The puppeteer of Mr. Canard sat inside his portable office, feeling irate and spooked. He was slowly devouring seventy eight burgers and twenty four pizzas from a McHeroes delivery order. He had purged a lot of biomass from his host to get out of the damned pipe. Precious, precious biomass that he had to gain all back as not to look questionably thin. Eating what he had purged off the ground was out of the question. Humans did not eat things from the ground. The other shard was right.

He had to blend in better. Blend in... much better.

The host’s brain meats were giving him information randomly and sporadically, resisting the little shard’s influence over it. The more the little spider learned of this new world, the more terrified he became. The all-seeing megastructure ring in the sky was the worst. He now knew that he could not do anything odd out in the open, or they would know.

Don’t give them a reason to check. Don’t be weird. Be a teacher. Blend in.

Anyone or anything could be an agent of the Superstate, he knew this now. He made a foolish mistake in making a nest in the bank.

Thankfully, that little blonde girl impervious to the hypno-pacifier had destroyed it. What was her name? Alexa? Alexa. A nice target for the propagation?

No! No she isn’t. She knows things. She vanished and reappeared beneath the bank somehow.

Was she a super? There is a lot of gold in this backpack of hers. Mr. Canard was in possession of two of Alexa’s backpacks now, having confiscated one and taken the other from the Ice Cream van. So much gold in the black bag and strange devices and diamonds in the pink one. Where did all of this stuff come from?

The little shard tried to draw conclusions from Alexa’s bags full of loot and failed, its desires for propagation and the strong mind of the host constantly interfering with its ability to formulate coherent thoughts. The need to make more of itself nagged and persisted. He pushed it all back, focusing on the thoughts and desires of the host. The host's desires provided the shard with useful information.

The host, the real Mr. Canard, knew that a super observer from the sky could notice that he was acting weird. The host knew that it would be a strike team of five supers with powers that reinforced each other that could easily take him down.

The shard worried that the SCA team would come for him. He feared that they would mentally disable him like the hypno-pacifier did, rip the little alien life out of the head of the teacher and vaporize it. Yet, nobody showed. Perhaps the little skinwalker still had a chance to exist in this terrifying world full of powerful hosts.

The longer he spent inside the teacher, the more was fusing with the host. Perhaps, there was still hope. Perhaps there was still a way to survive and propagate.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

No. Don’t think about nests. Don’t think about making a nest.

He wondered how the other shard was doing in the boy. Its integration had seemed far more successful.

It seems that the children made better hosts than the super adults.

Don’t think about infecting children, damn it! The eyes in the sky are watching. The prognosticators are calculating the future. Change too much and they will come down and destroy you!

Don’t do anything out of the ordinary. Just be a teacher. Just eat this delicious pizza. Don’t be a monster. Integrate. Belong.

. . .

Unfortunately, he could not hide forever away from the world, as being a gym teacher was a thing he had to do now. He put on a pair of mirrored sunglasses to hide his glowing, silver eyes and emerged out of the relative safety of his portable. As the pretend teacher walked across the gravel road into the gymnasium, he tried not to look up at the terrifying, gargantuan ring in the sky, dotted with eternally burning lights. Upon arrival into the gym he waited for the 8th grade students to emerge from the change rooms.

When the kids started to come out of the change room, three of the girls immediately drew the shard’s attention to themselves.

The teacher froze.

Firstly, his eyes settled on the [Equalizer].

He was warned via a text from the Vice Principal that she was a transfer student that was coming today. What he was NOT warned about was the huge, gun-shaped thing beneath her clothing, which the super’s x-ray eyes could immediately see through the cloak. It immediately stood out against the red pulse of the Equalizer’s body heat. Mr. Canard gulped.

This was a very dangerous gun, its core was colder than anything he’s ever seen. Fractal tendrils of darkness wiggled within its depths, reaching, wanting, waiting. The gun was alive and it wanted to feast, to devour his power. The infected super spotted the pin on her chest and shuddered. This girl was the highest Ascendant of the Equalizer Order, a Paladin Enforcer who executed true enemies of Equality, did too much damage to people or cities.

Mr. Canard took a step back, the host sweating in dread of the gray-cloaked Executioner and her living gun.

The second, [redhead girl] that caught his attention made no sense. She was a tad too tall to be an 8th grader. The host’s power determined her age to be approximately 15 or 16... or 19? There was something off, wrong with her age. Her bones seemed older than her face.

She was even more spooky than the Equalizer, because she didn’t belong to his class.

Mr. Canard suddenly recalled her name.

Dixie. Dixie had always been in his class.

This information came from nowhere like an infection. This was a memetic attack, a mental power in play!

His all-piercing x-ray eyes detected a pair of Superstate handcuffs in her pockets. Mr. Canard saw ghostly, barely perceptible, off-color... things floating all around the girl. They were just as terrifying as the living gun.

This girl was a concealed Superstate agent, the one who he feared would come for him!

Were these two part of a group that came to take him down? Where were the other three? Mr. Canard’s eyes beneath the mirrored sunglasses rapidly spun in their sockets, in different directions, calculating possible routes of escape.

The third girl that emerged from the locker-room was [Alexa Terranova] and she was holding a very large, shiny, brass tuba.

“Sup teacher-sama! Why are you wearing sunglasses indoors? I know what will cheer you up! A nice song!” She yelled, waving an arm at him and put her lips to the tuba, blowing.

A cloud of sparkly dust exploded out of the tuba.

It was the last straw.

Mr. Canard flung himself out of the window, glass shards raining in his wake.