No! No, no, no!
It'd take someone deaf to ignore the blasts of fire Lung had been letting off. It'd take someone stupid to continue toward the trouble.
Someone who clearly wasn't a cape was coming along, dancing his way like a drunken idiot to his death. The insects I'd tried to fly into his face couldn't hear anything, so I was beginning to think he was high. At least until I got the fuzzy impression from one of bright lights, and then -- headphones. The idiot was wearing headphones. Not high, just dumb and in a world of his own.
Lung was furious, roiling fire as he turned his head this way and that. The bees and wasps I'd gathered began to regroup with a vague direction in mind.
I didn't have any way to help prevent what was about to occur. I'd been unwilling, unable to just look away as Lung and his flunkies laid an ambush to kill some kids. I'd accomplished everything I needed to, before someone with a death wish came strolling into the alley nearby.
I can't do a thing about this.
That was the rational perspective. That was reality. I wanted to leave but I froze, one foot still on its toes where I'd been ready to take a step back and try to find somewhere to make a call to the Protectorate.
Maybe he won't notice. Drunk guy can just get to the next corner and turn there.
I didn't believe the thought even as it occurred.
Lung whirled around as if he'd heard a gunshot, staring down the length of the road toward where the drunk, shirtless guy with sloshing bottles was doing some kind of waddling walk on one foot in the other direction. To Lung, it probably seemed like the ultimate insult to the… gratuitous stings I'd committed with sadistic glee. The dead man dancing had his back turned to the cars, to the gang, to everything occurring a mere hundred feet off to the right of where he'd emerged. As if the explosions of fire weren't worth noticing.
A victorious roar filled the air, less human than the outcry he had made earlier. I felt a vague sense of resignation, for what it confirmed in my mind. Lung hadn't been facing that direction a moment ago.
Enhanced hearing.
The package of powers the bastard got from his transformation included superhuman hearing.
You heard about superhuman strength in a day to day way in Brockton Bay. There was video footage of plenty of capes with something of its kind doing various feats, but it was an entirely different thing to see it in person. I was almost too slow to react to how fast Lung leapt forward, form wreathed in burgeoning flame. His bounding step cracked and melted asphalt.
I threw wasps out at him despite the futility of it. Despite the fact that I knew it wasn't going to stop him. They burned before they could even get to his eyes, and I couldn't regroup them fast enough even with flight in their favor to try to form a buzzing fog. Lung just moved too quickly.
He took three huge leaps that put him in range of the innocent bystander about to suffer the cost of my actions, in the time it took me to consider the contents of my armor. The convex section along my spine offered me nothing for someone else's safety. At least, for this situation.
An EpiPen wouldn't stop Lung.
Lung's morphological changes had gone a step further by the time clawed fingers extended out to rip off a nameless innocent's head.
My unintentional scapegoat flinched, head tilting away, despite seemingly complete ignorance to what they'd walked into at the last second, to let Lung's hand fly past.
The furious cape's flame lit the dark spot of the sidewalk they stood in, underneath a broken street light, bright.
The orange-yellow of Lung's fire distorted, less than a blink of darkened rippling in the light cast on the nearby wall. A wind blowing down the street shifted.
It was almost instantaneous.
Lung's arm twisted around at two finite points, and tore itself from him like an overextended spring. His shoulder jerked, mouth already opening in a rictus of furious pain.
Then Lung was facing me, facing back where he'd come from. His lower half was facing the same way it had been though, the other way. His left leg was wrenched the same as his arm had been, coiled up in a helical bend that sent it splattering against the wall, ripped off of him with force.
Lung fell in a heap, as parts of his body went in all directions and a red mist spread fine over the air.
In the mob of flying insects I'd been desperately trying to get between them, I could better picture the distortion's nature by their abrupt removal -- deaths. I realized the experiences in a way that made the nearly invisible, three dimensional attack more apparent.
Only someone or something very small wouldn't have been caught up in the different, spinning lanes of what had struck Lung. Some of my makeshift swarm wasn't where it'd started, and some had their wings clipped for the near point contact with the unknown cape's power. It wasn't tight rows or straight lines of some kind of invisible blaster or something. At least, I didn't think so.
Striker? Shaker?
Lung snarled or screamed something in spite of missing limbs and having his spine spun around and some of limbs wrenched off of him. I couldn't tell if they were cries of pain, or fury. I noticed some of his intestines on the outside through the tear the unwilling one-eighty his tophalf had been forced through that his bottom half hadn't been fast enough to follow, somehow.
I saw his arm had been twisted up and torn into three different disjointed sections laid across the sidewalk and road behind him. The pieces of the masked cape that were largest had been flung away further. Part of his severed leg was the furthest, with bone fragments sticking out of a flayed thigh sitting under the nearest operating street light.
Lung's fire died off. He laid there on the ground, because while on one side his entire leg was missing, on the other, his foot was. One arm had been severed, and the was twisted up like a braid that was divided down the middle and tied into a horrible knot. There was nothing even about the way his body was bent in different ways and broken.
I'd never seen something so awful looking in my life. The bugs I had remaining, I sent in anyways, taking the opportunity to assure the Azn Bad Boy wasn't getting up soon. Even as my swarm descended upon him, where he laid mostly undefended, he snapped and snarled.
I wondered how he wasn't dead, but given his connected lower parts twitching just barely, his extreme durability was already showing itself. If someone else had survived that, they would have been paralyzed without a doubt.
Lung's noodly appendage's stumps were already trying to block off open tissue and heal.
I hit him with everything I felt like I had remaining, and for the ease of access to sealing wounds, sent further stinging, biting, envenomating bugs against his most vulnerable places. The remaining fire began to fade off as he grew more sluggish. The dark spot of the dead street light that I could see with my eyes but that didn't matter to the rest of my "senses" resumed where Lung's instant loss had occurred.
As the writhing Asian cape grew more still, something in the shifting mass of insects I was still pulling in from the surrounding area alerted me to a fast moving object. A tiny little flier I tried to land on the shirtless, pajama-wearing cape was abruptly a block away the moment the light faded from him.
A massive, warped creature the size of a car landed in the street, cracking pavement at the same time that two similar things landed on the rooftop near me.
I turned, caught somewhere between dread and resignation all over again. Shaking like a leaf and witness to layer upon layer of danger in one night, I grit my teeth through the fear.
Were they with him? I knew they weren't with Lung. I hadn't intended at the time to see a cape outside their disguise.
Each of the creatures sharing my rooftop bore a pair of riders that slid off and ran to the edge of the building we stood on. The tallest one approached me, and I read between the lines.
Not antagonistic, right now.
Distantly, I was aware of Lung's fire renewing itself in a minor way, like he was trying to rise to the new challenge all over again, but the huge creature down on the road snatched him up in its jaws and started to shake him back and forth roughly, like an oversized dog.
The tall one of the bunch wearing all black stepped closer to me. His voice was deep, masculine, but muffled by the motorcycle helmet he wore. I wouldn't have assumed his outfit was a costume at first glance, just motorcycle leathers alongside his face covering, but the full visor was sculpted to look like some kind of skull.
"What was that?" He asked. "The fuck you do to him?"
Oh no.
No, no, no, no I did not!
I resolved to say nothing at first, since I wasn't sure what to say. Internally, I fought a rising panic that was combated primarily by rising concern.
One of the two girls at the edge of the roof turned her attention my way, head tilting just barely as the eyes behind her generic domino mask lingered. She was wearing a skintight outfit that combined black and a pale shade of blue or purple. I couldn't tell in the dark. Her dark blonde hair was long and windblown.
"Wasps and bee stings, spider bites, and fire ant stings." She answered, for me. "But not just her…"
The other girl whistled at that, and the two other creatures on the roof with us leapt off and onto another nearby rooftop. As they spread out, while the other remained below hassling a thoroughly, if temporarily crippled Lung, I realized they were searching.
Searching for someone. The bug I'd placed on the cape shifted again. Three blocks away. He started to move slower, but was running, now. Whatever he was doing, he would again soon.
"Mm." Skull-mask made a sound at that. "Introductions. That's Tattletale-"
I threw myself toward the fire escape in a hurry. Dangerous and Dumb in pajamas was getting away. Realistically, I knew what I was doing was dangerous as well, going after him, but I wasn't so dumb as to leave a cape I'd never even heard of who twisted Lung into a pretzel as an unknown.
"Hey, wait!" I heard Tattletale shout, but when they didn't give chase, I didn't.
Fuck!
I threw myself around another corner at a dead sprint. I'd made some immediate distance, necessary. My MP3 sat silent in my pocket as I beat the pavement beneath me with my feet, in a rush. The two ripped halves of my headphones' cable were bunched up in my hand, the earbuds slack and connected to nothing, but still in my ears at least.
That had not been part of the plan.
Only when I ran another block did I breathe a sigh of relief and fall into a walk. I ignored another car driving by, heading in the same vague direction as me. I reached down to inspect my MP3 player's screen. Luckily, it hadn't been damaged.
I still had two minutes!
I am going to ruin that-
I stepped off of the curb, ran three large steps toward the center line to cross toward the opposite side. As soon as I crossed it, a car's horn blared at the same time that tires screeched. Light flashed in the corner of my eye and I flinched for the second time that night.
Metal screamed in protest, turned upon itself as I shifted onto my back foot. The car's momentum transferred to some degree unimpeded despite that, and that caused the engine block to fold in upon itself, practically exploding as metal burst into fragmentation under the immense force of meeting itself. The car ran into an angle, a twist that it couldn't follow through on, so those parts that began the turn shattered like it met a solid object.
Despite having been in line with its front left headlight, the car didn't slam to a stop but almost bounced off of me after its initial damage, shattering the windshield. Its speed diminished by the impact, it rolled by fast and came to a stop when it crashed into one of the working light poles.
I turned ever so slowly to my right, and started heading toward an alley that would let me cross over to another street to the east instead. It was slightly out of the way in my straight line back to my apartment, but I had time.
I got to the edge of the curb I'd been planning to step up.
A baby's cry split the night air. I froze.
It cried louder, over the hiss of the defeated car's engine and the faint groan of metal having come to a stop and still settling.
I clenched my fists around my remaining three bottles, shaking slowly as I brought them up. My jaw tightened.
"Fuuuuuuuuckkkkkkk." I whisper-shouted at the sky, because the universe was unfair.
I thought of the demanding power bottom in my bed, waiting on me. I thought of the time remaining.
"Fuuuuuuckkkkkkkkkkkkkkk." I real-shouted, hands shaking even more as every muscle in my body felt like it was flexing at once, forcing me to remain still. My grip on the bottles tightened to the point my knuckles whitened. "Fuuuuck youuuuu!"
I almost couldn't believe I was going to do it. My arms fell slack. I put two of the bottles on the edge of the curb and turned. I started back toward the car, right hand gripping the top of the black bottle and twisting it till the perforated seal on its twist cap was broken. I turned the bottle's bottom to the sky for a gulp, as the baby's cries continued to fill my ears and my feet carried me quickly closer.
At a power walk, I moved around to the driver's side, putting the cap back on good ol' Jack. The car was definitely totaled. It looked like a piece of junk to begin with, but I wasn't expecting much else for the area. A woman was slumped against her steering wheel. She was bleeding from her hairline, but the air bag deflating in front of her still told me that it had at least deployed.
Grasping the handle of the car door, I gave it a tug.
Locked.
It is the Docks.
I shattered the glass of the driver's side window, and reached inside that way, pulling the door open a second later. I set my bottle on the dented roof of the car and then leaned down. Reaching in, I felt around the corner of her neck for her pulse. Held my breath.
My sigh was relief, as I turned to peer through the back window toward a reversed car seat with a very upset baby screaming as if his, her, potentially their, or any other random configuration of societal roles assigned by language, life depended on it. Still.
Baby was in considerably less danger than the mother, given it had only heard the noise and felt the impact of them coming to a stop against the pole. A much more minor crash than what Mom had felt.
Still, I reached out through Mom's broken window to press the button to unlock the car. I didn't want to shatter more glass by Baby. Reaching one hand out to grab my bottle from the roof, I moved around the trunk of the car and crossed over to the other side and thus the rear seat that the baby was screaming from.
I pulled open the door.
"Shhh, shh, shhh," I encouraged the shit demon. "Shhhh. It's alright. Shhh."
It continued screaming, and I felt briefly around the edge of its diminutive form in its carseat, checking for a bottle or pacifier. When I came up dry, and it screamed all the louder with the acknowledgment that it existed, I shrugged and started to unscrew the cap on my bottle.
I lifted my index up to cover the top of the open bottle and tilted it over until the whiskey poured momentarily over my fingertip. I sat it back on the roof of the car, before leaning down and back in to get to where Baby the Loud still let me know its displeasure. I started to draw my fingers near the boner killer's little face.
I blinked, then hesitated.
I withdrew my right hand's fingers and gave them a sniff.
Oh no. Oh very much no.
I withdrew and changed hands, and then just as the plague-carrier, hormone influencer, fun sucker sucked in a few stuttered breaths to regather oxygen for another banshee scream, I shoved my left hand's pinkie with a touch of whiskey against her lips.
The joy drinker made a weird, "flrprtprtft", which was much better than crying. Certainly better than screaming. I rubbed the whiskey along its gums, back and forth briefly when it tried to bite me.
"Thaaaat's it, little demon." I whispered to them, softer. "Just a little taste of happiness. Enjoy it while it lasts. It's twenty a bottle, when you're a little older."
I pulled back and leaving my bottle where it was, moved to the passenger seat door of the car. As I'd already unlocked them, I pulled it open and crouched down enough to reach inside and find Mom's cheap phone. Thankfully, phones didn't require access to use emergency services.
I called the emergency line and let them know the location, before tossing the phone in the passenger seat. The operator's voice, asking for me to remain on location for assistance, I ignored.
The street light overhead flickered briefly.
I tucked a wad of bills into the mother's purse, where it sat in the floorboard, and then once I'd locked all the doors again barring her side, collected my wayward squad.
Jim, Jack, and Jameson all fell in line, a chokehold on their necks.
I didn't want to deal with anyone asking and quickly putting together how the car had crashed into itself, or seemingly nothing at all.
When I got to my apartment door, I reached out for the handle without going for my key. Squeezing it, I gave it a twist, and the door came open slowly.
Damn.
I closed my eyes, sighed, and stepped in. I pulled it shut behind me. Turning, I noticed the shoes my hookup had worn were gone. A note was sitting on my keyrack. I put my keys back in their spot and slipped out of my more worn slippers.
"I needed to be up for work tomorrow, anyways." I read out loud, alone in my apartment. Moving down the hallway slowly toward my bedroom, I glanced at the clock on my left nightstand.
Twelve minutes.
I lamented the loss. Her husband or job was lucky. Whichever she was married to.
Ah, well.
Bad bitches wouldn't be bad bitches if you didn't miss opportunities with them sometimes. Her sticking to her seven minute thing just cemented my feelings on the matter.
I stepped around the glass on my floor and placed the three bottles I'd returned with on my right nightstand. Tilting after, I rolled into my bed, the smell of the better parts of my night like a balm on my disappointed libido. Leaning down, I pulled out the drawer of that nightstand and felt around inside before pulling out the remote.
Pressing my back up against the headboard and getting comfortable, I slouched to maximum potato, and pressed the button to turn on my TV where it sat on a low wooden stand a little ways beyond the end of the bed.
Was fun while it lasted, I guess.
I watched the EMTs help extricate the woman from her car from the recessed stairs leading down toward someone's basement floor level. Well, I didn't watch them, but I watched through the insects that were interacting with different points on the scene.
She started to panic as she came to, worried about her baby, but that was resolved quickly with the woman's daughter having never gone anywhere. Reunited, the mother was taken by an ambulance. I kept the impression of her location with a bug on the ambulance, up until it passed outside my range.
I actually watched the front of the drunk cape's apartment building, feeling for and finding all manner of cockroaches, cellar spiders, and wolf spiders that I could use to scope out rooms and the design of the place potentially. I would probably need to use one of the wolf spiders with their better eyesight to try to corroborate which place was his.
I knew what he looked like.
I knew he was extremely dangerous.
But…
I thought of the baby crying. Of him standing on the curb, making angry, indecisive noises. I thought of him turning back and moving to check on them, and calling for emergency services.
It was the least he could do, really.
Minus giving alcohol to a baby!
He was a villain, for sure. A sneaky one, at that. The really dangerous villains of Brockton Bay could be found through the trail of bodies they'd left behind, displaying their powers or their methods.
I've never heard of someone turning people into spaghetti.
That was the scary part. That he could have been getting away with it, right under the PRT's nose and no one would have been the wiser.
Just like…
I closed my eyes, and put that out of my head.
When I opened them again behind my mask, I took a second to look around to make sure I remembered the place. Then I decided it was really, really time I got home. I needed to think. Mainly about the crossing point between a cape doing cape things without their mask on, and the rules that enforced secret identities.
I've done all I can for tonight.
As I was carefully closing the door to my room behind me, already dreading school, I wondered what ended up happening to Lung.