from the people she ate screeched at her to TURN RIGHT FUCKING NOW!

It was a good thing, surprisingly, that she was barreling down the wide main roads leading through the city, as flashes of black illuminated by occasional lightning and dim streetlamps fell amongst them like the roaring rains. Their thin forms invariably shattered on impact with anything hard like the asphalt, but not before cracking it and leaving dimples in the concrete. One managed to puncture the roof of the car, nearly taking Deadline’s mask off as it wriggled, unable to fully pass through.

“SHIT!” she punched at it, causing it to dislodge and return to the skies from where it came, though not without introducing the rain to the new hole in the car roof.

Surveil grumbled. “Fucking skyfins… of course…”

Nova eventually learned how to drive a little slower, although she was very sloppy at it. The passengers were learning quickly how precious life was, being hurled around the vehicle. Then Nova began messing with the dashboard with a third arm she grew for that purpose, turning on the radio and flicking through the channels.

Deadline reached forward to change the channel to pop. “Don’t play something lame!”

“Lemme try…” Nova shoved her hand away and turned the dial to a discordant breakhip country mishmash popular with like a niche audience of four thousand. Nonetheless, she found the tune ‘soothing’. To everyone else, it was more like metal scraping against a chalkboard.

“We really can’t stay in here for long,” said the puppet, “Those skyfins are still after us. I think there’s more of them, actually.”

The sound of another one punching a hole through the metal confirmed his suspicions. What other option was there, though? Run through the buildings?

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“Can’t this bitch fly? I don’t care if we run over a few skyfins, just get out of here!” Deadline leaned over the cupholders and between the passenger and driver seats to look at the dashboard more closely, only for Surveil to grab her by an arm, trying to pull her back.

“Do NOT do that,” he said, “Nova is barely staying on the road as is! No offense but I don’t want to be the victim of a flying-car crash.”

Turning her head to the right, Nova immediately spotted the button labeled FLY. And as any creature of any amount of curiosity might act, she did not hesitate to place a fat index finger on the red button and push it.

To her shock, though not everyone else's', the doors folded outwards and began to transform, shaped into wings aerodynamic enough to catch the roiling winds of the storm. The conditions were anything but ideal; without the doors, they were partially exposed to the elements and in danger of falling out, not to mention the skyfins flitting above their heads as rear-mounted thrusters began to fire. Deadline looked through the back window, watching both expelled columns of flame.

“Oh, sh--”

The car blasted into the air, zooming up into the noir of night’s storm, the female reporter petrified in her seat, clutching her seatbelt in her hands. The puppet was as blasé as could be, unconcerned with the fact that the car was pulling up hard. A look at Nova revealed she was tugging on the wheel that was now somewhat disconnected from the dashboard itself. Now it allowed for movement in three dimensions, which meant a third dimension in which she could now crash.

2:00 AM, read the car’s clock.

Surveil gripped his seat like his life depended on it. Which it did. “Oh my god we’re stalling, level off, level off!”

The wooden puppet helpfully decided to grab the wheel as well, pushing it forward so the vehicle would fly horizontally instead of vertically. Reflexively, Nova tried to yank the wheel away to the side, causing the car to bank and for Deadline to come uncomfortably close to falling out of the side if not for the seatbelt.

“Maybe this was a bad idea,” she suggested.

Surveil held on for dear life. “YOU THINK?”

There was a sickening lurch as skyfins slammed into the chassis, one of them puncturing a hole through a wing. There was hardly time to point and complain before the fragile exo-structure snapped off entirely from the terrible driving on Nova’s part, as she fought over the wheel with the puppet like an idiot. Both their eyes snapped to the place the wing used to be at the sound of metal ripping off, followed by a minor panic as the whole thing went down.

In their brief stint in the air, at the speeds they were going, it meant barreling headfirst into the Pacific Ocean, the cold water flooding the doorless cabin of the vehicle and inducing cold shock to the two human occupants. Airbags had bled most of the impact, but now the car was sinking with them in it! The temperature change shocked her something fierce, but the lack of air hauled her out of her stupor and twisted parts of her body into gills to try to breathe. Not fast enough, she needed more air in more places! Only when a good chunk of her “skin” was covered in gills did she stabilize, much of the oxygen going towards keeping her brain alive.

She had little knowledge of how to swim and merely flailed around to escape the car. It was a new experience being this deep into a body of water. Below her she could see the darkness of the ocean depths, a place that seemed to suck up light itself. The puppet did a lot better, the wood naturally granting him buoyancy that lifted him towards the surface.

The humans among them did not have the same luck. Neither could breathe, even though Surveil was a camerahead, and the cold shock kept them from moving for crucial seconds as they kept sinking deeper…

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Rather than swim, she morphed her arms to become thinner strandlike appendages capable of easily parting the water and latching onto the sinking car frame. One yank pulled her all the way to the vehicle. Insect mandibles formed on the ends of both arms, gnawing the seatbelts off so she could grab them both and pull them out. Both were dragged out by tendrils wrapped around their waists, initial panicked swimming becoming sluggish from the oxygen deprivation.

They were still sinking. A brief idea put itself together in her head; grab onto the wooden doll on the surface of the water and pull herself up that way. Thus more tendrils formed from her mass, some pushing off the car and others reaching up, higher and higher. But they sank too fast. Nova weighed a considerable amount, and combined with two more deadweights it was far too difficult to reach for the surface. Still she did not quaver. Tendrils became longer, thinner, more mass funneled from her body to form them.

Hollows began to form in her main body from the mass she was spreading across dozens of feet. More and more her internals resembled a sponge, only without the holes on the outside that allowed water in. These minuscule vacuums meant a pressure difference. A pressure difference meant the crushing weight of the ocean’s water. It squeezed her tightly from all sides, trying to crush the main body in its icy cold grip. In the dark of night, sinking into the sea, she concentrated harder than she had ever needed to concentrate before.

Slime locked into place, turning into chitin, then bone. Then the very bone hardened, creating a kind of internal spiderweb that fought the external pressure. At rapid speed she calcified her slimy skin and much of her insides, even the tendrils that still kept her two human packages close to her. The volume of water displaced no longer matched the mass, and the partially calcified slime reversed course, ascending to the surface from buoyancy similar to that of the wooden puppet.

She broke the surface to the roaring sounds of the storm, churning the ocean waters around her. The reinforcement and hardening effect collapsed immediately. The calcification followed suit, and she hauled the two up so that they were floating face-up. Both were unconscious, much to the wooden puppet’s chagrin.

“You got them! How are they?”

She presented to him the two, and he could instantly tell they were both out cold.

“They’re unconscious,” he said, “Both require CPR to evacuate the water in their lungs, and to give them oxygen again. But we can’t do that until we swim back to shore!”

A look around indicated they were in one of the deepest parts of the ocean in the area, at the mouth of a bay. A particularly observant person might notice it is the San Francisco bay. It shouldn’t take long to swim there, and then she could revive the two and go on foot to deliver the drugs.

She suddenly felt a keen emptiness. The drugs! In fact, the shotgun as well! The crash must have scrambled her mind for her to forget about those things. In the chaos she likely released the shotgun while morphing her body, and the drugs were in the trunk of the car, in the crate. She needed to recover them and bring them to Coyn, but it might be a better idea to resuscitate the two humans before doing that.

----------------------------------------

Nova pushed the puppet forward and motioned to the shore, where the rains washed away into the ocean. Before it could spit out a response she was already sinking again from her weight, diving into the depths. Eventually it was so dark she couldn’t see, blindly flailing around looking for any kind of purchase. Slime feet touched bottom, and then she could walk, albeit slowly across the sea floor. Gills solved the oxygen problem, but finding her way around was frustrating. Instead, she let more tendrils do the talking!

Tentacles sprang from her arms and spread out on the sand like a network of webbing or a tree’s branches. They crept in great numbers over the ridges and rocks, feeling the area around her as she walked. A sudden sharp drop off made her turn to the side, and then she could feel the car’s metal frame, sitting at the edge of the shelf. Pulling herself into the car was easy, and so was finding the drugs, nestled in a crate in the intact trunk. The car creaked as she shifted to the front of the car, feeling around until the unmistakable shape of the shotgun barrel made itself known in her tendrils.

Her weight was heavy. Far heavier than a normal human. As such, her movement was enough to destabilize the vehicle, which inched forward enough the last bit needed to drop off the shelf entirely. She launched out of the car with her feet, but it wasn’t enough to get her back up. Deeper and deeper she fell, arms and legs pumping to find a foothold to hang onto. Her first pair of arms held onto the crate, while a second elongated to reach out and grab onto the wall, only to find it had little in the way of holds to latch to.

It was a disconcerting feeling to sink towards depths unknown. The panic of potentially falling into a hole hundreds of feet deep was arrested by a sudden shimmering barrier appearing around her. It had a rough diameter of three meters, enough to encompass her main body without issue, and the fact it glowed meant she could see again. First she noticed that the seawater around her had vanished, repulsed to the boundary of the shield. Second, she was suspended in the center, the bubble following her as she floated upwards from the sudden buoyancy. Third and most pertinently, the sphere was see-through, allowing her to spot another sphere just like hers a dozen meters away.

It was hard to see much down this deep, but what really mattered was her rapid ascension towards the surface. This time, she broke the water’s surface with the cargo in tow, rapidly propelled towards shore. The barrier broke when she hit the beach, allowing her to finally stand up and see the puppet pumping the chests of both humans, who lay flat on their backs. The soaking rain hardly helped things, and the wooden doll looked up with relief when he saw her.

“You’re back! I can’t seem to resuscitate them, I don’t have a mouth for CPR. You’ve got to do it before they die!”

She didn’t have to do that, though; the same bubble of light appeared around both bodies, and all the water in their lungs was expelled at a high enough speed to launch a hundred feet into the air. That seemed to wake both of them up, albeit with a lot of hacking and coughing trying to breathe in enough air.

“What… the fuck…” said Deadline.

Surveil rolled over onto his side, water expelled from a breathing hole below his camera-face on his neck. “I’m never getting in a car with you again…”

The bubbles popped, just like the one around Nova. She whipped around to see another one rising from the chaotic ocean waves, creeping onto the beach before disappearing. But it wasn’t a person who showed up on the beach; it was a single red rock crab, slightly larger than a normal sized one. It waved one claw at her,

“You’re welcome, kid,” it said, “Name’s Chate. Remember that.”

----------------------------------------

“Thank you,” said Nova. “Where who you???”

Chate stared at her through two eye-stalks like she was stupid. Which she was.

“What? What the hell are you talking about?”

“What she means to say,” said the wooden puppet, “Is she wants to know… who you are, exactly.”

The crab looked as peeved as someone without an expressive face could. “I’m Chate. I just said that.”

“Crabs don’t just start talking every day, though…” Deadline rolled over, dizzy from the oxygen deprivation.

“Well, one day I started talking. I don’t really know why.” Chate the crab drew a circle in the sand with a claw, watching the rain wash it away nearly immediately. “I remember a bright light, like the big ball in the sky. It said something to me, but I can’t recall it… then it felt like my head was gonna split open.”

“What happen after?” said Nova.

“And then I could talk. And make the glowing yellow bubbles, of course.”

“Oh… save is good. Thank for save. I almost fall.”

“No problem. I get a lotta idiots falling in the waters here. Dunno why, but I’m the one closest enough to keep them from drowning, so whatever.”

The group turned around to look back at where they’d come from, where two end-pieces of a massive, shattered bridge overlooked the passageway that connected a bay and the rest of the ocean.

“Have to go,” said Nova. “Deliver drugs.”

Surveil looked at her uncertainly. “What about the Dust monsters?”

She didn’t follow what he was saying until he pointed out to sea, where through the darkness of stormy night (or day?) long legged creatures could be seen rising out of the ocean. The outline of blobs suspended by thin rods standing above the surface of the ocean illuminated by occasional lightning looked like something out of a horror movie.

Nova thought they looked yummy, if only they weren’t made of Dust and thus vanished after she killed them. “Okay we run.”

“Hey! Pick me up too, man!”

The puppet looked down at the crab who had his claws raised in the universal “uppies” gesture. “What? Don’t you have an ocean to get back to?”

“Fuck no! A few of them almost ganked me last year! Like hell I’m going back!”

----------------------------------------

The wooden puppet scooped up the crab, about the size of a basketball. A little large, but he could handle it.

“Could you keep up your ability on us?” Deadline held a hand up to fruitlessly try and shield herself from the rain. “The rain is cold as hell…”

“Fine. But I want a gun. I’m interested in getting a real good look at this city, and what better time than now, I suppose. I’ve got ideas on where to go.”

“How you know what gun is?” Nova took the shotgun out of her body, staring at it. She hadn’t known about what anything was up until she ate the brain of the moonlight assassin.

“I don’t know? The sun god or something split my head in half and I just knew all these things like I’d been one of you guys my whole life.”

She held out the gun to him. “Here. But I have place go. Deliver this.” She pointed at the crate of drugs, miraculously intact,

He took it cautiously, marveling over its design. “Now this looks like a piece of work. Just like I knew it would look like from my memories… even though I’m not sure how I got ‘em. Look, I just wanna go places.”

“Not to BURST YOUR BUBBLE or anything, but… you’re a saltwater crab. You’re gonna die out of the ocean,” said Surveil.

Deadline slapped him across the camera, which didn’t really hurt, but it still annoyed him. “Worst joke I’ve ever heard.”

The crab clicked a claw and conjured two more bubbles around the pair of humans, thinking about it. “I guess you’re right. Perhaps if you could carry me around in a tank of ocean water or something.”

Nova absorbed some of the water herself through her arms, which padded her size and weight up a few inches, as well as a couple of choice areas that didn’t seem important. She demonstrated her new ability by shooting a small stream of water at the crab, who blocked it with one claw.

“There. Salt water.”

“Alright. That works. Just make sure my gills don’t dry out.”

The small group began their ascent up the slope, climbing back up to the city proper. Nova would have reached for her phone or tapped on her watch, had not both been lost during the crash. She hadn’t seen them again, and she probably never would. That was going to be an awkward conversation with Marc later this morning. As a result, when they started walking down the nearest road, it split into two forking paths; to the left was the commercial area, where shops and stores were set up to take advantage of the area to the right: the residential sector. The motel Marc and Coyn were at was… kind of a mix of both, being a business but also a place of residence.

“Which way are we going?” said the puppet.

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The crab pointed a claw. “Left. Obviously.”

“NOT obviously,” said Surveil, “But I do agree this time. We might be able to pick something up at a store.”

“What do you think? Should we?” Deadline jabbed a finger over her shoulder down the waiting road.

Nova shrugged her shoulders, holding the drug crate securely with both slime arms. She didn’t know enough to care, so defaulting to everyone else’s judgment was as good an idea as any. Thus, the pentuple group trudged warily and wearily down the wet asphalt, hoping for a reprieve from the rain and dust.

Sunside City, like most efficient cities, segregated their available land into designated zones for ease of organization and quality of life. The biggest of these zones were simply dubbed ‘the commercial zone’ or ‘the industrial zone’ by most. The commercial zone in question was not terribly difficult to understand; towers of concrete and rebar held within them so many stores that you could spend years mapping out all the things, all the people that came and went via the flow of commerce. Hence, the main roads threading through the district were infamously known as ‘Moneyrivers’.

Humans built the first settlements around bodies of water, like rivers. The same phenomenon occurred with the most well-trafficked roadways of the city. Modernization meant less cars and more public transport, which meant more people at any given time strolling down the spacious sidewalks to find something to do. The bars here tried to cultivate at least some sense of elegance or dignity in their image and in their patrons. In such a competitive environment, being affordable AND rising over the common shop was a necessity, so consumer fraud was ironically less present than when the U.S. government was a coherent entity ruling over a nation, rather than a smaller provisional organization.

The tall buildings packed together made for a sort of maze-like layout, smaller branching paths extending from the main road in a byzantine display of urban development. A few buildings catch Nova’s eyes as they’re walking.

One of them has “FRUIT OF THE FUTURE” prominently emblazoned on a sign. They’re the main supplier of household electronics in this day and age.

Another is labeled “WANDER NO LONGER” with iconography of broomsticks and wands, an open tome for its logo. The metal sheet that covers the windows and doors glows softly with wards.

A third is named “MID-EVAL WEAPONSMITHS”. A brave name for a fearless startup; one that sells all sorts of ‘modernized’ melee weapons, like swords, axes, and spears.

A fourth is named “UNLIMITED EXPERIENCES”. It’s not immediately clear what it sells, though the discerning eye might remember the experience room Marc and Avalle went to during their ‘not-a-date’.

So far no one has harassed them, but it’s only a matter of time before someone (more likely something) notices them, and more Dust monsters arrive to pile on the pressure.

----------------------------------------

Chate raised a claw in the air—the one not currently holding the shotgun.

“I’ve always wanted to see what the inside of a building looks like. Tally ho, everyone! To the shops!”

Deadline tried sticking one hand out of the bubble she was in, feeling the rain on her skin before pulling it back in and watching the droplets slide neatly off her palm. “Did the orb or whatever make you British? Who says ‘tally ho’ anymore?”

“Which store are we going to?” said the wooden puppet.

Nova looked around at all the signs before sliding forward through the rain towards Mid-eval Weaponsmiths. She was a little tired from the earlier exertion (reinforcement is hard!) so her legs were once again back to being melded together into one giant circular foot on the ground. Surveil looked at the puppet, who shrugged and moved to follow her. They were out here at her behest and they sure weren’t stopping now.

Not surprisingly, metal sheeting entirely covered the windows and doors, preventing anyone from entering. The lack of light or sound coming out of the building matched every other store on the block. This way, the shop would be treated more like a random obstacle than a target.

Logically, there was only one thing to do; Nova banged her fists on the metal for a solid minute until the metal grate raised just enough for a middle-aged man to peek outside at the strange visitors. In front of him stood a life-size wooden puppet, a starry purple slimegirl, a red rock crab with a shotgun, a man with a camera head, and a newsgirl with one big cyclopean eye on a digital mask.

“Which asylum are you guys from? Stop makin’ a racket in fronna da store! Don’t want no monsters comin’ through the doors!”

Nova pointed to everyone else in the group, and then her. “We buy. Shopping.”

The guy looked gobsmacked. “Now? Inna middle o’ the fuckin’ storm?”

“Yes. Fight monster. Weapon for fight.”

“Whatever.” He sighed, flicking a switch to cause the metal sheet to retract halfway. “Get in, ‘fore somethin’ nasty comes through.”

The inside was rain free, thank God! Racks held weapons of all kinds, from swords and spears to halberds and daggers. Most of the normal items sat on the left wall. The right wall had more… exotic weapons. The center had cases of less-than-weapons to split the aisle: armor stands proudly displayed plate armor, with large bells and shields beside them.

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Nova set down the crate on a table with a thump, pulling out one of the vials inside. It was really quite shocking they’d all survived the journey thus far without shattering. Inside each corked container was a swirling gray-black concoction, roughly resembling tar or concrete sludge. Before she could check it for labels or anything similar, Chate swiped it from her slime hand with a delicate claw.

“This must be one of those human drinks! Let me try…”

He twisted the cork and tossed it aside to take a swig, letting the sweet liquid flow down his throat. Nova was too shocked to stop him, watching this crab consume some unknown liquid like it was juice.

“What did you call these? ‘Drugs’? Pretty good brand,” he said.

Surveil put down the sword he was inspecting. “That’s not a brand-- how would you even know what a brand is?”

“Orb.”

He threw his hands up in the air. Always with the orb. If he didn’t know better he would have assumed the orb told Chate how to build an airplane from scratch, or how to achieve superluminal travel. What a convenient explanation for everything…

Nova took the glass tube from Chate. “You are okay?”

He shuddered, twitching in place. His beady crab eyes became murky, jet black entirely.

“I can see… it’s all so clear.”

He’s clearly tripping balls. Nova put the vial back in the crate, deciding not to try her luck.

In the back, Deadline is gossiping with the store owner while the wooden puppet inspects a dual-plasma saber in his hands. It’s a rather unsightly weapon, like a double-bladed lightsaber but with sabres. It’s less a weapon and more an elaborate set piece for some gaudy low budget film. Surveil sat on a stool, trying to send texts through his Metawatch. Its sturdy construction meant it survived the crash for the most part, and he was eager to report to his superiors about where he was at the moment.

Damn. She had lost the phone and watch she’d taken from Marc. Now she wouldn’t be able to pay for things. She turned her eyes up to a clock on the wall that read 2:45 AM. Three hours, fifteen minutes.

----------------------------------------

Nova waved a hand in front of Chate’s face. His eyestalks wobbled back and forth.

“What you see?”

“Orbs. So many orbs,” he said.

Perhaps it was his earlier experience with orbs, but when he looked around he saw several other kinds like the big yellow one. They came in other colors; he saw blue, green, red, and pink, among others. Each one was visible to him through all manner of obstacles, lodged in the necks of the people around him. The puppet did not have one, and Nova’s was inside her head, but barring that, a great many orbs were visible to him.

He could not grab them with his claw, for they were all out of his meager range of motion, and even if he had longer arms, he had the vague feeling he was seeing something he was never supposed to see in the first place.

Concentrating, he peered outward beyond the confines of the building, through concrete walls and metal rebar. There were so many more orbs. So many colors. Every color on the rainbow was there, even white, gray, and sometimes black.

Each one seemed to move differently as well. Some rippled like a stone breaking a pond’s surface. Others were shifting and undulating, more of an amorphous water ball than anything else. A few were decorated with strange designs, like Surveil, Deadline, and Nova.

Nova had what looked like metal reinforcement brackets around her ‘orb’, like the gray edges of a shield or the steel support pillars of a building. Deadline had an image of a scribbled-out eye engraved on hers, and Surveil had a camera lens.

“Your orb looks tough,” he said to Nova.

She didn’t know what to say to that. He might as well have said gibberish, that was how well she understood it.

Chate idly pointed a claw at her and tried blowing up a sphere around her. Two showed up; one was centered directly on her stomach, the other on her head. The orb functioned as a second anchor point for his ability, thus allowing two overlapping fields at once.

“That’s new… [Personal Space], get rid of all irritants. Too much dust for my taste.”

The yellow field pushed away dust as he commanded it to, as well as something else he couldn’t see and could hardly sense. To Nova, it felt like she’d been given a little more room to breathe without even realizing it.

“Ooh,” she said, “I feel kind of better.”

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Caution be damned, if it worked it worked, right? Nova took another vial out of the crate, opting to instead eat the whole thing. Strangely, the glass she found too tough to dissolve, choosing instead to spit it out. The cork and the drugs were assimilated without a hitch, though, and they vanished without a trace. Despite having no blood with which to transfer nutrients around her body, the drugs took effect almost instantly.

It was like unlocking a sixth sense that wasn’t there before. She had no need to blink, so they simply appeared before her, as if reminding her they’d always been there and she’d been all but blind. Cautiously, she reached out to touch the one floating right in front of her.

“Hey, watch da hand!”

Chate pushed her hand away. Oh right, she was still in the real world, with real people, who had real bodies that formed shells around every orb in sight. Most orbs were featureless, but those who were Empowered were graced with intricate designs. Chate’s orb was covered in outwards palms, for example.

But she could not see her own orb. Thankfully, she could freely manipulate her eyes without restriction, so turning it around to look at her brain was simple. Thus, she learned her orb was purple and reinforced.

So then what was her Empowerment? To be able to reinforce? She concentrated on herself, trying to activate it. When it finally clicked, the action of her surface tension becoming taut enough to imitate real skin was not the only consequence. Her deep purple complexion grew darker. Black overtook her body until she was a moving shadow in the night-- it no longer strained her to remain in more accurate human form.

Surveil turned away from an accurate replication of the Eyelander to pick up one of the battle axes, only to stare at Nova instead. She nailed the body shape of a human woman down pat, but becoming a black slime instead of one with real skin… He looked her up and down. His approval of her convexity was at odds with the weirdness of her transformation.

“What the hell…?”

----------------------------------------

“Ish tis permanent?” said Nova.

“I… don’t know? Probably not.” Surveil’s curiosity was held back by his inhibition; touching a druggie was never a good idea. Especially not one that could produce acid from any part of her. “Only super expensive medicines change you for good. Or addictive substances, but only the addiction part is permanent.”

She looked at him innocently. “What is adictshun?”

Sigh. “I’m starting to think you’re not really a person and instead a slightly smarter slime,” he said.

“N-no. I human.” If Marc wanted her to be more human, she’d be more human, if only by insisting that she was one. Unfortunate that she’d been banned from growing human skin.

“I got this one,” Chate interjected, “I know all there is to know about addiction.”

If a camera could have a deadpan face then Surveil would be a picturesque example. “Let me guess. Orb?”

“Yes, orb. See here slime, addiction is like a couple’a nice clams…”

While Chate yapped about utterly inane and pointless bullshit that need not be explained to the reader in any capacity, Deadline was putting her time to good use by ‘rizzing up’ the middle-aged man that owned the store. That is to say-- she battered him with small talk he was obliged to answer.

“How’s the business been?” Her digital eye flit from rack to rack around the room.

“Eh. It’s been. Mass-produced slop beats artisan work nine times out of ten. I’m still kickin’ though.”

He threw back an arm to draw her attention to some particularly valuable items behind the counter.

“I got a few customers here n’ there that have an eye for quality. Shieldpiercers, streetsweepers, and exploding hammers; we got it all. You can’t get shit this good from the corner store.”

Looking over what was on display, she counted a few weapons that caught her eye. There was a spear that crackled with electricity, small arcs that created a constant state of flux around the shiny metal tip of the weapon. Small barbed hooks came out of the spearhead on four sides. Then there was a decorated empty hilt, the faint outline of a pane of light forming a proto-typical blade where shaped steel might normally be. A large sledgehammer with what looked like boosters on one side hung from the wall, while a metal shield covered in explosives lay on its back inside a glass cage.

----------------------------------------

“Some nice weapons on display,” she says, leaning in,” But what about the special stuff?”

He doesn’t meet her eyes. “Dunno what you’re talkin’ about. All my goods are special. Hand-crafted works of art, I tell ya.”

“Like… REAL special.” Deadline puts her elbows on the table, hands propping up her chin. “Everyone’s got their… projects they’re working on, right?”

“Not to assume anything, miss, but I don’t think you could afford them. Custom-jobs are a bit out of your budget, I’d imagine.”

“But I’m a reporter, see, and it’s my job to keep my hands on the city’s pulse. What’s the size of your network?”

He scratches his head. “Well… not the biggest, but that’s fine. It’s about how you use it.”

“I know people,” said Deadline. “I’ve got a few connections that could really appreciate a masterwork…”

The man leans away, hands clasped together. “I wouldn’t say they’re masterworks… I’m just a breakout startup. First store, can you believe it? Most people go to luxury brands for quality.”

“I can put in a good word for you with the people I know. Who knows-- you just might end up in the right place at the right time.” Her digital eye nearly closes, the hint of a pupil peering at him. “Whaddya say?”

“Some reporter,” he says. “Come with me.”

She follows him with a hop in her step. Past the counter, the back is where the staff go, and where half-finished projects collect dust while they wait to be put together.

On a table, parts to a mechanical tool lie around a shiny pickaxe. Small lights on the handle light up in accordance with a set of rules you are not privy to, and the curved pick-head is an intricately shaped device that spares only the pick tips themselves from the technological chaos. A large red button is slapped on the side.

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Deadline picks it up, turning it over in her hands. “What is this, exactly?” she asks.

“I’m glad you asked! Turn that dial in your hands.”

“What dial? There’s just a button.”

“Look at the side of it a little more carefully.”

Concentrating on its edge, she could make out tiny markings of a similar color to the button itself, nearly camouflaged into the design. A few words like ‘steel’, ‘wood’, and ‘concrete’ were inscribed on the button. A small arrow at the top denotes which setting was currently active.

“This seems kind of like hostile design.”

“Well, maybe if you used your eyes instead of a mask you would’ve seen it earlier.” The store owner picked up a cube of steel around a foot in length on every side. With some effort he dropped it on the metal table, bending over backward to stretch his weary back. “Now turn it to steel.”

She does as he asks, listening to it click with every turn of the dial. After it lands on steel she pushes the button, nearly dropping it from the sudden vibrations shooting up her arms. The tool trembles in place, almost a blur from the force of the shaking. It’s actually rather loud for a weapon.

“Do I just swing this?!” she yells over the din of the pickaxe.

“Yeah! Just don’t hit the table!”

With more than a little trepidation, she hefts the pickaxe by the handle over her head, aiming for the steel cube. Then she swings.

CLUNK! The sharp tip punctures right through the steel. It sinks several inches, leaving the thing embedded inside the box. The continual vibrations shake the cube as it sits on the table, as if it were prey struggling to escape the grasp of a predator.

She places two hands on the box to stop it from sliding off. “Wow! That’s, uh, a high-frequency blade. I think.”

“Yup. Always wanted to make Metal Gear Rising real. And now I can! The vibrations make it really good at busting through material, but it’s mostly only good for solid objects. Also gotta calibrate it to the right mat-type, or else it could damage itself.”

Running her fingers over the wound in the pickaxe’s test dummy, she notices a tiny spider web of hairline fractures extending from the point of contact. The constant vibrations seem to fuck with the integrity of the box, causing it to weaken considerably. If it were steel armor, a single pickaxe swing could decimate the durability of the item. Additional hits would serve to compromise it even faster.

----------------------------------------

“Anything else?” she asked.

The man rifled through one of the boxes, pulling out a titanium trident a whole five feet long. A leather grip made handling it easy, and the way the surface of the weapon shimmered told her it wasn’t any ordinary spear.

“This is one of my better ones… though not exactly because of my skill. Look over to your left.”

On her left was an aquarium tank that stretched across a table. The entire thing was filled halfway with saltwater, a few fish circling around in the limited real-estate. When the store owner pointed the trident at the tank and concentrated, the water began to slosh from side to side. Likewise, the fish appeared to panic, crowding the corner of the tank in fear. The man wiped sweat off his brow, letting the tank settle.

“Purchased an amp from an auction.” He flipped the trident over to reveal a small, glowing cube set into the connective point between the 3 prongs of the trident and the handle. It pulsed with a deep blue color in between its static white coloration.

Deadline eyed it with a little bit of greed. “Doesn’t the government usually outbid everyone for those? They’re a strategic resource of the state, and I don’t think enough Empowered die that there are too many amps to go around.”

“Everyone’s got their channels. I’ve got mine, and I bet you have yours, miss. Otherwise you wouldn’t have a clientele.”

“Touché. What does the trident do, exactly?”

“This bad boy,” he lifted it into the air dramatically, ”Lets you manipulate anything considered part of the sea. I’m not nearly strong enough to make use of it, but I’m sure you can find someone that can.”

“You ever wonder who had to be killed for that amp?” she asked.

“No thanks. All you need to know ‘bout the underworld; never dig too deep or you’ll end up disappearing.”

In the corner of the room, Deadline spotted a glass orb of some kind with a large sapphire inside. A strange metal cage around it kept it levitating in the air somehow.

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Deadline raised the dodecahedral cage into the light like some kind of cursed artifact. It probably was, considering how ominous it looked. It gave her the sense that one wrong move would unleash some kind of seal that would release a great and terrible evil into existence to wreak havoc on reality.

“What’s this doing here?” she asked. “This doesn’t look like a weapon.”

“That’s supposed to be attached to a staff. I have its sister part right here somewhere, give me a second…”

Looking closer, she saw designs etched into the gem. Calling it runes was a misnomer; it was magical circuitry. Lines and shapes together seemed to function as some kind of conduit, ferrying energy from place to place. The sapphire spun lazily in circles, any kind of movement being the impulse to shift it in a different direction. She beheld the device with tepid enthusiasm… The humming undercurrent did much to dampen her excitement. Nothing like the threat of being imminently blown up to step on your spirits.

“Here it is! Bring the finial over here.” The shopkeep twirled a titanium alloy cylinder in his hands, reinforced to ensure it wouldn’t break.

A circular insertion point provided a connection module for the stave, which the man slotted it with ease. A soft click indicated the locking mechanism was active, and he held the staff up in the air.

He pointed it at a steel block with a flourish. “[Mana Missile]!”

A trio of white darts formed from an ether released by the gem in its metal cage, slamming into the target with enough force to fling it into the wall and leave heavy dents in the material. Granted, the cube was hollow, but it was still impressive.

“It’s a commission for an up-and-coming artificer. Wish I could cast without a catalyst, but I got no mage Empowerment,” he said.

Magic was one of the more interesting Empowerments because mages were rather standardized. Sure, they tended to have a unique spell and a variable mana pool, but 99% of the spells you’d use were general spells or cantrips any mage could use.

----------------------------------------

“I could use one of these for self-defense…”

His face lit up. “Oh! Now thatcha mention it, I got a few spare prototypes lyin’ around. Let me grab ‘em real quick and you can take your pick.”

While he went to dig them up from his storage, Surveil nudged a prone Nova who was currently lying on the floor of the store.

“This shop has slimes in it, huh…”

“What’s she doing?” The wooden puppet sidled up to him to join him to stare down at the body.

“I’m not sure. I think the drugs are kicking in.”

She lay half-melted on the tile, tripping out of her mind. Though the drug was designed to not have this kind of unfortunate side-effect on humans, on other biologies it wasn’t nearly as discerning. Thankfully her dosage was rather low relative to her fast metabolism, so she’d be fine in half an hour or so.

“Here ya go,” said the man. “I got three prototypes right here.”

He put down a trio of staves, each one a rod of titanium with four curved bars forming some kind of cage around their respective gemstone at one end.

“This one casts [Earthen Spire]. Big ol’ pillar of packed dirt and solid stone.” He tapped the stave with a jasper on its end. “Once a day type deal when it comes to casting, though.”

Then he grabbed the one with citrine for a focus. “This one can cast [Aglow]. Makes things glow for ten minutes. It’s pretty light on mana, but if you use it like a hundred times or try to use it on a building you’ll probably have to wait a day before it works again.”

The last one was the quartz stave. “This just casts [Vitality]. It’s a mildly slow regenerative effect, but it can patch up anything a civilian nano-pen can in a few minutes. Lasts a lot longer than ten seconds, unlike a pen.”

Given that Deadline wasn’t a mage, she’d have to keep it on her person at all times to allow it to recharge, but she could afford to maybe grab one, and it would probably be somewhat useful for the journey ahead.

----------------------------------------

One purchase later and she was the proud owner of the affectionately named Fixer Upper. A stupid name, but the customer is always right or whatever. It wasn’t his business to tell her what to do with the product.

“Thank you, sir,” she said.

“Call me Gilligan. If any of your friends ever need anything… send them my way!”

He waved her off as she marched away with her prize. As a prototype, it was rife with imperfection, but it was still a beautiful piece of work all the same. Mana was a notoriously obtuse and strange form of energy; it was normally imperceptible unless channeled through peculiar and occult methods. Rituals of all kinds experienced a resurgence as some of them proved to be actually rather useful to certain Empowered.

Grooves somehow sanded into the metal allowed her fingers to neatly slot into an extra stable grip. Inside, a horticulture of bacteria floated around in specialized liquid agar that flowed through a variety of channels, some mere millimeters thick. From there they conducted mana up into the four prongs that held the gemstone in place, some kind of powerful magnetic attraction keeping it firmly suspended. She couldn’t swing it too fast or whack hard objects with it for fear of potentially dislodging and damaging the locus of the stave, but other than that it was mostly self-sustaining. As long as she used it occasionally, the microfauna would survive on mana alone.

With this in mind, she stepped out into the main area to see Surveil crouched next to a half-puddle of starry purple slime on the floor. Chate lay on his back, eye stalks swaying from side to side, and the wooden puppet brought a hand to his chest with one behind his back. Surveil sadly closed his hands around Nova’s melting one, camera shutters given the illusion that he was in some kind of horrible grief over the passing of a loved one.

“I’m sorryyyyyy…” murmured Nova.

The cameraman shook his head. “Don’t think about that any more. I know you didn’t mean to… we’re gonna get out of this, okay?”

Deadline dropped the stave with a dramatic clatter, the loud clink turning everyone’s eyes to her.

“What-- the fuck. Dude. Did you just kill her?!”

“OF COURSE NOT!” Surveil shot to his feet, outraged. “I won’t tolerate such bias from a supposed ‘journalist’!”

“Then why is she apologizing to you like she wants to die without regrets?”

“She’s just drugged on whatever’s she’s supposed to be delivering! She just feels bad for almost killing both of us in a car crash!”

She scooped up her newest acquisition off the ground, pointing it at Nova.

“I can fix that! Go, my Fixer Upper!”

It didn’t do anything.

“I don’t think you’re using that correctly,” said the puppet, unhelpfully.

“Gimme a second. [Vitality]!”

That seemed to produce visible results. The drug must have counted as some negative affliction, because Nova eventually pulled herself together again, sitting up and looking rather deprived.

“That feel weird. What happen.” Nova reflexively rubbed her face to stop the headache she was having, which was an out-of-place gesture for someone like her. No matter whose habits she inherited, they weren’t very useful.

“Don’t do drugs. Nova,” said Surveil.

“Aw. Okay.”

“It’s 3 AM,” said the puppet, “Should we be going?”

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“Ya. Probably. Ok we go now.” Nova picked up the crate with both arms, looking over to Chate. “Can you fix?”

Deadline aimed the stave at him, digital eye closed to show she was concentrating. To Nova’s shock, he actually glowed with a weird green light before getting up groggily.

“Huh? Whuh? What happened?” he groaned.

“You took those drugs, didn’t you?” said Surveil.

“Well. Yeah. Maybe. What if I did? Can’t a guy try things out?”

“First of all, you’re a crab. Second of all, the mysterious ball should have told you that drugs are bad for you.”

“It didn’t tell me that.”

“Oh so suddenly the ball conveniently forgets to tell you about that when you decide to take some random drugs?”

“Can it, ladies,” said the wooden puppet. “I’m starting to get tired of pulling these strings. Let’s head out already.”

The shopkeeper waved to them as they left. “Come again! If you’ve got the cash for a new weapon, that is!”

Chate clicked a claw and barriers surrounded the two humans. They all stepped out into the harsh rains, the winds blowing against them hard enough it was like being buffeted by a giant fan. Surveil looked around nervously, afraid of being speared through at any second by an angry Skyfin.

“I really do not want to be out here for long… where are we supposed to go?”

Nova spun around in a circle before remembering and pointing further down the road. “There way. I think.”

“Do you actually know where we’re going?” asked Deadline. “Or are you guessing?”

“Guessing?”

“I knew it. What’s the address, Nova? I know the city better than you do.”

“Umm… don’t remember.”

“Oh god. How were you expecting to get home?”

Nova tapped a finger on her chin like she was thinking. “Walk around then I see it?”

The mannequin buried his face (or lack thereof) in his hands. Deadline bent over backwards, hands on her forehead.

“Okay,” she said, “What about this. We find the highest building in the nearby area and Nova points out where we should go?”

“Nuh uh. I don’t do heights,” said Chate.

“Also we can barely see anything through the rain. How is that gonna help?” said Surveil.

“Well?! Do you have any better ideas?!?” She threw her hands up in the air, frustrated.

----------------------------------------

He crossed his arms. “I do, as a matter of fact. Watch and be amazed!”

Surveil pressed a button under his ‘chin’, if you could even call it that. At the same time, his true identity was revealed; rather than a camera, he now functioned as a flashlight, a terribly bright light unleashed from his lens. A large area in front of him was suddenly visible and no longer suffocated by the oppressive darkness that the storm brought with it.

“That’s just a flashlight,” said Deadline. “We need to be able to see the whole city.”

“That’s the thing. We canvas the city with the light, top to bottom, and narrow down the search based on anything Nova might remember. You remember something at least, right?”

Nova spat more saltwater on Chate’s shell to keep him properly hydrated. “Umm… maybe…?”

“See? Not exactly a stellar review of your idea.”

The wooden puppet raised his hands. “Let’s just get going. We are burning moonlight here.”

This did not mollify the woman with them. “Are we just gonna walk? In this weather? Under threat of attack at all times?”

“Fine. We can go look for an e-bike stand,” muttered Surveil, barely audible over the rain.

There was an unspoken agreement to not even consider a car again. Comparatively, electronic bikes were more flexible with where they could go with a lower risk of crashing. Also… if Nova crashed, at least everyone else wouldn’t pay the price. Finding one in the storm was a pain and a half, but with Surveil’s convenient facelight it was much easier. Several bikes were locked up on one rack, in various colors. One was blue, with a cargo basket. Another was pink, with painted flames streaking down the side. A third was green and had… wings. The fourth was gray, worn down more than the rest and slightly rusting on its exterior.

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Game knows game, and what better signifier of speed is there than sick as fuck flames? So naturally,

“This one.” She pointed at the pink e-bike.

Surveil turned to her in perplexion. With his superlight still on, the sheer luminosity of his head turned her into a rather fancy lava-lamp-esque nightlight. Unable to close her eyes, as she was translucent, they were irreversibly seared into blindness. She clutched at her eyeballs before remembering she couldn’t do that. Damn human reflexes. Instead she had to break down both of them and create two new ones, which took time and effort she didn’t like spending.

“P-point somewhere else!”

“Oh, sorry,” he said, “But shouldn’t you take the gray one? You’re the only one who can pedal fast enough to keep up if it breaks down on the way.”

The wooden puppet climbed into the seat instead, rapping his knuckles on the gray bike’s rusty frame. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll take it. I’m not the one risking my life, anyway. I can always pay for another puppet.”

If it works, it works. In the end, it was decided that Deadline would get the cargo basket one, where the crate of drugs would have to be placed. It was a little inconvenient that Nova couldn’t handle them directly while on a different bike, but it would have to do. Surveil chose, unsurprisingly, not to deploy the wings. He’s still a pansy for doing that though.

“Tonight… we ride!” Deadline’s mask changed to that of an image of a pair of sunglasses.

She revved the engine, which is to say she accelerated with the electric motor. It was actually rather quiet, basically smothering by the storm, so rather than a sick motorcycle takeoff it was more like an old grandma starting up her mobility scooter for a trip to the store. But unlike that it was actually pretty fast; she sped off at double the speed of a traditional bicycle, with the others not far behind. It seemed the rust did not measurably slow down the vehicle, for Mr. Mannequin could keep up just fine.

Nova stepped on the “gas” and blasted forward, only her relative weight to the average passenger keeping her grounded on the bike. Each bike had its own headlight to make sure no rider ever crashed from being unable to see the curb at night, and the four of them zipped down the streets like fireflies at twilight.

“Okay, Nova, tell us if you see anything,” said Deadline.

“A crab,” she said.

“That’s because you’re holding him. Tell me if you see anything besides him.”

“Company?”

She pointed behind them. Though they could not see through the storm, the sound of barking hounds was still recognizable through the downpour.

----------------------------------------

The optimal decision was obvious; she stepped on the brakes, swiftly moving from the front of the formation to the back. The shapes in the darkness quickly came into view, roving bands of dogs coming together like a disastrous tidal wave. She spat acid at them, but the downpouring of rain and the unpredictable nature of the stormy winds made it hard to hit a specific target. Those who were hit were spared the brunt of the pain, the elements quickly scrubbing them of the acid.

“Outta the way,” said Chate, “I got this!”

He struggled to manipulate the shotgun, as befitting a crab. With clumsy claws, he aimed and fired simultaneously. One of the 7 slugs she possessed blasted apart one of their heads, the mangy mutt unspooling like thread to be washed away by the tempest. The recoil tore the weapon from his grip, unfortunately, and Nova had to grab it out of the air so it wouldn’t be lost forever.

“Careful,” she chastised him, “Can’t lose.”

“Whatever. I’ll hold it better this time.”

Towering above the group, a lone figure came into view. It stood tall, taller than the buildings around it, perhaps even a skyscraper in its own right. Spindly legs like bamboo lifted a solid mass high in the air too hard to make out, massive strides allowing it to keep pace with the speedy Voidhounds. Each step carved holes in the asphalt or speared through buildings; one hit from that and you’d be turned into a kebab at best.

“That’s… not… good.” Surveil tried to crank the handle of his bike to speed up.

Deadline clutched her stave in one hand as she rode on. “Great. Thank you for the observation. I almost thought it was here for smiles and hugs, actually.”

“It’s fine, I can try to buy you guys some time if I have to!” the puppet yelled over the din of the downpour.

“Don’t forget about me! I can try shooting that thing before it catches us!” Chate then fumbled while trying to reload, so Nova just grew a second pair of slime arms and did it herself.

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He swung the weapon up to the clouds, up to where he caught scant glimpses of the huge bulbous abdomen or torso or whatever it was standing tall above the buildings. A moment of concentration saw him fire the weapon, only for the slug to miss by several meters, soaring into the night. The light and sound of the blast seemed to irritate the being, who lashed out with a leg and punted some of the dogs with enough force to send them flying forwards in a spray of living horror.

(ROLL: 8) Nova caught one to the head, Chate narrowly avoiding being knocked off. With her second pair of arms she backhanded it away, letting it hit the pavement and roll away.

(ROLL: 20) Miraculously, Deadline was placed in the exact spot to avoid all the incoming projectiles, the hapless hounds shooting past her like shot-puts.

(ROLL: 19) The mannequin swung his e-bike around to the side and leaned back, sliding across the asphalt for a few precious seconds while the enemy passed by overhead, earning him style points!

(ROLL: 7) It was a good thing nothing was on Surveil’s bike, because he was nailed in the back of the (camera)head by one the size of a puppy.

A terrible screech preceded the green wing-bike swinging left and right from a sudden loss of control. Before he could wipe out and eat dirt, Nova sped up to pass him, grabbing him right out of the seat before the bike flipped end over end. It bounced up into the air as it flew back into the mass of Voidhounds and exploded violently. Deadline watched the ball of flame expand before disappearing into the storm’s fog.

“Thanks… I don’t think they’re supposed to do that,” said Surveil.

“Well I’m glad there’s something we can agree on,” said Deadline, “How about you start looking ahead instead?”

This turned out to be a good idea, as the path ahead split into three; straight, left, or right. With the speed they were moving at there was no time to really think about which path to choose.

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Turning was far too risky and might result in a crash out, so forward was the only real option. Thus, the group advanced deeper into the Commercial District, a very angry pack of hounds on their heels…

“We’re seeing Spindlers outside, miss.”

A recon soldier in full gear stood with his back ramrod straight as he reported his findings to his superior. Decanus Ivo turned around, short-cropped white hair surrounding her stone-cold face. Even short as she was, only five-foot-one, she commanded a presence far greater than her size would suggest.

“They’re moving in from the ocean?”

“Yes ma’am. They only appeared last year to watch from a distance, but they’re coming up on land today.”

She rubbed her chin in consternation. “That’s unusually aggressive… How's the activity?”

“High,” he said. “There are far too many Dust creatures getting into the city this year.”

“Then we’ve got to go find where they’re getting in and plug it before the problem gets worse. Let’s move out; I want the vulnerability sealed by tomorrow morning,” she grunted.

“Actually there’s an incident nearby on the radar if you want to handle that.”

He brought up a holographic screen showing the increase in activity in the Commercial District. They were moving forward at high speed, as if chasing something. She rubbed her eyes, knowing what he meant.

“Any other quick-response units in the area?”

“None. They’re all handling other cases.”

She sighed. Cleaning up the enemies that got in was standard procedure for Wall Collective quick-response squads, but the adrenaline pumping tedium of being the equivalent of combat paramedics really grinded away at your sense of self and optimism after a while. But she was nothing if not ambitious. She would much rather complete a real achievement worthy of her own superior’s respect than anything else…

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Unfortunately for her, offending the top brass wasn’t an option. It would surely fuck her out of a promotion later down the line, and the thought of missing out on a big pay raise and the respect of a higher station because of a minor mishap like this seared her prefrontal cortex. Unhappy as she might be, it was a job she couldn’t refuse.

“Mmm. We’re moving out, soldier. Tell everyone to get their asses in gear. Three minutes,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am. High-speed response vehicle?”

“Naturally. If we have to, we’re gonna do it fast, and the whole thing’s on the company payroll anyway.” She allowed herself a tiny smile, almost unnoticeable. “If I’m playin’ by the book, I might as well read it from cover to cover.”

Some traditions never changed. To call their armored personnel carrier a humvee was no different. To be honest, it was a fair bit larger, spacious enough for the team of ten under her command to fit shoulder to shoulder in the back. It was uncomfortable, but a good soldier didn’t make a fuss over such petty feelings. On the other hand, Decanus Ivo’s downright reckless driving skills WERE something to throw a fit over. Being a Decanus was a big deal, putting her heads and shoulders above the rank and file. With that role she was given corresponding responsibilities; she had her own team of ten to manage, a little real influence in the Wall Collective’s organizational structure, and certain authorizations not meant for the common trooper.

And yet she still drove like she was drunk. That was on good days, by the way. At a time like this, where she prioritized speed over safety, some of her men thought themselves on a rollercoaster with how she rounded every corner with the kind of drifting you’d see in cheap action flicks all the way to the latest Micheal Bay movies (yes, he’s still alive and kicking).

In minutes she was trailing the small horde of Voidhounds chasing after some unknown target she couldn’t make out in the dusty rain; the Dust itself seemed to scramble wireless connections at high concentrations. Nevertheless, the ultrabright headlights on the car immediately gave away their position, but the dogs kept running, Either the large Spindler striding through the streets kept them together as a cohesive pack, or they hated the lights, bright enough to sear their skin (although dealing little damage).

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Mechanical pistons extended the base of a turret out of the roof of the armored personnel car, a heat-resistant alloy forming a barrel filled with focus lens. Drops of rain that landed on the rapidly-heating weapon turned into steam in seconds, a piercing red beam popping into existence to carve a line through the enemy. The sheer power in the laser meant it was visible to the naked eye as a scythe of doom, an instrument of death in the hands of a capable operator.

Contrary to popular belief, the laser did not immediately slice everything in its path in half. Rather, it bored holes into the Dusty bodies of whatever it happened to linger upon, a ranged drill just effective enough to function as a military-grade weapon. Even better, the bright light that banished the darkness made for a surprisingly useful deterrent; the Voidhounds were irritated by the photons and fled the touch of the beam. Unfortunately, they were now all very much aggravated with the major threat in their midst, and quickly turned around to engage the metal beast in their midst. A similarly peeved Spindler lashed out with one of its legs, shaking the entire vehicle but narrowly failing to puncture the metal.

“Get ready, everyone,” said Ivo, “Let’s show them what firepower means!”

Rather than stopping, all parties involved kept moving at high speed, only slowing down enough to move left or right to strike at each other. A dog leapt onto the front, trying to claw through the glass. Another sank its teeth into a side mirror, infuriated. Jerking the wheel left and right dislodged some, but not all her pursuers. With a grunt she rolled down the window and shot it with her service pistol, watching it fall off and be lost in the rain with a chorus of whimpers.

The sudden lack of pressure was a surprise to Nova, who saw the Dust monsters slip back into the night, replaced by faint sounds of battle from behind. She could count her lucky stars and leave, but her curiosity pulled at her slime…

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She turned away, fighting the urge to get herself into another messy situation. One last bang from the shotgun Chate’s holding announces your departure, as the enemies fall back to tackle the source of the light piercing the veil of stormy night.

“Thank God,” said Deadline. “We could’ve really bitten the bullet there.”

Surveil wiggled from where Nova was holding him. Because he was bikeless.

“Can I sit down?”

“No,” said Nova, “Not dodge good enough.”

It was a little mentally taxing to have to take care of a crab, a man, AND continue to drive at the same time, but nothing she couldn’t handle with a bit of elbow grease. Though… she was feeling an appetite coming on…

It’d been a lot of exertion tonight, battles, constant fighting, that sort of thing. While she could function without rest, energy was still a resource that depleted from wakefulness, which Nova had been experiencing in spades. Speeding through the Commercial District did end up taking a while, and by the time Nova had any real idea of where she was going and managed to get home it was already 5 AM, which, on speedy e-bikes, was rather abysmal travel time.

Nova picked up the crate of drugs, sans like two vials. In a very human display of emotion, she’d picked up a kid’s interpretation of shame and morality. That is to say she tossed the empty vials somewhere and hoped Coyn wouldn’t say anything.

“And we almost didn’t make it!” Surveil threw his hands up. “It’s a good thing I can record the time too, since I lost my actual watch in the crash!”

Deadline looked proud of herself for doing nothing. “That’s my Empowerment in action! It was my fortune that led us here. Something like that. Serendipity is the word I’m looking for.”

“Is that all?” asked the puppet.

Nova nodded to him, gesturing to the bikes leaning against a nearby wall.

“Well, we’ll be off then. See you around sometime.”

She waved her new friends goodbye, which was awkward because she had lost the phone and Metawatch. And… the house keys. Bummer. That was a problem for 5 minutes in the future her.

About six pushes of the doorbell later, Coyn cracked the door open looking like she’d been through the ringer. Her hair was all over the place, and major bags under her eyes gave her the appearance of a zombie, or perhaps a ghoul.

“Hahhh? What are you-- oh, right, the thing. You should’ve texted.”

Nova wisely did not mention the car crash that she lost the phone in.

“Put it down right here,” said Coyn. She pointed to a table by her computer for Nova to obediently place the crate down on.

“Thanks for the help. But, um… What's with the crab?”

Nova held up Chate, still holding the shotgun. “What? Never seen a real shellfish before?”

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Coyn wasn’t a fan of Chate’s irritated tone. “So who’s this guy?”

“Homeless man,” said Nova.

“Uh huh. I see. So, how was the delivery? It took you a while to get back.”

Nova briefly thought about all the stuff she went through over the past six hours. Fighting random Dust monsters and also participating in a mafia shootout probably held some kind of significant consequence in store for her in the future… whatever.

“It was ok.”

“Okay… anything else you need?”

She mimed rubbing her chin because that was a human gesture. “New phone. New watch.”

“You lost them already? How?”

“Car crash.”

Coyn paled and turned away, trying to avoid a terrible crash-out at 5 AM in the morning hopped up on caffeine. “I’m gonna choose not to ask you what you mean by that. Just go back to your room. I’ll have the things delivered in a few hours.”

“Can’t,” said Nova, “Lost keys too.”

How fortunate that Coyn also had copies of everyone’s keys in the building! Nova did not feel concerned about this information whatsoever. Thusly, she went to bed where Marc was still sleeping rather soundly, except with a crab this time.

“What’re we doing?” asked Chate.

“Wait for him to wake.”

He settled down for the likely long wait. “When?”

“Don’t know.”

“Whatever. I need more saltwater.”

The sunrise was obscured by the storm, but behind it all dawn still broke on a bored crab, an idle slimegirl, and her borderline incompetent owner who continued to sleep none the wiser to what had happened, though he was sure to complain about losing his stuff come noon.

“Weird day,” thought Nova.

Weird day indeed.