Ainōryoku Sentai Nightmærangers

by Shadow_Crystal_Mage

Summary:

In the city of Metro Manila, terrible beasts have appeared, possessed of impossible powers that stand against the principles discovered by science. These eldritch beasts run rampant through the city, causing chaos and suffering as public order breaks down in the face of this horror.

However, there is hope! Five brave souls clad in heroic colors have chosen to stand against this terrible, unspeakable, blasphemous chaos that threatens to drag the city down into a cesspit of accursed, loathsome vileness and indescribable, unknowable danger! Blessed and cursed with eldritch and nameless powers beyond that which men should know, they chose to stand against this coming blight!

They are the Ainōryoku Sentai Nightmærangers!

Notes:

Posting this to gauge interest. If there is sufficient, I'll post the rest.

Chapter 1: Prologue: Day Of The Plague Dog

If the world had a sense of drama, they would be doing this in the dead of night, maybe in the rain, in the seedy underbelly of the city.

But no, it was the middle of the day, the skies were clear and they were in a heavily trafficked public area. The buildings of Eastwood City– not actually a city, but rather a combination shopping area, IT park and residential complex– towered above them, shielding them from the sun.

"Is it nearby?" Tammy asked her cousin as they walked through the crowds of people thronging the sidewalks. A part of her wondered why there were so many people of all ages there, since it was just past lunch on a weekday. Didn't these people have work? School? Granted, she and Willy were there because every bathroom in their school had flooded, forcing the school to close for the day to find out what the heck had happened and wait for the water to drain, but what was everyone else's excuse?

Willy shook her head. "Too many people," she said, in a tone most people would have called brusque, annoyed and vaguely offensive. Tammy could tell that while Willy might be annoyed, it wasn't at her. She knew her cousin. "It's annoying. The thing is hiding in the back. It can't take it."

"Is it hurting you?" Tammy asked, concerned.

The much taller girl shook her head again like she was trying to shoo away a fly. "Doesn’t hurt. Just annoying. I'm fine."

Tammy nodded, trying to smother her concern. If her cousin found it annoying, she'd do her part to try and lighten her load. "But it should be around here?"

Willy nodded. "I felt it coming out of the water near here," she said, her head scanning back and forth as she used her greater height to see over people. "Couldn't catch it before it did."

"It was my fault," Tammy said. "I should have been paying attention."

"You were busy killing the others," Willy said simply. "It's fine"

They didn't even have to keep their voices down. Talking about killing in public? Nothing to do with anyone, they were probably talking about videogames anyway. Tammy resisted the sudden urge to wipe her arms. She knew they were clean now, but…

She shook her head, getting back on task. Despite the tall buildings all around them, a mixture of condos and office buildings full of banks, BPOs and call centers, at ground level the place had a lot of plants in its décor. The islands in the middle of the main roads of the complex were full of plants, there were plant boxes everywhere, and trees grew in large, cultivated patches fronting restaurants and fast food joints. She didn't have to close her eyes or try very hard to feel them. She was just… aware, like she was aware of her fingers or her toes. She could feel the light on their leaves, the slow growth as they broke down carbon dioxide into carbon to build themselves, feel the slow osmotic action of water entering their bodies…

Tammy shuddered, willing herself to keep moving, to not give into as she felt the urge to stand still and root and just grow. She reminded herself she wasn't a plant, no matter if she often felt like someone who was a thousand plants stuck inside a too-meaty human body…

She forced through the lethargy, even as she took control of all the plants in her vicinity. She felt the parts of the plants that reacted and sensed light, the phytochromes and the cryptochromes and other photoreceptors.

Tammy turned them into eyes.

She walked but the plants nearest her shuddered, their leaves gaining thickness. The plants around her, once limited to seeing red and blue and ultraviolet, found the entire spectrum forced on them. She saw people moving and building's rising above her/below her/past her/over her/on her (they were stepping on her, her stems were breaking, her leaves smearing on the ground, but she wasn't dying, she couldn’t die, and even as they passed stems knit and new leaves grew, seeing all around her again…), felt her multitude of leaves spreading wide to see as many angles as possible, felt the chemicals in the water, the tars in the smoke, the pollution in the river even as her roots drew them in–

She felt Willy's hand on hers, a cold, reassuring wetness and she struggled to keep herself separate, to not start thinking she was a plant/all plants!!!! She held on to her cousin's hand even as they kept on walking, not letting herself go over the brink. The plants were her eyes, and that was all! She was a person, a human, not a plant, and the plants were just her eyes!

She held her cousin's hand tighter as their pace slowed, trying to match the people walking on the sidewalk. It let Tammy focus on seeing…

People… so many people around her. She could see herself, though her plant eyes. An average-looking girl with her shoulder-length hair hidden under the hoodie she was wearing, just standing there holding Willy's hand, water dripping from where they touched. She blinked, and suddenly she was looking in front of her through eyes made of meat, in a body of muscle and bone and roots growing from her palms into her cousin…

Hastily, she pulled back, the roots withdrawing under her skin, becoming one with her flesh. "Sorry," she muttered. Her cousin's hand stopped being cool and wet, growing firmer and warmer until they were touching flesh to flesh.

"You needed water," her cousin said simply. "Can you see it?"

"Got distracted," Tammy said, resuming walking as the space in front of them cleared, leaving the small puddle of the water that had dripped from their hands behind. "Hang on…"

Her vision fuzzed and split, and she was seeing through the plants again, through photoreceptors that were not as nature had original intended. She ignored the people, walking in their shirts and jeans and jackets, being all tall and bilaterally symmetrical. She looked for things closer to the ground. She looked for dogs.

There weren't many stray dogs here, and what dogs there were belonged to those who lived in the surrounding condos. Willy had said it had come out of the water so…

She concentrated on the senses of the plants near the river. Many were stunted and unhealthy because the water was polluted, but they were growing. Tammy forced them to live, forced them to see. She saw the dog. It was dripping wet

It was the size of a car and dripping, covered in raw lesions and pus-spewing skin, with its hair falling out in patches. Bloody gouges surrounded by blisters leaked pus on its flanks as it stumbled over the cement walk fronting the river, out of sight of the road. The giant mutt was scrapping itself along the walls, leaving blood, scaled skin, torn hair and other fluids as it tried to relieve itself of the pain it felt from its sores and injuries. Blood and other fluids were bleeding from every orifice. Its stomach was making it look like it was on the verge of giving birth.

"Found you," she muttered, recognizing some of those wounds, surrounded by blisters and white sap. She'd managed to put them on the thing before it had run away.

As it passed them, the nearby plants began to die, and Tammy felt their leaves, their stems, their organs shutting down as shear disease filled them, bacteria and viruses drifting from the plague dog from every sore, every drop it left behind, every breath of air it panted out, infesting every plant. Tammy felt their pain. Tammy felt them die. Tammy felt herself die.

She tried to strengthen the plants, to fill them with life and growth and fight the infections that were killing the, but the plants were too close to the river, too tainted, too weak. She felt stems burst, felt bark split, spots and discolorations spreading on leaves as that plants that were her became factories for–

Tammy's eyes snapped open. The plants weren't her anymore. They were hosts of taint, vessels of unwellness, fonts of impurity. They belonged to the disease.

That was fine. She had more.

"It's that way," she said pointing in the direction of the dying plants. "Come on, we have to hurry."

They wove through the crowd, keeping each other in sight as they made their way across the complex. Their hoodies didn't stand out in the crowd of twenty- and thirty-somethings all wearing call center casual. Tammy doubted they even wondered why two girls would have their hoods up in the middle of a bright sunny day. She had to hold in her thorns in case she brushed up against anyone, but let her skin turn into smooth bark. Her sense of touch degraded as her sensitivity to airflow, temperature, and minor pressures disappeared to nothing, and her body seemed to become stiff even as she kept on moving, even as her joints stopped wrinkling properly when she moved. Her vision jarred, taking on a shaky-cam-like aspect as her neck stiffened, and she had to concentrate to make the small micro adjustments that kept her from feeling nauseous, even as her throat constricted and she was suddenly breathing through her skin.

Her feet and waist weren't contributing much, too smothered to breathe properly. But at least breathing was no longer mixed with smell, so she couldn't smell her own socks. She was aware of the white, blistering sap that now ran through her xylem and phloem in place of blood and veins, of the photosynthesis going on in her face…

They crossed the street, moving past tall trees through which Tammy saw herself. Covered as she was by clothes and wearing a long-sleeved hoodie, she still looked normal, if you didn’t notice that her eyes no longer blinked and were starting to dry. She was also walking a little funny, as if her limbs were stiff, which they sort of were.

Willy, at least, still looked like herself as she kept pace with Tammy, who was following the eyes of the trees. The plague dog had gotten onto one of the main thoroughfares of the complex, the one that circled around and led to the pricey hotel-slash-condo-slash mall complex from the back, and was causing a stir as people, and then cars, avoided the monstrously huge, obviously diseased animal as it stumbled onto the middle of the road while security guards reported on their radios and otherwise stayed where they were in front of doors.

Tammy sped up as soon as the way in front of her cleared enough, jogging stiffly, her feet pounding heavily on the sidewalk, Willy smoothly keeping up with her.

"Don't wait for me!" Tammy said. "You're faster! Get to it, get it away from people."

WIlly nodded once to show she understood, and then broke out into a dead sprint, her longer legs and lighter body letting her eat up ground as, in the eyes of the plants, her face blurred in the shadow of her hood, hair and skin melding together, becoming a transparent, featureless blob that rippled with her every footfall and movement. Her hood started darkening as it got wet, the dark stain and wetness spreading down her body to her blouse, her jeans, her socks, her shoes.

Tammy would have sighed. Sometimes she wished she could be as blasé about her clothes. As it was, she was pretty sure she'd have to buy a new set of everything, including shoes, even if this turned out well. Unfortunately, she couldn’t make cotton thread bind together again.

Her physical body soon lost sight of her cousin as Willy made like an internet parkour video, jumping over and narrowly avoiding every obstacle in her path, disappearing as she went past an overpriced foreign-brand restaurant with barbershop-themed signage. The eyes on the trees kept track of her cousin's blue hoody as she ran on the street, ignoring the cries of the security guard playing crossing guard as she wove past and between cars, only some of which slowed or stopped when she crossed their view. The trees and potted plants and bushes saw the plague dog's head perk up, and it let out a wet, coughing bark that left a large smear of blood, pus and phlegm on the road as Willy leapt onto a car stopped in front of the plague dog, her shoes leaving footprints on its trunk, roof and hood as she barreled into the plague dog in front of it, her arm drawn back, and punched it in the face.

There was an explosion of water that rose high enough to be seen over the line of restaurants in Tammy's way as Willy hit the plague dog with a punch literally like a firehose, her fist becoming a raging torrent that slammed into the plague dog with deceptive force, the water flowing with unnatural cohesion and surface tension to bring the full force of its mass to bear, sending it flying across the asphalt in an expanding pool of water, tainted blood and diseased bodily fluids.

That's when the screaming finally started.

Which meant people started going towards the screaming with their phones out.

Ugh, people! She was trying to save them, why were they making it more difficult for her?

The plague dog's claws tore at the asphalt, and its bloated belly bursting in bloody bits of unalliterateable fluid and viscera everywhere. From the way people were flinching back and gagging, the smell must have been horrible. Tammy didn't have much of a sense of smell now, and either did Willy.

Tammy finally reached the road, still at a run, her face shifting as her features smoothed out, leaving only a blank surface the green of young new bark. Her body was too heavy for her to do the weaving and dodging her cousin had, but thankfully she didn't need to. Traffic had been stalled and blocked, so she didn't have to pay extra attention to cars. And she wasn't the only one walking into the road for a better view. She just managed to avoid hitting anyone, otherwise it would have been with the impact of a swinging log.

Willy was grappling with the plague dog, which was still full of life despite literally being torn open and dripping filth onto the now-wet asphalt of the road. Her hands wafted cold vapor, and there was blood and more disgusting stuff on her hands, shaped like fists and made of ice. The twisted, bloody bits of flesh that had erupted from the plague dog's stomach were moving, resolving into immature, canid fetuses, their bodies twisted, flesh red and inflamed.

They were already starting to grow, inflating like one of her seeds bursting into a sapling. There were more than a dozen of the plagues puppies, skittering over the wet road so fast that it was hard to count even with her eyes in the trees. Even fresh from the womb, their skin was flaking and already starting to bleed and drip with their own pus. They grew from the size of mice to the size of cats, and then to the size of grown dogs in the time it took them to scramble the distance to Willy, swarming Tammy's cousin even as their stomachs went from cadaverously fleshy to bloating, foaming rabid mouths snapping at her, tearing at her clothes and trying to reach flesh.

Tammy groaned. They'd just gotten done doing this! She rushed into the scene, letting out a yell that sounded like a wooden flute being blown into with absolutely no musical talent as she leapt up and chopped down her hand, her fingers bursting into dozens and dozens of thorny bougainvillea-like vines, green and supple and full of needle thorns. The improvised lash slammed down on the plague pups, tearing at their too-soft, diseased flesh. The stomach that she currently didn't have roiled at the cruelty, even as she felt her vines getting infected where the tips of thorns had snapped and had touched pus.

Her body fought the infection as she ignored it and pressed on. She wasn't some potted plant: her thorns and vine grew rampantly, fighting disease with unbound growth as she let her vines wrap around their bodies, their struggles driving her thorns into their too warm, too stiff muscles as she tried to keep them contained. They contorted as their bloated bellies began to bulge, trying to gnaw at her vines, but she only grew more thorns, tearing and blistering their mouths with her sap, staining the foam they dribbled bright pink. Struggle as they might, with her vines wrapped around them the plague pups didn't have the leverage to tear their way out of her hold.

Her cousin had her own tactics: water couldn't get sick. Her now completely soaked clothes were the only things still giving most of her body humanoid form as fists of solid ice struck at the plague pups blocking her way and hanging on by their teeth onto her wet clothes. Still, she deliberately strode to get to the one that had spawned them. The plague dog stumbled away on its raw, jerky limbs, its gutted belly already knitting shut perversely, the edges bulging, flaking and scaling grossly as it grew like a cancer to seal back its innards.

The plague pups in Tammy's grip burst. The pups hanging from Willy's wet clothes by their teeth burst. The ones knocked to the ground burst.

She didn't feel the blood and other viscera flowing down her vines and staining her as the pups, now the size of full grown dogs, all burst at their bellies, each releasing at least a dozen small, writhing, mouse-sized premature pups, skins all red raw and scaling, even as they moved and grew and bloated…

She shouldn't have gotten squeamish.

Literally dozens of dozens of newly birthed plague pups began to swarm them in earnest, skittering on the ground with bloated, inflamed limbs and squamous hides, trying to entangle them with sheer numbers. The degenerate canines bit at her shoes, her jeans, climbed up on each other to jerkily throw themselves at her and covered her with worse than piss.

Her skin was bark and felt none of it when it was penetrated and white sap flowed, even as those that bit her yipped in pain as their mouths broke out into blisters and swelled even more than before. She wasn't breathing through a nose, and smelled none of it. Only the sight of what was happening brought her disgust, but she'd seen worse on TV and games. The vines growing from her hand fell off, freeing her limb even as they continued constricting and growing around the pups they captured, growing through flesh, roots burrowing inwards for something to latch onto and feed on, even as the pups filled them with sickness. Fingers grew back, fresh green and tipped with thorns as she grabbed the pups latching on to her and began rip them off, kicking them aside with her dense, wooden legs, trying to clear the path towards the plague dog. It had already gotten away once, it wasn't getting away again!

Then she heard the new screams.

Tammy realized she'd become distracted, even as she looked through the eyes of the plants around her again. From the vantage points of the grass, the trees, the decorative greenery and the potted plants on condo balconies, she saw the situation. People had been crowding, their phones out, some still trying to get closer even as something clearly unnatural was occurring. They had gotten too close, and not all the plague pups had focused on Tammy and Willy.

Twelve dozen rapidly growing, monstrous, plague-ridden puppies were more than enough to be some obstacle her and Willy, even as they both tried to power though them to get at the plague dog. They had pushed and thrown and beat the plague pups aside, little things that were swelling like balloons. The pups had kept on growing even when cast out of the pair's way, stumbling on uneven limbs that either refused to function or where twisted or undersized. But they had teeth. And as they grew, they had been pushed outward, towards the edges of the road, towards the watching people who were backing away, but not far enough, not fast enough…

And then the pups were too close, and they were going after people, biting at ankles and knees, and these people didn't have legs made of wood.

Even after all the pictures they'd shown on the news, of twisted creatures grown beyond sane size, of a swarm of bird-sized insects devouring everyone in a slum to the bone, of the giant forest of unearthly mushrooms that had overtaken Baseco out in Manila Bay, people had not yet learned to fear monsters enough. They still hadn't learned to run.

People fell, the plague pups drawing blood, biting deeply through flimsy business casual clothes and into flesh. People tried to kick, to crawl away, even as they found to their horror that they couldn't move their legs…

A heartsick cold gripped Tammy's chest, and despite not having a heart she felt like something was physically squeezing it. She stared after the plague dog, already hobbling away. Willy had abandoned her shoes and socks, vaguely foot-shaped blobs of water sprouting from the ends of her soaked jeans somehow supporting her weight and getting traction on the asphalt road despite seeming to blend with the water mingling into expelled mess on the ground as she made to run after it.

It was going to get away again. But they had to let it, otherwise these people…

"Blue!" she cried, an inhuman voice that sounded like wind roaring through the knots of a hollow tree. "Let it go! We need to kill the others!"

Willy heard her, coming to a stop and turning to look back at her. Even with a face that was just a blob of clear water, Tammy knew her cousin was confused at the sudden change of priorities, of killing the little ones instead of the big one. The big one was the important one, the carrier that made all the little ones, roaming along the border of Marikina and Quezon City and spreading infection and sickness.

But Willy didn't ponder it long. She trusted Tammy. Turning away from the escaping plague dog, she switched targets. The spreading water, still thick on the road and pooling at the gutters to flow on towards the drains, abruptly froze, the water turning into ice with no warning. Plague pups that had been hobbling on the water began to skid and slip, and a few that had been partially submerged found their feet trapped.

Tammy had the feeling they'd need to have another 'why didn't you do that sooner' talk.

The plague dog was still getting away. It was limping, but it did so with speed, ignoring the people in its path that, not surprisingly, were getting out of its way with alacrity. Tammy wanted to just go after it. To ignore the pups around her and the people they were attacking and bring the plague dog to the ground, making it one with the earth and filling it with her roots as she devoured every part of it with her roots…

She wasn't a plant. And she was doing this for a reason.

She turned away, knowing the plague dog would get away again, knowing they'd have to hunt it down once more. But they'd been hunting it to keep people safe.

Something yellow leapt over her, landing lightly behind her on the edge of Willy's ice and kept on running.

Still connected to the plants, still seeing through their eyes, Tammy didn't need to turn to see it.

At first, she thought it was some kind of exhibitionist wearing full body spandex. Then she realized their body was all wrong. It was too tall and slim to be healthy, with a waist so narrow it seemed spindly, or the result of too much photo-manipulation. Their limbs moved strangely in a way she couldn't quite put her finger on, reminding her of a doll. The long limbs quickly ate up the ground between the newcomer and the plague dog, which still struggled to run. The newcomer leapt over the plague dog to land in its path, blocking its way.

Just like the dog it used to be, the monster darted to the side to evade the newcomer, but a limping dog the size of a vehicle isn't as nimble as a regular dog. Its shoulder slammed into the yellow figure, tackling it aside. Instead of being thrown back, however, the unnatural limbs moved as if independent of the torso, the yellow one regaining their balance as one hand slammed fingers-first into the plague dog's side in a knife-hand strike.

Blood and pus erupted from the wound as the plague dog let out a surprisingly high-pitched yip of pain, even as the newcomer was yanked off their feet, pulled along by the plague dog. The newcomer was pulled along for a step or two before it leapt up onto the plague dog's back, landing amidst the raw, crimson skin and thrust its other hand, fingers rigid and aiming for the head. They missed, clipping off a leprous ear and tearing a bloody gash down one side of the plague dog's face. Not letting that deter them, they struck again and again, squeezing at the plague dog's side with their long legs. The plague dog frantically shook its head as they stumbled from side to side, trying to buck off its yellow rider.

Tammy kept several dozen plant eyes on them even as she fought to keep the plague pups away from the crowd. She tore open the front of her shirt with only a mild twinge of regret– she'd really liked that shirt– letting her front erupt into branches. Her back bowed as her feet burst her shoes open, roots growing across the asphalt she stood on, fine, fine filaments finding the minute cracks on the road and flowing inside, then growing and tearing the surface only to continue growing downward. The branches erupting from her chest grew with unnatural speed, bright green buds becoming silvery branches becoming brown, scaly bark as the branches grew and grew, leaves sprout all along their length, opening to catch the sliver of sun that came between the skyscrapers, taking in the carbon dioxide and breaking it down to so her body could grow, spreading in all directions, thorny vines bursting from their ends to dart down and tangle around the growing plague pups. They were the size of dogs again, their stomachs bloating and writhing as things moved under their flesh…

As her head touched the ground, her body now bent over completely backwards, she felt what would be her scalp writhe, felt the filaments of roots extend and begin to burrow and tear inexorably downwards into the ground as the tree that now stood shivered unnaturally, thorny vines growing faster than kudzu and striking like snakes to encompass the road and the sidewalks and the living. They ignored people, wrapping around plague pups, pulling them away from people, keeping them from escaping. More branches grew outwards, pressing against the fronts of buildings, smothering windows as they followed where plague pups had stumbled, vines drooping down and wriggling to seek them out. They were tainted by disease on contact, their wood beginning to rot, but she grew and grew, her growth outpacing the disease, smothering the plague pups. She felt peoples' screams on her leaves, felt them bat aside her vines, but she didn't relent. She grew and grew and grew, her canopy rising higher, seeking more sun.

Sudden water washed over her, and her roots fed hungrily as Willy flooded the road again, water gushing from her feet and hands and face, or at least the parts of her still intact and soaked clothes that corresponded to those parts. Her vines pulled at the plague pups, wrapping around them  as she pulled them under the shadow of her leaves, their wriggling bodies like putrid fruit. The water rushed over the diseased mongrels still on the road and water immediately became ice, freezing the plague pups in place, even as the vines wrapped around them, thorny seeds growing from the bark with the relentlessness of bamboo shoots, piercing their body. Their stomachs burst, trying to release more plague pups, but her vines wrapped and wrapped and wrapped, more thorny seeds growing from her vines, burrowing into the plague pups. Her vines strained, the plague pups trying to grow, to break free from her hold, but she continued to wrap over them, her vines reinforcing their confinement…

And then her thorn-shaped seeds, their hard outer shells protecting them from infection until they were rooted deeply in their hosts, burst into saplings.

Her massive, spreading body swayed as her hanging clusters of vines suddenly erupted, malformed and vaguely degenerate, stunted sapling growing from them, covered in gore, roots feeding on blood and flesh and bone marrow.

She sighed with satisfaction as the saplings fell from her grasp, all dropping to the ground as she severed her vines, cutting off the sickness. She breathed, filling herself with air, and she could feel her body breaking it down and growing from it even as they released waste oxygen into the atmosphere. Her body swayed in the wind, her leaves shivering as the canyon of tall buildings on either side channeled the air into a rush…

She jolted to attention as her roots froze, the veins in her stem filled with water and sap bursting as their contents expanded. Frantically, she tried to grow more roots, to mend and repair herself, but the cold was pervasive, chilling the ground, and there was a dark maw, and endless depth that she couldn't fill, a frightful and devouring–

Hey, a voice that spoke with the ice in her roots and sap and stems said, slapping her mind. Snap out of it. You're turning into a tree again.

The entire tree shuddered and suddenly Tammy opened her eyes inside her own mind and realized she was trapped, trapped inside a tree, unable to move, unable to feel…

With a scream of terror only her cousin would hear, a vaguely humanoid-shape ripped itself out from the side of the enormous tree that now blocked the road. Tammy stumbled, back in one body once more, even as she could still feel the ancient-seeming chimeric monster of a tree, even as she frantically tried to change back to have lungs and bones and muscles and skin–

Before that could happen, she felt a hand grab her wooden arm. Instinctively, filaments of roots began to grow at the point of contact, trying to suck in the water that suddenly touched it, even as she recognized her cousin's watery touch. Her cousin stood there in her sodden clothes, a vaguely humanoid figure of transparent water defiantly standing against gravity. "We need to get the dog," Willy said in the voice of the water that resonated through the puddle under Tammy's feet, in the fluid she'd managed to suck up, through the darkness in the back of her mind that sank into endless depths…

Tammy shook her head, bark falling off as she forced herself to define a division between head and shoulder and neck, forced herself to stop taking in the water that was Willy. More bark fell as she cast off excess wood, carving for herself an approximation of her body in vibrant, fresh green bark. Fine wooden fingers tipped with thorn claws flexed, and her thumb, peak of human evolution, pressed against them. Do good now, freak out about nearly becoming stuck as a tree twice in one day later. Again.

Sound came rushing back as she made organs to hear, sight returned as she lined the front of her head with photoreceptors. She could have seen from any point on her body, but she put them on her head. People saw from their heads, through their eyes, and although her eyes were wide, dark blotches on the front of a knob of wood as green as a new leaf, they were eyes and they were on her head. She was a person, not a plant, no matter how much she felt like one. No matter how much!

Legs that bent like new stalks but were heavy as hardwood stepped forward, away from the shadow of the tree she had… grown, towards the plague dog that now stood alone as it fought the yellow newcomer. Arms swung out of habit to keep her balance, and she breathed in air through her skin, let it out through her entire body. She was a person, not a plant.

Her cousin followed beside her, looking vaguely comical as she did, like something out of a laundry commercial. Ready and waiting to follow Tammy's lead, as she always did.

The yellow newcomer was… bigger now. Previously slim limbs had bulked with lean muscle, and what had seemed like tights now seemed like armor plates, and were covered in blood and pus. Curving claws protruded from the end of the newcomers hands, grappling with the plague dog and tearing bleeding furrows on their raw hide. Despite the plague dog greatly outmassing it, the two seemed evenly matched as the smaller newcomer danced nimbly around the plague dog's jaws and bulk, trying to tear at the beast's limbs.

Tammy stared at the newcomer, and in the back of her mind, she felt hunger, felt the urge to bury meat and bone into the earth and then devour it all with her roots, fill her veins with blood–

She smothered it just as she did every time she looked at her cousin.

Her name was Tammy Olivarez, and she wasn't a plant, no matter how much she'd felt like it since that day.

"Come on," she said, "let's go help them."

They ran.

Behind them, the tree stood, looking ancient as it rooted in the middle of the street, its leaves and branches pushing against the buildings on either side as the fallen sacks of vines that littered the ground around it bled blood and pus and gore.

---

The area of the street where the yellow newcomer and the plague dog were fighting was clear of people, who'd all drawn back to take out their phones. The plague dog grappled with the newcomer, trying to get them in its jaws. It fought like… well, a dog, leading with its fangs, batting with its front paws. Its limbs were jerky though, its inflammations working against it and hampering its movements. But it was huge, it treated the fact it was bleeding like a minor inconvenience– and if it was anything like Tammy, it was– and it had a single-minded fixation on surviving.

The newcomer seemed to possess an equal determination to kill it. The back of their left arm was thickening, becoming thick and shell-like as they used it to ward off the plague dog's jaws, even as the nails– the claws– on their other hand tried to tear at the monster's– the other monster's– sides, attempted to stab in between ribs, and generally make their body unsuitable to the business of being alive and functional. Their abnormally long and thin, almost insect-like limbs danced as they tried to avoid the paws that kept batting and swinging at them, trying to get them to stumble and fall to the ground. Their reflexes seemed to be keeping them ahead of the plague dog though, and Tammy had no idea how they were moving so fast. But the yellow one was keeping the monster in place, and its stomach was still cancerously sealing shut, so it couldn't release any more pups. This was their best chance to take it down!

"Keep it from running away this time!" Tammy cried.

Willy was running ahead of her, longer limbs– Tammy had unconsciously defaulted to her natural height and proportions, something that happened when she forgot to deliberately sculpt her form– letting her cousin take the lead. Water surged as one hand erupted in a fire hose-like stream, slamming into the side of the plague dog. The water immediately started washing off the layer of blood and puss and other unmentionable, unknowable fluids on its skin as it pushed the plague dog back. Willy directed the stream lower, refining her aim, and the dog let out a high-pitched yelp of surprise as its hind legs were knocked out from under it by the relentless flow of water.

The newcomer was on it in an instant, using its bulk to protect themselves from Willy's stream while getting on top of the dog to gain leverage. It tried to keep batting its paws at them as the newcomer shoved their left forearm between its jaws, forcing its head back and disorienting it about where to attack. Their other arm drew back, and in the split second when it stopped, Tammy saw it wasn't tipped with claws anymore.

A single, blade-like spike of bone now jutted from the newcomer's forearm, and it stabbed deep into the plague dog's flesh. It howled around the thick, hard mass of bone and shell and spines between its jaws as the newcomer bore down on it, seeming trying to keep it down despite their smaller, lighter body.

Now that they were no longer dancing around, Tammy finally got a good look at the newcomer. What had seemed like tights in the distance– even though she'd known in her heart they weren't, couldn't be– from much closer looked like the shell of a crab, segments locking together and over each other like the limbs of a high-quality articulated figure, covered in fine hairs– barbs? Spines?– and minute bumps . What had seemed an even yellow turned out to be subtle gradations of yellow and white. Their head was human-sized, too small and smooth to be a helmet, so all those glistening, slightly iridescent plates had to be its actual head, which was smooth and lacking any features beyond two large, black eyes wider than tennis balls. Their eyes were slightly bulbous and dark, with a vague textured sheen that made Tammy realize it had compound eyes like an insect…

And suddenly it fell into place. The seeming shell, the slimness… it was like someone had taken an insect and shaped it roughly like a human. Or a human had made themselves look like an insect…

She felt the hunger again, the wish to open herself up and devour them and thus make them part of herself over time…

Tammy ignored it like she'd ignore grass underfoot as Willy kept up her spray, keeping the plague dog unbalanced as she kept pushing its legs out from under it, keeping it in one place. They didn't want to have to chase and find this thing a third time today. The water around it started turning into ice, making the plague dogs attempts to stand even harder. It had only known tropical weather all its life, and it didn't know how to stand or balance on ice, particularly wet ice. The newcomer's head was jerking, as they kept glancing at her and Willy, but they didn't make any gestures to try and intimidate them to keep back.

Beneath the newcomer, the plague dog heaved, changing tactics as it rolled over on the slick, slippery surface, the spike in its side and the arm in its mouth letting it drag the newcomer with it. The surprised newcomer was pulled over the plague dog and hit the ground on its other side, smothering them beneath its bulk. There was a snap at the newcomer's spiked arm snapped under the plague dog's bulk, and it let out a cry as the spike was seemingly driven deeper into its flesh.

Yet it persisted, hind legs flailing to try and regain control of its body's position as it kept pressing down on the newcomer and rapidly shaking its head from side to side, as if intent on ripping off their other arm. The newcomer's long legs kicked and scrambled, as if trying to get purchase, but their feet– covered in shell as if to mimic slim armored boots– couldn't get enough traction or leverage on the wet, icy ground.

Tammy wasn't any good at jumping. Plants weren't jumpers, either. But her light, springy wooden body managed to compress and let her kick off with enough force to get decent air as she grew an enormous, meter-long, fine-tipped thorn on one arm and rammed it with all the force of her body behind it into the plague dog's now-exposed side.

The impact rammed the thorn all the way up to her fist, at which point it snapped as she misjudged her leap and mass and kept on moving to tumble over the monster. Fortunately, after skidding on ice for a few feet there was a parked car to catch her. The impact left a huge dent on the metal of the trunk and half-ripped off the bumper, but she was fine. Just a little scrapped off back and crushed trunk. Didn't even lose all that much sap. She glanced at what was left of her giant thorn, a ragged, moist stump that dripped white sap, and a new one grew from it, the point erupting through the middle and leaving only a ragged ring of interrupted growth that quickly smoothed to a rough ridge as the wood aged and firmed to be tougher. People always underestimated how sharp wood can get unless they regularly had to deal with thorns. Tammy knew why they were still a common design feature of a lot of plants: they were sharp enough to go through most flesh. And isn't that what she was facing?

The plague dog was writhing on the ground now, pierced through other side as she got to her feet, the ice under her suddenly turning to water, letting her step on wet asphalt. Her attack had gotten it to roll off the newcomer, who'd scrambled back out of the way, managing to skid along to the edge of the ice. Tammy was mildly horrified to see both of their arms had been sheared off at the elbow, leaving writhing stumps of dripping fluids and exposed bone.  The armored forearm was still in the plague dog's mouth, long strands of meaty muscle flopping from the stump, writhing and wiggling and… wrapping themselves around the plague dog's jaws?

What Tammy had mistaken for muscle that had been ripped out somehow resolved themselves into thin tentacles that wrapped themselves around the plague dog's head, keeping its jaws trapped around the armored forearm part as the fingers on the other end wiggled and grew like forms extruding from the ground, each claw-tipped finger becoming a head that wrapped around the plague dog from the other side before jamming their points into its flesh and hanging on like hooks. The tentacles writhed where they contacted its skin, their surface becoming red and raw, scaly and flaking, dry and cracked, gushing pus and blood by turns, and growing thick, dark lumps of cancerous growths, but they held on, keeping its mouth shut.

The spike of bone in its side was writhing too. The break there was more ragged and bloody, as if it had actually been torn off, but even as she watched the stump was growing flesh in a cleaner, faster way than the plague dog's cancerous flesh sealing, closing over the ragged stump to form even, smooth flesh. It trembled for a moment, as if shaking from the plague dog's movements… before segments of shell separated as if they'd always been there, and a lamprey-like mouth suddenly opened, revealing rows upon rows of small, curving teeth surrounding a deep, pulsating throat where Tammy could have sworn there had been bone a moment ago. The mouth bent its armored, flexible body down and bit into the plague dog's diseased flesh for leverage as it tried to push the bone spike that was now its tail even deeper in

Tammy looked over the bulk of the fallen plague dog, meeting the black gaze of the newcomer, compound eyes to mutated photoreceptors. For a brief moment, she felt the hunger in the literally inhuman gaze, a hunger she reciprocated despite herself before pushing it down hard, back into the dark rich earth of her mind, filled with the silent whispers of plants.

Then they both lunged for the plague dog.

Tammy got there first as Willy, despite her preoccupation with keeping the plague dog knocked down so it wouldn't run away, turned the ice in her path back into water so she wouldn't slip. She dove at the plague dog, fingers thorn-sharp, thorn-tipped branches erupting from her torso as she slammed into the plague dog fingers-first burying them to the knuckle. The plague dog immediately tried to buck her of, but her other branches grasped at it like hands to lock her in place, even as thorns grew, digging down, fattening into rhizomes that dug in deeper with feeder roots. The meat and blood and fluids were diseased, but she pressed on. She'd been sick as a kid, and she'd lived through it. She knew how to deal with sickness: power on through and keep on growing, keep on living. Her cells tried to change, to become deadly and cancerous and turn against her, but her body was a plant, and plant tumors didn't metastasize or become a threat to the main plant. Blood gushed and the plague dog howled as she dug deeper into it, roots growing towards its lungs, its heart, its brain, seeking its power…

There was the snap of cracking bone and wood, and Tammy jerked as she realized a part of her growing root system had just been ripped off, as well as the meaty flesh around it. She felt them, still growing, at least until it as crushed repeatedly and–

Tammy jerked again as her roots were ripped out again. And again. And again.

She didn't have eyes to close, but she'd stopped paying attention to her photoreceptors again. And whatever she'd been using for ears too. The plague dog was howling in agony, and as Tammy finally started seeing again, she found herself face to face with a monster from deepest nightmare that would have made her heart clench and start screaming at her brain to start running away from imminent death.

Plants didn't have hearts, and if she froze, well, plants generally didn't move under normal circumstances anyway.

The yellow one had pounced on the plague dog just like her, and it wasn't eating it from the inside. It was doing it the other way. Hook-like claws had grown back on the ends of its arms to replace the forearms it had lost, and were now digging into the body of the plague dog, visibly caught on ribs. Also, Tammy had been wrong. It had a mouth after all,  

It had several.

At first, Tammy had thought the newcomer had grown new arms. The long extremities erupted randomly from their shoulders, and were lodged into the plague dog's body, including several areas where Tammy knew she'd grown roots. Then one ripped out a large, circular chunk of meat and roots and Tammy realized those weren't arms but mouths with powerful jaws and triangular, recognizably shark-like teeth devouring the plague dog one piece at a time.

The plague dog… and her. Because with every bite, more roots were torn out, and she could feel them slipping out of her control as they were crushed and digested.

It wasn't without cost. She could see the mouths starting to blister from her poisonous sap, but that only slowed it down as it continued to devour.

She felt instincts inside her, instincts she recognized as that of the plant, telling her to burrow in deep, to keep feeding, to feed and plant seeds intside the dark, fleshy places so they would grow and continue on, a part of her…  

Tammy was not a plant and didn't consider continuation of the species at the price of her to be survival.

Still, a stubborn part of her pressed on, trying to outgrow, outfeed, and outlast… until a bite ripped a substantial amount of her rhizomes and roots out from under the flesh of the plague dog. Blood and puss was everywhere, and by the reactions of bystanders– Tammy still had no sense of smell– it must have been foul. Some of the insides of the plague dog was actively rotting, as if it was desperately trying to make itself as inedible as possible in an attempt to dissuade them…

Plants had no problem with rotten meat, and apparently neither did whatever the yellow one was. A carrion feeder, a scavenger? The shark mouths tore at the limbs to keep the plague dog from moving, shaking from side to side and even twisting around in circles to saw through root and bone and rip out huge chucks of unspeakable meat which they swallowed with disgusting gusto. Others, smaller and leaner, burrowed inside the plague dog's, feeding and feeding and feeding…

Her roots couldn't compete.

It was like ripping chocolate out of her mouth as Tammy let her fingers and branches tear away, throwing herself back, knowing she was in the presence of a faster, more voracious omnivore than she.

The yellow one seemed to have been waiting for just this opportunity. As Tammy stumbled back on shaky trun– legs, an uneven, slight askew line carved itself across the yellow one's chest like some kind of autopsy incision. She saw the interlocking teeth a split second before their entire chest simply… opens up, ribs like fangs swinging their torso wide to either side as if they hinged at the spine.

Despite not really being a vegetable, Tammy felt like she was going to be eaten.

It was a feeling that spiked and made her jump back, slamming once more into the car she'd previously abused, as tentacles emerged from the torso like a disgusting plurality of tongues, red muscles that looked like sandpaper and drew blood– well, drew more blood– from the plague dog's skin. They wrapped around the beast, too flexible for mere tongues, even as more cancerous grows and bleeding sores and–

The plague dog was pulled, whole, into the torso cavity, its cries reaching a panicked crescendo as the hook-like arms started pulling it into the open, predatory maw of the creature devouring it, as the tongues wrapped around it to prevent it from escaping, as flesh crept forward envelope it completely, as tears opened all over the tongues, revealing toothy maws of their own that bit and bit and bit…

The flesh closed in a mouth-like seem of interlocking teeth, leaving a comically, cartoonishly bloated figure with a stomach bulge literally the size of a car. The shark-toothed extremities shuddered and began to fall off, as easily as a lizard losing its tail. The now worm-like appendages began to thrash, gaping painfully, and Tammy felt slightly gratified as she recognized the symptoms of her sap's manchineel poisoning.

The bloated stomach was convulsing, and with each heave it got smaller and smaller as if its contents were being digested, even as the yellow one fell to their knees. Their face was still blank, but they were giving off the body language of someone having indigestion from eating way too much. Their fingers curled as they pressed on their engorge stomach, as if trying to physically assist it with getting smaller.

Willy's hand snapped up as if to shoot another stream of water, but Tammy gestured for her to stop. She watched in horrified fascination as the stomach got smaller and smaller, as if all reason and sense and little things like the conservation of mass didn't matter.

Tammy knew it didn't. She'd just turned into a giant tree on nothing but air and water. She hadn't even properly photosynthesized.

The bulge got smaller and smaller. Faintly, she could still hear the plague dog's cries, carrying stories of pain and agony as it was consumed. Then there was silence as the bulge finally approached a humanly-possible size, until finally it was gone, leaving a deceptively smooth and flat yellowish stomach that hardened back into shell. They stayed on their knees, arms trembling slightly, as if needing to mentally recover from what they've just done.

Despite the murmuring, pointing, watching crowds, it felt like it was just the three of them on the road as Tammy watched the yellow one shake.

Hesitantly, she took a step forward, causing the most minute splash on the still-inundated road.

The yellow head snapped up like a dog's, staring right at Tammy.

Then they leapt up, and Tammy had a moment to feel a distinct pang of envy as they managed to leaped over thirty feet straight up from a dead start and start scaling the sides of one of the buildings, claws gouging handholds on the façade. Then she was running towards her cousin, pointing after the fleeing… person. "Get me up there!" she cried, hoping her cousin would actually be able to think of a way. They hadn't exactly practiced this.

The hoodie moved as the transparent ball of water that was currently Willy's head turned to look at the scaling figure. Then her cousin grabbed Tammy by her armpits with both hands, and lifted her up, pointing her towards the yellow figure. Tammy turned her head around 180 degrees so she was facing front as her cousin angled her up slightly higher, and then she was flying through the air on twin jets of water.

She didn’t scream– mostly because she didn't have the right organs for a good scream– as her limbs flailed frantically, and she slammed into the yellow figure just as they reached the edge of the roof and were in the middle of pulling themselves up.  The two tumbled, falling onto the plain, gray roofing material and into a bank of vents.

Tammy recovered first. She was a plant right now, she didn't have things like an inner ear to get dizzy from, or a brain to get sloshed around and concussed from impacts. Judging from how their unfortunate victim was cradling their head, they did.

Still, even concussed, their body language was quickly becoming belligerent as they got on all fours, a knob near what seemed like their but growing and extending, clearly becoming a tail with some kind of spiked tip as their head writhed, changing shape subtly as the pair of black, soulless compound eyes locked onto Tammy…

Praying she was right, Tammy raised both hands as a lipless slit tore itself open in the front of her face. "Wait!" she cried, bell-like sacks growing in her chest to pump air as she tried to make vocal cords without making her throat all the way human. "I surrender! I just want to talk!" Her voice came out like a loud, windy whisper, but at least they were recognizably words.

They froze, compound eyes staring at Tammy expressionlessly. Then slowly, warily, they stood, the tail they'd grown touching the ground as they stopped crouching like an animal and started standing like a human.

They were taller than her, Tammy realized, their elongated limbs giving them a fey-like, alien aesthetic, their smooth yellow head expressionless and faceless save for those eyes, and for a moment she remembered that internet horror story…

Then a slit seemed to crack open along the front of that head, right were a mouth would be. Tammy saw triangular, shark-like teeth and a bizarrely normal-looking tongue.

That yellow chest heaved, the plates of the shell visibly shifting as if they were taking a breath for the first time.

"So talk," an incongruously normal, feminine voice said.

---

End Of Episode Narrator: They're not actively fighting each other! Is this really how a meeting like this should go?

Green: "I used the magic word that immediately stops all hostilities: Martha."

End Of Episode Narrator: Next time, on Ainōryoku Sentai Nightmærangers! The mysterious yellow being! Are they friend or foe? Are we finally getting it? An actual team?

Green: "Hey! Two people count as a team, if they work together!"

Blue: "..."

Greeen: "And she's totally an ally, what do you think this is, Kamen Rider?"

Yellow: "I am just... a passing through Apex Carnivore..."

 

---

"So talk," an incongruously normal, feminine voice said.

To be perfectly honest, Tammy hadn't really thought past this part. She'd sort of assumed that she wouldn't get this far. But she only had to talk. That wasn't hard.

"So, first off, sorry for crashing into you, but it was the fastest way up here. And thanks for not eating me," Tammy said brightly. She tried to smile, then realized without lips that didn't really work. Her mouth sort of just got wider, without the masses of muscle that gave it the implied upward curve at the ends. She closed her mouth again, hoping they didn't thing she was being sarcastic or threatening. "I mean, you ate a little bit of me, but nothing important. Nothing I couldn't grow back."

"Is that what that was?" the yellow one said, tilting their head in a surprisingly normal gesture. "I was wondering what tasted like toothpicks."

Tammy didn't think she tasted like toothpicks– she was a young green sapling! She probably tasted like celery at best– but didn’t argue the point. "So… are you human?"

"Are you?"

"I'm human!" Tammy said hastily. She held out her hand. "Plants don't have thumbs! Or talk! Or argue whether they're a member of the human race."

"Or need to justify they're human."

"You just ate a dog, that's not exactly something humans do."

"Maybe I like asocena."

"Off the street?"

"Asocena and street food." Teeth showed in a wide line.

Well, at least they sounded amused. And bantering! Tammy was actually bantering!

"Anyway, thanks for your help back there," Tammy said, relaxing. She didn't have muscles that could relax, but if she did, her shoulders would be loosening. "We were afraid it was going to get away again. It's learned to go after people to distract us."

"I was just passing through and saw it," Yellow said. "It looked like something I could beat, so I did."

"We're still thankful," Tammy said. She hesitated. "Are you… like us?"

"You'll have to be more specific," Yellow said.

"Did you just… wake up and…" Tammy trailed off.

"Found myself like this?" Yellow said easily. "Yeah. I'm glad I live alone, or that would have been awkward." She looked at her hand, and Tammy saw the intricate, interlocking shells that made them bend like human fingers. "It took some adjusting."

"When?" Tammy asked. "When did it happen for you?"

Shell-covered fingers tapped on mouth plate. "Um… during the night after the first reports of people in Baseco getting weird fungal infections showed up on TV? Before it turned into a mushroom zombie forest? And no, before you ask, I never went there. I didn't used to go farther than Makati."

"Used to?" Tammy asked.

The mouth opened again, showing teeth. "I've got new ways to get around now," Yellow said, looking very smug for some reason. "But no, whatever caused it, it wasn't because I got close to Baseco. I didn't go anywhere but home, work and groceries." Head tilt. "Was that what you wanted to know?"

"Not even close," Tammy said. "Can… do you have a phone? An email? A social media I can contact you on?"

"I don't just randomly give out my information, you know," Yellow said. "Especially when I'm not wearing my face specifically so people can't work out who I am. Besides, no offense, but we just met."

"Then I'll give you mine!" Tammy said. She held up her left arms and started scratching contact data on her inner forearm with one finger, the thorn on the tip hardened and the bark softened to help with the writing. She put in her cell number, her casual email, and one of her social media accounts, the ones she used for logging in to games that demanded it for bonuses. Carefully, she peeled off the bark so she wouldn't have to write it again, trying to suppress the shiver at the absence of pain as she essentially flayed herself, revealing the pale wood underneath.

"Seriously? You're giving your contact data to a bug person you just met?" Yellow said.

Tammy held it out. "Look, you're the only other person we've met who's like us. Most of the rest that's out there seem to be monsters. The mushrooms, the dog, those insects that ate all those people–!"

"Don't worry, I got those," Yellow said. Their tongue briefly licked out, before they winced. "Ach! Bleeding tongue, bleeding tongue! Teeth too sharp!"

"That!" Tammy exclaimed. "Look, you clearly know what you're doing! I don't even know how I'd handle bugs that can do that. The two of us couldn't even take down a dog. Sure, it was a huge dog, but it was still one dog. And you beat it!"

"Aw, crap, I think I bit the tip of my tongue off," Yellow said. "Ugh, I hate it when I accidentally eat pieces of myself, it always feels like cannibalism. This is probably why sharks don't have tongues."

"Can we, like… learn from you? On the job training? Some pointers? Please, anything! We're really bad at this!"

"This what?" Yellow said, voice sounding a little off, it's flapping mouth letting Tammy see that their tongue was indeed noticeably shorter.

"This! Heroing!"

Yellow paused and stared. At least, Tammy assumed so, since she was getting both compound eyes straight on again. "Come again?"

"Heroing!" Tammy said. "Great power, great responsibility, using our power to protect the weak and helpless, be protectors of the right, save people from these evil forces… you know, the whole comic book gig. I mean, pretty much all you need is a magic barbell."

"Okay, first off, heroism is not just something you can be, it is a pursuit with uncertain ends," Yellow said, one hand up with finger upraised in a lecturing pose, the other at her waist. "It is an accolade awarded by others in reaction and recognition to one's deeds, and as a result means one is admired for those deeds or qualities presented. One cannot just 'become' a hero, or claim to be a hero. To be a hero is to be recognized by others, and such recognition is purely arbitrary and semi-political. The same act that gets one person called a hero can result in another becoming forgotten in the annals of history. While one can act in a way that corresponds to the present heroic ideal of a culture, this does not make one a hero, merely someone seeking to be like a hero, which is not the same thing."

"…" Tammy said. "What?"

"Sorry," Yellow said. "It's a peeve of mine. You were saying?"

"You're… not doing this to be a hero?" Tammy said. "But then… why…?"

"Why go after these things?" Yellow finished. Tammy nodded a bit numbly. "Why do you?"

"Because… it's the right thing to do…" Tammy said lamely. She gestured at herself, at her body of bark and wood and thorns. "I mean, I can… this. What else would I do with it?"

"Hide it? Live a normal life, not putting yourself in danger?" Yellow said bluntly. "Do whatever you want, because you can? Do plant-related things for money? Something other than fighting dogs in the street and… did I see that right? You grew a tree in the middle of the road?"

"They were going after people," Tammy said, shuffling nervously. "I think they had rabies."

Yellow turned, looking towards where the top of the tree that Tammy had been was just barely visible. "Yeah… I think so. I'm not sure what I can do for them. Hopefully they can get shots before it really sets in, but…" Yellow shook her head, then shrugged.

"Why did you do it, then?" Tammy said. "Why go after the plague dog?"

"Plague dog?" Yellows mused. "Well, it fits." She looked at Tammy. "Do you ever get an urge, in the back of your head?"

Tammy went still like only a plant could. Eventually, she said, "What urge?"

"An urge. It comes from the back of your head, makes you want," Yellow said. Her compound eyes glittered. "Want things. Do things…"

Tammy realized her bark was getting very, very dense. Denser than oak, than mahogany, than palo santo. She felt the thorns on her fingers lengthening, hardening, felt more thorns growing along her arms…

"Urges," Tammy said, talking as much to herself as much as Yellow. Were her claws… yes, they were getting longer, sharper. "Yeah, I know about urges. Get them all the time. Getting some now, in fact. But you know the thing about urges?"

"What?" Yellow said, and her voice was no longer normal and feminine. It buzzed like a cheap audio effect, holding hints of growls and vibrations. Her tail was over her head, Tammy noticed, the point curved and sharp and pointing at her.

"Urges are stupid!" Tammy said. "Plants have urges! Dogs have urges! Animals have urges. But people… people tell their urges what's going to happen. Not the other way around. And I'm not a plant. My urges don't get a say in what I'm going to do. They can offer suggestions, but generally I don't listen, because they're stupid suggestions. That's what people… what humans do with their urges."

She met those compound eyes. "So, I'm going to ask you again… are you human?"

Very deliberately, she held up her arm still holding the sheet of bark, studded with thorns, glistening with agonizing white sap… and pulled the thorns back in.

Yellow shuddered… and then the claws seemed to fall off her fingertips, replaced by rapidly grown and very pinkish and human fingertips and nails, incongruously melded to hard yellow shell. The tail fell to the ground behind her, severed at the base like a lizard's. Teeth, triangular and shark-like teeth, fell from her mouth, revealing bleeding gums that were quickly growing more squared, human teeth. "I'm human," she said, her voicing sounding deep and raw.

"Say it with me," Tammy said. "I'm a human, not a plant."

A wide line, showing bleeding, but human teeth. "I'm a human… not an animal."

"People are friends, not food," Tammy said.

"Isn't that fish?"

"We're not fish, we're people. Don't argue."

A chuckle. "People are friends, not food."

Carefully, Tammy walked forward, covering half the distance to Yellow. Despite everything, Yellow tensed, crouching slightly. The tail behind her twitched, and the ragged flesh at the base of the tail started growing teeth before stopping and the teeth were pulled back in.

Tammy stood there, exactly half of the distance from Yellow and held out the bark again. Her fingers were soft, pinkish, with dull, useless nails.

Cautiously, Yellow stepped forward, her armored, boot-like legs clicking strangely on the gray cement of the roof they were on. The foot wasn't a single piece, Tammy saw. Instead it was segmented, adjusting like a human foot but covered in yellow shell. She tried not to look nervous and draw back as Yellow kept coming closer, seeming to loom until they stopped just outside of Tammy's reach. Tammy held out the bark. One elongated arm reached for it, then paused.

Abruptly that hand writhed, and Tammy watched in morbid fascination as the yellow shell seemed to fall off like scab, revealing a plain, human hand. Carefully, gingerly, they took the bark.

"So… call me?" Tammy said.

Yellow nodded, turning the slightly bark over in her hand. "Yeah, I will. I… yeah. I think I've been alone with my thoughts about this too long. Need to get some perspective." She held out her human hand. "I'm Sanny. Nice to meet you."

Tammy beamed, even if it was just the slit on her face opening wide. "Tammy," she said, taking the hand. "Nice to meet you too."

They shook hands. The lipless slits on their faces opened wide, showing teeth.

"Why is my hand blistering?" Sanny asked.

 Tammy gasped. "Ah! The sap! Sorry, sorry, sorry!"

––––––––––––––––––

Yellow– Sanny– flew off from there. It was fascinating to watch, seeing her body break apart into a flock of yellow birds that slowly turned brown to blend in with the local mayas, taking to the air and pretty much vanishing. Two of them were carrying the piece of bark with the contact information, holding on to a bit of vine Tammy had grown on either end. She really wished she could do that. Fly, not break apart into bits. Though she was pretty sure she could do that too, as soon as she figured out what those bits were…

Getting home was… problematic. While Tammy and Yellow– Sanny– were talking, apparently police from the nearby police station outside of Eastwood had arrived. And then soldiers from the engineering brigade at nearby Camp Atienza had arrived. And the soldiers stationed at Camp Aguinaldo had arrived. Only the ridiculous amount of traffic involved kept the police in Camp Crame on the other side of EDSA from joining in on time too.

Fortunately, water laughs in the face of threats of bullets, and Willy was never all that communicative anyway. Apparently she'd just stood there in the middle of the road, looking up towards where she'd thrown Tammy and ignored all the guns pointed at her, ignored all the demands that she lie down on the ground and surrender, ignored the policemen who'd charged her with batons, ignored the ones who tried to tackle her to the ground. She hadn't been able to ignore the ones who'd desperately grabbed at her sodden clothes in the vain hope they could pull her around with them because, as she'd explained to Tammy afterwards when they'd made their getaway, Tammy had once taught her that was a 'BAD TOUCH' and she was not supposed to let strange people just take off her clothes.

That meant that Willy had still had clothes on– if with some random bullet damage– when Tammy had leapt down from the roof and onto the sidewalk. Actually, she missed the sidewalk and landed in the dirt of the plant bed beside it, but that was fine, since she was pretty sure she'd have cracked the cement falling from that height, even with a body made of light, springy wood meant to absorb the impact that had bent and vibrated like a cartoon character smacked by cymbals. She'd been shot at but even fresh, wet sapling wood takes bullets better than meat does.

She'd stumbled shakily, still vibrating, Sanny's contact info etched into the bark of her forearm– one she'd made sure didn't have any sap in it, just in case, even when she'd changed out all her sap for some that wasn't a manchineel-derivative– before Willy had grabbed her and launched them both into the Marikina river.

It was disgusting. It was after the rainy season, so the river wasn't running low and stinking from all the years of garbage and factory pollutants staining the river bed, but the root fibers Tammy had instinctively– unconsciously?– grown when she'd hit water had the plant equivalent of spiting and throwing up when they'd tasted it, before they'd been enveloped by Willy pure, clean, clear water and been trust along the river at high velocity. They'd gotten out as soon as they were out of direct sight, just in time to avoid the helicopters in the air.

After that, it had been a matter of Tammy, to her consternation, hiding as an actual tree along the river bank while Willy had gone to where they'd stashed their wallets and phones– inside another tree, of course– and bought a shirt, pants and slippers for Tammy to go around in so they could commute home.

Three hours later, wearing cheap second hand clothes, Tammy and Willy, mostly human and tired, finally managed to get back home. The house was in one of the many subdivisions that had been put up near the end of Ortigas Avenue Extension during the 80's and 90's, a nice quiet place that was still a fairly safe and secure community.

"Manang Zeny, we're home!" she called. She could hear their katulong cooking the in the kitchen, the little radio there playing a local FM station.

"We're home," Willy mimicked her, since that was what Tammy had long ago told her she should do when she came back home.

"Welcome back," was the absent reply. Manang Zeny was either focusing on the food– it smelled like chicken adobo– or the music.

The two went upstairs to their room. Technically it was Tammy's room, and Willy's room was what had once been the guest room, but that was just were she kept her clothes so it wouldn't crowd Tammy's closet. As Willy closed the door, finally making them private again, Tammy sighed in relief, turning around and falling back to sit down on her bed with a practiced bounce that let her rebound so she was leaning on the wall her bed was shoved against.

"Haaaaaay," she sighed. "What a day." But they'd finally done it! They'd stopped a monster! Now, people were safer, without having to worry about mangy, epidemic-spreading dogs! She looked at her cousin, who was peeling off the hoodie. There were at least three bullet holes in the hood itself, with more spread around the back and front. It looked vaguely like some kind of cosplay. "Put it next on my desk Willy, I'll fix it later."

Willy nodded dutifully, neatly folding it and setting it on Tammy's desk, then opened the drawer containing the sewing stuff and took out a blue thread that matched the hoodie. Tammy nodded in approval at her cousin's initiative. She'd get to it with her sewing machine later. Right now she just lay back and enjoyed the feeling of having blood and bones and muscles and taking in oxygen instead of carbon dioxide.

She felt Willy sit down next to her, felt her taller cousin's weight shift the mattress. Pushing herself up, Tammy let her cousin lay her head down on her lap. "You did good today, Willy," Tammy said, stroking her cousin's hair. It was time for a haircut, she noted. Any longer and it would start looking untidy, since after all these years Tammy still couldn't get her cousin to take care of her hair properly. Oh well. "Do you want to watch something? Do you want to watch a movie before we do our homework?"

"News," Willy said. "I want to find out what happened today."

Tammy had to sigh, but it was a fond sigh. Sometimes she regretted explaining what the news was to her cousin. "Okay," Tammy said, reaching for the remote and turning on the TV in her room, switching it to a local channel, where the news was just coming on. Willy didn't move from Tammy's lap, but the taller  girl was no doubt watching the show intently.

Tammy, for her part, couldn't stand the news. Sure, it was probably full of important current events, but the way it was presented, full of what she called Human Misery Stories (not Human Interest Stories), presenting the day's human suffering in an almost pornographic way, full of crying people futilely calling out the people who'd hurt them on the air…

It was probably hypocritical of her, wanting to use her powers to stop monsters so they wouldn't hurt people, while being utterly disdainful of news footage of people who've been hurt. She told herself it was the portrayal, how the news seemed to take a nearly voyeuristic approach to interviewing people to get them to cry, but…

Sometimes Tammy wondered if she was a terrible human being even before she could stop being one. Was she really the best person to be teaching her cousin how to be a functional, responsible adult? Yes, she knew about imposter syndrome– she'd done a lot of reading on the internet once her cousin started living with them, trying to figure out what she was beyond 'special', before she realized she was trying to put her cousin in a box and stopped– but she felt justified in this instance, since she was trying to be an impostor. She was trying to be a good, responsible person so her cousin would have an example of what sort of person she should act like, and every time she was reminded she was doing this for that purpose, she felt like a sham.

She blinked as she felt a hand patting her awkwardly on the head, and looked down to find the side of Willy's head had turned to clear water in lieu of turning to look up at Tammy. "You're… sad?" Willy said tentatively.

Tammy had to remind herself she could no longer lie to Willy about her feeling, that she should set a good example to her cousin by being honest, and that it was a good thing her cousin was showing social and emotional sensitivity by identifying other's emotions– even if she was cheating now– and reacting to them in an empathetic manner. "A little," Tammy said. "I was just thinking I might not be a very good person."

"Tammy is the best person," Willy said instantly, as emphatic now as she'd been when they'd been little kids and she'd started following Tammy around. "So you don't need to be sad."

Tammy stroked her cousin's head and leaned down to kiss her forehead. "You're sweet to say so Willy. Thank you." Across from them, the news droned on. People who died in freak motorcycle accidents. People dead from 'fighting back against the police'. People dead because they were drug users or drug dealers or involved in drugs in general. News about a woman raped and found dead, because the news cycle was incomplete without one of those. Monsters being driven back by heroic members of the Philippine National Police and Philippine Army, who were 'killed while fleeing'…

"Wait, what did they say?" Tammy said.

"They say the police killed two monsters and drove away a third who'd caused a disturbance in Quezeon City," Willy repeated dutifully. "But that's a lie. It's very shoddy reporting." On-screen, the chief of police was praising the police officers on their quick response and saying that the police were fearless even in the face of monsters. Because this was Philippine TV, the next story immediately after was an update on the situation in Baseco– still barricaded, locked down, and full of fungus-infected zombie people– followed by reports of more 'alleged' monsters sighted. For alleged, there sure were a lot of cellphone videos and casualty counts.

Tammy listened as emotional witnesses frantically described a large dog everyone kept approaching and petting and cuddling, even as it started biting and eating them. People who'd rushed in to help had found themselves approaching like slavish zombies, even as they were covered in blood by the people being devoured. It had gotten away because no one had been able to stop it, and it had left the area, carrying a bleeding person in its mouth that still kept petting and cooing at it…

Currently it was somewhere in Pasay, although they wouldn't be more specific than that.

There was a giant spider climbing the buildings of Makati, leaving trails of webs everywhere. So far it didn't seem to have any intention of breaking into the buildings and eating the people inside, or descending down to ground level to eat the people down there. It was just… climbing and building, weaving an elaborate web between the buildings, slowly blocking off the sun…

Along Katipunan Avenue, something was apparently roaming the sewers and causing great geysers of superheated water to explode from manholes and drainage holes, which had already led to severe burns and injures from the various sewer covers being sent flying through the air. The exclusion zone in Tagaytay was growing as more and more bees were being born from the giant queen, with estimates of literally millions of bees in the air, attacking animals and people like some kind of cheap horror movie. Also, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology was warning of seismic activity in Taal Volcano, and people were talking about how such an eruption might potentially kill the bees…

More people had been killed along Manila Baywalk from something that had reached out from the water, plucked them from the sidewalk and quickly dragged them down. Since people had finally gotten the message and not walking on the sidewalk near the water anymore, it was now pulling in cars as they idled in traffic, and distant cellphone videos showed that the disturbingly human-like hand doing the grabbing was getting bigger, moving from the water in bursts of speed that raised up obstructing waves of water before turning back with the cars plucked from the road. Also, the Galleria was once more insisting that they did not have a giant snake in the basement that they fed people to via the changing rooms, as the sudden rash of monsters had brought those old stories surging back, now more plausible than ever…

Every day, Tammy feared she'd hear about a monster close to her house. So far, none seemed to have been reported closer than the Marikina River…

But there was so much…

She reached for her cellphone, where she'd already put in Sanny's contact information.

Hey. Watching the news. Wanna meet up Saturday? Can't just do nothing.

A few minutes later, as government officials spoke of how they needed to maintain the state of emergency to maintain order, and others accused them of using the emergency as an excuse to conduct political killings, the response came.

Why Saturday? Was about to go hunting now. Going to Makati.

Live in Rizal, too far away. Also, have school tomorrow.

Cant you just send a part of you?

Tammy stared at that message as the program switched to mindless celebrity news and Willy took the remote to switch to another news channel.

What? You can do that? Can we do that?

Maybe? I can control parts of myself I remove. Turn the part into a full body, operate it remotely. Or… be in it the same time im in other body. You cant do it?

Tammy stared at her hand. Concentrating, she made a little leafy stalk bud from her finger. Gently, she pinched off the stalk, which grew roots. She stared at it, and it began to shudder…

Notes:

Green. Yellow. Blue (technically transparent, but work with me here!). Not your standard 3-person Sentai/Ranger team array. And shouldn't Red be in charge, whoever they are?

Well, if Super Sentai can have a Rainbow-themed guy as the lead instead of Red, then we don't have to follow convention either!

Next time, on Ainōryoku Sentai Nightmærangers! A mysterious location that repels the eldritch! Is it a trap? An endless corridor? A recursion in time? A trap in an endless recursion in time? Tune in next time to find out!

Red: "Why aren't I the lead?"

Green: "Shh, you haven't been introduced yet, shut up."

Chapter 2: Interlude: Green

Summary:

In her room at home, Tammy waits dreaming

Sleepy, yet not asleep.

She lay in bed, dreaming, dozing.

She wanted to stay where she was. To just lie there in place, and not be moved. To breathe in and grow…

Ugh, but she was thirsty. So thirsty… and why were the lights off? Her eyes were closed, but she knew the light were off, and she couldn't rest properly without lights…

Lazily, she reached out, looking for water, for light… and maybe a little snack…

She felt something groan beneath her, as of something bearing a great weight…

AH! Light! Sleepy, yet not asleep, dozing, almost dreaming, she reached for the light…

Something was wrong. She could feel the light, but she couldn't bask in it… something was in the way…she reached for the light, and felt the thing in the way start to bend…

…? What had happened? Why couldn't she reach anymore/why was her arm on the floor? Confused in the way of strange dreams, she reached for the light again/she tried to root so she could reach for the light again…

…?! It happened again! She couldn't reach/her arm was on the floor/her arm was on her arm on the floor! What was going on? Confusion disturbed her dreams, and almost against her will, she forced herself to wake up…

(something…)

Tammy found her eyes stiff and heavy, and she almost went back to sleep, to dozing, to dreaming. But she couldn’t, she was too confused. She kept reaching, but her arm kept falling short/falling on the floor/falling on her arm trying to reach/falling on her arm trying to root… and she was so thirsty…

(something was...)

She though she felt something crack as she forced her eyes open, her vision dark and swimming. She tried to use her other arm, the one not reaching for the light, to rub her eyes to try and clear them, but her arm didn't want to move. It felt weak and lethargic, in a deeper sleep than she was as it rested on the wall next to her bed/curled over her head/lay at her side, reaching for the footboard/tried to root between the bed and the wall…

(something was wrong…!)

Her other arm was shuddering. She could feel it shuddering/being stepped on/WATER!/being kicked away even as she tried to reach for the light. Her body felt so heavy, and her head didn't want to move, but she needed to see, she was son confused.

Her vision brightened, and finally she could make out shapes, light and shadows. She saw the light she was reaching for and saw the familiar shape outlined against it… tall and sweaty (WATER!), Willy's face set in concentration, the arm nearest Tammy holding something steady. The other armed moved up and down in a robotic, repetitive motion, the stained machete from the tool shed methodically hacking off Tammy's reaching arm, which fell twitching to the floor on top of the pile of other growing, twitching arms trying to root and reach for the light…

Tammy stared at the absurd image in front of her, not comprehending. She kept reaching for the light, her arm getting closer to the window, but her cousin kept hacking at her arm with the machete, and her arm kept falling off, joining the pile on the floor…

Willy paused and turned to her. "Oh good. You're awake." Then she turned and went back to hacking at Tammy's arm with the machete…

One morning, as Thomasina Olivarez was waking up from a deep sleep and strange dreams after days and nights of tending to her cousin who had become a strange thing of water, she discovered that in her bed she had been changed into a monstrous inhuman tree, being pruned by her cousin so she wouldn't break the window.

Chapter 3: The House With Pink In Its Walls, Part 1 & 2

One morning, as Santiago Dalag woke from strange dreams of alien thoughts and sensations, filling his mind with disjointed visions of a world subsumed by tainted flesh, he discovered than in his sleep he had become a twisted, inhuman monstrosity of flesh-rending mouths in places they shouldn't be, tentacles that tasted the air and hungered for flesh, eyes that saw in the sunlight strange colors from out of space, and a urgent hunger that wished to be slaked.

Naturally, the first thing he did was check if somewhere in this asymmetrical, non-bilateral body he'd woken up in were his bits.

Eventually he found them inside one of the random mouths, in the middle of one of the tentacles that seemed to have grown from his left leg. Assured those important organs were intact– she was getting better at leaving those alone when freestyling while he was asleep– he forced order to come back to his body. He sealed the mouths first, all but the one with the bits, then worked on regrowing his internal skeleton. The one that he'd woken up with was mostly strange supporting bones for the tentacles, and he didn't even have a rib cage. When he wasn't in charge, this body kept opting for exoskeletons and invertebrates of some sort.

It took a while for him to finally feel like himself. Internal skeleton, bilaterally symmetrical bipedalism, manly bits on the outside and where they belong, the face he'd been born and grew up with… he kept looking back and forth between his reflection in the bathroom mirror and the various laminated photos of himself he'd taped next to it, but couldn't spot any major deviations. Sometimes he worried he'd forget what he was supposed to look like, that he'd greet his parents and he'd just be a stranger to them because too many things– his face, his height, his voice– were different. So he had those vaguely-narcissistic photos next to the mirror, the most recent photos he'd been able to track down that showed what he'd looked like. Thank goodness he lived alone and didn't need to explain that to anyone.

He didn't worry so much about losing the 60 pounds of body fat and sneaking in twelve inches of height into his bones. Those were purely for health reasons! Yup, totally health reasons.

After that he went through the usual morning routine. Shower, dress, a quick breakfast heated from the leftovers of the night before, eaten with the news running in the background. In the back of his head, he felt hunger stir at each mention of every unnatural thing now roaming Metro Manila's streets. He wondered how long before it spread. There was at least one thing hunting in the bay. How many had chosen not to hunt, but instead find new territory?

He took notes on new sightings, scribbling it down on the little cube of memo paper he'd started leaving on the table for that, then turned off the TV when it moved on to mindless celebrity news. He wouldn't be missing anything important. It was celebrities, after all. The whole segment was just a way to shoehorn in advertising about the hot new show full of bland young people and old, still-marketable standbys looking constipated because they thought that made them look intense that the channel was trying to get people to watch.

After the notes, he went back to his room, and updated the conspiracy-theory map of the confirmed general locations. The spider was still in Makati, and evacuations were slowed by the usual nonsense of people not wanting to evacuate; people in Pasay were asked to stay in their homes lest they become dog food, as if people didn't need to go out for food; there was traffic in Katipunan as drivers kept away from the erupting sewer openings, meaning all traffic was being concentrated on one lane in a 3-to-4 lane road…

He marked a neighborhood in Quezon City where a giant snake he'd been tracking had disappeared in the area. Sanny stared at the map, then grabbed his phone and began taking pictures. Something he could show them…

And he was procrastinating, he realized.

This wasn't a date, that much he knew. This was… what? Two, maybe three fresh acquaintances getting together to get to know each other better. Possibly move on from merely acquaintances to co-workers. Maybe they'd even be friends, and he'd be able to tell them who he really was. The plant girl… no, Tammy… she'd been the one to mention heroics, and she'd seemed to have comic book superheroics in mind when she'd said it. Secret identities were a thing, after all. It was as old as masks, older than the comic book genre. He hoped they understood.

That would be nice. He'd always wanted to have friends IRL.

Now, he just had to get a good reference for who to turn into.

 

––––––––––––––––––

 

When he'd walked into the coffee shop the message from Tammy had suggested they meet at, Sanny couldn't help but feel awkward. True, he'd done this before, but that was at home, just him and the guilty pleasure of seeing a naked girl in the mirror. This was in public, and with every step he couldn't help but worry he was doing something wrong. Was he not swinging his arms enough? Was he swinging them too much? Was he not doing it the right way? Was the way he moved too exaggerated, too flaming? Was he obviously a dude trying to pass himself off as a woman?

It had seemed so logical at the time. He was a guy, so in order to hide his identity, he'd used a feminine voice to talk so she'd think he was one. Simple. Obvious. Basic. Totally doable now that his body was malleable down to the cells. His bits were safe, somewhere up where ovaries would normally be. There were so many ways for the human body to have nonstandard parts after all. When he'd first started looking them up on the internet, the descriptions alone had made him squeamish. Now he was just frustrated the articles seldom came with some sort of diagram so he could work out the most efficient placement.

His disguise was mostly biological. The smooth, even, pale mestiza features so formulaic among television actresses, with just enough minor asymmetry to keep it from falling into the uncanny valley. He'd tried for perfect symmetry once and… yeah, that had seemed weird and unnerving, and he'd woken up with his dick in his own mouth this morning. He'd thrown in a mole– sorry, beauty mark– under his left eye for some variety, and had grown blonde hair with dark roots to make it seemed dyed. Because he wasn't going as himself, he'd made himself taller, though not as tall as he'd been yesterday, and just slim enough to be either a fairly unreasonable feminine body standard or a lucky bitch that had an viable metabolism. Limbs of lean muscle, some fat reserves to round everything out, and his disguise was set.

He wore a yellow shirt, hastily bought yesterday because all of the yellow shirts he'd already owned had been too big for his intended disguise and would have left him looking frumpy (new jeans too, since this disguise was a whole head taller than he normally was, even with his 'growth spurt', almost as tall as his armored form), as per Tammy's request so they could identify each other. In fact, he saw her as soon as he walked in, since the girl in the plain green shirt with her hand upraised and waving to him probably wasn't anyone else. There was a disposable paper cup on the table in front of her, which contained some kind of plant, which was slightly more confirmation. Sanny couldn't tell what it was, since it was basically some green stalks sticking out of dirt.

Next to her was a girl in a blue shirt who was even taller than he currently was right then, the kind that probably got all sorts of tiring comments about basketball. She had a rather unfortunate resting bitch face, which was Sanny giving her the benefit of the doubt, otherwise she was actually making a bitch face at him. Well, not directly at him, since she wouldn't meet his gaze, instead facing probably-Tammy after one glance.

As he waved back to show he'd seen them, hunger stirred in the back of his head, and with an effort, Sanny pushed it back. It stirred again, stronger, and while Sanny repressed it again, he also went to the counter get something to eat. That made the urges subside slightly, though he could discern a faint whiff of… petulance? Well, at least it wasn't going to be a problem, for now. And now he knew for sure these were the people he was looking for. Normal people didn't provoke hunger in him. Well, they didn't provoke that hunger in him.

He had to wonder what Tammy and her friend had felt when he'd walked in. Had they gotten hungry too? He decided to go the bribery route of getting people to like you and got them cookies.

Tammy's eyes seemed to light up when he came back with a tray of three cookies and a corned beef pandesal. He took one of the cookies– chocolate chunk, all of them– and pushed the rest to the two girls. "Ah, a woman of culture, I see," Tammy said, grabbing the cooking and taking a happy bite instead of using the fork next to it. "Thank you very much!"

Sanny liked her already. Why eat with a fork? The other one with the blue shirt had to be prompted to accept the cookie, and her thanks sounded rote. He amended his assessment of her naturally having that expression upwards, as her face didn't really change even as she clearly enjoyed the cookie.

"So…" most-likely-Tammy said about halfway through her cookie, "you're Sanny?"

"Yeah," he said, his voice sounding weird in his ears. Still, he'd have to get used to it if he was going to keep it as part of his secret identity. "You're Tammy?"

"Yup," Tammy said brightly. Sanny was very glad he'd come disguised and not his usual self. Tammy looked like she was in her early teens, and wouldn't even be in high school yet. Eighth Grade, as it's called nowadays. "I'm glad we could meet up. Ever since you gave us that tip, I've been trying it out and… look, look!" She held out the paper cup.

Sanny took it warily, careful not to let their fingers touch. He still wasn't sure that happened to the… the… the essence of plague?... that he'd devoured, and he didn't want to accidentally give her a flesh-eating virus or something. It hadn't… fit in… inside him the way the previous one, the flies that had devoured all the people– and animals and plants and food– in that slum along the Pasig River had. He had felt that one become a part of… them. Not completely, not perfectly, but the parts of it that could fit, had been fit in.

He looked inside the cup. At first, he saw nothing but dirt– high bacterial count, the back of his head conveyed to the rest of him in the same way his body told him his bladder was full– from which sprouted small, green stalks and leaves, the two parts the same color, as if fresh from the seed. As he looked, wondering what he was supposed to be looking it, the stalks moved, beginning to wrap and braid themselves around each other, stems firming and growing brown as–

Hunger welled in him, hunger that made him want to throw his head back and chug the contents of that cup, to devour it–

Sanny, with effort, pushed that urge into the back of his head.

– as the stems became supple wood, as the leaves braided together to form little arms. A little vaguely-humanoid thing looked up at him from the cup, with hands and a head made of small sprouting leaves, a body of woven stalks and, presumably, feet of more stalks and roots. It waved at him.

"I am Tammy?" he said, setting the cut back on the table pushing it towards her gently with one finger.

She giggled. "I am Tammy," she said, and twitches of movement in the cup said the little figurine was at least physically mimicking her actions. "I can work through it, as soon as I make it bigger. It's great, I don't have to keep losing clothes anymore, I can just send one of these and keep wearing my clothes somewhere else! Willy here–" ah, a name! "– can do it too, though I don't think she can show you. Oh! This is Willy, my cousin. Say hi, Willy."

"Hi," Willy said blandly, giving Sanny only the barest of looks and nods.

"Hi…?" Sanny said right back, still unsure if the girl was being antagonistic or just awkward. He really couldn't blame her, he felt awkward himself. If he'd shown up as a guy and sat with them, he'd probably have felt very self-conscious.

"Sorry, Willy takes a while to open up to people," Tammy said, her smile becoming awkward for a moment before it brightened again. "So don't get discouraged! She's really nice, it just takes a while."

Sanny glanced at Willy for her to either confirm or deny this, but she was watching Tammy as if the shorter girl was the only thing important in the world. Okay…?

"Are you two… together?" Sanny asked awkwardly, not sure how to phrase it any other way.

"No, she's my cousin," Tammy repeated. As if realizing that for some people this wasn't exactly a deal breaker, Tammy sighed and reluctantly added, "No, Willy's just… special, okay?"

"Aren't we all?" Sanny said, but he got the message. Still, that meant so many things these days, from having trouble paying attention because you never learned self-discipline due to bad parenting to actually having something different about you. Well, no reason not to be nice and just get to know her over time. "Well, I'm glad you found my little tip helpful. How many have you managed to learn to control at once?"

Tammy stared at him. "You can do that?" she breathed.

"Well, yeah," Sanny said. "It's useful."

Surprisingly, Tammy shuddered. "Every time I do that, I keep getting lost and start thinking I'm a tree."

Sanny frowned. "I… don't know about that," he said honestly. "Maybe you just need practice. Like with juggling, you start with two balls, then add on another one when you're ready."

"What sort of practice did you do?" Tammy said.

"Just… practice," Sanny said lamely. "Try controlling one more body besides this one," he gestured down at himself, "then when I get the hang of that, I make another one until I was used to that, then another one, and so on. After a while you sort of get the trick to it to just keep adding more, but yeah, I guess it can be overwhelming? After thirty or so, I sort of have to step back and just have it do the work for me while I focus on what I want them to do."

Tammy blinked. "It?" she said.

Sanny went still. Completely still. Muscles stopped moving, lungs stopped pumping, heart stopped beating, letting blood languish in the veins…

Sanny took a deliberate breath, made his heart deliberately beat, then went over every function of his body one at a time to make sure they were, in fact, functioning. "Yeah," Sanny said. "The power. This… thing that's not normal and in us." He looked Tammy directly in the eyes. "You know what I'm talking about, right? The whatever it is that lets us do… what we've been doing." He took a risk. "The thing that we had after we woke up that wasn't there when we went to sleep." Sanny tapped the back of his head. "The place in the back where the urges come from. The one that wants you to eat. No, not just eat. Devour. Make things... a part of you."

His tongue touched one of his teeth and Sanny tasted blood.

He blinked, then slapped a hand over his mouth, groaning as he felt their configuration. Narrow, triangular, pointed, serrated edges. Shark teeth, except for two long, needle-like incisors. The hinge of his jaw had moved way back, and had bifurcated in the middle to let him open his mouth wide.

"Sorry, sorry," he said through his closed mouth and he sternly forced his dental array to square up and number significantly less than sixty as he flushed in embarrassment. At least those were still working on proper involuntary systems and not being reconfigured to pump venom or something. "Ugh, so sorry. It just… it really wants me to do something about how hungry it is. Sorry, I swear I don't usually have this problem…" Ugh, what was with this obsession with sharks? Every time there was teeth it was always sharky!

To his surprise, Tammy laughed. "Nah, it's fine, it's fine," she said. "It happens. Sometimes if I'm not paying…" She paused, seemed to remember they were trying to be secretive, and leaned forward. Sanny did so as well, being very careful to make sure his face wasn't developing a second mouth that spat venom or sprayed acid, and that his teeth were very, very square and regular and human. "…if I'm not paying attention, sometimes I grow roots and start drinking Willy," she admitted conspiratorially. "I think we should forgive each other lapses like that, or else we'll be here all day. Everything's fine as long as no one gets eaten."

Hunger rose. Sanny told it to shut up.

"People are friends, not food," he repeated, and she nodded.

"People are friends, not food," she agreed.

They both leaned back, and Sanny saw Tammy was visibly forcing herself to relax, and kept her hands under the table. Impulsively, Sanny made a tear open on his arm, which opened to reveal an eye. Under the table, he saw thorns on the tips of her fingers and the backs of her arms, and her feet, which were wearing open, narrow, strapped girl sandal things, had turned wooden, with roots growing everywhere, and had been pulled back underneath her and as far from his own feet as possible.

Sanny looked at Willy, who seemed completely ignorant to the byplay, or at least didn't care to participate. "Why is she not having problems?" Sanny had to ask.

Tammy glanced at her cousin, who seemed to respond to the attention by leaning just a bit closer. "I can't be sure, but… tell me, does… it… ever step back? Stay passive? Sort of… hide and shove you to the front?"

"Never," Sanny said immediately. "It always tries to have a say. Sort of like an assistant manager who wants your job but can't get it, and tries to keep telling you what to do." He paused, then added conscientiously, "They really help out, and I wouldn't be able to do a thing without them, but sometimes they can be pretty pesky. Especially since I don't think they're used to me telling them 'no'."

Tammy smiled a little at the description, before frowning. "Yeah, my… thing is like that too. Like nagging, nagging and nagging all the time, but softly, so it sort of becomes background. Hypnotic…" She shook her head with an annoyed frown that Sanny was almost sure was self-directed. She looked at him seriously. "It's hard to say, since I only have the three of us to compare, but… I think… I think Willy's might be… special."

Sanny had to blink at that, and he looked at Willy, bewildered. To his surprise, there seemed to be an echo in the back of his head. The hunger that rose again was… not as strong.

"Huh," was all he managed to say. "What does that even mean?"

"I have no idea," Tammy said. "I could be wrong though. Three people is a terrible sample size for an average. Maybe it's waiting for Tammy to have some sort of moment of insight before letting her have access to its full power so she becomes Super Water Willy. It could be a programming error, or whatever it is wasn't made to deal with someone as awesome as my cousin." That last was said with pride.

Sanny nodded, tearing off a bit of the corned beef pandesal and taking a bite. He grimaced. Nothing but bread and potato. He took another. Much better.

"So…" Tammy said. "Can you show us how to practice? Being in more than one place at a time? It sounds disorienting."

"Not really," Sanny said, putting the pandesal down. "You just have to get used to having multiple inputs. Like reading a book and watching a TV show at the same time."

He waited for the confusion, the exclamation of 'that's not easy', but instead, Tammy brightened. "Oh, I can do that!" she said. "I thought it would be hard, but if it's like that… Wait, are we talking a show with just dialogue, or a show with subtitles?"

Wait, did she just…

"Dubs or subs?" he asked impulsively.

"Subs, always," she said instantly. "Dubs always sound so whiny."

And suddenly, all of Sanny's misgivings and worries fell away.

"Tammy, I'm really glad we met," he said seriously. "I really hope we can be friends."

She smiled, no, grinned back. It was a bright, radiant look as she extended a hand. "Thomasina Olivarez," she said. "This is my cousin, Wilhelmina Azul."

As if that was a cue, Willy held out a hand next to Tammy, waiting patiently. A drop of water fell from her palm.

Sanny reached forward and gently but firmly grasped Tammy's hand, ready to throttle any changes that might happen to his anatomy that might hurt her. Her hand felt so small, so soft, so delicate... for an outgoing girl, her handshake was surprisingly shy. "Sanny Dalag," he said. He shook Willy's hand to. Her grip was awkward and a bit too hard, but not the crushingly malicious sort. Just… off.

"So… we're free for the rest of the day," Tammy said. "Do you think you can show us a few moves? I mean, we might not be able to do them, but it might help? Your suggestion did, after all."

Sanny considered. Well, it wasn't like he had anywhere to be… "Sure," he said. "But we'll need somewhere private. No people, no surveillance cameras. Do you know of anywhere close by?"

Tammy tapped her lips. "Huh… actually, I do."

---

The graveyard in Marikina– sorry, the 'Memorial Garden'– was, in fact, actually fairly private. While they had a gate, the guards didn't stop anyone or even asked them who they'd be visiting, and the three of them just walked in, each of them holding a bouquet of flowers that Tammy had grown from the backs of her arms and wrapped with what seemed like a very thin banana leaf. No one even looked at them.

"This feels vaguely sacrilegious," Sanny said, already feeling hot from the bright sunlight coming from above, holding the improvised bouquet over his head. Occasionally clouds would drift overhead, giving some respite, but most of the time, the sun ruled undisputed. Under his skin, he could feel his body altering, trying to find a more efficient cooling system to vent heat. He wished he'd drunk more water.

Once they got inside, Tammy pointed with her bouquet. "Over there," she pointed. She didn't seem to be sweating at all, though her hair was starting to turn mildly green. "You can't see it from here, but there's a church over there. Since it's the middle of the day, the only ones here are the groundskeepers, and they won't bother you if you look like you're praying. We can practice there."

"We're practicing in a church?" Sanny said.

"Near a church," Tammy corrected. "I think the church itself is usually closed, unless it's Sunday or All Saints' Day. There're trees there."

Sanny could feel some sort of carapace starting to grow on his head, probably as a heat-protection measure, and stopped it. The hurried walk there was torturously hot, and Sanny found his metabolism becoming ectothermic, using the heat instead of finding a way to vent it. He let it, since that was better than suffering, and he did find himself becoming more energetic, though he willed away the venom sacs that had formed in his throat. From the back of his head, he felt frustrated hunger. "How do you know about this place?" he asked.

She pointed. "Our grandparents are buried here," she said. "Somewhere over that way. Huh, Willy and I should stop by to say hi."

"I'm sorry," Sanny said.

Tammy waved it away. "Nah, it's fine, I was only a little kid when it happened. I sort of remember them, but it's been a while, you know? Huh, I should check out our albums, I don't even remember what lolo looked like anymore…" Her tone had a strange wistful nostalgia to it.

The area around the church had the promised trees and shade, and Sanny was able to switch back to a more endothermic metabolism as he leaned against a tree, pulling his hair back from his face. Long hair was so ticklish!

"So, what can you show us?" Tammy said eagerly, sitting down on the ground in the shade and leaning forward eagerly, legs folded under her. Willy glanced at her, then after a moment sat down in the exact same position. She stared at Sanny with a disquietingly intent urgency. The bouquets lay to one side, out of the way. "Is it cool?"

"Do people actually still say that?" Sanny said as he sat down, his hair just brushing the ground.

"If people have invented new slang to replace it, it obviously hasn't caught on," Tammy said. "Not here, at least. Come on, show me, show me!"

Put like that, it sounded vaguely dirty, but Sanny didn't say that. Instead, because of the mention of grandparents, he held up both hands. "Okay, I'm going to pull off my thumb," he said. He stuck out one thumb, grabbed it with his other hand and pulled.

"I can do that too," Tammy said, tucking her thumb into her fist and doing the simple magic trick known to all dads and uncles.

Sanny opened his hand to show a severed thumb, one end a vaguely ragged stump showing red flesh and white bone. Only a little blood dripped around the edges.

"That's disgusting!" Tammy said, a wide grin on her face. She looked at her thumb speculatively. "I'm pretty sure I can do that too…"

"What can you do?" Sanny said. "Something related to plants, right?"

"Something," Tammy said, smiling.

Sanny nodded. Fair enough. "Looked about right. If you're anything like, you should be able to do this." A new thumb was already growing on his hand. "Anyway, watch." He held up the thumb he'd pulled off.

It bent at the joint as Tammy leaned forward, fascinated. Then it started wiggling.

Sanny could feel the changes happening under the skin. It had begun as it had appeared, a severed thumb, if one severed a bit too cleanly. Blood vessels had been pinched close before removal, nerves had been deactivated; the skin, bone, ligaments, muscles and tendons rigged to fall off like a lizard's tail. The cells were still alive, and would actually last for some time at the cellular level even detached from his body. Any body part would under normal circumstances.

His body parts though… well.

He could still feel through his thumb. He'd gotten used to the situation, but it was still weird. He could feel through his severed thumb, feel the warmth of his head, feel the nail still growing bit by bit. Wind blew and he felt it passing over the skin. And he could feel it changing inside, as easily as he felt any of the changes that happened in his own body, a level of hyperawareness that had once felt like too much information. He could feel the muscles and bone in the thumb changing, rearranging, the solid bones forming a skull, tiny vertebrae, ribs. The muscles squirmed under the skin, becoming more evenly distributed, supporting a different kind of movement. The mass of the bone reduced, seeming to just disappear, and new muscle seemed to come out of nowhere to replace it. The muscles became specialized, forming lungs for metabolizing, a basic digestive system…

Small needle teeth suddenly sprouted from around the raw edges of the stump at the base of the thumb, that entire end becoming a mouth. Between one moment and the next, what had been a stump of muscle and bone became a gaping– for its size– maw, and the thumb was no longer a thumb, but a bizarre, flesh-colored worm with a firm underside and soft back, what had once been a nail becoming a sort of decorative plate. It wiggled a bit stiffly, but its movements became more refined as its musculature and skeleton kept changing, becoming suited to its size, optimized to be a living creature.

Sanny had no idea how it happened, only that it did. Oh, he could direct small, individual changes, like the head being at the stump end, could feel each change and know what was happening, get some vague sense of how each organ contributed to the whole creature, and set general parameters, like it having no sexual or reproductive organs. He could control the finished creature as if he'd been born to the body, knew how to get to it move and do what he wanted. But how and why each part changed to become as it was? All the literally microscopic changes to the cells that made them stop being thumb muscles and become something else? He had no idea about those, and he'd felt them happen. It had all been according to the hand of someone else. Something else.

"Wow… that thing is gross," Tammy said succinctly, a wide, amazed smile on her face. She reached forward tentatively. "Can I–?"

Sanny felt the urge, opportunistic, hungry, selfish, felt the muscles bunch up just that little bit too much. His hands snapped forward to pluck the little form out of the air as it lunged at Tammy's fingers, its mouth opened wide, teeth growing absurdly in a split second. Tammy froze in place, eyes wide in surprise, but Sanny's hand had already wrapped around the little worm, willing it not to move, to be part of him, and it subsided, suddenly docile.

He could also feel it. Blind, deaf, with only a vague sense of balance and a general direction of where down was because of gravity. It had targeted Tammy by… by the input from his own eyes.

"Sorry," he said, keeping the worm back, using his other thumb to keep the mouth closed in case… yep, venom sacks. He willed them to uselessness and he didn't even know how he did that, it just happened! "Urges. You okay?"

Tammy stayed till for a little bit too long, then she shuddered and put down her hand which, Sanny realized, had become thorny again. "Y-yeah, I'm good. Wow, that happened fast."

"Sorry. I didn't have full control of it at the time. It shouldn't happen again… soon, anyway," he added conscientiously.

Tammy gave him a vinegary smile. "Yeah, I get it." She looked down at her feet, and Sanny realized roots had gone into the ground from her ankle. "You might want to find a different place to sit, there's a bamboo shot under your ass that's ready to go through you."

"I saw that show where they tested that, doesn't it take at least a few hours?" Sanny said, even as they carefully stood and moved a little to the side.

"I'm a growing girl and I grow fast," Tammy said as she wrenched up her leg, and frowned as she found the root was being really clingy. She grabbed the root, braced herself and ripped it off with a wince.

"Are you hurt?" Sanny asked, concerned.

"Nah, but it always feels like it should, you know?" Tammy said. "Like when you pull at a hangnail and a lot comes off with it and gets bloody and them mildly infected and painful and purple… "

"I… don't think I'm susceptible to that anymore," Sanny said, looking at his thin, feminine hands. "My nails obey me or die."

"Good for you," Tammy said, smirking. "Put those uppity nails in their place. Seriously though, I've already seen that trick. It was more awesome when you used your whole forearm and made a huge killer tail-stabby thing."

"I suppose," Sanny admitted, remembered he had done that. "Well then, for my next trick…"

He held up the now-docile worm in his hand. "This is currently a very rudimentary vertebrate. It would actually be more efficient if this were a true invertebrate, like a slug or a leech. It's also the size of my thumb."

"Because it used to be your thumb," Tammy said.

Sanny nodded. "Have you ever seen one of those videos where they show how an egg cell becomes a fetus?"

He didn't wait for a reply, instead– after glaring at the pace in the back of his head and getting sullenness and frustrated hunger– directing his will at the thumb-worm. It twitched, shuddered…

They both watched as two stubby little legs grew just behind its head and the place where the thumb joint had used to be and still had a pattern of lines on the skin. Another shudder, and the head began to distend, lengthening as a skull grew within, as a neck was delineated from head and torso, as more bones grew to give its body definition and the basic body plan of an animal of phylum chordata…

"It's growing," Tammy noted as what had once been a thumb-worm began to writhe, muscle groups becoming more complex…

"Yeah," Sanny said as the now fist-sized creature kept writhing, bones becoming thicker and longer, muscles splitting and lengthening… "But where is it all coming from? It's not eating anything, not drinking anything. It should have only the mass and elements of a thumb to work with."

"The air?" Tammy suggested.

"If you put it underwater, it'll still keep growing," Sanny said.

Tammy seemed to consider that. Then she turned to look at her cousin and pointed. The taller girl had been so silent Sanny had almost forgotten about her… if he hadn't been every bit as intently as he'd been watching Tammy. "Willy, can you put this in a ball of water and keep it out of the air."

Willy nodded, raising a hand. Sanny tensed, the muscles in his legs becoming fast-twitch and coiling in readiness to dodge, images of industrial water cutters in his mind's eye, but water only flowed smoothly out of Willy's hand like a cartoonish case of nervous sweating. The water fell to the ground, and against expectation didn't sink into the dirt, but gathered as a basketball-sized droplet. It rolled– flowed?– along the ground towards the twitching creature, whose limbs were elongating. Sanny felt the water cover it, felt miniscule lungs start to burn from lack of air.

"Can you aerate the water?" he asked. "I think it's drowning."

Tammy blinked. "It's drowning?" she exclaimed, staring at the creature, which was now trying to use its limbs to try to swim out of the water. It remained in place however, stuck in the center of the large orb of water no matter how hard it tried to move. "Willy, let it go!"

That did it, and whatever force had been keeping not only released it, but also spat it out of the orb. Sanny was surprised– but not surprised…– to see the creature was completely dry as it took small, gasping breaths. In the few moments it had been drowning, it had progressed to a clearly bilaterally symmetrical, bipedal humanoid shape, a little doll-sized homunuculus with, Sanny was amused to note since he hadn't thought of it or intended it, the little thumbnail resting on the juncture between its legs like some sort of strange censor bar, despite the fact it was completely biologically sexless.

It wasn't a miniature human though, any more than most dolls were an anatomically correct depiction of human body proportions. It had elongated limbs vaguely reminiscent of his combat form, thin androgynous proportions, and a face that was completely dominated by a circular, lamprey-like maw. Its little skull had a single huge– for the skull– hole in the front to accomplish this, in spite of it being mounted on a vertebrae stalk like a human head. It still had no eyes, and instead of tiny ears it had organs Sanny recognized from insects to get its balance.

"Whoa," Tammy said, staring. "That thing grew up fast."

"While it was drowning too," Sanny said, perplexed. "So… they don’t need food to grow, bulk up or have energy… but apparently they need to breathe? That makes no sense!"

"First time in the water?" Tammy asked, reaching out to poke the little homunculus, pausing, then grabbing one of the flower stalks from the fake bouquet and using that instead.

Sanny absently made it step aside. "First time in water that didn't have any dissolved oxygen," he said. "We gave it gills, but there was nothing to breathe, which is weird."

"Says the virgin single mother," Tammy said, still trying to poke it with the flower stalk. Sanny made the homunculus run to the other side of the water droplet, which was just politely sitting there, not dissolving into water and getting the ground and all of them wet. "Congratulations, it's a… fairy? Does it eat teeth? Pretty sure I saw something like it in a movie that ate teeth."

"Doesn't need to eat, remember?" Sanny said. "Just breathe, apparently… weird."

"I'll admit, that was a bit cooler than the arm thing," Tammy said. "But is that all?"

"What, you don't think being in two places at once is useful?" Sanny said. Technically it was three, but the him that was in the office was bored silly and on the verge of falling asleep…

Tammy blinked, then stared at the homunculus, which took on a random pose. Then it twirled, and crab-like, inter-locking, overlapping shells of bright yellow with subtle touches of white appeared to grow over the homunculus' body, and the entire thing actually became an invertebrate instead of having an internal-external skeletal system, the skull getting pushed outside of the skin, the teeth interlocking and fusing solid to complete the skull as black compound eyes appeared, letting Sanny finally see from its point of view. It wavered slightly as Sanny had to adjust to the boot-like feet, and he had to cheat a little by flattening the entire foot pad that made contact with the ground to make the whole thing stable.

"I'm not limited to this size," Sanny said as the little homunculus proudly put its hands on its hips and slowly began to grow, becoming taller, thicker, longer. "It can be full-sized and I can still operate it from a distance."

"Full-sized?" Tammy breathed, eyes wide. "Wait, does this mean I can just make a clone and have it go to school for me?"

"It… might depend," Sanny said.

"On what?" Tammy asked eagerly.

"On how humanlike you can make your duplicates," Sanny said. "I mean, I can make my duplicates very human-like. no one would even be able to tell the difference. But… well, your power is plants, right? If you're power is anything like mine, you'll probably be able to control some kind of human-shaped plant, and I don't know how human-like you can make that plant. My power basically lets me turn into any animal, or parts of animals, or vaguely animal-y, and humans are just another animal." Was that too close to admitting this was a fake face?

Tammy stared at him. Then she pulled out her paper cup with its cute little seedling-stalks-and-roots figurine. She gave it a very intent stare. "You," she proclaimed, "are going to school as me on Monday. Let's make this happen!"

 

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"It didn't happen," Tammy sighed in disappointment, now cupless and with a little plant person sitting dejectedly on her shoulder. It was the rich green of new growth– that is, it looked like celery– with clean limbs that probably looked a lot smoother than they actually were and probably had all sorts of hidden sharp edge on super-narrow, nearly invisible sharp spines in addition to the decorative but very sharp thorns jutting parallel to its forearms and over its elbow, and the smaller thorns on its fingers. If he had to guess, Sanny would have said there was probably other strategic thorns that was letting the little plant person get traction on Tammy's shirt. "I still have to go to school!"

"At least you can go to school and be out in plant form at the same time?" Sanny suggested.

"But I wanted it to be the other way around!" Tammy cried. Her cousin awkwardly patted her on the shoulder. Willy had been able to make a duplicate out of water too, but it had been… well, definitely not human. For one thing, it had more in common with a simple stick figure, without any proper human proportions at all but the vague shape. For another, it had been completely transparent. Sanny wondered if that had merely been compliant apathy on Willy's part, doing the bare minimum.

Sanny had his little homunculus pat her on the knee, careful not to let any poisoned spurs grow. "There there, it's all right. We can still go after monsters like this. And even during office hours too. Or school hours in your case, I guess." At the third pat, he felt something pointy on the armored palm of his little body. He blinked.

"Sorry," Tammy said, sighing in self-disappointment. "Urges. It's just a thorn though, and I don't think it was any of the nasty stuff–"

"It's getting really itchy and starting to rash," Sanny said.

"Yeah, that's the urushiol oil," Tammy sighed. "Sorry."

"As long as you didn't mean it," Sanny said. "I think we might have to get used to this if we're going to hang out together."

Tammy brightened. "You still wanna hang out?"

"Sure," Sanny said, surprised she was surprised. "Um, don't you? I thought we were getting along okay…"

Tammy looked flustered. "No, no, I want to! It's just… I wasn't sure if we were really getting along or if you were just being nice… Argh, I shouldn't have said that, right? Sorry, sorry, I'm being awkward, I… I don't get a chance to talk to a lot of people older than me, you know? They're mostly teachers or relatives, so I don't know how to talk to… I mean, do I call you ate?"

"You've managed to not need to so far," Sanny said, bemused and amused.

"Oh shit, you're right!" Tammy said, looking aghast.

Sanny laughed. "Look, you don't have to worry about that, okay?" he tried to reassure her. "I think we're equally inexperienced at this, so it shouldn't matter that I'm older. Just call me Sanny, all right?"

"Okay a–, er, Sanny," Tammy said.

"There, see? I didn't start hating you for not calling me ate," Sanny said. "We'll be fine."

Tammy nodded. Then, diffidently, she said, "And Willy?"

Sany hadn't forgotten the other girl, but he felt like he should have. She was just… there. Quiet, intense, and only seemed to really pay attention to Tammy. "I'm sure we'll get along too…" he said, feeling a bit unsure about that.

Tammy glanced at her cousin, who seemed to come to attention when the shorter girl looked at her, like she was waiting to be told what to do. "Willy," Tammy said. "Sanny's our friend now, okay? You be nice and talk to her, and she'll talk to you." Tammy glanced deliberately at Sanny, and her next words sounded like they were for him as much as her cousin. "I'm sure she'll be patient and understanding with you," there was a note of awkward pleading underlying the encouragement in the words, "so you be patient too, okay? Remember to explain what you're doing or ask for an explanation if you don't understand. If we're in a fight and I'm not around or I'm busy, you can ask Sanny what to do, okay?"

"Like teacher?" Willy said.

"No, not like teacher, this is only if we're in a fight or heroing," Tammy said. She glanced at Sanny again, and seemed relieved when Sanny nodded. "And don't forget to help her too if she's in trouble, okay?"

"What kind of trouble?" Willy asked.

"Like if someone is eating him or beating him up," Tammy said.

Willy nodded gravely, and for the first time since their handshake, looked directly at Sanny. The predictable hunger rose from the back of his mind, blunted at the last moment like it had remembered an unpleasant dining experience, and he hand to wonder what Willy was feeling. "You want to drink me too?" Willy said.

"Not… particularly," Sanny said. He didn't glance at Tammy, and only because he had a second body to do it with, even if one hand was still itchy from… what had she called it? Urushiol oil? "I'm thirsty, but I can wait until I get to a vending machine."

Willy nodded. "A little drink is okay. But only a little."

"Okay…?" Sanny said. "I don't really understand."

"You can't drink me," Willy said. "But if you're thirsty, you can have a little bit. Like Tammy does."

Tammy looked away with a wince, her face ashamed.

Ah. Drinking. Of course. She had water powers, after all, and you didn't eat water unless you were a senator at an impeachment hearing. "Thank you for saying that Willy, but I don't want to drink you. If I am, stop me, all right?"

Willy titled her hear, and looked at Tammy first, who nodded. "Okay," Willy said.

"And… do you want to… drink me, Willy?" Sanny ventured. Was that the right term? Ugh, it sounded dirty…

Willy shook her head, a single, sharp, abrupt movement. "No. You're too loud. It hurts. So it hides. It always hides."

Sanny felt his eyebrows rise. No wonder these two worked. The only one with… urges… like that was Tammy. Only one point of failure.

Or two, now… personally, he wasn't exactly sure how he'd even be a threat to Willy. She could just flow away. Actually, wasn't Willy pretty overpowered? She was water. No one beats water. Ask anyone making a 'mountains or the sea' comparative allegory.

Tammy, at least, sighed in relief, so at least he hadn't screwed up anything. "Well, we'd better go home," she said. "N-not that we don't like hanging out, but we live pretty far away, and we're going to get stuck in traffic as it is! My parents told us not to get home late."

"That doesn't mean we have to stop hanging out," Sanny said, pointing at the little plant person on Tammy's shoulder. "Can't I just bring that one with me when I go hunting tonight, and you can control it from your house?" He frowned as he thought of something. "Or do you need to be close to it or something to control it? I mean, I can control mine from a long way away, but that's me. You might be different…"

Tammy tilted her head. "Actually, I don't know how far away I can control it from…" She looked at the little plant person. "Why don't we find out…"

 

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"Thanks for being so patient," Tammy said through her little… offshoot? Her little offshoot. Its chest was bulging and shrinking as she made it into some kind of air sac to force air through whatever ever little vocal chords the little thing had so it could talk audibly. "With Willy."

"No problem," Sanny said through his little drone, reconfigured to be a large bird, carrying the offshoot in its talon. A little on the legs– talons?– carrying the offshoot let him hear what Tammy was saying over the rushing wind as the drone flew to Makati, while the drone wearing the new shirt and jeans walked back home and the third watched the clock until it was time to leave the office. "Is there… anything I need to remember? About her? Anything I can do to make her more involved? I feel like it was just the two of us talking most of the time."

"That's because it was just the two of us talking," Tammy said. "Willy's… quiet around people who aren’t family. That's just how she is. You want to talk to her, you ask her a direct question and you make it clear you're directing it at her instead of someone else, or she'll think you're just talking. But don't worry, it's my job to get her to be more involved. Don't worry about it."

Sanny pondered that, watching the winds and updrafts as he headed for Makati. He could flap all the way there, but the turbulence made it a little hard to hear. "How do I become friends with her?"

There was silence.

"Sorry, accidentally reacted in my other body. This is really weird, but I think I'm getting used to it," the offshoot finally said. "Becoming friends with her… That's gonna be hard. A bunch of kids we… used to know… they said they wanted to be friends with Willy, but they… well, they were kids. Kids aren't patient."

"That… sounds about right," Sanny said, sighing in one of his other bodies.

"I'm friends with them now," Tammy said wistfully. "At least, we say hi and talk when we see each other on the street. But Willy never forgets, and… well."

"It sounds…" Sanny didn't say 'tough' or 'hard, "like a lot to remember."

"Still wanna try being friends?" Tammy said. "It's okay if you don't, as long as you're at least decent to her."

"Yeah," Sanny said. "If we're going to be hanging out, might as well be as friends, right? There's nothing to lose, and I might get a friend."

Silence.

"Sorry, forgot to talk through here again," Tammy said. "That's… really nice. Okay, we'll see about you being friends with Willy. Can't promise anything, but… it'll be nice for her to have another friend."

There was a weird sound.

"Wow, throat clearing does NOT work in this thing," Tammy said, voice sounding a little ragged. "I think I tore something. So, where are we going?"

"Makati," Sanny said. "I've already checked out the spider, but I thought I'd give it a second look, and you can check it out and give me your opinion…"

One part of Sanny flew to Makati as two parts made their way home.

Chapter 4: The House With Pink In Its Walls, Part 3

"It's… pretty big," Tammy noted as they stood on the roof of a building, looking out over the modified Makati skyline.

From the TV footage and the phrase 'building webs', Sanny had gotten the image of a giant spider web draped over the buildings like some kind of giant circus tent, or strung between them like huge nets. Instead, he'd been reminded not all spiders built webs. Some built nests.

Several buildings on both sides of Ayala Avenue were covered in webs, supporting a large, warehouse-sized nest. Uprooted trees, abandoned cars taken from ground level, and bits of building had been woven into it as some sort of filler or aggregate, and lines of silk like bridge cables arced from the buildings, somehow supporting the whole thing. Sanny suspected that from the way the buildings were missing windows, the webs were anchored to the support pillars of the superstructures.

The surrounding buildings were dark and evacuated… for about a block, after which people were stubbornly holding on. While the office buildings were empty, many of the residents of the nearby condos were insistent on staying, too stubborn to leave, as if by their presence they could prevent their residence from being damaged, or were afraid of looters, or possibly waiting for an opportunity to start looting.

Typical reaction to being told to evacuate, really.

All this centered on the giant spider– the Gagambuhala, as the internet had lazily dubbed it, a portmanteau of 'spider' and 'giant'– which had caused all this. Its main body– the cephalothorax. and abdomen– was the size of a bus, and its limbs proportionately longer. Long hairs that got finer and finer at the tips covered its body, and a smell seemed to surround it, one that a part of Sanny instinctively identified as the smell of silk: raw, unprocessed, fresh silk straight from the spinnerets. It was a bright white and purple hue that Sanny wasn't sure was natural in any of the local spiders, and was currently occupied tearing apart an abandoned car with surprising delicacy considering the thing was using its fangs and pedipalps. It was on the ground, and Sanny was glad that despite its utterly bullshit ability to stick to and climbs buildings as if it was were a normal-sized spider– something that Sanny hadn't been able to scale up himself because of the square-cube law– it probably still found it tiring to supports its now-massive weight.

"What's it doing? My eyes aren't very good and there aren't any plants around to peek through," Tammy said.

Sanny obligingly added an eye to the ones he had, one that had better long-distance telescopic vision than the compound eyes he preferred for situational awareness, and tried to focus on what the Gagambuhala was doing. What he saw made that single eye blink on his forehead. "It's… removing the car's wheels," he said. "With a lug wrench."

"It's doing what with what?" Tammy asked.

"It's taking off the car's tires with a lug wrench," he repeated.

"What's a lug wrench?" Tammy asked, confused.

"It's… you know, those x-shape things you use to take a tire's nuts off? That's a lug wrench."

"Sound dirty," Tammy said. "Wait, it's using one? Seriously? "

"Seriously," Sanny said, just as bewildered. "Holding it in its pedipalps while the jaws holds the car still."

"The what?"

Sanny wanted to roll his eye, but she couldn't be blamed for not knowing, or not bothering to remember, grade school biology classes about spider body parts. So he just grew a couple on his head. "These, the muttonchop-looking things."

"Oh, those. Got it," Tammy said, giving him a thumbs-up and nearly falling over. "Oh crap!"

Sanny moved quickly, catching her before she fell and pulling her to stand her up straight again. "You okay? Balanced yet?"

"Uh, give me a few minutes more," Tammy said. Plants, it turned out, didn't have balance-correction organs like humans did. Sanny had to wonder how she'd been standing straight when they'd met. Maybe she'd kept her inner ears? "Maybe I should put down little roots, let those tell me if I'm tipping over…"

"Can't help you there, I'm afraid," Sanny said. "I'm kinda spoiled for choice when it comes to keeping my balance."

"Wait, I think I've worked it out," Tammy said. "Right, the roots was the right idea. Just… give me time to make a few more…"

"Take your time," Sanny said. "It's not like that thing's going anywhere."

He looked, just to be sure, but it was still playing around with the car. It seemed to be trying to pry off the hood with the lug wrench.

"I swear I don't usually have this sort of trouble balancing, even when my body goes full plant," Tammy said, her voice a strange vibration. "Now I actually have to think about my balance. It's weird."

"I think it's because it's not our 'real' body, so to speak," Sanny said. "It's a puppet, so we have to handle everything that needs to be done to make it move like the 'real' thing."

"Eh? Wait, really?" Tammy said, turning her head to look at him. She started to tip over, but before he could grab her she straightened to correct it… and overcorrected, so he had to grab her anyway. "Thanks, still getting used to this… wait, so you have to tell it to breathe? Involuntary functions? I thought the brain or the spinal cord is supposed to do that automatically."

"Apparently it can, but only if I'm paying attention to it," Sanny said, rolling his third eye.

"Wow. Doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose of, you know, having a brain to deal with involuntary functions?"

"It's not so bad," Sanny said. "This body is trimmed down. No digestive system, no endocrine system, no excretory system." He shrugged. "This should actually die in 12 to 24 hours from build-up of body wastes, but my bodies can bullshit through stuff like that, for the most part."

"Oh yeah, I get that," Tammy said. "This one has no flowers and no organs for it, minimal xylem and phloem, no sap, just offensive latex, and the chlorophyll is purely decorative." She gestured down at herself. "You know, for the nice color pallet. I really don't like looking like wood."

"So instead you look like a stick of celery," Sanny noted with amusement.

"Celery is good for you!" she said. "Cuts down on inflammation, helps prevent arthritis and stuff."

Sanny nodded sagely. "Well, now I know."

"And knowing is half the battle!" Tammy cheered.

They looked at each other and snickered like the dorks they were.

"Okay, I think I can try walking now," Tammy said. "Be ready to catch me so I don't fall off the building, okay?"

The edge of the roof they were on was five feet away, and there was another roof fifteen feet down, but Sanny nodded. He stayed close as Tammy carefully got to her feet. The body had been grown from the initial small offshoot she'd made, and they'd even stuck it in some soil for nutrients, though Sanny wasn't surprised Tammy was able to grow the offshoot beyond the amount of nutrients the soil could have possibly provided. It was human-shaped– two legs, two arms, a torso where they all met, and a big round thing on top for a head– and had the smooth texture of bamboo, despite being bright celery green. She wavered slightly, but whatever solution involving roots she'd come up with seemed to be working. The joints all creaked as she moved, as if protesting, but despite that Tammy's movements were smooth.

"Okay, looks like we're in business," Tammy said after walking back and for a few times. She put her fist on her hips. "Okay, let's take thing down and make the city safe for businessmen and bankers again!"

"Hmm," Sanny said, holding up two fingers. "How many fingers do you see?"

Tammy had no eyelids to blink, but Sanny felt she would have. "Two."

He changed the shape of his hand.

"Seven," Tammy said.

He changed the color of his external exoskeleton. "Tell me what colors you see, from right to left," he said, showing her his forearm.

She shrugged and peered at him in the weak light. "Uh, red, green, blue, yellow, pink or violet, I can't be sure, I think that's brown, orange, black and white."

Sanny nodded. "Which way is the wind flowing from?" he asked.

She stared at him with the strange, black blotches on the otherwise smooth wood on the front of her head. "What?"

"I'm testing your senses," he said. "You didn't have a sense of balance, so there might have been other senses you missed. Touch seems to be missing, and… would you say you feel hot or cold?"

"Oh. You could have just told me that, you know," Tammy said. "Yeah, I don't have taste or smell in this, and hearing is… weird. There are these weird hums I don't recognize."

Sanny listened with his own range of auditory organs, from ears to feelers to antennae. "Those are probably subsonic vibrations," he said. "I think plants emit them, so it makes some sense you can hear them."

"Ah. Good to know," she nodded. "And I have a sense of touch, it's just kind of… dull? It's more like I feel vibrations than impacts."

"There are plants that react to being touched," Sanny suggested. "Can you rig something like that?"

"Give me a minute," she said. "Huh, this is really different from using my own body. Sometimes I sort of lose my sense of touch there, but that's when I'm not paying attention. This doesn't have one to begin with. That's so weird. I guess there's still a lot I need to learn."

"I think you're doing pretty well," Sanny said.

"Not as good as you," Tammy said.

"Yeah, but I've had practice, and my body is pretty much a basic human form with stuff added to it," he said, gesturing down at himself. It was the combat form he favored as a starting point: humanoid, with long limbs, all fast-twitch muscles that he could reconfigure as needed, overlapping exoskeleton, compound eyes for wide field of view and claws. The mouth wasn't one he usually had, but he had one now because he wasn't alone. "You turn into a plant. Plants don't walk, they don't talk, they don't have to maintain bilateral bipedal symmetry, heck, they can't even see. Given you have to reverse engineer ways to get senses I take for granted back, I'd say you're doing pretty well. Plus you haven't tried to eat me once, which is more than I can say."

"Do you think I look bland?" Tammy said.

Okay, that wasn't a response he'd been expecting."Uh, what?"

"I think I look bland," she said. "I look like someone in a zentai suit."

"I thought that was the look you were going for?" he said.

"Well, yeah… but I look bland, right?" she said.

"I… don't really feel comfortable saying," Sanny said.

"Maybe I should add vines, or leaves," Tammy mused. "A flower on my head, maybe? I'm technically a plant girl, so should I show some green hair? Or vine hair–?"

He smelled raw silk in the wind, but it was too late as a pair of giant spider legs snapped up over the edge of the roof, a net of silk webbing held between the two limbs, and slammed down hard on the two of them. There wasn't even so much as a vibration as the giant spider climbed up the building they were on, and Sanny had a bewildered moment to see that it had wrapped silk around the its feet like shoes.

Sanny tried to move, tried to get away, but the silk was sticky, and the Gagambuhala was wielding it well, using it to sweep them off their feet. The resulting fall and tangle had gotten them wrapped on more of the rope-think strands. Sanny tried to claw at it, tried to bite through it as in his panic rush he let go of his control, letting his body change shape according to panicked thoughts and her. His limbs became bendy and fluid as his body eschewed arms for tentacles, mouths like scars tearing open and growing sharp, serrated triangular teeth as they tried to bite through the silk, to tear through, to try and get out of this trap.

Vaguely, he noticed Tammy was doing the same, forgoing an ordered body plan in favor of rampant growth as she grew branches, leaves, thorny vines, as her torso became a trunk that–

There was a sickening snap, and Tammy was torn in half as the Gagambuhala's jaws uncurled and sank down fangs, jabbing through her stomach. If she cried out, Sanny didn't hear as a sharp, bitter, acid stink suddenly washed over him, and his eyes and mouths burned as digestive juices were sprayed on them by the spider. He could feel them attacking his skin, going into his mouths, melting his eyes…

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They Died.

It was the sort of phrase that should be bright red and glowing, perhaps with a chord of ominous music to go with it. They died.

This wasn't the first time it had happened to Sanny. He'd learned to split himself off into drones for exactly this reason. Given how the spider had managed to catch him by surprise last time he'd gone to check it out, leaping at him and entangling him with the web it had been holding before devouring him… yeah, he'd sort of been resigned to getting eaten again. That spider was no joke.

It was also monstrously, horribly unfair. There was no way it should be sticking to buildings like that! Or being that quiet and sneaky! It was too big! Sanny had tried doing the same, trying to stick to walls like a spider. It had worked when he'd been the size and shape of an actual spider, but it wasn't the sort of thing that scaled up well. Stupid square-cube law!

Tammy had been fine when he contacted her, though mildly disturbed. Plant didn’t have nerves and pain centers like human did, so while she'd been aware of the damage done to her drone body, she'd hadn't really felt it, and she had apparently 'bailed out', as it were, as soon as she'd been torn in half. She'd even joked she'd given the spider its roughage for the day.

Sanny had tried to give the thing intestinal parasites, reconfiguring bits of the drone even as it was wrapped in web. Unfortunately, the spider had stayed true to how spider ate, injecting digestive juice into the web to start melting the meat. Sanny had given up at that point, but he swore that one day, he was going to get that bug– arachnid, whatever– and devour it whole and figure out how it was messing with the square-cube law to stick to buildings!

In the morning, he woke up covered in hairy exoskeleton, with eight tentacle limbs and sticking to his bed sheet because apparently she had decided to give spiders a try. His bits were, incongruously, right where they should be, between his rear-most limbs, and he had to work out how to stop sticking to the bedsheet before he was able to change back to human. Once more he compared his appearance to the pictures next to his mirror.

Then, as he sent his office-going drone to be an office drone, he sat down and began to search the internet for details about those wasps that lay their eggs inside spiders so the larvae could eat it from the inside out.

Later that day, Tammy messaged him asking if he wanted to patrol looking for crimes to foil.

I don't think public order is so bad we'd see crimes happening right in front of us if we walked around, he sent back. Not any more than usual, anyway. Didn't you see that movie?

Heroes on TV foil crimes.

Only in the opening scenes of episodes, and usually they're lucky enough for the crime to either be happening right in front of them, or have some sort of tap into some high tech police network and some way to get around town instantly, he pointed out. I can fly, but not nearly that fast, and I don't think you or Willy can.

You have a point. Stupid real life! Why does being a hero have to be so hard?

We don't have sloppy writing, contrived coincidences and 41 minutes to resolve the plot on our side?

41 minutes? Really?

Yup. Check Netflix.

Huh, you're right. 41 minutes. So, on TV basically a third of the time is all for ads? I feel cheated. So what do we do now?

Well, I've been following social media for reports of new monsters, following the news about what's happening to the ones still roaming around, and trying to figure out ways to kill them. I'm thinking parasite wasps for that spider.

I think I've seen that movie.

What movie?

Killing a giant spider by flying at it and dropping bombs.

I don't think I can do bombs. Not ones that go boom, anyway. I can do parasites though.

Maybe I can. Bombs are basically things that expand so fast they break things around them, right? Trees are pretty good at breakings things when they expand, it's how roots break rocks.

I'll leave that to you then. Wanna try tomorrow?

Make it the day after, I'll see how Willy feels about being put in a bottle so we can turn her– or a part of her, at least– into a bomb.

––––––––––––––––––

 Two days later, all three of them tried going after the Gagambuhala again.

This time they came at it from the air, Sanny carrying the other two, using a bird-shaped drone. Tammy's offshoot kept pricking him with thorns, which she kept apologizing for over the messenger app, but he withstood it, although the burning pain and blusters were… irritating. Willy was less troublesome, since she'd agreed to be carried inside a reused plastic soft drink bottle. They'd decided to communicate using their non-drone bodies with apps, since Sanny suspected all their talking last time had been how the spider had been able to learn they were there. Maybe they'd made its webs vibrate or something.

The first run seemed to go well, with Tammy releasing burrs that latched all over the hairs on the Gagambuhala's body. Then they exploded into saplings.

It was morbidly fascinating, watching such small seeds literally grow explosively, roots tangling onto the Gagambuhala's hairs and trying to burrow in deeper as the rest of the trees grew and grew, weighing it down, the trunks and branches reaching and melding into each other to stay on its back.

Sanny had been about to sweep down for a second pass when the Gagambuhala had scrambled for the entrance of an underground carpark and managed to rip the trees off its back by scraping them against the small opening. Tammy had tried to make the best of it, taking control of the trees and sending them to try and chase after the spider into the car park, but it had scrambled out through the other entrance and quickly climbed up and away towards it's growing webs and lines above the buildings. It had quickly scrambled towards the nest it had made over Ayala Avenue, climbing inside it.

They'd vetoed chasing after it, since they didn't think they had a chance against a giant spider in its own nest, and decided to try again some other time when it was out.

Three days after that, they had their chance again, coming at the Gagambuhala with the same strategy of dropping seeds so Tammy could grow them and entangle it, as well, as sending more seeds to block off any carpark entrances it might use to scrape them off.

They Died

WHY DOES A GIANT SPIDER HAVE ANTI-AIR SLINGSHOTS?

I don't know. Please don't capslock, Sanny replied over the app.

It had little robot spiders too! WHY does it have robots spiders? HOW does it have robot spiders?

Going by the shapes of some of the parts… I think it built them from the cars it was taking apart. Maybe using computers from some of the office buildings to run them.

THAT IS SUCH BULLSHIT!!!!!!

Speaking as someone whose entire physiology is bullshit, I don't think we can throw around that particular stone.

The day after, word came of the military moving into the Makati. Apparently, giant spiders were one thing. Giant spiders that built robots and silk-powered slingshot turrets? That it somehow controlled with its webs? That made someone nervous.

Maybe we should leave this to the authorities and concentrate on some other monster, Sanny suggested.

It's not going to work, Tammy sent back. I've seen this movie too.

Well, this monster doesn't have any fans, so maybe the director will let the military kill it this time.

The next day, what became known as the Battle of Makati began…

Chapter 5: The House With Pink In Its Walls, Part 4

The army, despite what media would have one believe, had actually fared well against the Gagambuhala. While small arms fire and even machine gun fire hadn't seemed to affect it (which was all sort of added bullshit, in Sanny's opinion), rockets and mortars had. They had needed to be sparing, surgical even, as even a single miss would get them on the bad side of the Makati community, since most of the nearby condos hadn't been evacuated, their residents either too stubborn to leave or not seeing is as necessary because the Gagambuhala had never come near their building. So while the operation, shown only in snippets on TV and online, had been slow, each rocket and mortar and other sorts of propelled explosives had unerringly struck the Gagambuhala directly.

So the Gagambuhala had retreated into its nest, hanging ominously above the streets of Makati. There it had hidden, unassailable no matter how heavy the weaponry the army turned on it, the silk and various materials acting as ablative armor and shock absorbers. It had been heavily secured to the buildings around it, such that the army would need to blow off the tops of the buildings to destroy the webs, which they were not getting permission to do because the companies who used those buildings had a lot of money to throw around. So did the owners of the buildings. There was speculation that napalm was going to be used as the nest seemed to grow bigger with each passing day, somehow swelling from the inside. The only entrance into the nest was a round opening on the underside that seemed to curve immediately.

All this, of course, inspired a lot of memes, like how the army needed insecticide, or to use the giant shoe in Marikina to squash it, or about how the Gagambuhala had been declared a terrorist or a communist sympathizer or a religious extremist by the government under the new anti-terrorism law to justify the army being sent after it instead of animal control, etc. The army had started amassing artillery, cannon and tanks on the street, all aimed at the nest, either to wait for the Gagambuhala to come out or to blow up the nest with concentrated fire. Helicopters and outposts on taller building kept watch in case it came out of the nest some other way. They didn't notice Sanny watching them. He was just one of the birds.

Maybe we should go there and help, Tammy suggested over the messaging app.

You want to show up in front of a group of heavily armed men hunting a giant monster while looking like some kind of monster?

I'm a cute plant girl! They wouldn't shoot me!

Are you seriously relying on hentai logic?

What can we do then?

Other than staying out of the way? Deal with other things.

Because of the military operations, most of the area surrounding Makati had been locked down, creating lots of knock-on effects. Like traffic. Lots of traffic. The kind of traffic where people turn off their engines and nap with the window open because they'd be there a while. Tammy had told Sanny she and her cousin had been getting up at 4:00 AM in the morning just to get to school on time. It had used to be 5:00 AM.

A lot of people had started walking or biking, which… well, had merely changed the nature of the traffic, since a lot of people still had only cars, and the usual disregard for… well, everyone else on the road. It was enough to interfere with Sanny's attempts to find more monsters, since social media was seemingly too inundated with other topics for new monster sightings to show up on his searches.

He really needed to learn how to do this better. 

The military had finally put an armed presence all along the Manila Baywalk to discourage… whatever it was taking people and cars and dragging them into the water to eat them (the cars were starting to pile up). The charm dog in Pasay was still roaming about and Sanny, Tammy and Willy (?) had all been unsure if they could take on something that seemed to be able to affect minds. They exchanged messages discussing what to do, and Sanny could feel Tammy's frustration as real life made it difficult to live her heroic aspirations. Like most of the city, they settled back into the frustrated routine of life, waiting for something to change, one way or the other.

A few days later, he got a message from Tammy.

Did you see the posts about the giant mosquito in UP? she'd sent. UP Diliman, she clarified.

He looked. He did.

Yeah, he answered back with his at-home body. Just saw it. Attacked a lot of people, UP being evacuated, students accusing the government of censoring them.

He'd deployed flying drones, shaped like large birds, as soon as he'd found out so he could try to track it, but he was pretty sure it was already going to get away. Apparently, a giant mosquito had risen out of the water of the university's Sunken Garden, whereupon it had found some students and… well, it was a giant mosquito. According to the social media posts and the news articles that were only just coming and were pretty much quoting all the top trending social media posts about it, the thing had stabbed people with its proboscis, sucking up organs and internal fluids before it had gotten the hang of going for the heart and sucking up blood. It had then proceeded to go on a rampage, attacking people for the liquid. 

As Sanny checked social media, he found more and more videos coming in about the incident. Most were too useless and shaky, or too far away, or wasn't properly focused. The few clear ones were already garnering numerous hits, before being taken down because of policy violations, likely because of the gore from people being shown with holes in their chests.

We need to do something, the next message from Tammy read.

Already sent drones to check it out, he's sent back. Can you or Willy do the same?

Still, a few videos managed to survive the bans. One video had a student trying to calmly narrate what was happening, with the mosquito in the distance– Sanny was able to estimate it as being about person-sized, with its long, narrow limbs and wings pushing it up to look bigger– before freaking out as the mosquito had seemed to dive right for her and smack into the window she was hiding behind. The video ended there, though under the video the poster had said they'd managed to get away by running into an office and closing the door. Other videos, shot from a distance, showed people convulsing as their orifices began to bleed blood, and the blood started flowing towards the mosquito…

Those videos usually had a lot of all-caps comments of disbelief and this being the end times and some such. Others mockingly warned of the arrival of dengue season. Sigh. People.

There had been students of the heroic idiot sort who had tried to take down the mosquito monster, swinging their bags, using fire extinguishers to blast at it, or holding up chairs to try and keep it at a distance. A few even seemed to manage good hits, and one of the videos showed a wing being crippled.

The mosquito had somehow used blood to not only regrow the wing, but to make some sort of armor around itself, and then the video Sanny was watching got deleted before he got to the end, citing a policy violation. Sanny was pretty sure someone had died in the footage.

Am stuck in class, was the reply he got. Contacting you using offshoot with stylus. Ah, he was glad she'd liked that when he'd explained it! Should we cause a disturbance, get classes cancelled?

Is that something a hero should be doing?

This is an emergency! Besides, we're close to UP. I think I can hear the ambulances passing by on Katipunan.

A notification appeared, and he checked on it before replying. The news stations are reporting on it, so it's not there anymore. Witnesses say it was heading west. My drones are more mobile, and I can fly. I'll go after it, keep track of it, you two finish school and send drones up to the roof for me to pick up with mine.

He got a sigh emoji and a thumbs up emoji, and he wondered how much of this was motivated by a desire to skip school. Not that he could blame her, he supposed.

After checking with his office drone– ha ha– he sat down and slipped into one of the fliers. His awareness of his body faded away, and the senses of others rose. He could feel the wind on their bodies, passing smoothly over their feathers, felt the lift pulling them upward…

He seized control, and suddenly it was his bodies riding the wind, strange instincts kept his wings flapping even as he felt a moment of disorientation of doing the same movement in several different bodies as his small flock of drones flew over Cainta and into Marikina. After a moment, however, the disorientation passed, and he was controlling a half-dozen pair of limbs, none of which were flapping in rhythm to each other, as easily as he wiggled his fingers. It was so smooth, so natural, like his mind had always occupied fifteen different brains kilometers apart. Each was the size of a large bird of prey, though shaped and colored like a smaller bird to not cause comment– well, not much comment– from those close to the ground. They were eagle-sized sparrows, basically. Though…

He frowned, and actually looked at the insides of the drones. Fertilized eggs full of larvae just waiting to hatch, each one a sort of burrowing parasite. Venom-tipped feathers and talons, and venom glands where the stomach would be, since these bodies didn't need to eat or excrete. Some had eyes, he noticed, that in addition to visible light were looking a bit into the infrared and ultraviolet. Other bodies saw everything too brightly, and a two seemed to spot every wave of movement even at a distance.

One of the bodies, he noted, had an oversized, saw-like, serrated tooth instead of a proper beak, and a gaping, toothy maw in the middle of its torso, like it was supposed to come down on people's head and decapitate them like a living flying guillotine. It had no bones in its talons, which were clearly some kind of claw-tipped tentacles.

Sanny hadn't designed or conceived any of it. They'd been… well, more or less normal birds– or at least bird-like things with all the unnecessary internal organs removed– meant for fast, powered, long-distance travel, their wings capable of flapping endlessly as he ignored basic aspects of biology like waste build up, the need for energy, water or rest so he could get them where they needed to be. He certainly hadn't thought of putting in weaponized eggs inside them. As a dude, he found the idea creepy as hell.

In the back of his head, there was a small, faint sensation of… satisfaction.

He shuddered in his chair, and in all of his bird bodies, and in his office and in the one bird he'd left to watch in Makati in case the Gagambuhala made any moves.

Picking two bodies that had the least visible offensive changes, he sent them to fly to Tammy and Willy's school to pick up their offshoot and… and droplet as he sent the rest to go mosquito hunting.

––––––––––––––––––

He managed to find the two on the roof of a building. Judging from the sounds coming below, class was still in session.

Both were sized small, since he'd have to carry them. Tammy had done this before, so she was basically a coconut shell with black dots for eyes, to better deter any 'accidents'. Their powers really wanted to eat each other, which they found mutually exasperating.

"Hi!" Sanny didn't know how she still managed to talk like that. It was honestly a wonder she managed to get any air flowing through some kind of vocal chord-like structure when she was… well, a coconut. Probably substituting airflow with pure enthusiasm. "Are you our ride, or are you some other weird-looking bird?"

Willy was a piece of ice. Literally. It was easier than trying to put water in some kind of container. Tammy's coconut was resting on top of her, roots extending into the ice and held in place. She also didn't say anything, but that was nothing new. Sanny tended to forget Willy was there, since she let Tammy do most of the talking. His perverse hunger for Tammy tended to forget she was there, for that matter.

Sanny replied on the app instead of trying to rearrange bits of his body. It's me, he sent. Ready to go?

"Yup," Tammy said, a pair of gnarled loops growing from the coconut. "Can you carry us?"

We probably won't reach the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow, but I think I can manage it, he sent back. Spreading his wing wide to glide, he reached his talons forward and caught the loops, then began to power upwards. If he was any judge, between the two of them they actually did weigh about as much as a coconut. He aimed upward, flapping for lift with deep, powerful movements, pushing the air down and his body skyward. A normal bird, no matter how big or well rested, couldn't just keep full-power flapping nonstop. Even small birds, no matter how much they flapped their wings, could only do it in short bursts measuring in seconds.

He wasn't normal.

Soon they reached an altitude where updrafts would keep them up, and followed after the rest of his bodies. Three of them had managed to catch sight of their quarry, weaving through the trees of Quezon Circle and terrorizing the people there. Fortunately, the trees, such as they were, were letting people evade the giant mosquito, since it kept striking its delicate wings on them and getting sent off course. The sack of blood on its underside was visibly deflating as blood kept being used to rebuild the wings, and the less blood it had, the more intently it hunted after people. already there were people fallen on the ground, some next to fallen bikes. His other drones saw more bodies on the road between the park and the university, with dropped bags and fallen morotcycles. Some of those bodies were–

He clamped down on those thoughts, eyes looking forward, focusing on the large, hemophagic predator. He couldn't think of that. If he did…He focused on the sensations coming from the back of his head. There was always something there, even if he only became aware of the strong ones. But there was always hunger. Always, hunger.

He let himself sink into that hunger, as he always did when it was time to fight, when he wanted power to fill him. He let himself focus on that desire, to hunt. To feed.

To devour.

He let that feeling in him, let it make him one with the body he was in, with every body he was in. He let it reach out, feeling the animals in the park. The stray dogs and cats. The untainted, smaller insects in the ground, in the trees, on people's skin and clothes, on garbage and on plants. The worms burrowing in the dirt, the rats hiding in the dark. He could feel the bacteria on everything: in people's hair, on their clothes, in the trees and soil and garbage, in the air.

He put himself into everything around the hemophage, put them all under her control, and gave them one order.

Attack.

The ground exploded with movement as spiders, insects, birds, cats, dogs and rats all over the park suddenly charged, all converging on the same location. That made people scream as rats came from seemingly nowhere. Even the decorative fish in the ponds tried to leap out onto land before Sanny dismissed them…

He realized the changes in his airborne bodies barely in time to arrest them as his head came down like a woodpecker and slammed three times into Tammy before he managed to stop himself, the new hard, pointed, wood-boring beak on it managing to mark her smooth outer shell.

No!

He tried to hold his urges back, tried to stay on the target of the hemophage, but it was suddenly so much harder, much harder to control his urges than they usually were. The urge filled him, surrounded him. His power, whatever it was, controlled this body. And the power wanted.

People are friends, not food.

He felt… dismissal. Hunger. Everything was food. Everything was meat, everything was edible, everything ate or was eaten…

Devour.

She wasn't convinced. She was there, in the back of his mind, waiting to pounce on weakness, and he had been weak, forgetting how much more control of the drones she had compared to his true body, his true meat and bone. She'd always been there, since he'd woken up inhuman. The assistant-manager who wanted his job, but couldn't get it, so she pushed and pushed and pushed…

Social animals! Pack hunting! You can hunt bigger prey with more hunters!

He got… confusion. Confusion. Exasperation. Disdain. More exasperation ash he used that gap of emotions to seize more control of the body carry Tammy and Willy, forcing it to keep flying and nothing else.

Sullenness. Hunger. Devour.

People are friends, not food. Friends help you get more food. He wasn't sure if he was arguing with himself or with something else that could understand.

Selfishness.

A little food you're sure to eat is better than a lot of food that will kill you for eating it!

Selfishness. Sullenness.

He calmed, and let the urge fill him. The urge to consume. To devour. To find monsters. To hunt them. To overpower them. To kill them. To eat them, and take in their power, make it a part of him/her.

He let his own urges out. To be strong. To be fast. To be tall. To be attractive. To be free, of restrictions, of time tables and logins, of expectations, of fees and payments, of working for money. To have all he wanted to eat, to not do anything he didn't want to do. To sleep all day and all night. To have the power to do violence, to attack to hit, to make something/someone hurt. To release a lifetime of petty frustrations with fists and claws and teeth and tentacles and horns and venoms and feeling blood on your fist and your claws and your teeth and standing over them victorious… !

Sanny tried to be a good person. He thought he wasn't a bad person, because he'd been raised right and knew hurting other people was wrong. But sometimes… sometimes… he wanted to be that guy. He wanted to be someone other than a man who had to stay his hand when other people annoyed him or aggravated him, simply because he imagined it would feel sooooooo good. Briefly. For a split second. Then they'd hit back and then there'd be laws and regulations and lawsuits…

But as he flew there, meeting the petty, violent, animalistic urges in his head with the equally violent, human urges of his own heart, there was a moment…

Understanding.

In that moment, they were feeling the same thing.

Insight. A sensation in the back of his mind. A presence in every cell, every tissue, every organ, every bone, every muscle, every fat store, every neuron. Touching everything, changing everything. Inhuman, encompassing, instincts that weren't his, knowledge beyond his understanding, capable of so much…!

Insight. A sensation all around, surrounding completely. Feelings complex, fast, changing, subtle, false. More than feelings, vast, unknowable, chaotic arrangements of neurotransmissions, complex mixes of hormones that confused and bewildered, incomprehensible and alien things linked to complex/simple sounds/shapes/ideas, so confusing, so hard, so dizzying…!

Hunger. Devour. Satisfaction. Strength. Hunger. Devour. Satisfaction. Strength. Hunger. Devour. Satisfaction. Strength. Hunger. Devour. Satisfaction. Strength.

It was probably the longest chain of urges he felt from the back of his head. It was almost a thought…

He tried to respond in kind.

If hungry, hunt. Hunt food. Kill food. Eat food. Not hungry.

Satisfaction. Satisfaction. Satisfaction. Happy.

Huh. That was new. Had he ever felt happiness before?

People are friends, not food. Hunt WITH friends, safer hunt.

Dissatisfaction. Hunger. Devour.

Hunt WITH friends, safer hunt. Bigger swarm. If hurt, protected. Food will be devoured.

Skepticism.

He hesitated. But there was only one thing to say, wasn't there?

Trust me.

For a moment, a long, long, moment, the darkness in the back of his mind was still.

Skepticism…trust… Skepticism

He was flying through the air, carrying Tammy and Willy. He was sitting in his cubicle, doing repetitive cut and paste work. He was at home, sitting blankly in front of his computer, staring at the message app window.

Excuse you. You okay?

Are you doing that? Sending animals at it?

Sanny we're going off course, the fight's that way.

Sanny? Sanny? Are you okay? Say something.

Hands in one body came up to type as another banked its wings and headed back towards the park. Sorry. We're fine. Sorry for the pecking. Had a lapse. Fine now. sorry.

Okay! Let's get this thing. Drop me!

He did. Then he folded his wings and dived after them, into the fight.

Hunt.

Hunt.

Chapter 6: The House With Pink In Its Walls, Part 5

Sanny had once been surprised to learn that, despite the many multitude of different kinds of phobias, there wasn't actually a name for a fear of falling objects. There was term for a fear of falling (basiphobia), a fear of walking near tall buildings because you fear something will fall off and hit you (batophobia), but not an actual term for a fear of an object just falling out of the sky and hitting you. The closest he'd ever found was meteorophobia, a fear of meteorite strikes and big asteroid impacts on the planet, and that was about a specific falling object.

It was an idle thought as Sanny followed after Tammy and Willy, his body changing, altering, growing more and more flesh and meat…

Either his aim had been better than he thought or Tammy had been guiding herself, but she and Willy plummeted straight at the giant mosquito, slamming onto its blood-engorged abdomen. Syrup-thick blood went flying as the abdomen tore, the digested blood that had been stored in it dripping like sludge as the ball of ice that was Willy shattered to bits and Tammy bounced once and rolled until she hit a planter box.

The blood immediately stopped dripping and started to flow up, sealing the injury like a dark red, shiny scab as the giant mosquito reeled, trying to get up on its spindly legs as its wings buzzed.

That's when Sanny slammed down into it, his body a large, disgusting mass of flesh and muscle with a few small bird bones swimming around inside like lost fish.

Naturally, he exploded.

He struck the mosquito dead on, and he could feel bits of its exoskeleton cracking under his weight for the spit second he had before the rest of his body hit the ground and he burst like a waterballoon. His skin literally ripped itself apart as his insides exploded, tissue and muscle fibers tearing and spilling out in a spreading pool of blood. Pieces of skin and muscle went flying, and blood gushed everywhere as the blood pressure of his body forced the fluid out, despite the fact his heart had stopped on impact.

He immediately started growing himself back together. Exposed muscle writhed, becoming skin as they pulled themselves close and entwined to make tentacles. Other skin began to grow over his body like an encroaching rot, covering his muscles and organs. The brain was mush, bruised horrendously inside the little bird skull. The skull had cracked too. That was fine. He wasn't really using it for thinking anyway. The spine was broken as well, the spinal cord torn apart. That was slightly more problematic, since he needed that for limbs.

Still, his drone wasn't dead. That was all he needed to be combat capable. He already two– wait, three– three tentacles made from boneless muscle. Nerves began to grow from either end, reaching towards each other as a stomach grew inside his skull, prying the shattered bones apart and digesting the brain as another brain began growing somewhere else. Eyes tore themselves open like mouths, his vision swimming as the cones and rods rapidly divided and specialized themselves and the lenses focused. Other tears became mouths, sucking in air, performing crude oxygenation of blood on the spot as they waited for new lungs to form. Beneath him, he felt the mosquito shifting, trying to drag itself out from under his weight. Clumsily he tried to wrap his boneless fillet of a body around it, trying to smother it to death. After all, if he needed to breathe, so should it, right?

He heaved his body awkwardly even as he tried to grow more eyes underneath his body so he could see his prey, routing the nerves of the new brain to be able to better process the drone's senses. He struggled to move his tentacles without bones, but his muscles had enough leverage to move and try to enfold around the monster pinned under him. Somewhere in his body, a heart started to beat, restoring blood flow, energizing his body again.

Beneath him, the giant mosquito started to struggle harder, and Sanny felt some kind of weird jelly against his body. What was…?

Sanny jerked as a something stabbed though his body and into his new heart.

Proboscis, he identified.

And then came the siphoning suction, and he felt his heart being ripped out of his body, felt the blood being drawn from his arteries and veins…

Frantically, he tried to cut off those vessels, forming bones to create more blood in other parts of his body, forming another heart as the mosquito under him writhed wildly. Some of his eyes had imploded at the abrupt loss on internal pressure from the fierce suctions of the proboscis, and he was frantically growing new ones, trying to see his prey…

And that was when the abrupt wave of water slammed into him and the giant mosquito both, sending them both tumbling and knocking them apart. There was a moment of panic as water flowed over his every orifice, and he couldn't breathe, there was only water and no air and–

The ground beneath him suddenly tore and he was trust upward on muddy roots that quickly turned into branches and he could breathe again even as more senses came back, and he started to hear the sounds of rushing water. he tried to move, but his body was still weak from lack of blood– how long had that been a thing?– but he could feel strength returning as new bones and new marrow started to produce it. More new organs were forming, and he tried to get it all organized, tried to grow an exoskeleton to contain it all, to give him a way to at least move his tentacles…

He became aware of more messages from Tammy, asking if he was all right, warning him of Willy's flood, asking him to respond. They kept coming, another bubble with a message showing up on screen (Are you all right? Can you fight?)

Hands in another district entirely moved, typing. I'm okay. In the zone. Won't reply. Focus on fighting.

And then he was back there, raised up above the water on roots that were turning into branches, even as he felt some trying to bore into his flesh with thorns. He ignored those, growing exoskeleton to protect from Tammy's urges as he raised an eyes-laden tentacle to see around him. The water had washed away all the animals he'd dominated to fight, which was no big loss. They hadn't been all that useful, and were all now wandering, wet and out of his control. The water was flowing away, leaving only mud as a tall figure made of ice and a small, slim, celery-green figure attack the bloodsucking insect form both sides.

It had changed.

Gone was the oversized but anatomically correct mosquito from before. It now stood on four of its long, slim limbs like some kind of weird centaur, the thick pulsing abdomen filled with thick blood hanging obscenely beneath it, too large and still to be a tail. The remaining two limbs, equally long, was flailing at the two girls randomly as if it had never used those limbs for that before. Large compound eyes covered nearly all its head, and between them extended a long, swordlike proboscis, still dripping with Sanny's blood and already covered with a thick sheath. Its body and ragged wings were covered in dark red scales like hard plates instead of the fine hairs its kind should have, its long antennae twitching at seemingly random. Was this why it had writhed as it fed on Sanny's blood? Why had it changed?

Helplessly, he watched as the three fought. The mosquito moved with speed, evading the thorny vines that Tammy was growing from her arms as she rushed full speed at it trying to get close, and the sprays of water Willy was shooting out with as much annoying nimbleness as the rest of its smaller kin. Just like the Gagambuhala in Makati, it blatantly gave the square cube law the finger as it kept dodging back and forth from the trees to the ground, scurrying leaping and twisting all over the place, seeming to maintain its grip with hands on the end of its limbs as Tammy kept charging it like she was in some violently energetic game of tag. Occasionally the branches of the trees it was on would move, trying to snare it, but it would always quickly dance away. It didn't seem to be fighting them so much as avoiding them, and when it moved deliberately, it seemed to be towards the sounds of people's cries, as if seeking prey was still its priority.

Sanny's drone body was mending, bones growing and snapping into place, exoskeleton growing like fingernails from his flesh and overlapping each other to form a protective outer layer that snipped off the roots burrowing into him, glad that plants seemed to eat slowly. Lungs grew, drawing air from a single mouth, and the new heart started to beat, pumping the new blood being generated in the marrow. Excess flesh sloughed off, falling to the ground to wriggle like worms as he slid off the branches onto mud, still uncoordinated as his bones slipped into place, multiple ball joints snapping together and cartilage wrapping around them as tendons anchored themselves to bone and muscles and hardened exoskeleton. A skull finally finished wrapping around his new brain, with only a few holes for sensory nerves as dark compound eyes spread over his face, the last of the extemporaneous mouths and eyes closing up in the flesh under the armor plates.

His own feelings of satisfaction mixed with the ones coming from the back of his head as he pushed himself out of the mud and browning grass, the last of his bones, organs, muscles and thick, bony plates falling into place as he got to his feet, teeth filling the area just beneath where his mouth would be. More teeth were growing just under the skin of his arms in a line along the outside of his forearm, under his heel, folded along his elbows and knees. He rolled his shoulders, feeling the two connected ball joints that gave him his range of motion shifting with the movement. They were incrementally different again, giving their limbs just that little bit more range to rotate.

Then he crouched, turned, and pounced.

Tammy and Willy had drawn the altered mosquito away from him as they tried to coral it among the trees, whose branches were becoming tighter and more entwined as Tammy controlled and altered them in no doubt the same way he could control and alter normal animals. They had maneuvered to opposite sides of it, keeping it between them with blasts of water and vines as they slowly trapped it, containing it to where they could force their way close.

Sanny covered that distance in what seemed like eye blinks, his unnaturally untiring muscles accelerating him faster than anything a merely human body, no matter how tall, would have been capable of, and he slammed into the mosquito's torso with all four limbs as he reached for one of the thing's long, darting legs and grabbed it with both hands. As they tumbled into the dust and mud, he twisted unnaturally, planted both feet on its small, red-plated thorax, and kicked hard. The stiletto-like teeth slammed into the red, rock-like plating as he used the force to rip the leg he was holding on to off the mosquito's body in a shower of viscera and yellow-green hemolymph.

He threw the leg aside, twisting in midair to bring his feet down and his face toward the mosquito again, launching himself once more. One hand swept down to grip another leg, holding it in place as the other hand snapped up to grip the base of the proboscis right where it connected to the mosquito's head. Twisting, he slammed the mosquito head-first into the ground, crushing the top halves of its compound eyes, before placing a foot on its chest and pulling. Leg and proboscis ripped off in more hemolymph and, in the latter's case, thick, syrupy blood.

Sanny didn't roar, but he did feel a bloody satisfaction, echoed in the back of his mind, at fighting back with this mighty body, a violent thrill that sang to the part of him that had always writhed in frustration every time he had to hold himself from punching some idiot who'd irritated him, from having to just keep walking when some highschool tough guy had shoulder checked him in the corridors for seemingly no reason, for every forced apology he'd had to insincerely give just for defending himself from some gradeschool asshole…!

He took that lifetime of repressed feeling and 'emotional maturity' and 'being the bigger man', gathered it all in his foot and slammed it down into the thing's abdomen with violent, cathartic force, crushing the blood reservoir there, drenching himself and the monster at his feet. Tammy and Willy faded from his awareness. There was only him and the strength coursing through his body and the monster before him. A perfectly acceptable target for that strength, and the desire to punch, to kick, to inflict pain and cause harm and to claw and bite and to not have to turn the other cheek or say pointless sorries or anything of a lifetime's experiences of school discipline that always seemed to favor the bullies when it tried to be rationally fair and impartial...

The mosquito's wings were buzzing, but they'd been crushed again when Sanny had kicked it to the ground, and it was trying to awkwardly slide away on its remaining limbs. He fused the teeth on his forearm, and they thrust out like a dagger over the back of his hand, anchored to bone and exoskeleton.

He slammed down his other foot onto one of the mosquito's legs, trapping it in place, and drew back his arm to punch through the joint between its thorax and head so he could rip the latter off.

His compound eyes exploded, bursting from the insides as his own blood was pulled from the other parts of his body, the sudden surge in blood pressure rupturing the delicate organs. Unexpected, excruciating pain wracked him as his blood boiled, bubbles of steaming blood filling his veins as the mosquito lurched forward, its elongated limbs with their strangely hand-like ends grabbing his head and pulling him down as it jammed what remained of its mouth parts into one of Sanny's eyes and started feeding on his blood.

His eyes burned with pain, his veins filled with agony as the blood was ripped out of them yet again, but there was nothing as his brain was sucked out like so much mush to get at the blood circulating through it. He tried to fight back, to push it away, but the pain… it filled him, every part of his suffocating as his blood was stolen away.

A literally distant part of him, sitting in front of a computer, noted that his bodies needed both air and blood.

Sensation was fading as his body was drained of life blood, and the feeling of hitting the ground again was distant. His marrow was trying to make more blood, his exoskeleton opening at the seams to allow the flesh beneath to take in air, his body switching to other circulatory systems to keep functioning.

He wasn't dead yet. He could tell from how it hurt so much… How could he be in so much pain without a brain? Oh, his spine was functioning, and there was still some brain matter at the base of the skull. Apparently that was all it took to be in agony…

For a moment, he was back home, staring at his laptop's screen. Am fine, he typed. In pain. Still alive. Will try to revive again.

It wasn't that he was no longer aware of his broken, exsanguinated form. That part of him was still in pain, still too weak to move. Indeed, his other bodies were shuffling uncomfortably in sympathy, shifting uncomfortably in their seats, fluttering weakly in the air…

Oh.

He looked through the eyes of one of his flying drones, still in the air. Tammy was dragging away his drone, and he was vaguely aware fo the feeling of her vines on him as she pulled him back from the mosquito. It had changed again, its limb growing thicker, stronger. It was completely red now, and it had regrown its limbs with what seemed to be congealed blood. Its torso had grown wider, more humanlike and it… it…

It had a long, proboscis-like, bony spike jutting over the hand-like ends of its limbs.

Shock filled Sanny as realization hit. It had fed on his blood, his drones blood, and had somehow used it to… alter itself? Make its body more like Sanny's drone? That was… new. He looked at the drone again, and finally saw the similarities. The long limbs, the armor-like plates made of blood, the now-crimson, blood-covered compound eyes…

Oh, shit.

He was vaguely aware of roots burrowing into his drone, even as Tammy let out a weak, wheezing sound of frustration and ripped the roots out of him with a hasty 'Sorry'. Willy was fighting it now, her limbs of ice melting into water so she could lash at it with liquid tendrils. It kept evading her, darting back and forth seemingly even faster than before, its wings buzzing behind it giving it speed, and even seemed to allow it to hover for short bursts…

Oh, come on! he wailed internally. Why could every monster fuck the square-cube law but not him?

Tammy's offshoot was speaking, he realized, and he forced himself to listen, to pay attention, routing his ears through the little bit of brain he had left in his mostly-empty head.

"– here, okay?" she was saying. "It's feeding on blood, and you have that. Try to get people to safety, we'll take care of this, okay?"

He forced his face to tear open, opening a mouth behind all the teeth that had been stored there. "Got it," he said gutturally as soon as he had basic vocal chords.

She gripped his hand, obviously trying to be reassuring, and so he tried not to take the thorns that suddenly grew personally. "You did great getting us here and hitting him like that. Now leave this to the ones without blood."

He… supposed he had to agree with that logic.

She let go of his hand, leaving thorns in the joints of his exoskeleton there, and he focused on expelling them and deal with the inflammation they caused as the rest of him tried to heal his entire body all over again.

His brain started to grow again, and he forced his ruptured eyes to work once more, rebuilding them from their torn flesh (why was this taking so long?). He needed senses, needed to see, needed to be able to be able to pick up more than distant, confusing sounds, and strange vibrations from the ground as his body slowly started filling with blood again…

Vision returned in time to see a large, candy-pink monolith looming over him and about to step on his head with one blocky leg.

Notes:

So, how are you guys liking this story?

Chapter 7: The House With Pink In Its Walls, Part 6

Of the 'deaths' he'd experienced so far, getting his head stepped on while exsanguinated was definitely the most undignified to date.

Having the rest of his body squashed like a bug under one of those hydraulic compressors was definitely overkill. Reasonable overkill, since he was pretty sure the drone was still salvageable, but definitely overkill.

Tammy, you have incoming. Pink rock thing, he typed into the app.

He waited, but there was no reply for some time. Either Tammy was too distracted by what was going on, or what was happening around her and her urges were too much to handle for her to multitask. Given how vulnerable he'd been to them while mostly in a drone, it was a very real possibility.

He sat there, staring at the screen impatiently, before remembering he still had a few drones on overwatch.

Thankfully, once he became aware of them again and picked one to 'inhabit'. None of the birds had been too altered. No blatant tentacles or anything like that.

Still, he wasn't going down there. Tammy was right. Of the three of them, he was the only one whose bodies had blood in them, and that thing was clearly able to rip it out of him from a distance. So, first rule of hostile ranged attacks: don't be seen, and stay out of range. It worked for the military, it worked for gamers, it should work for him…. Hopefully.

He spread his wings, extending his feathers, optimizing for flight and catching the wind as he made eyes on the stomach, looking down, like some sort of biological military surveillance drone.

Having eyes on multiple lines of axis to each other had been hard to coordinate at first, which was why he'd gone for compound eyes. But he'd gotten used to it over time, and eyeballs still had an advantage over compound eyes: they could see clearly, farther. It's why birds of prey had them. The tree cover was thick in Quezon Circle, but fortunately he had multiple drones, and sent them off to get better angles while he remained directly above, trying to see through the obscuring leaves.

Thankfully, everyone was brightly colored and contrasted sharply with the colors of the trees, leaves and grass around them, so even obscured, what few glimpses he got let him keep track. Tammy's bright, celery greens stood out against the darker shades around her, and the hemophage's now dark-red coloring, not darkening to brown the way normal blood would, stood out even more.

He didn't see Willy, but he did see a big pink thing. Had she been neutralized somehow? How? What could you do to stop someone made of water? From his angle high above, he really couldn't tell its proportions very well, any more than he'd been able to get a good sense of it from below before it stepped on him. All he could get through the trees was pinkness and a feeling of angles.

His drones were still trying to find a good angle to see the action from when the pinkness got close to the greenness that was Tammy and… Well, he didn't see clearly, but when the pink moved on, there was no more celery green.

Tammy? he typed into the app.

I'm here, she replied. Just saw your other message. What was that?

Your guess is as good as mine, Sanny typed. What did it look like? Beyond being pink.

It looked like some kind of rock monster, she typed back. Big heavy arms, huge chest, little cube for a head.

Sanny sat back to consider that. It wasn't hard to come to a solution.

It's a person, he said. A human. Like us.

I think so too, but how do you know?

Only a human would want to have two legs, two arms and walk upright. No monsters have been human shaped. They've all been animal shaped.

That sucker bug looked pretty human-shaped to me. Though it had tentacles too.

Probably from drinking my blood, or the blood of all those people it attacked. It changed right after it exsanguinated me, after all.

But why did they attack me? I was just a cute plant girl.

Why wouldn't they attack you? You were a monster plant girl.

I was NOT a monster plant! I looked cute, darn it! I looked like a cute little girl!

You had a coconut helmet head.

That was part of an ensemble, which was very cute!

They must not have realized and thought we were monsters too, Sanny wrote. Or they were overwhelmed by their urges. Is Willy ok? I didn't see what happened to them.

Hang on, I'll ask her.

Sanny waited, watching down below. From what he could see, the pink thing– person, whatever– seemed to be trying to engage the hemophage, but without Tammy trying to hem it in, the thing was free to run, it's now glistening red wings buzzing furiously and somehow giving it speed. Again, why could everyone violate the square cube law but him? It was so unfair. He saw pink things seemingly being thrown at that hemophage, moving at speed. Was the pink thing shooting at it, somehow? Or at least throwing bits of their body as projectiles?

Willy says she suddenly found herself in a maze and couldn't get out, Tammy eventually said. She could hear us, but couldn't tell where we were. She flooded the place, but still couldn't find a way out, and the air holes were strange, so she just abandoned that body.

Sanny sighed. I still have some drones in the area. I'll try to follow them, see if they go to ground.

Can we meet tomorrow? I feel like we need to talk about this, face to face.

Sanny hesitated. Sure, he eventually said. Where do you want to meet?

Let's decide tomorrow, Tammy said. Hopefully, near wherever the mosquito thing goes.

 

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Sanny stood in his room after a restless night following the hemophage, starring at the back of his hand. It was covered with a thick protective exoskeleton, and on the very back, like some bizarre jewel, was a large compound eye. He stared at it and stared at himself through it in turn, confirming it was functioning, and nodded in satisfaction.

Then he disconnected every nerve not needed to operated voluntary muscles, dissolved his tactile sensory organs on the arm– especially the ones that perceived and relayed pain– lay his hand on the wall, hefted the hammer in his other hand, and started pounding on his now-numb hand, making sure to completely turn the compound eye to mush

He felt absolutely nothing, only a vague vibrating from his shoulder and a sort of awareness that something was physically shifting his hand, but there was no pain as the eyes were crushed messily, as vision in those eyes went dark, as blood went everywhere before he remembered to cut off the veins from his circulatory system. He didn't manage to crush the bones to shards, but only because he wasn't really trying to. That wasn’t the point.

Finally, when his hand was a big, bloody, gory mess, he set down the hammer and briefly wondered if this counted as self-harm. Then he shrugged, tapped the screen of his phone and started regrowing his hand, including the eye.

The individual lenses of the compound eyes started to grow, spreading out and reconstituting the eye like bubbles in a soft drink. Flesh sealed, and the blood that had drained out of the veins was replaced. As soon as his hand and everything was fully functional again, he stopped the stopwatch on his phone and checked the time.

There was no denying it. His drones, unless they were fresh from his main body, regenerated and altered their forms at a significantly slower pace than his man body did, which explained the strange disconnect he'd felt while fighting. It had never really been relevant before. He'd used swarms and attrition to make his first kill, and he'd taken on the plague dog personally. Really, until he'd started interacting with Tammy and Willy, he'd mostly used his drones for surveillance, not actually having to go to the office, and buying groceries.

He supposed there had to be more limits to this thing than needing to breathe, blood, and the never-to-be-sufficiently-cursed square-cube law. Sure, it starts with you feeling invincible but then you find out you're vulnerable to space rocks, magic, tasers, sufficient prep time, character assassination, angst and retcons.

He willed the shell and eye away, and watched as they quickly–very quickly– seemed to blend in with his skin like aging scar tissue, until there was nothing left but seemingly perfectly normal human flesh over human muscle and bone.

Sanny sighed and gave the blood splatters around him an annoyed look. Then he went to fetch a wet rag before it started to stain.

 

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Sanny had asked them to meet him in one of the coffee shops outside of the mall at North Edsa, which was significantly out of his usual way. He'd come in his own body again, suitably altered of course, and it was only when he stepped inside and saw Tammy waving at him enthusiastically, Willy at her side, did he realize he was wearing the same yellow shirt and pants. The clothes had been the only thing that fit his disguise right, but he hadn't considered what it would look like if he was dressed the same as the last time they'd seem him. Well, seen him in human form, anyway.

He was carrying a backpack with him this time, however, and the oversized backpack was big enough to fit all his clothes and his shoes. After all, when all was said and done, he'd need clothes to change back into. He waved back to Tammy and made a quick detour to buy three cookies.

"Thanks Ate Sanny!" Tammy said, helping herself to one and ignoring the fork like a sane person.

"I thought we agreed you weren't going to be calling me that?" Sanny said, waiting for Willy to take a cookie.

"Oh, right," Tammy said. "Still feels weird." She noticed her cousin not getting one and nudged her gently, the gestured towards the plate.

Willy reached over and took a cookie and, at another prompt from Tammy, said, "Thank you," in a tone that was only mildly awkwardly insincere.

"You're welcome, Willy," Sanny said, taking the last one for himself and biting into it.

There was a moment of respectful silence as they gave the chocolatey bliss its due.

"So, before we start, I'm sorry for hitting you yesterday," Sanny said.

"And I'm sorry for sticking roots in you," Tammy said. "Really sorry. I swear, I'm usually better than this…"

"I think that might be my fault," Sanny said. He took a deep breath. "I've… been doing more testing with drones. I think… I think we lose a degree of self-control when we're operating through a drone than if we're in our actual bodies… so to speak."

"What do you mean?" Tammy asked, frowning.

Sanny pointed to the back of his head. "I think our urges gain more control of the body if it’s a drone. At least, that seems to have been what was happening to me recently. I've had more instances of subtle losses of control in my drones when you were around, compared to when it was really me."

Tammy frowned, looking down at her hands thoughtfully.

"Also," Sanny said. "I think there are other limitations. Have your powers been slower to act through your offshoots?"

Tammy looked up sharply. "You too? I thought it was just me being stressed, but…"

"No, my powers definitely work slower through a drone," Sanny said. "If I'd been there in the flesh yesterday…" He shuddered, imagining the pain. "I might have been able to recover faster. Fast enough to have made a difference."

"Given how your blood exploded everywhere and the rest of you was squashed like a bug, I'm glad you weren't," Tammy said. "That pink one… I didn't even scratch them. It was literally like hitting rock. What can we do against someone like that?"

"Off the top of my head? Pickaxes," Sanny said. "But hopefully we won't have to. I think… I think whoever that was is a college student. Someone like us, who just woke up weird one morning. Maybe they thought we were monsters like that mosquito too, and was just making sure. I mean, it's not like we talked much. They may have thought we were all monsters getting into a fight over food or territory or something. But regardless, there's still the other one. The one that drank my blood. It seemed to get stronger when it did."

"It certainly changed, that's for sure," Tammy nodded.

"I didn't get a good look after… well, after my eyes exploded,"  Sanny said. "You said it grew tentacles? Did they have eyes?"

Tammy thought, getting a disgusted look on her face. "Ugh, was that what those things on it were? Like little bulbs?"

"Eyes," Sanny said, nodding. "Probably compound eyes, since it was an insect. At least, used to be an insect. I think drinking my blood allowed it to alter its body to be like what I'd been like at the time which…" he frowned. "To be honest, doesn't make sense."

"Makes sense to me," Tammy said, shrugging. "It vampired you."

"Yeah, but I was making those changes on the spot," Sanny said. "Those changes shouldn’t have shown up in my blood, which wouldn't have a lot of DNA in the first place."

"I don't see what the problem is," Tammy said. "Our powers are bullshit. It shouldn't surprise us that the powers monsters have are bullshit too."

Sanny winced. It had been something he had been tentatively thinking about, but to hear Tammy say it… "Does that make us monsters?"

"If TV and downloaded anime have taught me anything, it's that people don't need bullshit powers to be monsters," Tammy said with all the sagely authority of someone who's read and watched too much mass media. "All they need is bad parenting and an election. And the election is optional. "

Sanny tilted his head, nodded. "I suppose that's true."

"Yup," Tammy said, nodding fiercely. "We could be monsters, but we don't choose to be and try not to be. So we're not. We're people."

"And people are friends, not food," Sanny said, nodding.

"And if something doesn't get that… well, that's a monster," Tammy said confidently.

Sanny thought about the place in the back of his head, and tried not to shudder. Instead, he said, "I had my drones follow the hemophage–"

"The what?" Tammy asked.

"The giant mosquito," Sanny said.

"Kinda long," Tammy said. "I just called it the blood bug."

Sanny tilted his head, then blew the lock of hair that flopped down across his face as a result. "Huh. That's shorter, at least. Tell you what, how about you name them from now on? It's certainly less pretentious than what I come up with."

"I shall wield this great power with great responsibility," Tammy said solemnly, which was sort of undermined by the dorky smile she had on.

Sanny nodded. "So, the Blood Bug," he said. "I had my drones follow it but we lost it after nightfall. I've been following social media, but so far the posts have been mainly about the people who died in UP. If anyone's posting about the Blood Bug, I haven't seen it yet."

"Where did you lose it?" Tammy asked.

"East Triangle," At Tammy's blank look, he shrugged. "It's that block directly south of Quezon Circle, with all the hospitals? It managed to lose me by going down into a covered creek, and by the time I found the other end, it was gone. I don't think it knew I was there, but to be honest I don't know how smart it is or how good its eyes are."

Tammy sighed and pulled out her phone. "Can you show me?"

Sanny obliged her, finding the right map. Tammy regarded it, angling it so that her cousin could see as well. Willy looked, but seemed uninterested.

Eventually, she sighed. "What about the pink one? Did you see where they went?"

Sanny shook his head. "They went underground. Literally underground, as in they sank into the ground. Though it supports the theory they're human. They must not want to be identified too."

Tammy sighed. "So, we don't have any more leads," she sighed. "Now what do we do?"

"We do what any hunter does," Sanny said. "We make the prey come to us. We set up a trap, put down some bait, and wait."

"Why does that sound like the last seven minutes of a Scooby Doo episode?" Tammy said. "What sort of bait would we even use?"

"Blood," Sanny said simply. "Lots and lots of blood."

Tammy stared at him, looking vaguely nauseous and horrified. "That's sick."

"It'll work," he said. "I can make a drone that does nothing but make blood and we can set it as bait for the Blood Bug. Throw in some sensory cues of the kind mosquitoes use for finding prey, and it'll come to us."

"I'm vividly remembering the last time it drank your blood," Tammy said. "It got armor."

"If it changes when it drinks my blood," Sanny said, "then we use that to our advantage. Here's what I'm thinking… "

Chapter 8: The House With Pink In Its Walls, Part 7

"This feels rushed. This feels very rushed. This is going to go badly," Tammy said to him through the little offshoot he'd left with her. it was nestled somewhere in her branches, a little ball of shell that was basically full of ear, lungs and vocal chords for him to talk back to her with. As the one who was most mobile between them, it was likely any offshoot she gave him to talk through would just be dislodged.

"Well, maybe it won't take the bait and we'll have to go back home," he said, lying down on the roof of a school building to keep out of sight of the people below and staring up at the sky as he kept watch on the area with drones in the shape of birds. Well, vaguely in the shade of birds. His yellow exoskeleton gave the discomfort of lying down on the debris-strewn concrete roof a different flavor than it would otherwise have.

"Why would it take the bait? The bait is disgusting!"

Sanny had to agree. The huge, bloated drone that was basically a huge bag of producing blood, antigen-laced sweat, and carbon dioxide rich exhalations was… well, it looked like something out of a 'mutation apocalypse' video game level, either as a disgusting bit of background scenery or as something a boss would explode out of. It was covered with a thick skin, and already dozens upon dozens of regular mosquitoes had taken the bait, latching on to it and feeding on the rich blood on offer. Were it capable, the drone would already be infected with dengue and malaria.

The fact the big bloodbag of a drone, a pulsating ball of flesh the size of a car, was just lying in the middle of a field next to the Sunken Garden in UP Diliman had initially caused panic, followed almost immediately by a crowd of people with their phones out when they saw it was just lying there, occasionally moving as it 'breathed' to release the carbon dioxide meant to bait the Blood Bug, as Tammy had termed it, out of hiding. Despite it being a weekend, and there having been a violent incident the day before that resulted in many people dying, the college hadn't closed, though the places where people had died, marked with dark brown splotches of blood, had been cordoned off, and each had already gotten a small pile of candles and flowers around them. There were also student activists with subdued but still distasteful signs and small flyers declaring that the deaths were the result of the government's neglect in protecting the students, or that the government had allowed the deaths because they thought that students were all militants and therefore the students should join militant groups to teach them a lesson, or that this was an example of red-tagging by the government…

Sanny could feel his old urge, born from his own college days here, to yell at people to go home and study because they were wasting their tuition on this activism nonsense, rear up inside him, and firmly repressed it.

He'd added the transparent, pustule-like portions that showed the insides were filled with blood, lest someone had tried to poke it. As it was, the campus police had come to try to keep people away by blocking off the roads, which was a little like trying to catch water in a colander, since all the students were on foot. The non-campus police were still taking their sweet time showing up, and he had to wonder if there was some kind of malicious politics or personal history involved. The security guards, notably, were staying exactly where they were, near the doors of the campus buildings.

 The blood bag drone wasn't the only bait he had out, just the biggest and most obvious. He had bird drones, cat drones, dog drones, and commandeered rats going around the areas where he'd lost track of the Blood Bug, stomachs bloated with blood, feverishly hot, and smelling of blood antigens. He figured he might as well get rid of the rats while he was at it. Disgusting things. A lot were being killed by panicked people who saw them, especially in the slums in North Triangle, but that was no big loss, and he'd made sure to have the ticks and other parasites on them become fused to the rat's flesh so they wouldn't spread. True, all the pressurized blood he'd filled the rats with were going to be mess, but he had bigger problems, and anyway, he wasn't the one who'd clubbed rats until they exploded into 3/4ths their weigh in blood.

Which was why he was lying down on the roof, his biology set to ectothermic to keep him from being uncomfortable in the sun, as he guided all the drones. He wasn't controlling them individually– he couldn't multitask out to literally hundreds of bodies, even if the number of rats kept slowly dwindling– but each drone had the brains of a trainable animal, and a broad command to spread out and hunt for the Blood Bug had been met with a burst of enthusiasm from the back of his mind.

Which was… mildly disturbing, but no less so than everything else happening.

"Any sign of anyone who might be someone like us?" Sanny asked. Tammy had taken control of trees and plants around the bait, and she was supposed to also by watching using the trees… somehow. She had been against putting the bait there, which meant Willy had also been against it, but Sanny had argued that they also needed to look for the pink rock person who'd shown up, and given how they'd shown up, there was a strong chance they were a student there. So the bait was there for anyone willing to bite. She'd only agreed when Sanny had emphasized that even if she didn't come along, he'd still be going forward with this plan, and that her participation would at least mean innocent people didn't get hurt. Well, far less likely to get hurt, anyway. This was a college. That meant they were surrounded by idiots who'd find ways to hurt themselves even without blood-sucking mosquito monsters.

"Not yet," Tammy said. "At least, no one is obviously big and made of pink rock. How about you? Found the Blood Bug yet?"

"Still looking," Sanny said. "I seem to be attracting every bug near my drones but the Blood Bug."

"What do we do if it doesn't show up? Stay the night? Go home and try again some other time?" From her tone, she was ambivalent to either option.

"You two go home," he said. "I'll stay. They'll be less people here at night, so less likely people will be hurt."

"You remember you're the only one with blood to get ripped out of you, right?" Tammy said. "That happened twice yesterday, let's not give it a chance to eat you a third time."

"She," Sanny corrected absently. "It's female. Only they drink blood, the males live off nectar like bees."

"Why? I mean, why not just eat nectar too?"

"They don't need it for food, they need it for animal protein," Sanny explained. "So they can start laying eggs."

For a moment, Tammy was silent. "So, it's a female, and going through the motions of reproducing… like the plague dog we fought?"

"Yeah," Sanny said.

"The one that spontaneously got pregnant three times on the same day and threw its babies at us like cannon fodder working for the bad guys?"

For a moment, Sanny went still. "Shit," he hissed to himself.

"We need to find water," he said to Tammy through his drone, the organs he was using in place of a heart pumping fast as they tried to comply with biological reactions they weren't naturally meant to. "Mosquito eggs need to be laid in water."

"The plague dog gave birth by exploding," Tammy pointed out.

"The plague dog was a mammal, our young develop internally," Sanny said. "Mosquitoes give birth with eggs."

"Unless that changed when it ate your blood," Tammy pointed out. "Like the tentacles."

Oh. Oh. Well, wasn't that a disturbing thought?

"That's a very disturbingly plausible thought," Sanny said. "Why didn't I think of that? I'm supposed to be the animal biology person."

"Well, we all have bad days. And you did get skullfucked yesterday."

Sanny twitched. "Thank you for that image, I needed something else to haunt my nightmares." Actually, it would be nice to have something actually coherent to dream of at night–

There was a moment of disorientation, as he realized he was suddenly in a different body, one that was in agony as it was being impaled and exsanguinated–

And suddenly he was back on the roof, trying to breath hard and not having the lungs to do it with, leaving his torso twitching as he tried to heave muscles that weren't there. He shook his head, for once having the right kind of ears to get some benefit from the movement, feeling disoriented after being momentarily in a large mammalian body that had been extreme pain.

Distantly, he heard Tammy talking. "Did you mean to spit on me or did you lose control again."

"The second. Sorry. Uh, I think that's venom, don't touch it or let anyone else touch it. But the Blood Bug just killed one of my drones," he said back, breaking down the venom gland that had managed to grow in his drone on Tammy. "A dog. Hopefully all that happens is it start walking on four legs and gets furry. I'm having the rest of my drones converge on it and try to lure it out. "

The dog drone was still mostly alive, in that cells in its body were still metabolizing, but that wouldn't last. It has been completely drained of blood, its heart gored through. But that was still alive enough for Sanny to be able to have some power over it, and he used his sense of where it was to have all his other drones converge, small mammals breaking out from under cover and bounding at full speed. He heard screams through several as way to many rats for anyone to be blasé about seemed to come out of from every possible hiding place and scramble in a fleshy, verminous tide, their backs starting to bulge with an unnatural pustule filling with red blood platelets and reeking of blood antigens to try and get the blood bug's attention and hopefully away from the people around it.

He had the first drone to reach the Blood Bug throw itself at it to distract the monster–

– he was a dog, thin from a life on the streets, a large blood-filled pustule at his back, and he threw himself at the Blood Bug to catch it's attention and distract it–

– as he organized the rest into a line back to the main bait in UP Diliman. It was a disorienting experience, as he seemed to be in each body long enough to have the thought of what he needed to do and start doing it, only to suddenly be booted out and find himself in another body, and another, and another, and all of the bodies were his/weren't his, just drones under his control/just animals he'd possessed, all moving to his will/moving to her control…

"They're coming this way," he told Tammy. "It's following my drones. I have to keep letting it catch one so it'll keep chasing them, but it's working."

"'She', remember?" Tammy said. "All right, I'm ready. Just get it here and it's not going to get away."

"Is Willy ready?" he asked.

"As soon as I give her the signal," Tammy confirmed.

Sanny really hoped nothing happened to Tammy. Not just because she was a good kid and a nice person, but because he suspected Willy was going to become completely inhuman without her to keep the taller girl tethered to people.

Slowly, he made himself get up to his feet, and began walking back and forth swinging his limbs, rotating his shoulders, careful to not be seen from the nearby buildings, which meant staying next to the boxy structure that held the motor for the elevator in the building. He felt the body slowly switching to endothermic, but he still felt strangely sluggish…

He felt his drones getting closer, felt them staying just out of the Blood Bug's reach, even as one threw itself at the Blood Bug–

– he threw himself at the Blood Bug–

– to keep luring it in with the promise of blood.

Through the surveillance drones flying up above, he saw the wave of drones running in front of the Blood Bug to lure it back to the university. And he saw the Blood Bug.

It… no longer looked like a proper mosquito. Instead of been long and slim, with slender-looking limbs, it looked… well, it looked vaguely like his battle mode if it were mosquito themed and painted red. It seemed to have doubled in size, and stood on four slender legs like a centaur, the long, bulging abdomen extending behind it, engorged with blood, and ending in a long, rat-like tail that was clearly starting to grow fur. Instead of being narrow and seemingly spindly, its thorax was thick and wide, with a vaguely body builder-esque silhouette, if that body builder was a hunchback. Its front limbs were clearly arms now, thick compared to its other limbs and just as long. While the left ended in was looked like a claw-tipped hand with a proboscis protruding like a spike from behind it, the right ended long in five long tentacles, all studded with compound eyes and thorny proboscis (proboscisi? Proboscisae?) that made the tentacles look like spike-covered whips. Its previously round-seeming head had elongated, the proboscis now seeming to be its nose as a hinged, doglike jaw with uneven teeth and rodent-like incisors snapped at the air. The Blood Bug was covered in armor-like dark crimson plates that seemed covered in shaggy red hair, and its wings had grown to enormous proportion, extending from its back and over its abdomen, seemingly made from transparent red film.

When they flapped, it wasn't so much a buzz as a roar like a helicopter, and it certainly flew like it, sending the air around it in powerful blasts of downdraft as it aimed for food in the pack of drones beneath it, lashing out with the tentacles on its arm. The drones dodged– he dodged– the tentacles as best as they could, but some inevitable got hit, and those threw themselves at the Blood Bug to keep baiting it as the rest ran just within reach…

"Get ready," Sanny told Tammy, his main body crouching down and getting ready to jump from the building. His shell would crack and his muscles tear from a leap at this height, but his main body could heal too fast to let little things like that stop it, and he was surprisingly light on his feet for something of his size. Sanny supposed he told the square-cube law to go fuck itself in his own special way.

Below, screams of disgust began to sound as the forward elements of the flood of drones came into view of the people in the area. The horde scrambled down the middle of the street, their muscles tireless from his influence. Then the disgust became true terror as the Blood Bug came up behind them, face covered in animal blood that was already hardening and integrating into the armor covering it.

In the middle of bloodily devouring a dog, it paused and raised its head, and Sanny saw to nostril-like holes on other side of its proboscis, next to its mandibles, flare wide, as if it was taking in a breath.

Sanny cut the antigen secretions and the breathing of the bait drones, making them dissolve into worms as he had the large, blood-filled bait drone let out a warm, carbon-dioxide heavy, antigen-filled breath. It was probably overkill, like putting a spotlight on a pile of steaks under a box held up by a stick… but that was sort of exactly what they were doing.

A normal human wouldn't have seen what happened next. Their eyes would have seen, but all the muscles that needed to move to point those eyes in the right direction were too slow, needed to be consciously moved. Their ears would have heard the sudden, helicopter-like roar as the wings propelled the Blood Bug towards the bait, its proboscis sinking into the flesh, drinking in the rich, thick blood underneath.

"Now!" he told Tammy, purely for some way to let out his excitement.

She was already moving, the little saplings around the bait that had gone unnoticed– why pay attention to suddenly-appearing saplings on a field when that field had a huge, fleshy, blood-filled abomination in it?– exploded into rampant growth. Thin growths barely twice as thick as a thumb seemed to inflate like a time-lapse as they became arm thick, leg thick, and then just thick in seeming heartbeats. Branches exploded upward and to either side, weaving together with unearthly synchronization as the explosively growing trees all rose up and bent inward over the top of the bait, forming a dome of thickening new growth. Leaves erupted, cutting the Blood Bug off from most of the carbon dioxide being exhaled by everyone else on campus, hopefully effectively putting them out of the Blood Bug's awareness.

Then, as the Blood Bug continue to gorge itself on the bait blood, water began to rise out of the ground. It flowed to the edges of the dome and just stopped, even as the water level began to rise like a flood, climbing up the Blood Bug's legs, swiftly covering it up to the waist…

It was completely submerged before it realized it was in danger as air to its nose and spiracles was finally cut off, and it realized it couldn't breathe.

Willy was not oxygenated.

It finally pulled itself out of the bait, and blood began to darken the water as it gushed out of the entry wound as the Blood Bug struggled to reach the surface for air. It's wings flapped, creating a thick froth, but try as it might, Willy water kept the surface just out of reach as it filled every cube of Tammy's wooden dome and beyond, the Blood Bug and the cage of trees soon trapped in a large dome of freestanding water…

And that was when the ground suddenly collapsed underneath them, and water, trees and Blood Bug suddenly fell into a pit lined with strangely iridescent pink stones...

"Tammy!" Sanny cried, trying to talk to her. He checked on his drone, nestled in a hollow inside the tree Tammy had reluctantly been disguising herself as, and found it underwater, growing gills but asphyxiating.

Willy was not oxygenated.

For a moment, he just stood there, staring. Then he threw himself off the roof, rolled when he hit the ground almost like he knew what he was doing and got to his feet running towards the field, where he threw himself into the hole after the two girls…

Chapter 9: The House With Pink In Its Walls, Part 8

Sanny threw himself into the hole the two girls fell into.

The first sign this might not have been a good idea was the hole going from thirty feet wide when he was above it, and the size of a field when he was in it. That did not pair well with the fact that even when it had been thirty feet wide, he hadn't been able to see the bottom. At first he'd though that was just his angle of view, but now he wasn't sure.

Now he was in freefall into a pit fit for the foundation of a skyscraper, the walls of which seemed distant and strangely twisted, studded with little points of blowing pink rocks that looked like someone had stuck LEDs to backlight pink sugar candy. He could barely feel the air rushing over his body through the sensory nerves he'd put on his exoskeleton as he angled one of his drones above to fly directly over the hole and try to see what was inside. Despite the wide opening to the clear sky above, the inside of the unnaturally huge pit was dim, as if not much light was getting through. His compound eyes reconfigured, becoming superposition compound eyes to increase his night vision, and his view of the pit brightened, the colors growing sharper.

The ground beneath, he saw, was a roiling, heaving, vaguely glowing field of pink. It moved unnaturally, seeming to explode like it was growing, shattering and rolling along like waves, creating strangely geometric shapes that no one substance would form naturally in nature. Grains that seemed fine as sand heaved large, too-regular cubes, which seemed to shift and roll strangely without ever changing shape…

On top of that, the shattered circle of trees that was Tammy lay like debris on a flowing river. A few were partially encased in pink stone growing on it like some kind of bad pink ice special effect, while other were fighting back, roots and branches growing explosively and shattering the stones binding them. As waves of pink hell sand and unnatural, twisted, warped stone tried to subsume Tammy over and over again, she just kept growing and growing, expanding within the layers of rocks trying to cover her like amber covering a bug, showing exactly how trees cracked apart rocks into pebbles.

Beneath and around that battle, water and strangely glittering sand fought their own rendition of the mountains versus the sea as the formless, onrushing tide that was Willy slammed into the glittering pink again and again, seemingly breaking against the stones. However, when she passed, edges were a little less sharp, and whenever the sand started to fuse together into stone to try and encase what it could, the water froze into ice, expanding ruthlessly, filling cracks and expanding some more.

In contrast, the dripping wet Blood Bug seemed the only sane thing there by trying to gain altitude and leave all of this behind, listing slightly from the weight of the tentacles at the end of one arm, its thorax bloated from the blood it had managed to suck up from the bait drone. It had changed again as well, just as they'd intended. Its four lower limbs now looked tipped by short, stubby claws that made no sense, as if it had taken from a mishmash of dogs, cats and rats, which it probably had. It was also bloated. Its head, abdomen and thorax were bulging like an obesity fetish drawing, which was making flying difficult since its wings were obviously straining to make it move. Still, the occasional rocks thrown launch at it by the shifting field of pink were telegraphed enough it was able to move aside to avoid them, even if it moved like a blimp.

How the heck was it still flying?! Stupid square-cube law discrimination!

Sanny took all this in moments, not even needing to turn his head—the wonders of compound eyes—as he plummeted towards the roiling pink ground below.

Yeah, no way was he touching that.

The exoskeleton on his back fused together, ripping out to form four large, near-transparent wings of cuticle the length of his arm. They flapped rapidly as his spine, head and a few internal organs sloughed off of the rest of his body, the jettisoned weight allowing him to slow his fall considerably, even as his head and spine flopped down towards the ground like a reverse balloon as the bone and attached bits of meat and nerve writhed, growing on the bare bone and connective tissue like a rapidly spreading mold. Bone was consumed, leaving only light, hollow shell as more and more muscles connected to the flapping wings. Sanny felt his head contorting, his skull dissolving under his exoskeleton, bits of his brain turning to mush and absorbed as unnecessary mass, his bits being tucked inside the forming body to a mild feeling of exasperation from the back of his head…

Sanny couldn't help shuddering whenever that happened, couldn't help but wonder what he was doing his thinking with while it had taken place. His spinal cord, maybe? He doubted it was with his… well… no matter what people said about men.

Far, far below, the body of meat, skeleton and exoskeleton he'd just ejected struck the flowing, chaotic pink ground, cracking and splattering upsettingly, especially since he was still connected to it. A moment later, the sand and stone and heaving geometry all slammed and wrapped around his ejected biomass, and Sanny could feel the microscopic grains tearing at the little pores and spiracles of the shell, deliberately widening and ripping through them like drills, shoving between the plates of his exoskeleton, into the wound in its back where he'd ejected head, spine and manly bits, completely wrapping around and penetrating everything and…

Sanny had learned about fossilization in school. How buried organic matter, usually bone, had its molecules replaced over hundreds of thousands to millions of years, creating a perfect stone impression of what used to be there, sometimes wrapped in exact outlines of skin and hairs and feathers. What happened to his discarded body was fossilization happening in heartbeats as the stone completely encases it, binds it, penetrates it. Then from the outside in, every cell was suddenly pierced by microscopic, shifting, mineral particles that seemed to vibrate and shiver to some strange, unspeakable cosmic music. His body's cells were torn apart molecule by molecule and replaced with particles that shook as if alive, cellular fluid getting pushed out for viscous stone that flowed as if pink obsidian was trying to flow like watery glass—!

Sanny watched and felt as the pink stone devoured him, the body he'd so recently vacated, made from his own meat and bone…

The connection broke like a New Year's resolution, and suddenly he was himself again, stuck alone in a mutant dragonfly body, wings flapping literally tireless as his strange biology and terror drove the muscles to flap and never stop. He tried to contact his drone with Tammy, but it was gone, the connection broken as if it never was. The bait drone was the same, and he had the momentary image—imagination or memory?—of the bait drone tumbling out of the water, over being covered in sand and stone and…

Consumed.

Devoured.

A part of him was screaming to get out of there, to cut his losses, take to the skies, rebuild his body, head back home and just crawl under the cover. For once, the sensations from the back of his head said they really wouldn't mind going with the 'flight' part of the 'fight or flight' instinct. They'd had drones die before, eaten and digested. But to be devoured, even at a remove…

The feeling he got from the back of his head wasn't as simple or prosaic as 'fear'. It conjured memories of his childhood, lying alone in bed, of the house silent and staring into the dark of his own room, every shifting subtle shadow a place for something to hide, a monster from his deepest nightmares that made him want to cover his head to hide, except if he did that he wouldn't see what was coming out of the dark, he'd have no warning, he couldn't leave because if he stepped on the floor something would get him, he couldn't sleep where he could be seen from the window lest he present a tasty, helpless meal—!

Sanny snapped himself out of the spiraling fear, no matter how much they paralleled his own thoughts. He wasn't a helpless child here. He was the monster in the night, the terrible devourer out of nightmare. He was the one with all the teeth and fangs and relentless, devouring hunger, the thing that looks through windows in the dark.

He was the beast of nightmare.

They had come here to lure, catch and devour prey, and that's what they were going to do!

He stared at the Blood Bug. The shell between his much reduced compound eyes shivered as the exoskeleton softened to flesh, a tear forming, and he opened a single, lensed eyeball in the front of his head, configured for night vision and distance. It was disorienting only for a moment before his brain started to extend down his throat to increase the size of the load that was processing his sensory input. It wasn't like he needed any organs other than his lungs, his circulatory system and his bits. There was plenty of room, since he'd gotten rid of his liver, his intestines, his stomach… The eye stared focusing on the object of their hunt, their target their prey. It buzzed and darted, enormous wings flapping and making it zip with a clumsy, unstable grace.

Prey. Catch. Devour.

The dark spiraling fall into a void of emptiness coming from the back of his mind shuddered. Slowed.

I need, Sanny… didn't exactly think. Didn't exactly feel. Didn't exactly say. Didn't exactly imagine. He wasn't sure, but he didn't think the thing in the back of his head—her—the one who managed the powers under his control could understand words. But he was human, and words could be wrapped in thought and feelings and imaginings, and that's what he used. I need to fly. I need to fight. I need to DEVOUR before it escapes again!

He tried to imagine something with wings and claws, maybe with poisons sacs and glands, bones spikes… something  he could use to attack, to strike down this monster that had escaped them before and eaten of them while doing so, so that this time they would be doing the eating…!

A spike of eagerness in that spiral of fear…

Even so, seemingly against his will, without even needing to turn his head because of his compound eyes, the field of pink below seemed to dominate his vision, and the spiral spun, and it was darkness and hiding and not wanting to be seen and needing to watch…!

Deliberately, he took his one eyeball away from watching the Blood Bug and stared at the tree that was Tammy. It had stopped being buffeted by the surging, chaotic geometries of the field of pink, somehow rooting itself as it spread its branches and grew, the branches drooping down and growing streamers that became roots that fell into the pink sands and cubes and polyhedrons and Klein bottles, bifurcating and breaking through the pink mineral that tried to coat it and batter it, the sudden erupting spikes that embedded into the now thick, ancient seeming wood being entangled and enclosed and crushed by wood that grew and grew, one enormous many-branched limb suddenly swinging down with deceptive slowness and sending the sand flying, like a giant broom clearing the floor of dust…

Movement, and the eyes shifted direction, focusing on the surging waters that now filled the bottom of the pit from wall to wall, flowing like raging currents and seemingly trying to erode the walls, suddenly exploding into miniature icebergs and sending pink geometries flying, trapping stones in ice, waves of water meeting waves of sand in bigger and bigger surges that were clearly becoming more than the stone could bear. Barriers of pink stone grew, only to be met by equally huge icebergs slamming into them, their mass augmented by kinetic energy, cracking the stone, making openings for water and roots to enter and expand, shattering the stone from within, whirlpools forming as sand and water met and churned, forming a strange pink sludge as the two mixed…

The spiral slowed, and stilled. Wariness came from the back of his head.

He shifted the eye to point at the Blood Bug.

The spiral turned ever so slightly, but the eagerness rose once more, even as another spike of wariness accompanied it. Then the spike dulled, broke, fell.

… trust…

And suddenly, the sensations in the back of his head seemed to vanish.

For one disorienting moment, he felt alone in his own head, as if he was back to those old days of being short and heavy and slow and weak and…!

A presence in every cell, every tissue, every organ, every bone, every muscle, every fat store, every neuron. Touching everything, changing everything. Inhuman, encompassing…

It was like wearing a second skin, but over his mind, but it was inside him as well, and he was what was being worn…

Realization was followed by eagerness as he felt his body in a way that had always been there but hadn't been aware of. The cells that made up his muscles, his bones, his nerves and brain, the way air he breathed through his spiracles was used to break apart sugar for energy, the wastes his muscles produced, the wait, no, how was that, strange, no, that, isn't, no sense, where how—

His body tried to sweat, to shiver in… horror? Excitement? Awe? Terror? It tried, and he saw the parts of his brain that sent the signal, saw the parts of his body that responded, saw them suddenly stop dead as he willed himself to not shiver, not sweat, not have his circulatory system increase the flow beyond what it had already been doing to support the wings keeping him aloft and all other systems besides, saw…

Sanny blinked, the flaps of skin that had spilt apart to reveal his singular eye squeezing shup and open again, the musculature and epidermal folds for it seeming to appear near instantly in the moment between him thinking of blinking to clear his mind and the actual blink. He blinked again, trying to ignore the literally millions of minute cellular changes, shifts and alterations this caused. It was all too much… too much to think about…

He focused on the Blood Bug.

Prey. Change form. Attack.

He imagined the form he wanted. Something bipedal, long-limbs, clawed fingertips, the internal skeleton, muscles, tendons, exoskeleton armor layer… he'd have to ditch the wings, since the stupid square-cube law wouldn't let him fly, but if he got above the blood bug and dive-bombed it… well, that had worked once before. He could—

…trust…?

He thought something had come from the back of his mind again, but no… it had come from everywhere, as if every cell of his body was talking to him… as if something had been laid on the back of the soul of his hand. Not a hand or a claw or a tentacle, but an appendage made of trust and a question.

For an endless moment, Sanny hesitated… and then somehow, he let go.

From everywhere at first, and then from the back of his head, where it had always been, he felt spark of satisfaction, agreement dulled and strange and… once more, as if something was being laid on the back of his hand.

And then his entire body began to writhe.

On his back, he felt his wings lengthening, beating faster and faster. Nubs formed on the underside of his body, segmenting, forming miniscule limbs. The tail that had grown from his spine, meant to balance the weight of his head, hardened and fused with the rest of him, and he felt the man bits in the center of his body beginning to drift downward. His balance shifted, his body suddenly becoming tail-heavy, his head going up, suddenly starting to writhe and narrow and lengthen. The nubs shifted, two moving to the side, and suddenly they were growing, the limbs becoming arms, the subtle graspers on the end shifting and altering and flattening to become hands, even as the other nubs drifted blow, shooting out into limbs that form legs that narrowed to a point, before cracking to form an ankle and a thick, weighty heel…

His abdomen hardened, thickened, expanded, shaping itself, narrowing to a waist, growing overlapping plates of lightweight shell. Not exoskeleton, as he'd had before, but a substance with a structure not unlike seashell, except it was made something else, something that was being drawn from… the liver? He had a liver, despite usually getting rid of it to save space…

Sanny raised his hands, stared at them. The hard outer covering seemed slightly thinner than what he usually covered himself with, yet felt strangely lighter. It had minute striations beneath the layer of glossy, natural polish, shining a brilliant, living yellow. Fingertips flexed, and their tips reforms into claws. No, not claws. Teeth. Slightly curving, serrated, shark-like teeth. Wide, unblinking compound eyes saw all around him on a head that felt… right. Interlocking plates of shell covered his body from his crown to the tips of his armored feet. Yet, he felt… light. Lighter than he'd ever felt before, as if he'd shed so much unnecessary weight. On his back, the four insectile wings buzzing kept him aloft and level, his greater mass keeping him from wobbling and being caught by eddies of wind like smaller insects were…

He was flying. He was bipedal, armored, clawed, and he was flying.

From the back of his mind, satisfaction and smugness rose.

His wings roared as he stopped merely hovering and attacked, darting towards the Blood Bug like a bullet.

Chapter 10: The House With Pink In Its Walls, Part 9

It felt good to fuck the square-cube law.

His wings flapped at a rate too fast for him to put a number to, but it was probably in the neighborhood of 'too-bullshit-fast' per second as he flew at the Blood Bug, a knife-like serrated tooth rapidly growing behind his wrist to extend over his hand. He'd… well, to be perfectly honest, he'd yet to use it in a way where it was actually useful, but he liked it, it was cool, and it had to work someday! And maybe that day was now! After all, it wasn't like he could grow a gun or something…  

The Blood Bug saw him of course, and tried to evade, but it couldn't tell every law of physics to go fuck itself. Just because it could fly when by all rights it was too big to do so didn't exempt it from the consequences of all that mass. Newton's laws and its own mass made it handle like… well, exactly like how a big, fat, heavy thing trying to maneuver through the air with a single source of both thrust and lift would handle.

Sanny, in contrast, was lighter, smaller, and probably had more powerful wings. He adjusted his aim with contemptuous ease and came at it like a missile, the arm-spike/tooth in front of him to impale the Blood Bug's head. It tore through one of the Blood Bug's enormous compound eyes, which were far larger than the ones he had, cutting a bloody gash through the organ that made the Blood Bug roar in pain in a strange, high-pitched, doglike yelp.

And then he was past it, still moving at speed, and while he was lighter than his enemy, speed was a greater multiplier in momentum than weight, and he'd been moving pretty fast. Still, it was simple to flip around and point himself back the way he came, his wings beating like a chainsaw as he redirected the direction of his thrust back the way he'd come.

Movement, and he'd dodged before he realized what he was doing, avoid the huge pink chunk of… rock? Crystal? Himalayan salt? Sugar? It had been hard and pink and big as his torso, so it would probably have ruined his day if it had hit. All around him, his compound eyes caught more glimmers of pink movement, some heading for him, some at his foe—no, his prey. This one was getting eaten, one way or another. The rocks were no threat. The Blood Bug was managing to evade them, sluggish as it was, since it had an altitude advantage. Sanny not being able to do the same would be embarrassing bordering on Darwin Award.

One of the stones clipped the Blood Bug in the side, the side he'd blinded when he'd made his pass. It was jerked aside, the movement looking deceptively gentle, but Sanny had been 'accidentally' clipped by fat guys in school hallways. That rock that had hit had probably weight only slightly less. One of the Blood Bug's legs had been crushed, its abdomen slightly caved in, dripping blood and hemolymph. If anyone asked, he'd totally meant for that to happen when he'd gone for the eyes.

Sanny shot forward again, aiming for the head, the other eye, anything, even as blood—thick syrupy blood, dense in blood protein— flowed out of the wounds wrapping around the broken leg, patching up the damaged portions of its side, making a weird crystalline eyepatch on its face. It saw him coming, and this time rather than dodge, it let out a vaguely feline hiss and literally lashed out with its tentacle-tipped arm.

But it had gotten those tentacles from him.

He snapped up his left hand, the fingers there erupting into long, muscular tendrils held together with the barest internal chitin, fattening faster than an anorexic's worst nightmare, his wings actively growing longer and wider to compensate for the sudden mass. The two sets of tentacles met, his moving with grace and agility to swat aside the Blood Bug's, rips tearing open into toothy mouths that snapped out and bit at the thorn-like proboscises. They shattered in his jaws, filling him a strange, dusty, metallic taste, filling his mouths with bacteria he quickly consumed and integrated into his biomass. They'd been part of him, after all.

The tentacles had done their job, though. They had slowed him down and warded him back, and now his own tentacles were hindering his movement. He pressed forward, tentacles leading the way, finding himself in a weird shoving contest, the Blood Bug's mass letting it stay relatively unmoved.

That meant it stayed in one place long enough for another rock to strike it from below, hitting it between all four legs and making them dangle uselessly, broken. Sanny used his own grip on the Blood Bug's tentacles to swing himself out of the way of the projectile aimed at him.

Blood trickled down from the injuries, wrapping around the broken legs, and with a shudder they started to move again.

Well, getting in its face had never been part of the plan to kill it, anyway. And since plan A, drowning it, hadn't worked…

Sanny activated plan B.

At first, nothing happened except for the Blood Bug seeming to be indecisive about whether it should press towards him or keep running away. Then it shuddered.

Its thorax, full of blood proteins, began to bulge. The Blood Bug let out a scream as it started clawing at itself, as if trying to rip out something inside of it, its tentacle arm writhing in apparent agony as Sanny saw splotches began to spread along its flesh, say it began to swell, inflamed, saw the blood-colored plates darkening like scabs and falling off…

The bait drone, and all the co-opted animals they'd used as lures, hadn't just been full of blood. They'd been full of bacteria. And now the Blood Bug was getting an infection.

He hadn't been able to do this, once. Not until he'd consumed that plague dog. Not until he'd finally stopped having dreams of tainted flesh being devoured from the inside, and gone back to his usual dreams of hunting, eating, nature red in tooth and claw and tentacle and venom and eyes and slime and phagocytosis and…

Well.

The Blood Bug screamed, its own bounty of blood turned against it as the bacteria in its system reproduced at nightmarish rates, as they came together in the blood, feeding on healthy cells, blocking veins as they grew to form masses…

Sanny grabbed its tentacles with his own and darted in close as it reeled in pain, his arm blade darting forward and slashing upward, amputating the immobilized limb. He let it and his own tentacle limb fall, cutting it off at an elbow like a lizard losing its tail, bone, muscle and shell already growing to form a new hand and forearm. He darted back, avoiding the arm flailing in pain, then darting in to grab it by the wrist and slashing upward again, disarming the Blood Bug completely.

Heh. 'Disarmed'.

He darted back as it lunged at him headfirst and kept moving, avoiding the proboscis it was wielding like a twisted unicorn horn and the snapping jaws it didn't seem to know how to use but was trying out enthusiastically anyway. Blood tried to spurt out to cover where the arms had been and regrow them, but it was too thick, and writhing…

When you get down to it, bacteria are just cells. Cells that were a part of him, under his power. Cells that he could make fuse together, cells whose composition could be changed from independent life forms to components of tissue. Tissue that differentiated into organs, and then…

From inside the Blood Bug, vessels were blocked and exploded as small worms devoured their way out, still forming, dribbling out of the blood it was trying to use to heal its wounds. Screamed and writhed in agony, and all he needed was an opening, a shot…

He saw the pink mass flying towards then and briefly changed priorities, getting out of its way, pulling the Blood Bug with him as it chased him single-mindedly, and the car-sized pink mass passed harmless behind the dying insect as—

The car-sized pink mass exploded.

Irregular and too-regular pink rocks went flying in all directions like shrapnel, yet somehow hitting the Blood Bug in the back and ruthlessly crushing its wings and thorax. Despite how the rocks burst, they seemed to curve in mid-air in a way that made his compound eyes want to water as if the rocks had minds of their own, aiming for the Blood Bug with an almost tangible malice. Not every rock managed to hit, even after it curved, but each and every one certainly tried.

It spoke of intelligence and lateral thinking and the ability to problem solve, all of which were good signs whoever the pink was, they were human.

That didn't excuse the fact that they seemed to be aiming for Sanny just as assiduously.

But he had compound eyes optimized to track movement over a wide field of view, a smaller body and fast, maneuverable wings, and thus he finally got to be on the evading side of the ancient contest man trying to squash bug. Despite his dodging, the pink still got lucky. One slammed into his bicep, deflecting off the armor there, and another hit his knee with such force that if he couldn't heal he'd have had to retire to be a guard.

Flesh wounds. They were already healing before the rocks hit the ground.

The Blood Bug didn't have that advantage. It tried to heal itself, calling its blood from its stores, but there was more bacteria than blood left, most of it consumed to fuel the growing parasites inside the Blood Bug's body. Without its wings, it was gravity's bitch as it plummeted.

They couldn't have that.

Sanny dropped into a powered dive, tucking his arms in and dropping headfirst with wings at full power as he chased after it. They couldn't let it just hit the ground! It was prey!

It was in his sights, a dark, bleeding outline against the glittering, glowing pink sand and stones below, and he could feel the bottom half of his face altering, felt teeth growing, his jaw bifurcating to form mandibles, ready to be opened, and he realized what it was far…

From below, right in front of his eyes, pink boulders were suddenly launched straight up in the air, heading right for them. They weren't hovering of moving anymore. Their path was literally straight and predictable, and the boulders had been launched in a line going the opposite way.

The leading boulder struck the Blood Bug, ripping off its blood-filled thorax completely, sending the red goo flying like a tasteless special effect. Sanny rolled out of the way of the deflected boulder, stretching out his arms, which were inches from the Blood Bug…

There was a whirl of movement, and the pink below was eclipsed by darkness.

No, not darkness.

Branches and leaves.

The Blood Bug slammed hard into a woven mat of thick branches that stopped its fall with all the gentleness of a sledgehammer to the face as Sanny quickly kicked his legs downward, reversing his position and flapping his wings as hard as they would got to keep from meeting the same fate at more-than-terminal velocity. The rest of the boulders slammed into the woven branches, sending the entire enormous branch shaking up and down but holding firm as the kinetic energy was absorbed by the far more flexible wood. He felt the sudden reversal of forces try to pulp what internal organs he had, but fortunately he didn't have any. Still, it was too much for his wings, and there was a snap as they tore from the force, sending him spinning drunkenly for a moment as he tried to regain control, tried to—

He slammed into a thick bank of leaves, grasses, soft trailing vines, leaves, more grasses, young bamboo that snapped like wet celery, actual oversized stalks of wet celery, and one unfortunately placed very hard tree branch that amputated the leg that encountered it at the knee.

Still, his exoskeleton didn't crack like an egg and his insides didn't become outsides, so he was actually pretty good.

"Ow…" he groaned, mostly for effect, his voice coming out strangely through the mandibles and other mouth alterations. It was what was expected, after all.

Sanny blinked as right in front of his eyes a bud poked through the tree bark, two leaves sprouting before a bump at the end grew and grew and became a coconut that became a head, with two dark patches for eyes, long stands of unruly fibers for hair, and an opening for a mouth.

"Sorry!" Tammy's head said, and he could hear some kind of sack laboring to provide the air for the whatever facsimile of vocal chords she was using. "I saw you falling. Glad I managed to catch you in time." The face broke into a huge smile. "Holy shit, you flew! You've got to teach me that!"

"I don't think you can do it, but I'll try," he said, regrowing his leg. As cartoonish as it had been, all the impacts to relatively soft things that had broken before his body could had managed to bleed out his momentum. Had he been injured? Oh, certainly. It would have killed a normal human easily.

He wasn't normal, and there was a question mark on whether he counted as human right now.

"Where is it?" he said. "Where's that bug?"

Every leaf around Tammy's head pointed in the same direction to the side and a little bit down. Sanny nodded, pulling himself up easily, his feet reconfiguring to having gripping hands for stability as the branch Tammy's head was growing from reconfigured, becoming arms and torso fused at the waist to the food of the tree for her head to sit on properly. More branches grew near him, and he accepted the proffered handholds since the branch, and by extension the whole tree—Tammy had grown huge while he'd been fighting—was being rocked by the relentless attack of the pink sand, rocks and whatever.

"Hold on!" Tammy suddenly cried, and the whole branch—which come to think of it was the size of a decent-sized tree in its own right—bent out violently of the way of several large boulders that had been thrown up at it in a ballistic arc. Thankfully these didn't explode into shrapnel, but he had a feeling the next ones would be.

His wings finished regrowing and his gave them a practice flick, spreading all four wings wide before having them start flapping. He sighed in relief as they lifted him off the ground, the fear that his flight had been a once-in-a-lifetime pity-fluke melting away.

"I'm so jealous right now," Tammy said, her upper body bobbing up and down. "Ugh, come on, let's deal with that stupid bug."

What was left of the Blood Bug was still alive, which wasn't surprising. Sanny buzzed towards it as, below, Tammy and Willy went on a combined offensive against the pink to give him some uninterrupted time, the entire field flooding before turning into ice, roots spreading out and growing new trees to try and act as ablative defenses against any more launched rocks, even as they fought against being encapsulated and fossilized by the pink rocks.

Tammy had restrained it with branches, and even now a few had grown roots and were burrowing halfhearted into its open wounds. It continued to thrash weakly, despite being only a head, a much-abused abdomen and some useless dangling limbs, and what little liquid blood still covering its body that Sanny hadn't consumed as bacteria-food was even now flowing and writhing like a living thing, trying to repair its wounds. Sanny landed some distance away from it, the hands on his feet gripping the branches for stability as he kept his wings flapping gently for added balance. Next to him, just under his wings, Tammy's celery-green head and torso grew out of the wood.

Sanny stepped forward to finish it off, then paused. "Do you want to take care of it?" he offered.

From the back of his head, he distinct objection and hunger, but focused on Tammy.

For a moment, Tammy stood still, moved only by the swaying of the rest of her. Then she shuddered, and he saw the roots that had grown into the Blood Bug retract. "N-no," she said. "I… I'm not sure if…"

Sanny nodded, then bent down not at all that far to pat her head. "It's okay, I get it," he said. "Look away, this will get messy."

Tammy nodded woodenly (hah!), then physically turned away. It was probably a meaningless gesture, since she was the entire tree, but…

Sanny floated toward the Blood Bug, wings buzzing like he was the mosquito. It heard and saw him coming, of course. It struggled to free itself, still as energetic as if it wasn't being eaten from the inside and dismembered to boot. Its rat-like jaws gnashed, trying to get free of the branch wrapped around it its muzzle, the tip of its proboscis broken off.

Prey.

Devour!

He was pretty sure all he needed was the head, but just to be sure…

A line grew vertically along his chest, shell ending in flesh as his internals reconfigured itself. As he stepped toward the struggling blood bug, his torso swung opening, revealing wet, pink folds of vaguely lewd looking flesh, the edges lined with teeth. From where his intestines and bowels would normally but weren't, since he hadn't put them in this body, tentacles began to curl out, rough like a cat's tongue, tipped with curling, claw-like spikes. His mandibles opened wide in sympathy, rows of shark-like teeth snapping out into position to rip and tear…

Just from looking down, he could tell there was something off about the maw in his chest. It seemed to go too deep, to descend into depths beyond the back of his spine. Though it was completely under her control as he opened it wide, tentacles lashing forward to hook onto their prey, it felt other. It seemed to salivate in perfect time to the hunger in the back of his head, and the phantom sensation of it taking a deep breath—absurd. It didn't connect to any lungs—pulsed in time with the anticipation that wasn't his own.

Sometimes, he wondered if one day that anticipation would be.

But today, only the third time he'd done this, it was still alien, in him but not of him as he stepped forward and dragged what was left of the Blood Bug from Tammy's suddenly willing branches and into himself to consume.

To devour.

As the weakly struggling monster was pulled into him, as the teeth-edged flesh grew to encapsulate their prey, he felt it. For the third time, he felt it. The shift inside, like his soul was opening its mouth wide and licking spiritual teeth to—

—Small. Weak. Barely a spark, more a bundle of instincts that kept it alive. Its last were more instincts, a desire to procreate, to relieve itself in waters like its birth and release its eggs, then… eat? Eat… eat… eat… —

—Hideous. Indescribable. Eldritch. Red. Liquid. Life. Bonds. Family. Information. Code. No, no, no, it didn't want to die, it didn't want to die, don't, please don't, don'teatm—

For a heartbeat that felt like forever, Santiago Dalag felt small and insignificant as he stared through a crack for the third time, and saw. The little, almost non-existent spark that had been a mosquito… and within it, around it, part of it, something….

And then that something was consumed, devoured, and his torso was just closing around dead, empty meat as he felt satisfaction from the back of his head so strong, and yet so alien, and yet so part of himself…!

There was a crash, and he moved on instinct, darting into the air and avoiding glistening pink shards even as they tried to put themselves in his path, the air behind them warping strangely as they did so, and instinctively he plucked the nearest pink stone out of the air.

It immediately started to grow in his hand, and he could feel perfectly geometric spikes under his palm, felt—

His mandibles fused, teeth drawing back, vocal chords and lungs to run them setting into place as the meat inside of him came to rest. He opened his mouth and screamed in the bitchiest voice he could manage, "Hey, ASSHOLE! Stop trying to kill us! We're on the same side here! So stop being an ASSHOLE!"

Far, far below, he heard the field of pink suddenly grow still.

Chapter 11: The House With Pink In Its Walls, Part 10

In his hand, the pink stone, with its sharp geometries and strange glow, began to vibrate. "You can talk?" The voice was small and panicky.

"Obviously," he said. "Can you please stop trying to eat us now? That you're doing is cannibalism." A thought occurred to him. "Wait, is THAT what you did to my corpse in Quezon Circle? That's disgusting!"

"I didn't… ! I thought…!"

"What's your name?" Sanny demanded. Might as well give it a shot, right?

"Kim! Kim Bunhong!"

Wow. It actually worked. That was… kind of sad.

"All right, Kim," Sanny said. "First, you've going to stop eating us. Then, you're going to show yourself next to the big tree, and we're going to talk. There will be no eating. Is that clear?"

"Y-yes ma'am! I'm sorry, ma'am!"

Very sad.

Sanny tossed away the rock—it hadn't managed to penetrate his hand—and landed back on Tammy's branches. Lacking anything better to do, he bent down and knocked on wood. "Tammy?"

There was a beat, and then the wood shuddered, and a head poked out. "The rocks stopped trying to eat me. Was that you?"

"Yeah," Sanny said. "Listen, I need you to make an offshoot…"

 

––––––––––––––––––

 

They disengaged and sent in drones.

Tammy wanted to stay and talk with Pinky herself, but Sanny wasn't having it. For one thing, they were, for all intents and purposes, in Pinky's mouth, since they seemed to control rocks, sand, dirt, and no doubt made this pit with their power. All they needed to do was close it, and the three of them would be devoured. Perhaps they hadn't realized that, but Sanny had, and he wasn't about to have a conversation in someone's mouth, not when he wasn't sure how good their impulse control over their urges were.

So while the three of them sent in drones—Tammy had gotten Willy's attention and told her what to do—they'd had their main bodies leave. It wasn't even all that disorienting to go down to the base of the tree while at the same time flying away for all they were worth.

There was a figure standing there on the pink sandy ground. It was an upright bilaterally symmetrical biped, of the sort you would find anywhere. It stood far too stiffly, as it if were a statue, and its feet were blending into the pink sand it was standing on. In general shape, it looked like a naked androgynous human with blank doll anatomy, but simplified, as if the usual curves at the limbs and muscles had been lopped off for being aesthetic. Sanny had almost expected caricaturized and exaggerated features, but no, it was blanker and smoother than a clothing store mannequin. Their face was a blank, curved surface, with only the faint hint of something resembling a jawline.

Tammy's drone dropped down onto the sand, then let out a squawk as she sank, the sand just flowing round her legs.

Sanny's drone, just about to land, immediately put power into his wings again, sending the fine pink sand flying as he kept his feet from sinking into the dirt.

"Ah! Sorry, sorry, sorry!" The voice came from everywhere, as if every rock and speck of sand was vibrating and acting like a speaker.

Watching Pinky—Kim—move was strange. Rock monsters were a familiar element of fiction, and Sanny had seen a lot of different kinds of rock monsters at different levels of production values. For some reason, a part of him found it extremely disillusioning that Pinky—Kim—was like something between 'cheap rubber suit' and 'lazy motion capture and cheap ass CGI model'. Their movements were smooth, and there was no folding or hinging at the joints, not like there was with Tammy's wooden limbs. In a way, they moved like Willy did when she made her body into ice, as if they were some weird stop motion animation that was not being moved but instead replaced by a completely different solid figure in a slightly different pose. But it was too smooth, and didn't have that sense of mass properly animated CGI rock monsters had.

It was a very strange and irritating reminder that special effects were not actually accurate to real life. And that his real life now consisted of critiquing the movements of a bidepal rock monster—sorry, rock person—as not being 'realistic' because they were too fast and smooth. He moved the same way a normal person would as he shuffled nervously and apologized for Tammy sinking in the pink sand as he made the sand push her up and then fuse together into a solid platform for her to stand on.

Another platform fused together underneath Sanny, but he simply folded his arms and continued hovering in midair. Ah, sweet, sweet flight! Flying in one body was nice, but having two flying bodies was even better!

Willy, who'd already been there as a large amount of water, simply appeared as a transparent, humanoid form standing on the surface of the water mixed in with the sand.

For a long moment, they all just stood there awkwardly.

"Uh, hi!" Tammy said, a smile forming on her offshoot. She'd gone full on 'cute plant girl', with an actual humanoid face, strands of grass for hair, fake ears, a flower at one temple like some kind of hair clip, and she'd even put on a skirt made of enormous flower petals. Though she'd at least had the presence of mind to not make it a copy of her real face. "It's very nice to finally meet you! I'm—"

"Green," Sanny interrupted. He gestured at Willy. "This is Blue, and I'm Yellow."

Willy said nothing, just looked like a special effect from the 80's as her blank, faceless head pointed itself at the pink rock figure.

"Do we have to do this?" Tammy said to his main body, a mouth opening on her coconut. "We already know his name, it's only fair that he knows ours."

"Secret identities are a thing for a reason," Sanny said. "You're not a billionaire industrialist with an army of lawyers. If your name gets to the government, what are you going to do?"

Tammy pouted, but didn't say any more. Instead, her offshoot said, "Sorry, but we'd rather people don't know our names. Secret identity and all that."

"Who are you people?" Kim the pink rock said. "I thought I was…"

"That you were the only one?" Tammy said, and Kim nodded. "Yeah, so did we at first. Then we met each other." She gestured at Sanny. "Though you might have heard of our work. That tree in Eastwood? Me." She patted her chest.

Kim looked at her, then at the huge tree next to them. It soared up like a World Tree from a videogame or manga, a massive, sprawling thing that should have taken centuries to grow, or at least a decent number of decades. "I see the resemblance."

"Anyway, we're heroes!" Tammy said. "Or at least we're trying to be. We fight monsters to protect people."

"It's a work in progress," Sanny said blandly. "And technically, we're more properly vigilantes."

"Oh, don't start that again."

"Look, 'heroes' are recognized by external public acclaim, not—"

"Everyone knows what I mean when I say hero!"

"It's still incorrect."

"Whatever! Just because you're correct doesn't mean you're right!" Tammy declared with finality. "Anyway, we're really glad you finally stopped trying to eat us. Wanna join?"

Sanny did facepalm.

"You can't just ask someone if they want to join!" he said. "Have you not heard of background checks? References? At least checking the internet to make sure Pinky's not on any weird websites or videos?"

"But I asked you to join…"

"Actually, you asked to join me, remember?" Sanny pointed out.

"Oh, right…" Tammy said, as if remembering.

"Um, excuse me?" Kim said, raising a hand as if they were in class. "Join what?"

"Our team, of course! Our hero team!" Tammy said enthusiastically, a wide smile on her face.

"Vigilante group," Sanny corrected.

"What, like a gang?"

"No!" Tammy said.

"Yes," Sanny said.

"We're not a gang! We're a heroic group of heroes, heroing heroically!" Tammy asserted.

"We're a vigilante group who goes around killing monsters so they stop being a threat to people, and not doing very well at it," Sanny pointed out.

"I'm willing to meet you in the middle as 'heroic vigilantes'," Tammy said.

Sanny considered. "Good enough."

Tammy nodded, as if this settled something. "Anyway, would you consider joining our heroic vigilante group and helping us protect people from the monsters now appearing out of nowhere?"

Kim just stared at her. Even though their face was already blank, Sanny had the feeling that even if they'd had proper expressions, it would still have been blank. "Can I… think about it?" they said.

"Sure! Take all the time you need," Tammy said cheerfully.

Kim nodded. "How do I contact you?" he asked.

"Make a pink spire appear in the Sunken Garden," Sanny said before Tammy could reply. "We'll contact you there."

"I…don't think I should do that," Kim said. "Isn't that vandalism?"

"Didn't you just dig a big hole in the middle of a field?" Sanny said.

Kim looked up and winced, seeming to recall where they were. "I can fix it!"

"I'm sure you can fix the spire too," Sanny said. "We look forward to hearing from you, Pinky. Eventually."

They all abandoned their drones, leaving them to collapse, living but empty, at Kim's feet.

 

––––––––––––––––––

 

As if turned out, Kim was not, in fact, able to fix the hole. Oh, they were able to try and close it, but there was the small problem of there being a huge tree inside the hole. As a result, the UP Diliman campus suddenly found itself the proud owner of a three hundred foot tall tree of unidentifiable origin, that managed to shade not just the sunken garden, but the buildings on either side of it as well.

Factions for and against cutting it down sprang up immediately and soon began protesting, counter-protesting, lobbying and counter-lobbying each other, instead of actually going to classes like they were supposed to.

The campus was closed for three days, making students protest not being able to go to classes, and then it was reopened again with military personnel stationed on the campus in case anything like the Blood Bug happened again, making students protest about the 'intrusive military presence', and therefore making reopening the campus redundant for some because they weren’t in class anyway. All the wild areas, especially the Sunken Garden, were all fumigated to kill the insect life, which probably worked for about a week and was only good for signaling that the administration as 'doing something', even if it was completely useless.

There was certainly no shortage of insects for Sanny to take control of when he went back to the campus a week later. In fact, if the students knew how many insects were in all the kitchens, in the food storage, in among the plates, and in the cafeteria, well, they'd… probably not be all that surprised and it would only impact their appetites for a day, because this was Philippines, after all. The insects certainly made it easier for him when his target went indoors, where his larger, bird-shaped surveillance drones couldn't follow. Insects, however, were everywhere, and could get into anywhere…

Really, bug control was such a convenient application of his powers.

He walked into the cafeteria, a book and folder full of papers in hand, his body configured to the feminine form he used with Tammy and Willy, if a bit shorter because the secondhand clothes he'd gotten were all too damned small. Just because he could literally wear any size didn't mean he didn't have a preference! He'd also foregone the 'blonde gyaru' look so he could slip beneath notice. Entering casually, he looked around—not that he actually needed to, since his insect drones had been scouting the place constantly—bought some chicken nuggets as a snack, and headed towards an empty table, passing a couple sitting close together and holding hands with their heads close together. Suppressing his instinctive burst of envy, he sat down, set down his folder, opened his book—a reference book he'd had at home—and began pretending to read, occasionally grabbing a chicken nugget.

The tables on either side of him were empty, and the wall fans and what people there were generated enough noise that he couldn't possibly hear anything with normal human ears.

Humming to himself, he focused on the senses of a particular drone.

"—doesn't think I should do it," his target said. "He's says do what I think is right, but he's worried about me being hurt."

"And your mom?"

"Oh, you know her, she says it'll interfere with my studies, and that I need every advantage to land a good job, and having good grades are important."

Sanny winced in sympathy. Oh, he remembered that nagging…

"I know they want what's best for me, but… I think this is important too. I've found people like me, and they…"

"They're inviting you to join their gang."

A sigh. "Yeah. It sounds really sketchy when you say it like that."

"I still can't believe you actually gave them your cell number and email!"

"It was a reflex, all right. I already heard about it from my parents…"

There was silence. Sanny pretended to read and actually did eat.

"My little brother thinks I should do it," his target continued. "Says it'll be cool to have a brother who's a superhero. My sister says exposing myself increases the risk of being locked up in a plastic tube and experimented on." Wait, what? What the hell?

"A tube?"

"Well, I can turn into sand, so a cage wouldn't really work."

A cage wouldn't work for any of them, Sanny thought as he realized Pinky's entire family knew about his powers.

"What do you think I should do?"

"Does it matter what I think?"

"Well, you're my girlfriend, so… yeah. I mean, we've known each other since we were little kids. I got the stupidest haircuts because of your advice. I don't think you telling me what to do is going to stop now."

His family AND his girlfriend! Riajuu, please die. Normies, explode.

"I think you should stop fishing for approval and do what you think you have to do. You already know what you want to do, Kim. Do it."

There was silence.

"Well, I'll have to wait until it's dark anyway," Kim muttered. "And then who knows how long before they call me once I make a spire in the Sunken Garden?"

There was a snicker. "It still sounds so dirty."

A reluctant chuckle. "Yeah, it does, doesn't?"

Sanny had agree. He really hadn't been thinking that when he said it, but…!

He stood up, gathering his book, his folder, and the plate with a few chicken nuggets left on it. He walked a short ways and slid into the bench of another booth.

The two in front of him regarded him with surprise and sudden annoyance.

"We're waiting for someone," the young woman lied immediately. She was tanned, pretty, with curly hair and would have been way out of Sanny's league back in college, before he'd gone on the eldritch diet. "That seat's taken."

"I know you're waiting for someone," Sanny said, and the young man stiffened at his words. At his voice. "And now I'm here. Hello, Pinky. Ah, sorry, I mean Kim. I heard you've decided to join our gang of vigilantes."

The young man was staring at her. Medium build, slightly above average height but not enough to start triggering basketball comments, he was a bit on the pale side for a Filipino, with a mestizo look to him. South Korean on his grandparent's side, as Sanny had found.

"Yellow?" he said tentatively.

"Hai, hai, Yellow-desu," he said. There was no recognition. Sigh. Well, not everyone could be like Tammy. "I heard you wanted to speak to us? The other two aren't here, unfortunately."

"Have you been following me?" he said.

Sanny shrugged, the strap on his shoulder slipping down. Irritably, he pulled it back up. "It wasn't like we could just start calling your friends and family to get your references. I had to find out what kind of person you were. For all I knew, you were this close to snapping and becoming some sort of supervillain." He held up two fingers almost touching. "I've seen those episodes. Those are the episodes in superhero shows that are filmed like horror movies. Then it would be our fault for not noticing and stopping you. Can't have that. This city has enough monsters."

"He's not a monster," Kim's girlfriend snapped. He tried to ignore the glare the girl—Kim's girlfriend—was directing at him. All right, it was probably sucky he'd been watching the guy, but still, it had to be done.

"I know that now," Sanny said calmly. "But I didn't know it then. So could you really blame me for being worried?"

"Is this the sort of thing you guys do?" Kim demanded, voice level.

"Actually, this is a first for me," Sanny said. "So I'm kind of going overboard on the paranoia." He shrugged. "I understand you might be mad. But given how viciously you attacked us when we first met, can you blame me?"

"I thought you were monsters," he said.

"We thought you might be a monster too," Sanny said. "But we checked first to make sure."

Kim winced.

"The other two don't know I'm here," Sanny said. "They're still waiting for your signal. So if you're going to be mad at anyone, be mad at me. This is all my idea. And if you don't want to join up, that's fine too. But I figure you'd want a chance to ask questions first. So I'm here. Ask."

He spread his hands guilelessly.

Kim and his girlfriend shared a look. Then they both leaned forward intently.

"Do you know what I am?" Kim asked quietly. "Do you know why I have these powers I do? Why me?"

"I have no idea. I have no idea. I have no idea," Sanny answered succinctly.

"You said you'd answer my questions!"

"I thought you'd been asking about the group! I didn't think you'd be asking about existential stuff," Sanny said. "We don't know why or what. Just that one day, I woke up and I was… like this." He gestured at himself.

Kim sighed. "So you don't know anything?"

Sanny shrugged. "I know I can violate conservation of mass and conservation of energy. I know sometimes the square-cube law doesn't apply to my physiology. But as to the big, lore dump-type questions?" He shook his head. "I have no clue. I'm still at the stage where I'm writing down my observations. I don't even have a hypothesis, much less answers. We're all making it up as we go along. But that's not what we're about."

"What are you about, then?" the girlfriend demanded.

"Monsters," Sanny said simply. "We're about hunting and killing monsters. It's our way of helping people."

"Why not let the police handle it?" Kim said.

"You've seen the news," Sanny said. "How many have they actually managed to kill?"

Kim slowly nodded.

"Look, if you don't want to join because I followed you, I understand," Sanny said. He pulled a sheet of paper from his folder and slid it forward. "Here's an email you can contact me on. If you ever run into a monster you need backup with, send me a message."

He finished the last of his nuggets, got up, and walked away.

Sanny took the long way home, commuting with public transportation since he had stuff with him. He stopped at a grocery for food. Had to meet with his office drone and absorb it to get male-appropriate clothes so he could enter his building as himself.

Eventually, he checked his email.

Finally, he let out a sigh of relief.

I still want to join, the email from Kim read.

Chapter 12: Interlude: Yellow

Summary:

The shadows lengthen in Manila

The dream was always the same.

The dream was always different.

Sometimes he was running, two or four or six or eight or ten powerful legs beneath him pounding the ground in rhythm. Sometimes he ran through an empty plain, along an endless beach, up a rocky mountain path, down empty highway roads, or over stalled traffic. The setting didn't matter. The body didn't matter. He was running and he was strong and tiredness was for lesser beings. His muscles thrilled with power and a desire to run faster and faster, and he did. He would run and run and never tire and it was glorious.

Sometimes he was swimming, with fins or wings or tentacles or a long sinuous body writhing through the water. Sometimes he dodged between rising stalks of seaweed, through an obstacle course of reefs, through an underwater cave with nothing but echolocation to guide his way, through shallow rivers and between the roots of trees, or though the endless ocean, with sunlight above and endless blackness below. Whether salt water or fresh, warm or cold, deep of shallow, he didn't care. He was swimming and he was strong and fast, his teeth sharp, taking in air through gills or breaking the surface to fill his lungs, just feeling the cool water over his skin, his scales, his fur, his shell…

Sometimes he was flying, on wings of feathers or flesh or scales or cuticles, defying gravity as he tore through the air. He flew through rain, through fog, through smoke, between buildings, through the canopies of trees, between blades of grass. His size didn't matter. His form didn't matter. He was flying, and that was enough…

Sometimes he dreamed of eating. Eating and eating and eating and eating until there was nothing left to eat and moving on.

Sometimes he dreamed of spreading. Of growing infinite bodies borne on the air, or in the water, or droplets of water in the air, of waiting on surface, carried on blood and spit and growing and growing and growing, visions of a world subsumed by tainted flesh and rotting wood.…

Now, he dreamed of blood. Flowing through veins, filled with oxygen and minerals and energy and hormones and bacteria and virions genetic data…

But it was always the same.

There was something behind him, or at his back. He couldn't see them. Not when he turned his head. Not when he chirped, listening for echoes. Not when he opened eyes, so many eyes, eyes all over his body, so he could see.

There was no one there.

There was someone there.

They were on his back as he ran, when he swam, when he flew. There were there when he ate. They were there when he spread. They were there in the blood. When he moved, they moved. When they moved, he moved.

Sometimes he dreamed of killing.

What he killed was always indistinct. All he got was a sense, whether they were large of small, slow or fast, soft or hard. He killed in the sky, something that was the same size as him, their tentacles ripping at each other with mouths as they tumbled through the air, trying to win before they could hit the ground. He killed in the water, dozens of limbs with claws trying to latch on so his tail could have the leverage to pierce through flesh and start pumping in air and drawing out blood. He killed in the trees, the ends of his limbs catching on bark as he maneuvered with pincers and tongue. He killed on the ground, standing on two armored legs, four fingers and a thumb all tipped with shark-like serrated teeth for claws, another tooth held like a dagger in one hand, climbing a large, indistinct thing and stabbing it through the ear.

They were there, at his back. Not someone to be defended. Not needing protection. Not weak. He never saw them. Not out of the corner of his eye. He never heard there. There was no breathing besides his own. He didn't smell them, or taste them, or feel them, but they were there.

Waiting.

Watchful.

Hungry.

He was the hand, and they were the tooth.

He was the tooth and they were the hand.

Almost, he could hear whispers in the dream winds. Whispers that seemed to come from the back of his head.

Something fell on the back of his hand, something cold and warm and soft and hard and slimy and scaly and furry and hairy and angular and…

Sometimes, he dreamed he was being born. He has curled in the warmth of a womb, lungs filled with fluid. Curled up in an egg, hearing the outside. Feeding. Changing. Growing.

Alone.

Not alone.

They were there too. Feeding. Changing. Growing.

They wrapped around him.

He wrapped around them.

They nestled within, burrowing like a parasite.

He nestled within, burrowing like a parasite.

In the dream, his eyes opened, and the thing looking through them wasn't him.

In the dream, he opened eyes that weren't his, looking through them using someone else.

In his dreams, he stood in front of a mirror that showed a monster. Eyes and teeth and claws and fangs and fur and scale and wings and tentacles. One hand reached for the mirror, and the reflection did the same. They touched the surface, and there was no mirror, only hand against hand, and it was disgusting and wrong and alien and—

One hand drew back, fearful, turning to run, to hide, to get away from the eyes of this strange and terrible monster…!

He lunged, grabbing their wrist and she screamed…

Chapter 13: On the Madness Of Mountains, Part 1

The first thing Kim Bunhong did when he woke up was make sure his room was the right dimensions.

The pink sand, tetrahedrons, cubes, octahedrons, heptahedrons, nonahedrons, Klein bottles, rings, and more common shapeless rocks on the floor and his bedspread weren't really that important. Those were easy to clean up after he'd reverted his body to being meaty instead of rocky. But if he left his room the wrong dimensions, it tended to leak out into the rest of the house, and his mom had told him to only do that if they needed the space. It was starting to be his first chore in the mornings, but there was no other way. His grandparents had trouble navigating the house because of its size as it was. No need to make it even bigger.

So he got out of bed, grabbed the tape measure on his night stand, and started collapsing the expansions. The walls of his room warped, their dimensions pulling tighter, going back to its normal length, width and height. He double-checked with the tape measure just to be sure, and had to fix the window because it somehow managed to be five feet wide while taking up four feet of length. His family claimed they got headaches when they looked at things like that for too long, but he never did… which was concerning. All he ever saw was a mild shimmer, which was strangely more visible the farther he was from it.

It was only when his room and the things in it were the size they were supposed to be that he finally gathered up the bits of himself that had fallen off when he'd been asleep. The sand and all the weird geometric shapes came next. He had to shake them out of his mattress, gather them up with a broom, and then will them to fuse together so he could just bond with them and add them back to his body. Not his mass, but his body, because apparently the excess just disappeared when he was all fleshy.

Once that was done, he grabbed his towel, slipped on his slippers, and headed for the bathroom. People were still asleep, and he bemoaned having to get up this early on a weekend, but he was expecting company today, so he wanted to look his best.

By the time he finished his bath, he could hear the house waking up. Manang Beth was cooking in the kitchen, manang Belle was outside sweeping, and he could hear his little sister Loretta downstairs, probably getting water. She always walked more softly than her twin. He passed Ryan's room, where he could hear his brother sleep-kicking his bed. He knocked on the door. "Ryan, time to get up!"

There was unintelligible guttural moaning from inside, and the sound of a body turning over. Shrugging, he headed for his room to drop off his towel before going downstairs for breakfast. Grandpa Ben was already there eating. He was very straightforward that way. The food was there, he was there, he was going to eat, no matter if no one else was around. Grandma Nene was puttering, trying to help with the food preparation and being fended off by manang Beth. Grandma still thought she had to help around the house, doing the cooking and cleaning, not seeming to realize they had three katulong so she wouldn't have to. Kim gently coaxed her to the table so she'd sit down and eat, giving his grandpa an annoyed look that was completely ignored.

His parents and sister came down next, his dad sitting at the table while his mom went to talk to the katulong and went over what they were supposed to do for the day, which they already knew, and Kim stifled his urge to make a comment about micromanaging. They were all already eating when his mom finally sat down. "Have we prayed already?" she asked, leading to various indistinct murmurs before everyone stopped eating to pray along with mom.

It was another typical morning.

Ryan was the last one down, and only when he'd sat down and started to eat—after mom reminded him to pray first—did Kim's dad speak.

"Kim, what time did you say they'd be here?" he said.

Kim nodded, swallowing his corned beef and rice. "They'll be here at nine, and Yellow told me that if I felt up to it we might go to Makati."

His mom frowned. "Are you sure they said Makati? Maybe they mean Marikina. Nothing's open in Makati, it's a warzone."

"I think they want to kill the giant spider," Kim said.

"That sounds dangerous," his dad said with a concerned frown. "Are you sure you're up to it?"

"Nothing's been decided yet," Kim said. "We might not even go. I mean, it's only the second time I'm meeting the other two, and if they're as bad as Yellow, then I won't join."

"Yellow sounds like a bitch," his sister said.

"Lori!" their mom exclaimed. "Language!"

"Yes, mom," his sister muttered with sullen contriteness, before flaring up again. "But she is. What if she's still spying on us?"

Kim winced. He had needed to tell his family someone might have spied on them for several days, leading to their dad calling a meeting for them to talk about information safety and not letting things been seen from their windows and how they should all think of ways to mitigate this so it doesn't happen again and he knew his dad was trying to help, but how exactly was one supposed to keep a woman with monster insect powers from spying on you? He hadn't been able to and he was supposed to be the one with weird, reality-violating super powers!

"If she is, then we will kindly ask her to stop," their dad said calmly. "I'm sure she'll be reasonable. She was only trying to protect her friends, after all. Now that she knows you're not a danger to them, she has no reason to do it anymore."

The words sounded like wide-eyed optimism and naiveté, a man talking about a reasonable, civilized outcome. This was the same man he'd once seen grab a snatcher who'd tried to take mom's purse, slam him to the ground, and knock the man out with one punch that resulted in a broken nose, then both call the police and make sure the guy didn't drown in his own blood. Kim wondered if his dad could break Yellow's nose. Maybe if she wasn't being all buggy…

After breakfast, his mom fussed over the living room, where they were to hang out, putting down throw pillows, worrying about the dust behind the TV and on the high shelves, and telling the twins to wear more presentable something presentable than the old, wrinkled shirt Ryan had slept in or the long jersey Loretta had on. The two had sighed, and gone back to their rooms. Ryan had come down in khaki shorts and a more presentable shirt. Loretta hadn't come back down at all, choosing to stay in her room and read.

His grandparents had also dressed up. While his grandfather had only put on a button-down shirt, his grandmother looked like she was going to church, and the only thing missing were her jewelry and makeup. Kim had to sigh. Everyone was always so… dressy when someone came over. He'd long since stopped feeling embarrassed and overdressed and was just resigned and praying he wouldn't act like that when he got old. Really, the only times they managed to dress casually for visitors were his aunts and uncles, and Katherine. And he'd had to firmly sit them down and tell his mom to not start doing it when the two of them had started dating, because it was weird. It was one of the few times his dad had backed him up to overrule his mom.

Mom was just pulling out three different bottles of soda and a bowl of ice next to the glasses when the doorbell rang.

"I'll go and get it," Kim said, leaving his mom to her fussing as he headed to the front door. He opened that and stepped out into the sun, walking down the path to the little gate next to the main gate. The walls around the gate were high enough to block off all view from the outside and stopped to keep people from climbing over it. Decorative growth climbed up the walls, already beginning to grow over the pink stones he'd fastened strategically along the top of the wall. They served as his eyes and could notify him if someone tried to climb over the wall. Most of the time, all he saw/felt were birds, and the occasional cat skinny enough to fit, but better safe than sorry, especially when it came to his family.  

He reached the people gate, looking at it nervously. On the other were—

Someone banged on the gate in a familiar rhythm. "Hurry up and let me in, it's hot out here!"

Kim perked up, quickly sliding the bar and opening the sheet metal gate. Katherine stood on the other side, waving at him casually and letting herself in. "Hey. They here yet?"

"No… What are you doing here?" he asked as he closed the gate.

She gave him a quick peck on the cheek, the way she'd used to back when they had been little kids and decided she didn't care if they got teased for holding hands. "What, you don't think I'm just going to let my boyfriend join a gang without me, do you?" she said. "Have to make sure they're not as bad as that bitch who calls herself Yellow. What kind of a name is Yellow, anyway? Does she have a little sister named Red? A girlfriend named Black?"

"Her friends are Green and Blue," Kim said helpfully. "And she called me Pinky."

"Very colorful," Katherine said. "Well, I'll go inside and say hi to everyone." Another peck, and she was walking casually towards his house like it was her own. Well, she had been coming most days they'd known each other, which had started when he was five.

He was staring after her, appreciating the view, when the doorbell rang again. He instinctively reached for the handle on the bar of the gate, then paused. "Who is it?" he called.

"Gang recruitment," an impish, young-sounding voice replied.

For a moment, Kim seriously considered saying no one was home, or telling them he'd changed his mind, or even just saying they had the wrong address. Two of those things were really stupid to say, but the urge was there. He shook of his nervousness, reminding himself he'd chosen this. For all her attitude, invasion of privacy and brusqueness, Yellow had been straightforward, and she'd even given him the option to back out even after he'd thought he'd committed himself when he'd sent her that email.

Besides, he could always back out later.

Taking a breath, he drew back the bar and swung open the gate. "Hi," he said, trying to put on a welcoming smile.

Then he blinked.

He'd been expecting three people. And there were in fact three people there. That was where his expectations ended.

Yellow was recognizable, though was taller than he'd thought she'd been when they met. She was easily over six feet tall, maybe even seven feet, and her once black hair had been dyed blonde. She was also wearing a bright yellow men's collared shirt—he had an unfeminine little sister and a girlfriend, he knew what a woman wearing a man's shirt looked like—and loose jeans. There was a backpack over her shoulders, and she held several square, bright yellow boxes bearing the logo of a local bake shop chain. He was surprised to see she looked… nervous? He hadn't expected nervousness from the woman whose first words to him had been to call him an asshole… but maybe the fact her first words to him was to call him an asshole was biasing his opinion. She'd had a point, in hindsight, but…

The two other people with her, however…

One was also tall, taller than him, and was wearing a blue hoodie that had been amateurishly patched with squares of denim, which the rest of the hoodie wasn't. In their hands was a block of ice with four large soda bottles stuck into it. The ice wasn't dripping. And while their hands looked normal—how was their grip not slipping on the ice?—their face was a completely transparent, featureless blob that let him see the inside of the hood they had raised.

The third was significantly shorter than the other two, wearing a cream T-shirt, capri pants, and a green hoodie. A strange, green, fairy-like face looked at him out of the raised hood, with bright green skin, dark unblinking eyes, and a little flower growing at her temple. From her—very human-looking—hands hung plastic grocery bags full of snacks.

"Hi!" Green said cheerfully. "Kim, right? It's nice to finally meet you face to face!" She smiled brightly at him.

"For the record, they didn't look like that until we were right in front of your gate," Yellow said blandly.

Kim blinked and shook his head to clear it. "Uh, come on in?" he said.

"Thanks!" Green said cheerfully, coming inside as he moved out of the way, her grocery bags making rattling sounds at her perky step. The faceless one who was presumably Blue followed after Green, with Yellow following in the rear, her high-heeled boots clicking on the paving. "Whoa, your house is huge!" Kim waited, but she did not continue with the usual rider of 'are you rich' and similar. "And you have mangos! Willy, they have mangos!"

Kim blinked. "Who's Willy?"

Green looked at him. "Oh right, we didn't introduce ourselves to you properly, did we?" she said. She raised a hand towards him saw that it was full of grocery bags and frowned. Suddenly something shot out of her elbow, and in the time it took Kim to blink, a long, slim, hand-shaped branch with young, silvery bark had grown from the joint as an extra appendage. Green giggled as the new wooden hand extended towards him to shake. "Hi, I'm Tammy. I'm in Grade 9." Her face was also changing, becoming more human and flesh, whites growing around her eyes, until it had become a perfectly normal human face. " Nice to meet you!"

Hesitantly, Kim shook the proffered… hand?

To his surprise, his hand started to harden, turning pink and stony. Crystalline growths started to erupt from his hand and began to surround hers. He could feel tendrils in his palm start pressing against hers, forcing—

Kim drew back, the still-delicate crystal breaking as he pulled his hand away. "S-sorry!" he cried. "I wasn't trying to—"

"It's fine, it's fine," Tammy said. "That was perfectly normal for your first time."

Kim frowned. "First time what?"

"First time meeting someone like us," Tammy said, gesturing at herself. "The urge to try and eat us is instinctive. Just be aware of it, stop eating us when we ask you to stop, and learn to hold it back, and you'll be fine."

"Wait, eat you?" Kim said, horrified. "I wouldn't—"

The realization came to him at the same time as Yellow's significant cough.

"It's fine. You learn to deal with it, provided you know you need to deal with it," Yellow said. "Can we save the exposition until we get inside, Tammy? The brownies are going to get sticky."

"Oh right," Green—Tammy—said. The third hand was pulled back into her elbow, the wood getting pulled back before becoming just a green, wooden bump on her skin before that went back to normal too. "Sorry. Lead on, Kuya Kim."

A bit shaken, Kim fell back on manners to steady himself, leading them towards the house. "So, I guess… you're Willy?" he asked Blue.

Blue nodded, making a vaguely affirmative sound.

"Now Willy, say it properly," Tammy said. "And show him your face, he knows who we are now."

The faceless face glanced at the smaller girl, then looker towards Kim. "Yes, I'm Willy," she said, the voice sounding strange and fluttery. Her face was also changing, gaining color and opacity, until a normal-looking human face was there under the hoodie, just as expressionless as the water had been.

Kim glanced at Yellow. "And… you are?"

"I'm fine with being called Yellow," the tall woman said. Her eyes were flicking around everywhere in a way that Kim did recognize, clearly comparing her life to what she saw.

"Ate," Tammy said reproachfully.

Yellow sighed. "What's the point of being secret vigilantes if we tell everyone we meet who we are? Don't you know you're not supposed to just give people your private information, Green?"

"But Kim's one of us now," Tammy said. "Team work makes the dream work and all that."

Yellow frowned, clearly disagreeing, and Kim found himself irritated. Did the woman not want him here? Is that why he'd tried to talk him out of joining after he'd replied. "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to," he said, hiding his annoyance.

Yellow pursed her lips, then shook her head. "Ugh, might as well," she said. "Tammy won't be able to keep the names straight otherwise. My name's Sanny. Just Sanny."

"There! Was that so hard?" Tammy said, nodding in satisfaction. "Now we've all properly introduced ourselves! Our bond levels have gone up! New lines in my room! Now let's go inside, I'm feeling the urge to photosynthesize and people don't do that."

Kim looked at her, confused. "Um, I don't know what that means," he said as he reached to open the door.

"Ah, it's nothing important," Tammy said. "Just good civilization, is all. Um, by the way, where did your parents go? Kind of early for them to be gone on a Saturday. The malls aren't even open yet."

Now that the moment was here, Kim… hesitated. "Um, well… ah…"

Ah. Now he remembered. In between planning to meet this people and talking to his parents about meeting these people he'd… never really gotten around to telling them his parents would be here, had he.

"Psst," a voice hissed. Kim looked up, realizing Yellow—Sanny—had hissed to him. "This is the part where you explain about all the people inside the house and how your family knows about your powers."

"Wait, what?" Tammy said, looking at Kim in surprise.

Kim felt a moment of relief followed by sudden guilt as Tammy looked at him for an explanation. "My family's inside," he explained. "They wanted to meet you."

"You asked us to come here when your family was here?" Tammy said incredulously.

"My dad insisted," Kim said. "He wanted to know what sort of people were in the gang I was joining."

"You told your parents about us?" Tammy said incredulously.

"Of course I did," he said. "Why wouldn't I? They're my parents."

"Oh, God…" Tammy  suddenly said. "Your parents know. They know about your powers. Your parents know about your powers…" She sounded horrified.

"If was kind of hard for them not to notice, yeah," Kim said. He'd woken up as a pile of rocks and sand and the inside of the house had been bigger than a mall, of course they'd noticed!

Tammy rounded on Sanny. "Did you know about this?" she asked.

"I guessed," Sanny said. "My surveillance revealed his parents, family and girlfriend knew about his powers. I was waiting for him to do the right thing and tell us. I didn't realize he'd have us come over while they were in the house."

"Wait, they're in the house?!" Tammy said, wide-eyed.

"There are ten people in that house," Sanny said. "Two are too young to be soldiers, two are too old, and the rest have the wrong physique and physical conditioning. So I guessed it was probably not a trap. Just thoughtlessness."

"A little warning would have been nice," Tammy said.

Sanny actually looked apologetic. "I… yeah. I'm sorry."

"Apology accepted," Tammy said. She gave Kim a look that was both offended and disappointed. "So, do we go in?" She was clearly not talking to him.

"I've been carrying this food all morning, I want to eat it," Sanny said. "Yeah, let's go in. Might as well right? I mean, it's not like they know our names or anything and can come after us, right Green?"

Tammy winced. "Sorry," she muttered.

"Apology accepted. Willy? What do you want to do?" Sanny asked.

Kim realized he'd been ignoring the third person there completely, and focused on the person wearing the blue hoodie. "Whatever Tammy wants to do," Willy said.

"And that is?" Sanny said, looking down at Tammy.

Tammy glanced at him, then at the still closed door, then back at the gate. She took a deep breath. "Fine. Let's meet them, I guess. Maybe we can bypass all the drama about them wanting you to stop being a superhero, only for you to decide it's something you need to do, etc, etc." She frowned at Kim, though it looked more like a pout. "But you should have asked us first, kuya! Next time, ask! All right?"

Kim squirmed. "Sorry," he said. "You're right. I should have asked first." Despite the fact she was both shorter and clearly younger than him, Kim felt like he was being scolded by his mom. It must have been the clear moral high ground.

Tammy nodded. "Good. As long as you've learned your lesson and never do it again."

The relief at being let off the hook was brief as he realized that Sanny was glaring at him. It wasn't a full-on bitch-face glare. It was just the eyes: intent, piercing, and… loaded, somehow. Clearly she didn't think he should have gotten off with an apology, for all she'd been agreeable to this. And, wait, if she'd known, why hadn't she told Tammy? Oh God, was this the power plays and internal politics his dad had warned him about?

His train of thought was derailed as Tammy said, "Okay, let's go in and say hi to everyone, and then we can talk hero stuff."

"Vigilante stuff," Sanny said as Kim finally opened the door and gestured for them to come in.

"We'll be acting heroically, it's hero stuff!"

Did he even fit in here?

Chapter 14: On the Madness Of Mountains, Part 2

Meeting everyone was brief.

"Everyone," Kim said as he led the three to the living room, "this is… everyone else."

"Good one, babe," Katherine said, giving him a small thumbs up. It was part mocking, mostly affectionate.

"Hello, sir. It's nice to meet you," Tammy said as she shook hands with Kim's dad after putting down her plastic grocery bags on the coffee table. A lone bottle of soda, a bowl of ice, a box of tissues and a small stack of plates were all that was left after mom had probably hidden away all the snacks once she'd seen his visitors had brought their own. Next to it went the yellow boxes from the bakery. "Thank you for having us over. I'm Tammy."

Every was waiting for them in the living room, and despite Kim's best efforts, his mom and his grandmother were clearly overdressed. Tammy was just as clearly uncomfortable for a moment before she doubled down on the smile.

Kim's dad nodded genially. "I'm Milo, Kim's father, and this is my wife, Marie. This is Kim's grandfather and grandmother, Benito and Nene, and our other son Ryan. And this is Katherine, Kim's girlfriend and a friend of the family." Tammy moved to shake hands with everyone. "We're heard from Kim how the three of you dealt with that monster that killed all those people in UP." Kim was surprised when both Tammy and Sanny straightened at that. For the latter it was subtle, such that one would think she was merely shifting her weight. For the former, however, it was an obvious, almost comical shift in posture that probably added maybe a half inch to her height. Only Willy didn't react, but then she looked like she wasn't paying attention. Or at least, her attention was on the block of ice still in her hands.

"Ah, we were just trying to help, sir," Tammy said, visibly trying to keep herself from preening and stay humble as she shook hands with Kim's grandmother. "Really, Sanny did all the work. It was her plan and her trap, and she was the one who finished off the Blood Bug in the end." Kim tried to keep himself from shuffling as he remembered how close he'd come to killing the tall woman back when he'd thought she was just another monster trying to score a meal. In hindsight, the way she'd fought the… Blood Bug? Is that what they were calling it? The way she'd fought the Blood Bug in the air should have been a clue she was human.

"Which one of you is Sanny?" his dad asked.

"That would be me, sir," Sanny said, stepping forward and shaking his dad's hand. "How do you do. I'm sorry for spying on your family, but I didn't think asking you what kind of person your son was would make sense." She didn't even look like the admission of guilt bothered her.

"Don't do it again," his dad said firmly. It wasn't a request.

"Of course, sir," Sanny said. She didn't look intimidated at all. Was it because she was taller than his dad?

They parted, and Sanny exchanged handshakes with everyone else as well. Katherine just smiled and didn't offer her hand, but Sanny didn't seem to notice.

Kim's dad turned to Willy. "Hello," he said, but did not offer his hand, since hers were occupied. "I'm afraid I didn't get your name?"

"This is my cousin Willy," Tammy said. She nudged the taller girl gently. "Say hi Willy."

Willy glanced at her cousin. "Hi," she said quietly.

"She's very quiet, isn't she?" Kim's mom said.

"Um, do you have a bucket or something?" Tammy said. "The ice will start melting when she lets go of it, and I wouldn't want the floor to get wet. It's a very nice floor. "

"She's keeping it from melting?" Ryan asked excitedly. "Are you superheroes like kuya too?"

"Yup!" Tammy said.

"No," Sanny said.

The two exchanged looks, one exasperated, the other mildly amused. You could practically see the exchange of 'Really?' and 'Yes, really'.

"Well, we just wanted to meet you and say hi," Kim's dad said. "I hope we'll have time to talk before you leave."

"Of course, sir," Tammy said. "I'm sure you have plenty of questions you'd like us to answer. Thank you for inviting us into your home. It's very nice."

"I hope you get along with my son," Kim's dad said, exactly the same way he had whenever Kim had brought people home. "If you need us, we'll be upstairs watching TV."

Kim's parents and grandparents left, his grandmother needing to be dissuaded from staying and getting snacks for everyone. Kim half expected his mom to come back down and start putting ice in all the glasses and pouring everyone drinks. Ryan had to be pulled along, and he kept looking over his shoulder at the three girls—well, two girls and one woman—as if he wanted to pester them with questions.

"Well, they seemed nice," Tammy said. Then she blinked and looked around.

Katherine waved at her.

"Huh?" Tammy said.

"So, what did you want to talk to my boyfriend about?" Katherine said brightly.

 

––––––––––––––––––

 

First things first: getting rid of all the throw pillows so they'd actually have somewhere to sit,

"You really have a lot of throw pillows," Tammy commented, staring at the one armchair that had been sacrificed to the cause. It had been piled high with pillows, and a few were in danger of falling off.

"My mom likes to put them everywhere," Kim said semi-apologetically. He sat next to Katherine, between her and… his new gang, he supposed.

"Right!" Tammy said. "First things first, let's put the drink in a bucket so we can finally get the bottles out before they freeze solid!"

She made to put her hands together, then paused, glancing at Katherine.

"What?" Katherine said, smiling pointedly.

"Um… well, you know about Kuya Kim's powers?" Tammy said hesitantly.

"Please don't call me that, I'm not a weather man," Kim said.

"Yes, I do," Katherine said. "So anything you say to him, you can say in front of me."

Tammy glanced at Sanny, who was opening the boxes from the bakery. The tall woman shrugged.

"O-kay then…" Tammy said. "It's nice to meet you then, ate. Please don't bust us to the government."

"Take care of my Kim and I won't," Katherine said.

Tammy nodded, glanced at Kim for some reason, then brought her hands together.

Katherine had already seen him use his powers, and he'd already told her that Tammy, or Green, could grow and control plants. Still, she stared in fascination as Tammy hands became wood and seemed to fuse together. Her fused hands began to grow, turning pale and strangely striated. It was also clearly getting heavier as it touched the floor with a 'thunk' of wood on carpet. Growing from her hands was… well,  a bucket. Or at least, a piece of wood that had grown and coincidentally become shaped like a bucket.

There was a crack as Tammy's arms disconnected from the bucket, then another as they disconnected from each other. Her wrists ended in pale wooden stubs, but she seemed unperturbed as they swelled, eventually lengthening into fingers. "There we go," she said cheerfully, flexing her newly regrown fingers as they changed from wood back into flesh.

"Did you remember to not make the sap corrosive or poisonous?" Sanny said, not looking up from where she was… was using a claw at the end of her finger to slit open the shrink wrap plastic around one of the trays of brownies. She at least seemed to be careful to not actually touch the brownies as she did it.

"Crap, I knew I forgot something," Tammy said, bending down to touch the bucket-like wooden thing.

"Why do you have corrosive and-or poisonous sap?" Kim had to ask.

"It's my default in case I get bitten by monsters," Tammy said. "Though admittedly, it wasn't all that useful the one time I was up against something that bit me. There, done! And it won't get sap on the carpet, either. Willy, put the drinks in here, please."

Wordlessly, Willy carried the large block of ice, the plastic soda bottles visible through the frozen liquid, to the bucket and bent down— "No, don't bend your back, bend your knees," Tammy chided her cousin, who complied—and placed the block in the bucket. It was just barely big enough to fit it, though the block jammed onto the side of the wood.

"Huh," Tammy said, staring down at it. "Willy, can you move the ice around so we can get at the bottles?"

Wordlessly, Willy stared at the ice. The ice started to shift, seeming to flow down around the bottles while remaining… well, ice, forming a chunk of ice on the bottom of the wooden bucket thing but leaving the plastic bottles exposed.

"Yes!" Tammy cheered, bending down to touch one of the bottles, still half-embedded in ice. "Cold! Mission accomplished!" She pulled, and the bottle came away from the ice. She let it go to rest on the piled ice and began wrenching the other bottles out.

"Here, let me help you with that," Kim said, reaching for a bottle and pulling.

It was stuck. He could feel it moving just the slightest bit, felt some give in the ice, but he wasn't strong enough to pull it…

"Um, I'm kind of cheating, kuya," Tammy said sheepishly. She lifted the hem of her t-shirt just enough to show a little skin. Only it wasn't skin, it was wood. "You want a little BS-power to pull them out." She pulled and another bottle popped out. Her hand, he finally noticed, was made of pale wood too.

He looked down at the other bottle still stuck in the ice, then hesitantly made himself change. Color began to rise from his arm from his fingertips, a wave of brilliant pink was went up past his elbow to his shoulder. He could feel his body unbalance slightly as one side became denser and heavier than the other.

His sense of touch in his altered limb became… strange. He could still feel pressure and temperature, but it came as resistance against the outermost layer of the molecular structure of his arm. Temperature took a while to register, and he couldn't feel the movement of air at all. Their molecules were too fine to affect the structures of the minerals that part of his body was made of.

Gingerly, carefully, Kim pulled.

One of the bottles came off.

"Yay! You did it babe," Katherine cheered, clapping her hands. Tammy joined in as well, before reaching down and pulling out another bottle. Between the two of them, they managed to pry them out, leaving them stacked on the ice to keep cool.

While they'd been occupied, Sanny had apparently been preparing the snacks. The large bakery box had been put next to the tray of brownies and flipped open, revealed individually packaged cinnamon rolls. Ice had been put in the cups, and she'd given one to Willy, who'd stepped aside to let her cousin do her thing but otherwise hadn't moved.

"Ah, sit down Willy," Tammy said when she saw her cousin was still standing. "Here, sit over here. What do you want to drink?"

Willy seemed to stare at nothing for a moment. "That one," she said, pointing at one of the bottles.

Tammy grabbed the indicated bottle, twisting off the red cap and pouring some into her cousin's glass. Sanny handed her a glass with ice in it, and she poured some into that too. "You want some?" she offered to Kim and Katherine.

"Please," Katherine said with a smile.

Wordlessly, Sanny got two more glasses with ice and handed it to them, and Kim accepted them with a nod, his arm turning back into flesh.

Once they all had full glasses, Tammy coughed. "Ahem!" she said. "A toast! To Kim, our newest member! I hope we can be friends! Cheers!" She raised her glass high, and Kim self-consciously did the same. He saw Sanny, sitting in grandfather's favorite living room chair, lazily raise her glass in his direction and drink almost daintily. Kim looked away self-consciously.

There was an awkward silence.

"So!" Tammy said, chasing the awkwardness away with an angry mob of happy puppies, "your entire family knows about… you?"

"Like I said, it was hard to miss," Kim said, relieved to have something to say. "Mom wanted to take me to a doctor to find out what was wrong with me, but then we saw the news about the people from Baseco and we were afraid it might be contagious… and I sort of had to learn to unshrink everything first, since we ran out of gas going from the garage to the gate."

"Wow, that's rough," Tammy said. "We had to get rid of all the wood Willy cut off when I started growing into a tree in my sleep. We're lucky none of the neighbors saw and Manang Zenny was visiting her family."

Tammy turned and looked at Sanny expectantly.

"Oh, I live alone," the older woman said easily, reaching over and tearing off a corner square from the tray of brownies. "No witnesses. I just had a panic attack and trashed my room with my tentacles. Lucky I didn't have a throat or I'd have been screaming, and the neighbors would have heard."

Kim looked at the messy edges now on the brownies. "I'll get a knife," he said, standing up.

"Please," Sanny said. "I'd make us one, but people probably won't think it was properly sanitary."

Kim, Katherine and Tammy looked at her. "Wait, you can make a knife?" Tammy said.

"Sure," Sanny said. "Just make a claw and rip it off. Knife."

She took a bite of the brownie.

Kim hurried to get a knife.

In the kitchen, Manang Beth, Manang Belle and Manang Levi were conspicuous by their absence. Kim supposed his dad had told them to wait in their room in case… in case. He rummaged through the cutlery until he found a little blunt butter knife. He turned to go back, paused, then grabbed a second just in case.

When he got back, Tammy was sitting next to her cousin, and a bag of chips was lying open on the coffee table, the vertical back seem pulled open to that the entire foil-backed sheet of the back could be spread out, with the chips on a pile in the middle. Katherine looked relaxed, but Kim had known her for years.

"I have the knife," he said, putting them down next to the brownies.

"Thank you kuya!" Tammy said brightly.

Kim sat back down next to Katherine as Sanny began using the knife it cut the brownies. It was all very domestic, even mundane.

Kim reminded himself he'd tried very hard to kill these three, and had been (ironically) stonewalled. That they were dangerous and that one had already invaded his privacy. That they didn't die even when killed, and seemed to have a lot more experience with their abilities than he did with his.

Admittedly, it was a bit hard to do that while watching Tammy pile brownies and chips onto a plate and give it to her cousin so that Willy would eat it.

"Is… something the matter with her?" Kim asked, looking at Willy.

"Nothing is the matter with her," Tammy said, her voice containing just a little bit of edge. "Willy's just special, that's all, and special girls get special treatment."

"Are you going out?" Katherine said.

"We're cousins," Tammy said tiredly.

"But you're going out?"

"No, we're not going out," Tammy said with weary patience. "We're cousins, and we just happen to be close."

"O-oh… Uh, sorry."

"It happens. A lot," Tammy sighed.

Kim jumped where he was sitting as a tentacle that ended in three finger-like digits rose up holding a small plate.

"Brownie?" Sanny said.

Tammy plucked the plate from the tentacle's grasp. "Yes, please and thank you."

Sanny nodded and then sighed. "So… I can't believe I'm saying this, but how about a little ice breaker? Everyone has already introduced themselves, so how about explaining your power as you currently understand it, your hopes, your dreams, and your favorite flavor of ice-cream."

Kim blinked. "Why favorite flavor of ice cream?" he had to ask.

"So that we know what ice-cream to get next time," Sanny said as if it was obvious.

"I'll go first!" Tammy said. "Hi, I'm Tammy and I'm a cute plant girl! I can control plants, become a plant, turn parts or all of my body into wood, leaves, vines and other plant materials, and I can photosynthesize in sunlight. My hopes… I hope we can all be friends and work together to protect people from monsters. My dreams… " She paused thoughtfully. "I dream of someday finding someone who will be understanding of my circumstances. And of course, my favorite flavor is the best flavor, avocado."

"Avocado? Seriously?" Sanny said, sounding surprised. "You're not just leaning into the plant girl and green color palette thing, are you?"

"Nope!" Tammy chirped. "Always liked avocado ice-cream, even before my big power-up."

"Hontou ni?" Sanny said nonsensically.

"Hontou ni," Tammy replied with a nod.

"Hontou ni hontou ni?"

"Hontou ni hontou ni."

"Hontou ni hontou ni hontou ni?"

"Hontou ni hontou ni hontou ni, now stop asking, or no kinako bread for you, princess!"

Despite her words, Tammy was laughing as she said it, and Sanny was snickering right back.

"Um, what are you talking about?" Kim asked, feeling left out.

"Sorry, we just watch the same shows," Tammy said. She pointed dramatically towards Sanny. "Okay, your turn, ate."

"What did I tell you about calling me that?"

"Tita?"

"That's even worse."

"Sissy?"

"Bad translator! Away with you," Sanny declared, then cleared her throat. She looked at Kim as she spoke. "So, my power is basically shapeshifting by controlling the cells, shapes, arrangements, organs, and structures of my body. I can also control and modify any animal and non-plant metabolizing mobile life form. Any rat, cat, mammal, bird, fish, insect—"

"Bug control?" Tammy said, a big smile on her face. "Eh, I can take you."

"Please don't raise death flags like that, I don't want people on my team to die," Sanny said, chuckling.

"Wait," Kim interrupted. "You say you can control any animal. Does that include people?"

"Of course," Sanny said easily. "Theoretically, anyway. Homo sapiens is still part of the animal kingdom, even if they like to think they're better than the rest. Never tried it though."

"Then how do we know you're not controlling us right now?" Katherine demanded.

"I can control your bodies, not minds," Sanny said. "You're confusing my power for mind control. It's not. If I was controlling you, you'd basically have locked-in syndrome, unable to move or control your body as I used it as a puppet." She shrugged. "If you can move, I'm not controlling you."

"Huh," Tammy said, staring at Sanny. "That's… kind scary, now that I think about it."

"I'm pretty sure I can't control you when you're a plant," Sanny said, then turned to Kim. "Or pink and rocky, in your case. I'm strictly limited to living things made of meat. I can also violate conservation of mass and energy, and the square-cube law, but only in certain body configurations." She frowned. "It's actually easier for me to violate conservation than the square-cube law, which is kinda messed up. We all violate conservation though, so it's not all that special."

"Violating conservation of mass isn't special," Katherine said blandly.

"Not for the four of us," Sanny said. "My hopes… I hope to someday be able to violate the square-cube law at will."

"That sounds more like a dream," Tammy said.

"I can fly by flapping four wings on my back that are smaller than my body," Sanny said. "It's within my grasp, so it's a hope. My dreams…" She tilted her head. "Being able to control my urges completely?"

"Shouldn't that be a hope?"

"It doesn't seem like something I can do any time soon, so it's a dream," Sanny said, one hand rubbing the back of her head.

"What urges?" Kim had to ask. She didn't mean… did she?

"We all have urges that occasionally have us subconsciously try to eat each other," Sanny said, staring straight at him, her eyes intense. "Like how you tried to eat Tammy when you shook hands. They sometimes slip through, and it gets worse when we use a drone, or are in a high stress situation."

Kim frowned. "I thought you said you controlled living things made from meat. How do drones fit into this?"

"Ooh, he can't use drones," Tammy said, sounding glad for some reason. "Don't worry kuya, we'll teach you all about how to use drones. It'll be fun!"

That didn't sound worrying at all.

Chapter 15: On the Madness Of Mountains, Part 3

"Let him finish his introduction first," Sanny said, then frowned. "Wait, let me finish my introduction first. I still haven't said my favorite ice-cream."

"Which is?" Tammy prompted.

"Mocha fudge," Sanny said.

Kim gave her a skeptical look and he wasn't the only one.

"I've never heard of that flavor," Katherine said, actually looking interested.

Sanny sighed. "They discontinued it years ago," she admitted. "That and chocolate marble, and there used to be a strawberry ice-cream with real strawberry bits… all gone… stupid ice-cream company…"

"Your favorite ice-cream is a flavor they don't make anymore?" Kim said.

"You don't stop loving something just because it's gone!" Sanny said fiercely. "This yearning is that love enduring! Besides, ice-cream flavors cycle. We said good bye before… someday, we might say hello again!"

"Now, that reference, I got," Katherine said.

"That was a reference?" Kim said, confused.

"Right, right," Tammy nodded. "Come on kuya, your turn!"

Kim was vividly reminded of the first day of school. Every level of school. Even in college, there were still professors that did stuff like these, even in the engineering department, where you'd think the classes would be too big. Generally he just said his piece and blended into the crowd again, but…

Tammy was giving him a polite, attentive smile, and Sanny was just looking at him, less the glare in her eyes. He supposed that was polite. Willy was looking at Tammy, but she'd been doing that the whole time. He suspected it was normal for her.

Kim coughed nervously, then chided himself for it. "Well, I'm Kim," he said, "and I'm in the electrical engineering course, and planning to minor in mechanical engineering. Er, sorry, force of habit."

"No, that's fine!" Tammy said. "It means we know more about you! Ooh, does that mean you can fix cellphones?"

"Not yet," Kim said. "Though these days, fixing is more a matter of replacing parts anyway. So it's all just soldering. Um, my powers…"

Kim was aware of how the two women leaned forward at that. "I can turn into and control rock," he began lamely. "Pink rock. Pink rocks, pink sand… I can also manipulate my hardness, crystal structure, lines of cleavage…"

"Any specific kind of rock?" Sanny said. "Quartz, feldspar, obsidian, Himalayan salt?" Was she writing on the cardboard box the brownies had come in?

"I… don't know?" he shrugged. "I'm in the engineering department, not whatever department has geology."

"College of Science. It's hidden behind Arts and Letters."

Everyone looked at her.

"What?"

"You were an art student?" Tammy said.

"No," Sanny said, very firmly and flatly. "Do your rocks actually glow, or is it reflective? Does it generate piezoelectricity?"

"Definitely not a Fine Arts student," Katherine muttered.

"That's a stereotype!" Sanny said. "But no, I'm definitely not."

"Um, it's a little of both?" Kim said. "It does glow, but it can also be reflective. I can change the properties of my rock into anything I want, so it can be anything. And I don't actually know if I can generate piezoelectricity." He frowned. "I really should have thought of that. Um, I can also… affect space. That is, I can make spaces bigger and I can make straight lines… not straight?"

He was pretty sure he wasn't explaining it right, but to his surprise both Tammy and Sanny nodded. "Dimensional alteration fuckery," Sanny said, "Are you limited to expansion, or can you make spaces smaller too?"

"Oh, I can make it smaller," Kim said, relieved they seemed to understand. "And affect its contiguousness as well."

"It's what?" Tammy said.

"I'm guessing wormholes," Sanny said. "Or possibly one of those 'trapped in a room', 'endless corridor' looping things."

"Wait, does this mean you can trap us in this house and keep us from ever leaving?" Tammy said, alarmed.

Kim frowned. "I… think I can?" he said. "But I'm not sure what shape that would have to be…"

"You haven't gotten a lot of practice with your powers, have you?" Sanny said.

"I'm been trying to keep it secret," Kim said, trying not to feel defensive. "Just go to school, and try to be normal."

"Conceal, don't feel," Tammy said, nodding in understanding.

"Don't let them know," Sanny said with a smirk.

Mercifully, they didn't continue from there.

"One last question," Sanny said. "Can you control the states of your rock? Can you make it molten or vapor?"

"Oh, like lava?" Tammy said, eyes lighting up. "That would be so cool!"

"Er, no?" Kim said, confused. "It's rock. The best I can do is make sand out of it."

For some reason, the two frowned.

"Huh. That's weird," Sanny said.

"Why is that weird?" Kim said. "I've got rock powers, I make and control rock."

"And space," Tammy pointed out.

"And space," Kim conceded. "Though I just warp that, I don't make it, and I don't become it. Not sure about that. Maybe it's a gravity thing?"

"Why are you asking us?" Sanny said. "It's your power. Wouldn't you know it best?"

Kim shuffled. "I've only ever practiced in my room," he said. "There's an office building nearby that can see into our yard, so I can't practice there."

"Why would that be a problem?" Sanny said.

"Well, my room's not that big," Kim said.

Sanny gave him a look. "You can manipulate and expand space… and the reason you're not practiced with your powers is because your room is too small."

Kim opened his mouth.

Kim paused.

Kim slapped a hand on his face.

"You really haven't had a lot of practice, have you?" Sanny said.

"It's probably from not having to hide it from his family," Tammy said sagely. "Real creativity comes from having something to hide."

"True," Katherine nodded in agreement.

Kim decided to power through that. "Um… apparently that's all I know about my powers. My hopes…" He paused.

"Yes?" Katherine said with a smirk.

"I… hope to graduate?" Kim said. He got an elbow in his side for his trouble. "Ow."

"Kuya, even I can tell that's a cop out answer," Tammy said.

"Seems a good hope to me," Sanny said. "Graduating is hard."

Kim debated taking the out Sanny had given him, but decided not to risk it. "Okay, truth, I hope to have a family one day," he said, to his girlfriend's firm nod of approval.

For some reason, Sanny and Tammy exchanged a look.

"Um, my dreams…" he shrugged. "Honestly, I don't dream of anything, really. Maybe travel the world? I've always wanted to go visit other countries…"

"I think that counts as a dream," Tammy said, nodding.

"And my favorite flavor of ice-cream is ube," Kim finished.

"All right!" Tammy said, then turned to her cousin. "Willy, can you tell us what your hopes, dreams and favorite ice cream is?"

Willy frowned, thinking. "To be with Tammy," she said. "To be with Tammy. Avocado."

"Great!" Tammy said. "Good girl, Willy. Do you think you can tell kuya Kim what your power is?"

Willy turned towards Kim, no emotion on her face. "I turn to water," she said. "And feel things."

Kim blinked. "Um, feel what?" he asked.

"Feelings," Willy said bluntly.

"Wait, she can what?" Katherine said. "She reads people's minds?"

"No, no!" Tammy said. "Near as I can understand, she can tell what people are feeling by… hearing them? Or something? But she doesn't really understand it, so she just ignores it." Willy nodded jerkily.

"How…?" Kim managed to get out.

"My cousin is a special girl," Tammy said, in the tone of someone who would murder anyone who said otherwise. "The world is just not good enough to understand her."

Seated behind her, Willy awkwardly raised her arms and gave her cousin a very stiff -looking hug from the back. One hand rose up and patted Tammy on the head.

"Oof. Ah, don't worry Willy, I'm fine, I'm fine," Tammy said, turning her head to give her cousin a reassuring look. And by turn, meaning her neck turned to wood and her head turned around 180 degrees. "Thank you for the hug. It made me feel better." An arm shivered, becoming dark and woody, and it extended up to pat Willy on the head in return.

Willy nodded jerkily and let go, grabbing Tammy's left hand and sitting back.

There was a beat, then Sanny turned towards Kim. "So, shall I teach you how to make drones?"

 

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Drones were actually pretty simple. It was similar to how he managed to see, hear and talk through rocks he left behind in certain places, like the border of the property. He hadn't realized he could grow them like he could grow his own body, or reshape them from a distance. Put it together with the sensory abilities he already knew, and he was soon looking up at himself looking down at himself.

Despite her calling them 'drones', Sanny insisted on referring to what he made as a 'knack-off'. It was probably some reference he didn't get. She made a lot of those, he noticed. Still, she'd been a good teacher and very patient with talking him through the principles of making what was essentially a second remotely-operated body. Not bitchy at all. Maybe that had been an uncharacteristically stressed response from her at the time…

"It's so cute!" Katherine said, leaning down at the little turtle-like rock he'd grown legs on to move it around. Like a turtle, it didn't move very fast. "You can really control it? What can it do?"

"At the angle you're leaning at, see down your shirt," Sanny said blandly, the little armored fairy-bug thing she'd made by ripping off her finger as a demonstration sitting on her head. Suffice to say, Kim had not copied her.

Katherine paused, and looked down at herself, then glanced at Kim. He looked to one side, not really able to ignore the fact that… well, yeah, his little knack-off could see down her shirt. Raising an eyebrow, his girlfriend picked up the little rock with legs, and—

Kim blushed as she held it to her chest squeezing the rock between… well, between. "So, does that mean you can feel that?" she said with a teasing smile.

"Uh, technically?" Kim said. "My rocks— ah, I mean, the pink… mineral doesn't process touch the same way my skin does. It's pressure and temperature but not… well, it's different," he finished lamely.

"You're lucky," Tammy said. "I started putting a layer of soft tissue on my outsides because otherwise my body doesn't feel touch at all. Plants aren't very touchy feely."

"Aren't makahiya plants really sensitive to touch?" Kim asked.

Tammy stared at him. Her hand came up and her face fell down to rest in it. "I'll try that," she said, her voice muffled. "Thank you for suggesting it."

"Aw, so you can't feel it when I do this?" his girlfriend said mischievously as she kept rubbing the rock on her… chest.

"I can feel, but I can't… 'feel' it?" Kim said.

"Please dial it down, there are minors present," Sanny said mildly.

"Yes, no lewds in front of Willy," Tammy said.

Katherine relented, putting down the rock.

"All right," Sanny said. "Why don't you try—"

"Kuya? Kuya? Kuya, you and your gang need to see this!"

Kim, and everyone else, looked up as Ryan's voice—he'd been supposed to stay upstairs—called from the door to the living room. "Excuse me," Kim said, getting up and watching himself get up and walk away as he walked to the door. He opened it, frowning down at his brother, who was holding his tablet pad. "What?" he said.

His brother held up his tablet, which was showing a video. "Taal Volcano just erupted, and a monster did it," he said quickly and succinctly. "I thought you'd like to know."

Kim's first reaction was tiredly asking his brother why he'd want to know about a monster that made a volcano erupt. His second was to stop and remember that he was joining a weird gang that fought monsters and… well, they'd probably want to know. His weeks of hiding made him hesitate still, but he reluctantly said, "Come in and show us."

 

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Their TV was one of those with Wifi and talked to other devices. His brother, after awkwardly smiling and waving at everyone, went to turn it on and set up the video he'd apparently been watching upstairs.

"Is… that a horse?" Tammy said, staring at the admittedly low-quality image. On the large TV screen, what had seemed a sharp if distantly indistinct image on a tablet screen was… somehow less sharp-looking. The digital zoom the news network had done had made it fuzzier as well, but…

"Yes," Sanny said, nodding authoritatively. "That's definitely a horse. Made of lava. Molten rock, definitely. Though by the scale, it's at least twenty feet tall and about thirty long. So another sonova… ahem, is also breaking the square-cube law. This is so not fair…" She sighed.

"That's what you're worried about?" Kim exclaimed.

"Well, yeah," Sanny said. "Things getting to break the square cube law when I can't means that eventually monsters will be too big for me to fight. I don't know about you, but that's something I want to avoid."

Taal Volcano was a relatively small volcano on an island in the middle of a lake, in the middle of a circular crater lake that was the third largest lake in the country. Technically, the entire massive crater was Taal Volcano, and the little island with the smaller volcano on it was Volcano Island, but since Volcano island was where geothermal activity tended to happen, it was unsurprising the two often got confused. Even the news channel they had rapidly switched to was making that mistake, but since the volcano on Volcano Island was in Taal Volcano and technically a part of the volcano itself, it probably wasn't incorrect to refer to it as Taal Volcano…

"Well, they have been detecting seismic activity from it for weeks," Katherine said, watching as the news channel devoted talking head time to the 'developing story'. "Maybe it's just a coincidence there's a lava horse monster…" She trailed off.

Even as they watched, the monster horse reared, and behind it, lava spewed violently into the air, literally touching the clouds above the lake and lighting them orange. Gray plumes of volcanic ash and steam continued to spew, some lifting into the air, other rolling down the sides of Volcano Island's peaks to paint it's slopes gray, broken only by the burning, glowing equine form cavorting around it…

On TV, they continued to talk about evacuations and how the bee infestation was complicating matters because the bees were spreading from the exclusion zone to get away from the ash, and people were advised to wear long sleeves and long pants and to cover their heads with blankets to protect themselves from bee attacks…

As the news continued on, showing more videos of the volcano and the burning horse that had been posted online, Kim heard his parents coming down and joining them to watch the TV with them, his sister in tow, looking grim. Manang Beth, Belle and Levi peaked from the kitchen, listening in and watching what they could.

The talking heads on the TV talked about the military being deployed to help with the evacuation and to pacify the monster horse the way they had pacified the one in Makati. There was more than one snort of disdain and disgust at those words.  

"We need to go and do something," someone said.

Kim would have wanted to say he had spoken, but he hadn't.

"What can we do?" Tammy said, looking towards the taller woman who had spoken.

"What we always do," Sanny said, looking calm and determined. "Go in. Kill it."

"Just like that?" Tammy said. Strangely, she didn't seem enthused. "Sanny, it's a small kaiju that looked like it's insides are made of molten rock. You're made of meat, and I'm made of wood. If we go in there, we become barbecue and kindling."

They were so calm when they said it. Go in. Kill it. Be killed. How could they be serious?

"Willy's made of water," Sanny was saying. "Maybe she can wrap around use, keep us from getting burned?"

"So we boil instead?" Tammy said. For someone arguing against a stupid idea, she sounded strangely calm. Why was she calm? "Convection is a thing. We learned that it in class. And on the box of our oven."

"I'm aware."

"Willy's the only one of the three of us who can get near that thing, and she can't fight that on her own," Tammy said.

"Fine. We don't fight it. We take care of the bees. I should have done that before this anyway," Sanny said. "At least that way, the people evacuating won't be in as much danger, and we can stop those things from getting loose into the surrounding provinces. Then you take over all the trees around the crater lake, combine them to turn into a kaiju tree, become so big you don't burn in one go, and squash that thing down to size so Willy can smother it and we can kill it."

Tammy slowly nodded. "Sounds like a plan. Let's go." She turned to Kim's parents. "Ma'am, sir. It was nice to meet you, but we have to go in a hurry. Can we leave our food here and we'll come back for it later?"

Kim's dad turned from the news to the two girls who were making crazy talk. "You're leaving?" he said, surprised.

"We have to go do what we can," Tammy said simply. "We're sorry for imposing. We'll try to come back, but if we're not back by tomorrow… well, it would be a shame if the food went to waste. Come on, Willy."

"Wait."

Tammy and Sanny paused.

Kim took a deep breath. "I'm part of this gang now too, right?" he said.

The two looked at each other.

"That's up to you," Sanny said. "We can't force you to do anything."

Kim took a deep breath and reminded himself he chose this. Reminded himself he had still wanted to join these people even after one of them spied on him.

It was time to stop just… being there.

"Dad," he said. "Can we borrow the car? Sanny can fly, but I don't think she'll be able to get all four of us to Taal on her own. Not in time, anyway."

At his words, Tammy smiled widely. Sanny merely nodded.

His dad hesitated only a moment. Then he turned to Kim's brother. "Ryan, go upstairs and get the keys." He thought about it, glanced at the girls and Sanny in particular for some reason. "The ones for the van. Kim's friends will need the leg room."

Sanny's shoulders seemed to relax at this. Kim supposed she hadn't been looking forward to finding a way to fly herself, Tammy, Willy and… himself… to Taal by herself.

Ryan looked between their dad, Kim, and the girls, grinned, and ran upstairs.

"Don't run on the stairs," Kim's mom called after him. "Honestly, that boy…"

"You're really coming with us?" Tammy said eagerly.

Stop being there, Kim reminded himself. Be there. "Yeah," he said. "I figure a guy made of rock can do something about a horse made of melted rock."

"If we can find out the melting point of lava," Sanny said, "and if you can turn into a specific mineral, you might be able to be something whose melting point is higher than the lava's temperature. Then you can back up Willy as she thermal shocks that lava horse to death." She frowned. "Tammy, think of a name. 'Lava horse' is boring to say."

"Volcanequine?"

"That's one syllable longer than 'lava horse'."

"Volpony?"

"I'm fine with 'Lava Horse'," Kim said. "It's simple, it's descriptive, and it's easy to say."

The two looked at him, considering that.

"Lava Horse," Tammy repeated with a nod.

Kim smiled. It… wasn't much of a contribution, but it was a start. And a start was what this was as one of the…

He frowned. "Um, what's our group called?"

All he got were blank looks.

"I knew we forgot something!" Tammy exclaimed.

Chapter 16: On the Madness Of Mountains, Part 4

So… apparently, his new gang had forgotten to give themselves a name.

They were now trying to rectify that.

"The Othersiders?"

"No references to that series, it'll probably jinx us with grimderp."

"I have to ask," Kim said. "What series are you talking about?"

"It's this story on the internet about the cycle of bullying," Sanny said. "It's strangely popular."

"Is that what it's about?" Tammy said.

"Yeah. See, she got bullied, then she started bullying everybody else, who bullied other people, and so on."

"Doesn't sound like something I'd like," Kim said.

"It's an acquired taste," Sanny agreed. "So, names?"

"How about 'The United Magical Girl Association'?"

"We're not all girls," Sanny said before Kim could. "What if we turn off people because they think the group is girls-only?"

"The Metro Manila Brigade?"

"That's a ref to that series and you know it. Besides, we don't even do anything in Metro Manila proper. We're more along the outskirts."

"The Monster Hunters?" Kim proposed.

"We'd get sued," Tammy said.

"Why?" Kim asked.

"That's the name of a series of videogames. Companies can get really violent about branding."

It was early enough on a Saturday that traffic was still actually moving, though it was tricky navigating the military roadblocks and diversions that kept people out of Makati to get to one of the ramps that led into the Skyway, the long, elevated road that in theory was meant to lighten the load of the South Luzon Expressway and in practice… didn’t.

Kim's dad was driving them, with his brother Ryan to keep him company on the drive back. Kim, Tammy, Sanny and Willy sat at the back, with Kim and Sanny sitting in the middle row of seats and the two cousins in the rear. They'd been talking about what name to call themselves since they'd left the house. Kim hadn't understood most of the proposed names, which had apparently been references to some show or other Tammy and Sanny had both seen. The only reference he'd understood had been 'The Prevengers', and Sanny had shot that down for being inaccurate. Kim couldn't tell if she was just being a killjoy or just had a thing about accuracy.

"Not that this discussion isn't fun," Kim said, "But do we have a plan for what we're going to do when we get there?" They probably wouldn't get there until after noon, but Kim saw no reason to wait until then to think up a plan.

"We usually make it up as we go along," Tammy said cheerful.

"The last time we had a plan, someone decided to dig a hole and drop all of us into it," Sanny said blandly.

Kim winced. "Uh, I'm not going to do that this time?"

"Ah. Well, that's nice," Sanny said. "Still, I suppose we need to have some goals laid out."

"Kill the Lava Horse," Tammy said.

"Get Kim to the volcano," Sanny said. "See if he can do something."

Tammy blinked. "Huh?"

"There's no guarantee that killing the Lava Horse will stop the volcano," Sanny said. "We're assuming, and there's probably a correlation, but volcanoes are complicated things. Pressure has probably built up down there, meaning that pressure needs to be vented somehow or we'd have a bigger explosion."

"And you think I can do something about it?" Kim said.

"You can expand space," Sanny said. "All pressure really needs is somewhere to expand into safely."

Oh. Well, when she put it like that…

"But yes, I suppose you and Willy need some sort of plan of dealing with it by yourselves," Sanny continued. "Though really, I can't think of any other plan but the one we suggested already, which is Willy trying to drown it in water to induce shock from a sudden temperature shift, you throwing big rocks at it to try to get it to splatter all over the landscape, and maybe drowning it in the lake. Speaking of which," she turned to Tammy, "will Willy be all right by herself?"

"She's right here," Tammy said irritably. "Ask her yourself."

For the first time since Kim had met her, Sanny seemed discomfited. "You're right. Sorry. Willy, do you think you can handle fighting the Lava Horse without Tammy?"

Silence.

After long enough with nothing but the sound of the engine, the air conditioning, and the wheels on the ground rolling away, Sanny glanced at Tammy—who had one of those looks—sighed, and reached over to nudge Willy to get her attention. "Willy, do you thing you can handle fighting the Lava Horse without Tammy?"

Willy stared blankly at the tanned blonde, then glanced at her cousin. Tammy made an encouraging gesture.

"Yes," Willy said. "I can fight. I can beat it."

Sanny nodded. She jabbed a thumb towards Kim. "He'd be going with you. Do you think the two of you can work together?"

Willy glanced at Kim. It was the first time she'd actually seemed to pay attention to him. "I can."

Sanny paused. "Will you please work together with him?"

Behind Sanny, Kim saw Tammy smile and nod her head. Not as a signal to her cousin, but seemingly in self-satisfaction.

Willy glanced at him. "All right. As long as he doesn't make things harder for me."

"I'll try not to," Kim said. "But what will the two of you be doing?"

"Hopefully, we can do something about the bee infestation," Sanny said. "If we can get rid of the bees, then people will be able to evacuate faster and get rid of the danger of the bees moving to another area."

"So… you're going to kill bees?" Kim said.

"We're going to kill a Biblical plague of bees," Sanny said. "They've driven people out of their farms, and I suspect their queen is huge, probably bigger than the Blood Bug, going by relative sizes between mosquitos and bees."

"Wait, bees are animals," Kim said. "Couldn't you just… control them, like you said you could?"

Sanny shook her head. "Animals already affected by a monster's powers can't be controlled," she said. "It seems like it's first-come, first-served. And I'm fairly sure these bees are being affected. I think their hive's queen might have been monsterized, and that's why they're acting the way they'd been, attacking people and taking over farms."

"Wait, what do you mean, taking over farms?" Ryan said from the front seat.

"Ryan, don't interrupt them," Kim's dad chided.

"I want to know too," Tammy said. "They've been taking over farms?"

Sanny nodded. "According to my research, they first appeared in one of the pineapple farms around Tagaytay. They seemed initially benign—not actually attacking people—until the farmers deployed insecticide. Then they killed the people who'd been spraying, and started attacking everyone. Since then they've spread to other farms in the area, and there are a lot. Lots of fruit farms, lots of coconuts… and lots of houses near fields where things were being grown. Those were the people that initially had to be evacuated, and then they sent people in with insecticide again, so the bees swarmed them with their death throes… " She shrugged. "After people learned to stop doing that and keep away from the areas they’ve taken over, they've been mostly keeping to themselves, but now with the eruption, people are getting bottlenecked keeping away from them, and this might cause them to migrate to another area. So they need to be dealt with before they move down to the growing areas in Cavite and really interfere with the food supply."

Huh. That actually did sound serious.

For a while, they continued to drive on in silence.

"So, names," Tammy said brightly. "Monster Busters?"

"I think that's a game?" Sanny mused.

"Hunter Squad?" Kim suggested. "Like, we hunt monsters?"

Tammy and Sanny both tilted their heads. "We are Hunter Squad…" Tammy said, as if trying it out. "How proud would you be of being part of Hunter Squad?"

"Not very?" Sanny said.

"Now that I think about it, it doesn't really grab me," Kim admitted.

"Maybe our initials?" Sanny said. "That's… 'S', 'T', 'W', 'K'…"

"Stuck? Cuts? Twix?" Tammy said.

"How are you getting that from 'S', 'T', 'W' and 'K'?" Kim asked.

"Used the 'W' as a 'U' sound."

"We're all shapeshifters, in a way," Sanny mused. "Maybe something from that?"

"We all have a preferred color," Tammy mused. She frowned. "Actually, why is that? Sanny, why are you yellow most of the time?"

"My combat form is partially inspired by bees and wasps," Sanny said, looking at her arm. "It's a nice 'danger' color found in nature. Though I don't have to be yellow. I can be any color. It's just… kind of my default because of my combat form?"

"I'm just… naturally pinkish?" Kim said.

"We should really see if you can become specific minerals," Sanny mused. "Or at least figure out what mineral you're made of."

"Why does it matter?" Kim asked.

"Carbon, Sulphur, Potassium Nitrate," Sanny said. "All naturally occur as minerals."

Oh. Kim knew enough chemistry to know what those three added up to. He looked at his hand speculatively, the not-pink-at-all-but-a-mishmash-of-reds-and-vaguely-yellow-vaguely-brown flesh with vaguely green, vaguely blue veins turning a hard pink, the feeling of touch changing on his fingers. Even then it wasn't a uniform pink. He could vaguely make out subtle transitions to white…

Kim made a fist. It felt completely natural, even though he knew that there were no longer skin and muscles and bones and tendons in his hand, only pinkish rock all the way through. No skin to break. No muscles to tear. No blood to lose…

This morning, all he'd wanted to do was get to know these people, not… go and fight a Lava Horse monster. And the weird thing was that he was going off to try to fight it, not the fact that it existed at all. Lately it seemed like the world had become this weird nightmare where more and more dangerous things started appearing but people just kept on going with their lives, convincing themselves that it wouldn't have anything to do with them…

But he'd chosen to do something about it.

Hadn't he?

He stared at his hands, lost in his thoughts as Tammy and Sanny's discussion of possible names for their group—Tammy seemed to have latched on to the word 'ranger'—continued on, and his father kept driving them down the expressway.

 

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Eventually they got off the Sound Luzon Expressway, exiting to head west towards Tagaytay and Taal Volcano along the Santa Rosa-Tagaytay road. It wasn't long before they stopped moving, however. The road was full of vehicles moving away from Tagaytay, and they'd taken over three lanes of a four lane road to do it. In the distance, seemingly just to the left of where the road was heading, they could see a tall, dark plume of ash rising from Taal Volcano. Fine gray ash fell like rain, and the windshield wipers had been left to sweep back and forth so his dad could see.

"Are all these people from Tagaytay?" Ryan said, leaning forward so he could crane his neck and try to get a better view of the people on the other lanes.

"No," Sanny said, frowning. "A lot of them have been stung by bees. I think these are people from nearby areas who just got kicked out of their homes. "

"I have to ask, how exactly do you know that?" Kim said.

"I can feel their injuries," Sanny said, frowning. She glanced out the window. "I think we need to get off here and walk. No one in cars moving for as far as I can feel. Kim, leave your phone."

Kim looked at her in confusion. "Why?"

"Because if the worst happens, I don't think you want your phone lying around to incriminate your family, do you?" Sanny said. "Also, take off your shoes and leave them in the car. Socks too, if you want to wear them again later."

"Wait, my shoes?"

"They won't fit in my backpack," Sanny said. "All our clothes will have to go in here, and the shoes would be too much."

Kim's complete lack of understanding must have finally shone through, because Sanny sighed. "Look, when we fought last time, do you remember us wearing any clothes?"

Oh.

"Wait, you fight naked?" Ryan said from the front seat.

"It's sort of necessary," Sanny said coolly. "We're shapeshifters, but only our bodies change, not our clothes. And clothes aren't cheap. So yeah, going commando it is."

"But that was when it was just you three girls, wasn't it?" Kim said.

Sanny sighed. Then she reached down and pulled up her shirt.

Kim didn't even have time to try looking away. By the time he did, it was too late, and he aborted the motion partway through as he realized what he was seeing.

Sanny's chest wasn’t dark tanned flesh or light untanned flesh. She hadn't even been wearing a bra. Instead, what looked like interlocking plates of shell covered her torso, shifting and sliding over each other so seamlessly that her movements seemed completely natural. It went all the way up, plates of shell mimicking the contours of breasts and stopping just under her neck.

"I don't think this is the sort of under-shirt anatomy you'd be interested in," Sanny said dryly, letting her shirt fall. "Tammy's will be similarly made of wood, and so will Willy's. And you've shown you can make yourself anatomically incomplete when you're full rock. So it's not like we need the clothes for our modesty. I'd have all of us strip down now if it didn't mean having four obviously monstrous people stepping out of your dad's car in dead stopped traffic, so people would start asking him questions."

"Wait, has your chest been like that the whole time?" Tammy said. She'd been staring at Sanny's chest too.

Sanny shrugged. "This way I didn't have to wear a bra."

"We're going in naked, no shoes, no pants, no phones," Kim said, suddenly feeling more helpless than he'd ever been.

Sanny made an impatient sound, and her voice started taking on the bitchy notes from when she'd first spoken to him. "Phones are delicate, breakable, don't survive well under high temperature, and honestly aren't going to be of any use where we're going. Clothes have no armor value and will just restrict our range movement. Not to mention every bit of weight lost makes it easier for me to fly everyone to where we're headed. And if you're about to say you want to be able to contact your family, leave one of your rocks with them. You can talk through those, remember? Cheaper than phones, and it can't be wiretapped, so it's secure. "

"Give me a break," Kim snapped at her, matching her tone. "It's not like I've ever done this before."

"We know. We have, and we're telling you how we do it," Sanny said. "Come on, we don't have all day."

She moved to open the door

"Aren't you going to take off your shoes?" Tammy asked.

"I'm not wearing shoes," Sanny said, and for the first time Kim looked at her feet. Really looked at her feet.

They were covered in the same overlapping shell plates her chest had been, and the heels and toes looked like hooves. How had he not noticed?

"I'll look for a spot where we can change and take to the air," Sanny said as she opened the door and stepped out. "Join me when you can."

She closed the door behind her.

For a moment, there was only silence, filled with the sound of the engine and the air conditioning.

"You don't need to come, Kuya Kim," Tammy said gently as she started taking off her shoes. "If you're not ready, you shouldn't force yourself."

"I'm coming," Kim said determinedly. "I'm just… it's a lot to take in. Is she always like that?"

"Ate Sanny?" Tammy said glancing out the window to where the woman had reached the sidewalk and was looking around. "I think she's just pissed you ate her twice and haven't apologized for being so willing to murder her."

A pressure wrapped around Kim's heart.

He remembered what he'd thought was a helpless yellow monster, covered in blood, eyes ruined, lying on the ground. His anger at what a monster had done to people while he'd just stood by, helpless, not acting, even though he could have, should have, he'd had the power to. He remembered…

"What was the second time?" he found himself asking.

"In the hole," Tammy said as she pulled off her socks and stuffed them into her shoes, followed by what looked like her wallet and phone. "After she jumped in after us, she… well, she sort of had to eject most of her body so she could fly, and you ate the rest when it hit your sand."

The pressure increased.

He thought he could remember that second one. He'd been sand and rocks and distributed all over the hole to expand the space well beyond what simply moving around earth could achieve. Kim had seen the monster that had killed so many people, that had gotten away when he'd been distracted by what he'd thought were lesser monsters, and he'd been overwhelmed. The tree monsters wouldn't stop growing, the water monsters seemed impossible to subdue, and he'd been following strange instincts that had let him control the rock as if he'd been born to it…

He remembered something falling from the sky, something soft and other and his sand had moved to engulf it, to… to…

To consume it.

To devour it.

He remembered being unsatisfied, like he'd been expecting to bite into a rich chocolate and instead gotten a mouthful of bubblegum, and moving on because there were other things to eat…

His stomach clenched and he would have thrown up if there'd been anything left in his stomach as realization crashed down on him like a collapsing building of rationalizations.

"Hey! Kuya Kim, are you all right?"

Kim realized he was bent over. His hands were hard and pink and covered with sharp little tetrahedral studs, little spikes fit for a villainous monster…

With an effort, he drew them back, making them sink into the surface of his skin, leaving him smooth once more. Kim winced as he realized the dimension of the cab had warped. The ceiling had rose high enough that Tammy could stand and still need to reach up to touch the felt lining, and while his side of the car seemed not to have grown much, maybe only an inch or two, the side which Sanny had left through was now the size of a garage door.

"Did you mean to do that?" Tammy asked, standing up and looking around. Kim wondered what that would look like to people watching from outside fortunately, the windows were tinted. His father and brother were looking over their seats back at him, concerned.

"I'll… I'll fix it," Kim said, reaching over, feeling the warps in the air, feeling where things had been pulled…

It took no time at all for the interior to be the right size again.

Tammy finished tucking away her shoes under the seat. Her feet, he noticed, had turned dark brown, with a striated, barky texture up to her ankles. From a distance, it probably looked like she was wearing shoes of some sort. Willy's feet had turned to clear ice and he had no idea how she planned to walk like that. Wasn't ice completely frictionless? Or was that just wet ice?

They were waiting for him, he realized. He found himself taking off his shoes and socks, emptying his pockets. His feet turned to pink rock, and he hoped no one looked at them too closely. He was about to open the door to step out when he remembered at the last moment, and held up his hand.

A pink cube started to rise from his suddenly solid palm, about the size of some kind of marble paperweight glowing with a strange, inner light.

"Here," he said, handing it to his brother in front. "I'll call you with this, all right? If you need to tell me anything, just tap it and I'll notice."

His brother took the cube excitedly. "How does it work?" he asked excitedly.

Kim shrugged. "It just does," he said.

"Maybe you should test it to be sure?" his brother said.

Kim concentrated.

In his brother's hands, the cube shook slightly. "Testing, testing," the cube spoke in his voice, its sides acting as a vibrational speaker.

His brother grinned. "That's so cool!" he said, and Kim heard through both his ears and the cube. "Can you use it to make soundwave attacks?"

"Er, no?" Kim said. "It's just the rock vibrating."

"Yeah, but if you—"

"Ryan," Kim's dad interrupted. "Your brother needs to go." He looked at Kim questioningly. "Right?"

Kim pursed his lips and nodded. He opened the door, then flipped the seat next to it forward so Tammy and Willy could get out. As he closed the door, Tammy got a distant look in her eyes, before she began to walk purposefully in the direction Sanny had gone.

"Good luck," his dad said as he got ready to close the door. "Stay safe. Watch each other's backs."

"I'll do my best," he said.

"That's all anyone can do," his dad said, looking a little sad.

Kim slid the door shut and hurried to catch up after the girls, the feeling of the grass and dirt and sidewalk strange on his bare, rock feet.

Through the cube he'd left behind, still in his brother's hands, he heard his dad start to pray. "O God, Our loving Father, we pray before your Holy Presence, to ask for Your blessing and guidance, for my son…"

Chapter 17: On the Madness Of Mountains, Part 5

They found Sanny hiding in an overgrown vacant lot. The lot had been fenced off with barbed wire, but this was the Philippines. Very few people took that as an actual deterrent. Most barbed wire fences had a hole politely left open with wire pulling the barbed wire back as a courtesy to other trespassers.

Kim wondered what the people sitting in their cars who saw them go in thought about it as he, an obviously high-school or even elementary school-aged girl, and a tall person of almost indeterminate sex went through the hole in the barbed wire and the foliage convenient closed up behind them to block them from view. probably nothing good, but this was the Philippines. No one was likely to call the police until actual screaming, running, or a rock being thrown and just barely scratching their car happened.

Kim was surprised to find Sanny had already… changed, in every sense of the word. Gone was the dark-skinned dyed blonde. Instead, a tall humanoid insect stood there, calmly folding a pair of jeans in its chitin-covered hands. Hard-looking plates that reminded him vividly of seafood, if they'd been orange instead of yellow, shifted, slid and overlapped each other at the strangely mundane action as she finished folding and stuffed the pants into the backpack at her feet.

"Hey guys," she said, the barest little slit where her mouth should have been flapping as she spoke. "Get dressed and shrink down. I think I can fly us faster than the traffic. At worst, I might have to turn into something with legs and just run us there." Her voice still sounded the same. For some reason, Kim had expected some kind of buzz to her words, of some kind of weird modulation, but no. It was a perfectly ordinary-sounding, feminine voice.

Tammy tilted her head, even as her visible extremities began to change, taking a dark, bamboo-green hue. "Are you sure you can fly like that?" she asked.

Sanny looked down at herself and sighed. "Yeah, I can, but I suppose I'll go faster if I shrink down," she said, sounding regretful. Her compound eyes glittered as she turned to face Kim. "Get changed, Kim," she said a little more brusquely. "And by that I mean turn to rock, then take off your clothes. We're all going naked here."

Kim wasn't sure he flushed in embarrassment—he'd never actually seen that happen—but he did start to turn pink. Bright pink. His hair turned pineral-like, getting absorbed into his suddenly-reflective skin, a few places stained with sweat and skin oils that had been left behind when his body had changed. He felt himself growing heavier as his inside became homogeneous, his breathing, blood flow, and all other bodily functions just… ceasing to be as he changed into mineral. His brother had once asked him what he did his thinking with when his head was solid rock and he didn't have a brain. He'd stayed up all night staring at the ceiling that night.

Tammy had started stripping with an ease that had made him self-conscious, even though he'd consciously pulled back any, ah, outgrowths into his body before he started undressing too.

It was so strange when his body was completely rock. He could see from every square inch of himself, giving him literally omnidirectional vision. He could even see through the soles of his feet, and he was glad he didn't have a stomach anymore because the little moving things in the soil were he was standing were vaguely distressing. He heard with his skin, picking up subtle vibrations in the air, felt wind direction from subtle pressure.

It should have been all too much. The sensory overload alone from having every square inch of his surface being something he saw with should have left him disoriented and stumbling. After all, he could barely floss his teeth in the mirror without getting confused, this should have been utterly paralyzing.

It wasn't. It wasn't, and he couldn't understand why.

He gathered up his clothes, rolling them up together as small as he could, only to realize that was far too thin. There'd been no feeling of resistance, only seemingly miniscule pressure. Pressure that had compressed his clothes so firmly they look like they'd been lain flat and ironed.

"You might want to let up," Sanny said dryly. "You have to wear those pants again later."

"I guess you haven't been able to get used to your strength yet," Tammy said, patting in on the shoulder. That felt strangely solid as her voice reverberated across the surfaces of his body closest to her. "Um, don't touch anything except the monster then, okay? If you're anything like me and your sense of touch isn't as sensitive as it normally is, you'll need practice to recalibrate yourself so you don't start crushing things."

"How long did it take you to learn?" Sanny asked.

"Um, a few days? Willy let me practice with her, and… well, it's a good thing we heal."

Sanny's face was completely smooth. There were no cheekbones to tighten, no eyebrows to draw together. Just a mostly blank shell-like surface and a pair of wide, building compound eyes. Her tone, however, told Kim she'd be frowning if she had the capacity to do it. "Is this safe? I know we're all stupidly hard to hurt normally when we're like this, since we can just bullshit injuries, but if he's so inexperienced he's not even used to his other body, it might be too dangerous to bring him along."

"I'm fine," Kim said. "I might not be used to being like this, but I'm tough. I mean, my body's tough."

"It's not you I'm worried about, it's the soft, squishy meat people like me being around you," Sanny said blandly.

Kim didn't wince. Unless he intended to move, his body didn't. It was rock after all, and rock didn't move. His face was featurelessly smooth, almost but not quite like Willy's completely transparent face, and so betrayed nothing.

Actually, of the four of them, only Tammy had any sort of facial expression at all. Her bright green face with dark spots for eyes contorted into an almost pouty frown that she leveled at Sanny. "I'm sure Kuya Kim won't hurt anybody," she said.

Sanny gave a sigh. "Fine, fine. The three of you get shrunk down so I can carry you and we can be off before people start getting down from their car to peep at what we might be doing."

Tammy nodded, eventually followed by Willy.

Kim stared at her blankly. "Um, shrink?"

That blank stare bored into him again.

"I'll teach him!" Tammy said hastily. "Okay, Kuya Kim, it's simple…"

 

––––––––––––––––––

 

It was simple, and obvious, in hindsight. After all, he could absorb the bits of him that fall off in his sleep without getting bigger or heavier. That meant he could make his absorbed mass go away, at least when it came to his pink rock form. And if his entire body was pink rock…

He learned it quickly, despite Sanny pointedly tapping her foot in impatience, and soon… well, he'd reduced his body to an octahedron about the size of a small paperweight, Tammy had become a very undersized coconut, and Willy was a lopsided, oblong ball of ice. All of them were being held in a firm but gentle grip as Sanny flew through the air, her for dragonfly-like wings sounding like a particularly powerful two-stroke motor.

Kim could see dark, seemingly discolored spots moving around the hard green shell that was Tammy right then, like little worms burrowing under something's skin. He was getting the feeling those were her eyes, or at least how she saw when she was… planty? How did that work, exactly? Plants didn’t have eyes, right?

The view, for his own part, was… well, not exactly breathtaking, but certainly not something he'd ever seen before. Even when he'd ridden on planes, he could never really look straight down. Here he could see in all directions, despite the serration-edged tentacle… claw… thing… Sanny was carrying them with—he could sort of understand not wanting to touch Willy with flesh, since he could tell she was very cold—and the low altitude let him see a lot of detail down below.

The road they'd been on and still roughly following—they were going straight towards the rising volcanic plume, not following the road, but the road more or less continued to stay under them—was filled with vehicles trying to escape the area around Taal Volcano. Already a thin layer of gray volcanic ash was falling from the sky like rain, covering everything with a light layer than had cars occasionally turning on their windshield wipers.

Off to the sides, at the roadside amenities and restaurants and the store-filled stopping area, he saw people pointing up at them—well, probably pointing up to Sanny, since the three of them were barely visible—as they flew by. It was hard to judge how fast they were flying, since they didn't really have any markers to compare to up in the sky, but given how quickly they were approaching the tops of the massive volcanic caldera of Taal—far faster than Kim ever remembered them approaching by car, even with no traffic to slow them down—Sanny had to be flying at least 60kph.

They'd traveled about half the distance to the volcano from their take-off point when Kim noticed something in the distance. "Hey!" he called, vibrating his whole body.

In response, Sanny's raised her hand, with the three of them held in it, up to the side of her head like a phone. "What?" she called, her voice faint and weak over the sound of her wings and the wind.

Kim didn't have fingers, and he didn't dare risk growing anything, since it might accidentally make Sanny let go, but he tried as best he could. "Back the way we came and to your right," he called, his body vibrating. "Back towards Manila! There's something glowing in the air."

Sanny turned her head slightly, and Kim was suddenly getting a direct look at one of her compound eyes. "I see it," he heard her say faintly.

Behind them, flashing and arcing streaks of light were visible in the sky over the city. Though, from the angle, it was just as possible it was happening over Manila Bay. Between the clouds and the volcanic ash, visibility was a bit shot, but the lights had burned, radiant and bright, seeming to pierce through clouds in the way.

Next to him, barely audible even though they were right next to each other and touching, he heard Tammy say, "What is it?"

"Probably nothing good," Sanny said, somehow managing to hear her. "Likely something we'll have to deal with. I hope it's not another thing that can fuck the square-cube law. I'm getting really tired of those."

"Kuya Kim, can you ask your Ryan if there's anything about it on the internet?" Tammy said.

Kim was confused for a moment, then remembered he'd left a bit of himself with his brother. "I'll ask."

Now, how to do this again…?

It was like holding two things in his hands and shifting his gaze from one to the other while still seeing the first in his peripheral view. One moment, he was high in the air, behind held like a cheap brick cellphone, the next he was lying next to the handbrake of his family's van, in the little cup holder too small to fit anything more than one of his corners. He heard the sound of the air-conditioning, felt his molecules getting ever so slightly closer together as cold air blew over one of his surfaces without really feeling the air rushing over him.

The radio was on, and his dad and brother were listening to a report on the progress—or lack thereof—the local governments surrounding Taal volcano were having in evacuating people. There was mention of 'lava bombs' falling from the sky and either demolishing buildings or splattering into still-molten lava when they hit the ground, which was apparently very unusual. Many of the latter were reported to have started taking horse-like shapes, only to suddenly collapse…

Was the Lava Horse making drones? That… was bad, right?

Kim made his cube vibrate, rattling it against the plastic of the cupholder. "Dad? Ryan?"

There was a moment of confusion, and both of them checked if their phones had accidentally been put on speaker mode before remembering the cube.

"Kuya? What is it?" Ryan asked, picking him up and holding the cube to his mouth. Kim was glad his senses were radically reduced when in this form. He didn't need to smell his brother's breath.

"Ryan, you don't need to hold me that close, I'm not a phone. If you can hear me, I can hear you," Kim said. "I need you to check the internet. Anything about bright lights or streaks of light over Manila or Manila Bay in the last… ten, maybe twenty minutes?"

"Sure, I can check," Ryan said, putting him down on top of the dashboard.  "Why?"

"We saw something from the air," Kim said. "Something glowing bright enough to be seen through clouds."

"Wait, you're flying? That's so cool! Are you using a warp space bubble?" Ryan said excitedly, even as he started tapping on his phone.

"Ryan, I'm an electrical engineering student, I have no idea what you're talking about." Kim said patiently. "Sanny is flying us."

"She is? How?" Ryan asked.

"Flapping her wings really hard," Kim said. "People should have taken pictures of us flying by now. You can look for it later, find me the light's first."

"Found it!" Ryan said. "There's… some kind of bright lights flying over the city… planes being diverted to stay clear… oh, it says the lights are something REALLY hot, people on the ground say they can feel the heat even from a distance! A few people got blinded looking directly at it. People are comparing it to the sun…"

The sun?

"According to this, it's moving away from the city," Ryan said. "Heading towards Cavite."

"Wait, it's heading here?" Kim said.

That couldn't be a coincidence, could it?

He focused towards the body Sanny was still carrying, looking around.

In the distance, a bright, burning speck of light seemed to be just hanging in the air, moving ever so slightly sideways…

Or heading in their general direction at an angle.

Just as he was about to vibrate and warn the others, however, it vanished.

No bright afterglow was burned into his eyes. He didn't have eyes that worked like that. instead, one moment there was a bright, burning speck of light in the sky, the next it was just… gone.

"It's gone…" he heard Sanny say. "Was that it?"

"I don't know," Tammy said. "But whatever that was, I could feel it. My chlorophyll was photosynthesizing from that…"

"Guys," Kim said, "we might have something coming towards us." He told them what his brother had found on his phone.

"Huh…" Sanny said, sounding thoughtful. "That's… huh."

"It's heading here?" Tammy said, sounding alarmed.

"No reason to think that," Sanny said thoughtfully. "All we know it's that it's bright, hot, and flying. It could be a literal firebird or something. Which would still suck, since it's going to be hard to catch if it's hot enough to be felt from the ground."

"What do we do?" Kim asked.

"Focus on the problem in front of us," Sanny said. "Deal with the bees and Lava Horse, make sure people evacuate from here safely, hope whatever it is hadn't melted the highway or something on our way back. I think this is where we need to split up."

Kim looked down below. In the brief time he'd talked to his brother, they'd moved a long way. The road was narrower now, and both lanes ahd been clogged by vehicles moving away from Taal Volcano, because of course it had. Others had tried to drive on what little shoulder there was, and had only made things worse. "Why here?"

"There are bees harassing people below us," Sanny said. "Most of the bees are following the road, but enough are diverting to try and swarm people. And not everyone is in an enclosed car."

Kim could see what she meant. There were a lot of jeepneys below, their roofs loaded and overloaded with luggage and furniture of all sorts. They had no windows, only sheets of plastic to roll down when it rained, and even as he watched, he saw one jeepney disgorge its passengers, who started running around, flailing at something too small for him to see or trying to bunch together to hide small children with their bodies. Other people were hammering on the windows of nearby cars, likely demanding to be allowed in…

Kim saw people fall to the ground, one arm flailing at the air as they tried to pull their shirt over their face, only for someone else to trip on them, and a third to step on their head…

"This would be a really good time for that bug control," Tammy said. Kim saw shoots start to sprout from her surface

"Been trying. It's not working. Something else got there first," Sanny said.

"So… we have to manually deal with a fuckton of bees," Kim said.

"We have to manually deal with a fuckton of bees," Tammy said. "You and Willy need to get to the volcano. Even if it's not going to stop the eruption much, you need to put down that Lava Horse before it gets past the lake and starts setting everything on fire."

"About that," Kim said, recalling, "I heard from the radio, it might be learning to make drones."

Sanny groaned. "Of course it is… we'll keep an eye out. But you and Willy need to go! I'll have a drone get you to the volcano while we take care of this."

Kim saw Sanny's other hand reach up and delicately plucked Tammy from the tentacle… graspy… things… holding them. The… appendage… began to shift, wrapping around them differently, compacting…

"Wait!" Kim cried. He extruded some rock from himself. "Take these! We don't have phones, so we need a way to stay in touch!"

"Oh, right! Good thinking, Kuya Kim!" Tammy said.

Kim didn't react when two pincers on the end of tentacles seemed to extrude out from Sanny's other arm, taking hold of the two protrusions of rock. The pincers tugged slightly, and Kim let the protrusions break away from his body.

"Remember to keep these things from trying to eat us," Sanny said.

Kim was confused for a moment before he realize what she mean. "I'll… try?" he said.

With a wet squelch, the hand holding him and Willy suddenly separated from Sanny, and Kim was disoriented as the world around him began to spin, only to level off as, with a sound somewhere between a snap and a wet squelch, the shape of dark wingspread out to either side, watching the wind, turning their drop into forward momentum, and beginning to flap towards the volcano ahead.

From the point of view of the two pieces of himself he'd given to Tammy and Sanny, he saw Sanny offer a piece to Tammy, who reached towards it with a small… root? Branch? A growth?… and pulled it towards her, pulling it to her side as wood grew over the edge to clamp it in place.

Almost immediately, he felt the piece of stone try to grow, fine crystalline structures starting to press into the wood around it—

Kim stifled that urge, finally recognizing it for what it was ahead of time, and the growth subsided as the stone kept its shape. When Sanny warily mounted the one she was holding on what he identified as her wrist, he managed to keep it from reacting at all.

The placement didn't give him a very good view, but it was enough to tell him they were diving towards the ground. The view from Tammy's side tumbled away, and there was a sharp vibration as she hit the ground and bounced, rolling to a stop, even as the view kept shifting, getting higher…

He pulled back from those pieces of himself, concentrating on what lay ahead of them. The drone carrying him and Willy rose, seeming to go faster than they had before, and suddenly the volcano was in sight.

It rose from the lake surrounded by glood, shadowed by the still-rising cloud of ash coming from its crater. Kim had been to Tagaytay before, seen Taal Volcano many times. He'd always assumed the little, pointy peak off to the side of the island was the volcano in question.

He was wrong.

While a small plume was rising from the little peak, the majority of volcanic ejecta was coming from the large, wide caldera mouth nearer the center of the island in the middle of Taal Lake. Bright against the massive plume of ash were geysers of lava that would explode high into the air. Kim tracked little glowing globs as they flew up high in arcs, only to curve down again, some still trailing ash behind them. To either side, there were bright orange fires that stood out against the increasingly gray-coated landscape.

Kim had to look to remind himself Willy was still with him. The young woman in the shape of a ball of ice had remained quiet all this time, not speaking at all. It made her easy to forget. "Willy?" he vibrated hesitantly.

For a moment, there was nothing but the rushing of wind. Then a spot on the ice became… not truly liquid, for it didn't flow away. Fluid. It vibrated in a way not that different from him. "Yes?" The word was flat, monotone, and implied boredom.

Kim didn't swallow. He had no throat, no saliva, no muscles. What had he been expecting from her? Moral support? Saying she could handle this? Wasn't he supposed to be older? "Are you ready? To fight, I mean."

"Yes," Willy said, in the same tone. "Calm down."

That caught him off guard. "Calm down?"

"Calm down," she repeated. This time there seemed like a tinge of annoyance. "You're being very distracting. If you're not going to calm down, then don't talk to me so I have one less thing bothering me."

The little spot froze back into ice, effectively ending the conversation.

It was at that moment Kim realized that he had absolutely no idea of Willy's personality at all. All he knew that she seemed very attached, almost seemingly dependent, on her cousin… who wasn't there.

Well, shit.

Chapter 18: On the Madness Of Mountains, Part 6

Kim could vaguely see what the other two were doing through the pieces of himself he'd given them.

They were being terrifying.

He was pretty sure it wasn't intentional on Tammy's part, but he wasn't too certain when it came to Sanny.

It was hard to see, given they'd both decided to mount him on their wrists like some sort of smartwatch, but Sanny had apparently decided to fight a biblical plague of deadly insects with… another biblical plague of deadly insects. Just on the arm he was on, Kim could see orifices had opened all along the length of the limb at seemingly random, disturbingly yonic and toothy at the same time. From these orifices, wasps were crawling out and launching themselves at the nearest bee. There wasn't far to go, since Sanny had somehow drawn the bees' attention and was being swarmed. Tongues—tentacles?—lashed out from other orifices, whipping through the air and catching bees on their stick surface before pulling them in back into the orifice, presumably to be eaten.

Tammy was growing... things. They vaguely resembled pitcher plants and Venus flytraps, but smaller and faster, the pitchers surrounded with dozens of long, stick vines that trapped bees and pulled them to itself. He saw giant flowers that were drawing bees in, only for them to snap closed with disturbing chewing sounds…

In the cars, people were screaming. Cars tried to force their way forwards, tried to push the car in front of them, crushing those made of more delicate material or had their brakes on.

Kim really couldn't blame them. Even if he knew those two were trying to help, they looked really scary…

With a metaphorical shake of his head, he concentrated on what was going on around him. How did Sanny make it look so easy, just breaking herself into hundreds of parts like that, all moving and acting at the same time? They were flying over the lake, the water below stained with ash to a dark hue. All around the island, he could see the water was boiling, and in spots he could just make out a dim, orange glow deep within the water. Given how cloudy the water was, it must have been very bright.

He could feel heat coming from below them, notable even to his crystalline body. The drone carrying them was clearly sweating, and feathers on its wings were ruffling a lot, as if facing intense winds. A layer of sweat was forming on Sanny, and Kim's vision was starting to develop spots of water, as well as occasional veils of moisture that were quickly evaporated by the hot air.

Abruptly the drone banked sharply, turning to put the island at their left and began circling around. What…?

"Uh, Sanny?" he said, speaking though the piece of himself he'd given the woman. "Why are we turning?"

No response.

He was just about to start asking again when a mouth opened directly above him. "Avoiding the island until we find the Lava Horse. The heat is causing updrafts and is pretty intense. I want an eye on the target before moving in, and the area above the water is marginally cooler."

"Oh," he said, and for a weird moment wondered how many military movies Sanny watched. "Okay. Is it really that hot? I… can't really tell when I'm like this."

"You can't?" For a moment, Sanny sounded thoughtful. "Well, hopefully you'll be able to tell when it's getting hot enough to melt what you're made of. I'll have to ask you to keep an eye out for the target, eyes I make aren't doing so well in this heat… okay, have to stop talking now, I have to eject my lungs and grow a new pair, I'm too filled with ash and smoke…" The mouth sealed shut.

She was kidding, right?

The drone carrying them convulsed, and behind them, Kim saw a dark, glistening pair of organs getting ejected out from a thankfully-concealed orifice. It quickly vanished into the gloom as it dropped to the waters below.

"Did you actually just eject out your lungs?" Kim vibrated.

For a moment, there was silence. Then spots of pigment appeared directly over Kim, their colors standing out against the still predominantly-yellow body.

Duh, they spelled out. Keep Watch.

Kim decided to do just that, to maintain his sanity. He couldn't imagine just… just throwing out his lungs because they got… well, filled with ash, but it really wasn't an option for him. Apparently, it was for Sanny…

The island was dark and overcast, making seeing difficult. The video had shown the Lava Horse to be huge and glowing, so it should have stood out even in the gloom. After all, the rivulets of lava flowing down the slopes in places and the jets of it erupting from the crater certainly stood out brightly.

They had to go around the island before Kim saw it.

It was certainly huge, all right. As long as one of the buses he saw around the city and twice as tall, it was a mix of stone and lava. Solid in the parts of its body that didn't see much movement, molten in places like the joints, flanks and head, the monster was moved with the heavy grace of a living being, moving just like a living horse of a smaller size. Each stepped caused lava to splatter as if it had stepped into a puddle of the stuff, and lava constantly dripped down from its tail, which flicked back and forth constantly, sending out sprays in all directions as a dense liquid kept trying to copy the physics of thread of hair. Its mane was similar, a line along the spine of its neck from which a sheet of glowing lava flowed down and dripped onto the ground, dancing flames erupting along its length.

It was walking along the slope of the island's caldera, its relaxed pace incongruously casual compared to the erupting forces around it. In fact, it reminded Kim a lot of the horses he'd ridden before when going to touristy places with his family, which always seemed to be one step away from coming to a dead stop and always seemed to do so when he was holding the reins. Kim was too far to see if the dark blobs around it were greenery or something else, but given how excitable it had seemed on the video on the video they'd shown on TV.

There was a tap, and Kim was confused for a second before he realized what was being tapped wasn't this body. A second tap bought his attention to the piece of him Sanny was carrying. From the angle of his view, looking straight at her insect-like, compound-eyed face, she was holding her arm up like she was reading the time on a watch.

"I'm here," Kim said.

"How do you want to do this?" Sanny said, and he could feel the subtle vibration of shell-like plate around him as it also conducted the sound of the words from her throat. "Drop in from straight up and hit it like a falling boulder or do you want to try and dig a hole under it again?"

The edge was there again in her voice, but Kim stifled his instinctive defensiveness. "I'm sorry," he said.

That seemed to take her by surprise. "Huh?"

Kim didn't need to take a deep breath. He wished he did. It would have made him feel better. "I'm sorry for just attacking you when you were helpless and… eating you. I swear I didn't know what I was doing, but that's no excuse. And I'm sorry for attacking you all and eating your body the second time. It was stupid, and if I'd stopped to watch and think, I would have realized what you were all trying to do. I didn't and I did something stupid because of it that could have hurt you guys and might have put people at risk if the Blood Bug had gotten away again."

"Oh." He was going to have to get used to reading blank faces. Those compound eyes and smooth face gave nothing away. "Well… apology accepted. Try not to do it again." There was an awkward beat. "Though I did mean what I said about the hole. It's ground bound, huge, and its limbs end in hooves. Perfect for keeping stuck in a hole. I wouldn't recommend being in the hole with it though. Given how all our powers work, there's a good chance it will be able to start spewing lava all over the place."

"Can you get us in behind it?" Kim said. "After just apologizing for going in and hitting people, I better not go in by starting a fight."

"I can do that, though I'm not sure how well my drone will stand it. It's really hot down there. It's really hot up in the sky, for that matter."

There was a crack of thunder that he heard with three of his bodies.

"And it seems like it's about to rain. Typical." For once, the bitchy tone wasn't direct at him. "Stupid ash seeding the clouds. This should keep the bees down though. I'll bring you in and try to keep my drone in the sky to give you an eye up there, if you leave it another rock."

"Good idea." Kim said.

"Good luck," Sanny said. She sounded like she meant it now.

Kim switch to his main body in time to see that they were diving towards the ground a ways behind the Lava Horse. He didn't feel this either. Terminal velocity didn't make his stomach heave, because he didn't have one, only undifferentiated pink rock insides. He began to extrude a piece of himself, and a pincer-tipped appendage reached down to take hold of it. Kim tried not to be concerned how quickly the ground was getting closer, trusting that Sanny knew how to fly properly. He released the extrusion, and Sanny pulled it away and mounted it on a suddenly shell-like part of the drone's body as the ground got closer and closer.

Kim didn't feel the momentum as Sanny suddenly opened her wings, only felt the things gripping shift and adjust their hold as the drone seemed to move away. The ground was a blur all around Kim's range of vision, flickering past too fast for even him to make out details, lit only by his own dim pink glow…

The things holding him let go.

He didn't feel it as he flew through the air. He did feel it as he hit the ground, his molecules registering the force of impact the first time he hit. He bounced one more time before he started rolling, hitting small rocks and charred undergrowth and gravity started to take hold as—

He changed his body into a cube, but it still took a while for momentum to stop making him flip end over end. It was only when he finally stopped rolling and saw that Willy, who had probably also been released when he had been, had turned herself into a pile of snow did he think to himself that maybe he should have turned into a pile of sand.

He vibrated slightly and then…

His points of view changed, expanded, pushed inward so some parts of him were looking at other parts of him as extrusions became limbs and extremities, and he was glad that this time he didn't have to pull anything back in. Kim scrambled to his feet, his feet sinking into ash, mud and dirt as his body lit the area around him with a pink glow. He could feel vibrations going up through his legs, some of which were tracking with vibrations in the air he was interpreting as sound.

He could see the smear of slush on the muddy, ashy ground that was Willy going from semi-solid to liquid like it was some kind of CGI special effect, flowing and merging together before taking on a recognizably human shape. Willy was keeping her height, and Kim wondered if she played any basketball. For all that they were made of different materials—heck, they were made of different states of matter—Kim realized they actually looked someone alike in their near androgyny and lack of notable secondary sexual characteristics.

They became the same state of matter as Willy somehow expelled the ash and dust swirling inside her, and her body hardened from clear water to mostly clear ice, save for the ash now covering her and the layer of white frost starting to form. Her face was smooth a clear, a blank bust waiting for lips and eyes and really every feature that would have given it humanity. Only the curving, smooth line of her jaw would have hinted at femininity, and Kim thought that could only because he already knew she was a girl.

He raised a forearm and looked out through it towards his own profile. Just as blank, if opaque. Just as she had the smooth blank curves of a wooden figure like the one his brother kept in his room for posing and sketching, so did Kim. There were no bumps of curves indicating breasts or pectorals. At best, he was a bit wider along the shoulders, she just a bit narrower at the hips.

They probably looked like really boring mannequins.

"Well?" she said, a spot where her mouth should be becoming water that didn't flow. "Are we going?" The words were flat, the tone bland.

He shook his head, even though that didn't provide the same sort of physical stimulus it should have. Just his head going back and forth, not even really affecting his range of vision. "Yeah, let's go. Quietly. We might be able to sneak up on it." A thought occurred to him. "Will you be all right, getting close to it? It won't be too hot for you?" He could tell the ground was hot though his feet, felt the heat in the air, more intense than it was up high.

"I'm fine," she said, still bland.

Well, she'd know, right? "Let's not attack it just yet," Kim said, vibrating it with his head. "I want to see what it's doing first."

The featureless, transparent head dipped down ever so slightly. "Tammy said to douse it in water and attack it," she said, as if correcting him.

"And we will," he said, recognizing that mulish phrasing. Those were the unimaginative words of someone planning to do exactly what they were told. "Just… wait a moment so I can figure out the best time for both of us, not just you."

He didn't have breath to hold, but he would have.

"Fine," Willy said. He didn't breathe a sigh of relief. "And relax. It's annoying. I'm not stupid. I'm special. Tammy said so."

Oh. Right. She could read his mind. Well, feel his mind. "I'll try. This… isn't a very relaxing place."

"Trying is better than nothing. People who try aren't as annoying," Willy said with a sharp nod. She turned and began to walk towards the bright orange glow that indicated the Lava Horse.

She was made of ice, right? How was she not slipping? Ice was slippery, wasn't it?

It seemed incredibly unfair, because Kim was slipping as he followed after her. His feet would sink into the hot ground, slide on loose ash, and he kept forgetting he was heavier than he usually was, like this. However, the one time he tried to make himself flesh again to lighten his weight, the burning heat, like he'd stuck his hand inside among glowing barbeque coals, had quickly disabused him from trying it.

Someone tapped him.

Kim looked around in confusion and it happened again before he realized it was Sanny, tapping the part of him on her wrist.

"Yes?" he asked, confused. It was raining where she was, thought he couldn't see more than that.

"Make yourself hollow," she said. "I'm watching you with my drone, and… well, make yourself hollow. It's not like you have internal organs or anything, right? So just hollow yourself out."

Oh. OH! Now that it had been said out loud, Kim groaned at how it should have been obvious. Sanny was right, he didn't have internal organs, or internal anything. He could get rid of some of the weight on him without it hurting him!

"Thanks for the advice," he said, hoping his voice sounded sincere and afraid it just sounded awkward as he did just that, opening a hole in his chest to let air in as he started hollowing out his torso. "I should have thought of that."

"No problem," Sanny said. For some reason, she sounded equally awkward. "You're probably still not used to your body yet. Plenty of time to learn when we get back."

Kim nodded, then realized he was in the wrong body for her to see that. "Yeah. Thanks. That's really helped." And it had. Hollowing out his torso, head arms and legs was letting him move lightly, more lightly than if he'd been human. "Is the Lava Horse doing anything?"

"No problem. You're coming up on the Lava Horse now. Be careful. It might hear you."

A few steps, and there it was. Molten footprints splatters railed behind it, darkening further back to what were probably burning hot rocks. It was huge, and so bright in the blood. Human eyes would have needed to quickly avert their gaze, lest they burn the afterimage into eyes. Kim had no such problem.

Even as he watched, one of its front legs clipped a large rock in its path, causing it to stumble, a vibration that Kim felt run up his legs.

"It tripped?" Sanny said, sounding confused and… focused? "It wasn't that small, it should have seen it…"

"Maybe it can't see?" Kim said, even as he focused back on his body, still trying to catch up to Willy ahead of him. "It is dark, after all."

"It's made of glowing lava, it should have enough light," Sanny said. "I can see it and I'm all the way up here." Her tone wasn't belligerent or bitchy, just someone objecting.

Kim would have frowned, if he could, as a sudden thought came to him. "Wait. Why would it be able to see?"

"What do you mean?" Sanny asked.

"You can see because you have eyes," Kim said. "From what I can tell, those dark blotches on Tammy are her equivalent of eyes. Okay. But that thing is made of lava. Molten rock.  Rocks can't see."

"You can," Sanny pointed out.

"I know," Kim admitted. "I don't know how I do it, but I can."

"Something to do with absorption of radiation?" Sanny mused. "Your material reacting to light, and you somehow process that into sight? That's how all sight starts, with specialized cells that can react to the presence or absence of light… "

"That's what Ryan thinks," Kim admitted. "I wouldn't know, I'm an electrical engineering student. But I'm made of some kind of weird bullshit superpower material. This thing is made of lava. How can it see?" In fact… "I hollowed myself out like you suggested, and I can't see anything in there, even though I should be glowing—" and just like that, he literally saw inside himself. It was all just a mass of glowing pink. "—until just now when I thought of it. I didn't even do anything!" Certainly nothing conscious or deliberate.

"They do that," Sanny said absently. "Can you see through this piece you gave me?" She was holding it very close to her eye. Eyes? They were compound eyes, after all. He could even see reflection of her arm and the little bit of pink stone embedded in it.

"They? Uh, yeah. Why?"

"I need you to shut off the light coming from it and let me crack it to see the cross-section. Can you control it enough to do that?"

"I'm… not sure. About letting you crack it, I mean. It's pretty tough." Kim did dim the glow though, though he wasn't sure how he did that either.

"Okay then, plan B… Sorry about this. I swear I'm not pissed at you, this is for science!"

At which point, Sanny knelt down and started to bang the piece of Kim on her arm onto the pavement.

"Uh…" he managed to vibrate through the abuse, "what are you doing?"

"I think you have a transparent outer layer," Sanny's voice said, Kim's perception of it interspersed with the sharp shocks of being struck on the ground. "I'm trying to chip a piece off to confirm. If you have a transparent outer layer, that means light passes through you, interacting with your molecular structure, and possibly that's why you can see. Willy should be the same, since she's always transparent. The light needs to be absorbed by the body somehow. Wow, you're really tough. There's a good chance I crack my shell before I chip you."

Kim looked down at himself. Raising on hand up to his face out of habit, he grew a very narrow needle of pink on the end of his finger, looking at it through the light of the Lava Horse beyond.

The tip was just the slightest bit transparent. Pinkish, but transparent. "I think you're right," he told Sanny. "I see transparency."

There was a heavy vibration and crack though the piece he had with her. "And I just managed to crack my arm," she said, voice bland. "You are officially one hard mofo."

"Sorry," he said.

"Don't worry about it, easy fix. So, you think the Lava Horse is blind?"

"Well, it doesn't seem to have eyes, I don't think it has those black spots Tammy has, and unlike Willy and me, lava can't really have transparent bits that can let light pass through, right?"

"I… feel like I'm forgetting something, but the logic seems sound," Sanny agreed. "So, it's blind, it's glowing and you both can see. If nothing else, you've got some advantage. Digging a hole under it is starting to sound better and better."

It did, actually. "I'll try to get ahead of it. It should be simple since it's walking so—"

He saw Willy raise her hand. Saw water gathering on the ends of the limb of ice. Saw a blast of smooth, contiguous water slam into Lava Horse's side, causing the lava to darken as they cooled to rock, saw Willy slide back slightly at the force of her own blast, saw piece of the Lava Horse's hindquarters actually go flying off as water pressure blasted at the rock…

The ground beneath them rumbled violently as the Lava Horse screamed a high, bubbling cry. Lava erupted from its side like blood and flames burst from the still-glowing parts of its body as it stumbled about on the uneven slope, its legs striking the ground if forceful impacts in its confusion.

"Willy!" Kim cried as he struggled to stay on his feet, falling to all fours to keep from falling over and skidding downslope. "What did you do?"

That blank bobble of ice turned to face him. "You told me to wait," she said, her voice distant, dismissive. "I waited. I'm done waiting. So now I'll drown it, and you throw rocks at it. Pull your weight. I'm not going to do all your work for you. Tammy said everyone should contribute to group work."

So saying, that featureless face turned back to the Lava Horse, more water gather—no, appearing— around her hands, and sending it towards the monster in a too-cohesive stream. The water that had sprayed all around seemed to gather itself out of the ground, clumping at the Lava Horse's feet, globs that grew bigger and bigger as they wrapped around tree-thick limbs that made them boil on contact, even as they turned to ice. From the caldera, there were sounds of explosions as streams of lava suddenly erupted high into the air, lighting the sky orange yet not really doing much for the gathering gloom

Kim watched, aghast and panicked, not sure what to do. He scrambled to his feet, fell, and then just tried to move on all fours to get to Willy, not sure what he'd do after that, but determined to get there…

He saw movement, struggled to place what he was seeing, and realized he was seeing above him just as the dark blob with faintly glowing patches of lava slammed into him and seemed to explode.

He felt his body shatter, felt the thin layer of pink stone he had left after he'd hollowed himself out breaking as it was struck by a torso-sized lava bomb at terminal velocity. His vision shattered for a moment, becoming hundreds of different, confusing points of view as his body broke, panic filling him again as he tried to make sense of what he saw…

Kim's entire body collapsed into sand, rolling and flowing across the ground, mixing with the dirt and ash, his vision shattering into thousands, millions of points of view instead of hundreds, but at the same time a… familiarity arose. Broken, shattered, hollowed, that was confusing… but sand?

He'd been sand before.

He literally pulled himself together, reforming and fusing his body, adding mass to fill his insides. Around them, other lava bombs fell. Willy had abandoned a human shape and form, becoming a large, rolling blob of water, like a swimming pool that had decided to crawl up on land. Lava bombs struck her, exploding inside her at the sudden temperature change, bubbles of steam fizzing from the shards, but she just rolled on, leaving the steaming pieces of igneous rock behind as they fell through her.

Through his skin, Kim saw another bomb coming from above. He jerked to the side, turning back to sand, letting the sand stream and flow and bond to imitate Willy's unnatural viscosity, trying to avoid the bombs, to get to Willy.

Willy didn't seem to have any intention of getting to him, herself. Her focus was on the Lava Horse as she kept blasting it with progressively thicker streams of water that didn't break apart in the air, but kept lashing at as a solid stream. Each stream made glowing patches of lava go dark or chipped away fragments of the monster's outline. Kim was reminded of a video his brother had shown him of industrial water cutters tearing through metal…

Vibrating in frustration—and suddenly feeling much more apologetic of interfering with Sanny's plan to catch the Blood Bug all those days ago—Kim charged in to try to help, and deciding then and there to NEVER work alone with Willy again.

Chapter 19: On the Madness Of Mountains, Part 7

The ground was being very uncooperative as Kim tried to take control of it through the particles of sand he had touching the ground. When he'd done this back in UP, and in other times before, it had been like plunging into water that he started spreading out in all directions and yeah that was a horrible comparison. Sticking with the comparison though, instead of water, the ground felt like a rocky beach, dense and thick and try as he might, pushing into it was both difficult and unpleasant. It wasn't impossible—he could feel the ground in direct contact with his hand and feet becoming part of him yet separate, and from there, he could slowly push outwards but there was resistance.

It looked like dropping the Lava Horse into a pit wasn't an option.

The ground shook violently as Willy's streams managed to punch through one of the Lava Horse's limbs, sending it stumbling as it crashed into the ground, its huge bulk beginning to slide downslope, its angered, panicked cries vibrating the sand Kim had reduced himself to. The hardened stone covering its form ripped off its body, exposing the glowing lava beneath that smeared on the ground and burned as the Lava Horse kept roll and falling. It seemed to almost fade in the darkness below, the glowing parts of its body standing out in the gloom. Above, the clouds were so thick they were opaque, and sunlight was a weak, distant thing on the far edges of the immense ash cloud being fed by the volcano. With every cry, the volcano shook, more and more ash spewing, and above them, at the rim of the volcano, Kim saw a burning, moving orange glow as lava began to pour down the slope. It wasn't tame, slow-moving, realistic, nature documentary lava that was cooling naturally as it moved. It was violent, rushing, splattering, fast flowing movie lava, spurts of it seeming to lead the mass like fingers trying to reach the sky.

And it was heading straight for them like an approaching flood.

"Willy, move!" he cried as he pulled all his sand together into a ball and flung himself downslope, fighting all his instincts that told him this would get him hurt as he let gravity take hold and go down the slope the fast way. He rolled and skidded on the ashy ground, occasionally getting flung up some more as he hit bumps.

Willy, thankfully, hadn't needed to be told twice as a large, unnaturally cohesive mass of water flowed down the slope a little off to his side, looking like a giant bag of slime rolling down. Behind them, the gloom became more orange as more lava surged up from the volcano. The leading elements seemed to keep surging, and Kim could make out horse-like shapes, of heads and hooves, screaming and pawing the ground violently…

They reached the bottom of the slope, and Kim kept on rolling, vibrations from all over reverberating through him. He burst into sand, reforming back into a humanoid form as he tried to run, the ground still repulsing him as he tried to move and shape it, to create walls to lead the lava way and channels for it to flow through—

Oh. Right.

He turned and, having watched TV and movies just like everyone else, thrust his arms towards the onrushing lava. Glowing spikes grew on his arms, and a massive surge of growth at their base became an explosion of sand that launched the spikes more or less in the direction he wanted. They spun randomly before he reached through them, around them, and bent.

The pieces of himself he'd just launched did not alter their course. They were still moving at the same speed, in the same direction, on the same parabolic arcs caused by the interactions of their shape, spin, mass and velocity. It was the space around them that bent to lead them towards where he wanted them to go, and they slammed into the ground in a straight, if unevenly distributed line. Space bent, and there were no gaps, the pieces all touching, coming together, fusing.

Space was restored, and they were all still touching, a long line of pink on the ground.

Grow.

The pink shards grew, dimensions expanding in all directions, almost as fast as they would have grown from him. The line spread to either side, gaining a slight curve towards him as walls rose, points of crystal trying to stab into the ground. The ground bent, twisted, the points digging in, then tearing the ground apart and being constricted into place as space straightened.

Willy launched herself over the wall, a piece separating from the huge, vaguely frightening watery mass that struck the ground in front of Kim, seemed to ripple and stretch like a giant unbreaking water balloon, before it seemed to snap into a faceless humanoid shape that immediately stiffened into clear ice. The rest of the huge mass arced over her similarly stretched and bounced when it hit the ground, and then rushed at the fallen Lava Horse. The mass of water seemed to grow and grow as it charged, before freezing into an iceberg-like mass that slammed into the burning monster without losing speed. Immediately, the bright lava skin went dark, and there were gunshot-like snaps as the iceberg broke apart, sizzling where they touched the creature's fiery flesh and actually bouncing as the ice turned almost instantly into steam on contact.

"Good. You're helping." Willy's vibrating voice was bland and dismissive. "Don't be a parasite at group work."

So saying, she charged the Lava Horse again as the mass of ice she'd launched rippled, shivered, and began to grow, trying to encase the equine, its skin growing dark even as the ice touching it continued to flash into steam. It struggled, but while it was able to melt its bonds at the point the ice immediately touched, the ice kept pressing in, growing and enclosing…

The lava rushing down the slope slammed into Kim's wall, and he felt the point of contact start to shatter and crack at the sudden heat. He didn't wince, because that was an involuntary reaction, but he forced the pink to fuse back together, forced it to keep growing, to thicken, to resist with shear mass even as the outside started to snap apart, cracking and breaking along cleavage lines.

Kim could see through the wall. The wall was a part of him and he could see through it. He saw the lava, blazing bright and how, closer than any human being should ever have to. He could feel the heat in a way that no human should, could feel it transferring obscene amounts of energy into his molecules, heating them up as he tried to think cold thoughts.

He felt it when parts of him started to melt, too hot to stay solid, felt them slipping out of his control, as those bits of him went blind and numb, joining with the lava…

There was no pain, not as he'd grown up with it. Why should there be? His body wasn't meat and bone, but some bullshit pink rock. The heat he'd felt wasn't burning agony, but energy and shaking molecules and how did he know that?

No, no, now was not the time for him to start wondering why he knew that he felt temperature directly from the energy exchange with his molecules and not some sort of intermediary. He turned his back to the wall he made. It would hold for now, diverting the lava to either side as the bits that burned and melted off were replaced. It was very convenient, that 'violating conservation of mass' thing that they could all apparently do. He ran to join Willy, whose ice had completely enclosed the Lava Horse save for a small spout from which steam and spurts of hot water were erupting, only for the latter to freeze back into ice. Inside, he could vaguely make out the equine form still struggling inside the growing, spreading mass of ice, form obscured by bubbles of steam.  

The ground shook violently, and Kim nearly fell again, barely moving his feet in time as he had to maintain his balance using purely visual cues and what little pressure information he had from the parts of his feet that touched the ground. More Lava had erupted from the rim of the Volcano, and he hurriedly raised the height and width of his wall to keep it back from them, he could feel the heat like a constant weight pressing down against his body from the mass of lava near them,

The surge of lava slammed into his wall, and then to his horror started to climb over it, the glowing infernal liquid piling up behind the cracking pink barrier and pushing it up higher and higher instead of flowing to either side. The apex of the lava crested over the top of his wall, forming the head, neck and forelegs of a horse. It made strange, bubbling screams as it tried to pull itself over the wall, its glowing legs hitting the ground with a wet plop. The end of the legs started to spread before they darkened into glowing red stone hooves, pulling the rest along and lava started to stream over his wall .

"Willy! There's another one!" he warned. Kim reached through the wall he had made, its upper edge cracking and snapping into small bursts of shards at the heat, and made it grow. Thrusting spears and pillars of pink rock grew from beneath the horse-headed stream of lava, pushing into it, trying to block its path. The lava just flowed through, and Kim felt the secondhand pull of gravity as he realized that his wall was dangerously unbalanced and at risk of toppling over…

Spikes of stone thrust into the ground to take the weight, and the wall held, even as more and more lava tried to climb and flow and drip over it, trying—Kim glanced back to be sure— to reach the trapped Lava Horse that Willy was trapping in more and more ice. The ice was the size of a building now, water erupting from the spout at the top like a geyser as the dark shape within the layers of frozen water and trapped ash continued to glow a dull, fiery red. Kim remembered the blazing glow visible through the dark waters as they had flown overhead, and the lake that boiled, the forms of dead fish floating on top…

The dark shape trapped inside suddenly blazed gold.

That was the only warning they had as the tomb of ice suddenly shattered explosively, a tall geyser ejecting upwards from the vent hole on it before car-sized chunks of ice and smaller chunks of rock went flying in all directions in a massive cloud of steam. Willy broke into a least four pieces as she was struck by bits of her own iceberg, getting knocked to the side, the pieces tumbling away from Kim. What remained was a large misshapen thing of dark and crimson glowing rock, steam wafting from its quickly drying surface. Hadn't the Lava Horse been smaller than that—?

It had grown, Kim realized with a chill. Like them, it had increased its mass and heat by somehow generating more lava out of its body, or perhaps turning all of its skin back into lava simultaneously—

There was a crack, and the wall Kim had raised sheared, the top half collapsing as a wave of lava suddenly came rushing down. Kim scrambled out of the way, the world around him bending randomly in his panic and urgency that was all in his mind as the lava surged, slamming into the glowing nugget that was the lava horse. Random flames flickered as the lava wrapped around the stone, turning the bits of ice it flowed over into so much steam without seeming to lose any heat, and enfolding the trapped mass in a new fiery embrace.

Kim had a sudden flashback to that morning, of him checking on and under his bed for bits of sand and rock.

The lava seemed to clench, and then a slit tore open, releasing a bubbling roar as the lava began to take the shape of a horse's head the size of a van, as opposed to merely being the size of a motorcycle. The lava behind it thickened, growing or drawing from the surging lava behind what remained of Kim's wall, becoming a neck. Pillars as tall as telephone poles and thick as ancient trees slammed into the ground and distending it as lava solidified into stone, which glowed a dark red, formed hooves…

Kim ran, watching all this behind him, even as a part of him screamed at him to turn around, to be a decent adult and go back for Willy. Through the literal back of his head, a torso that could have been a small office building ripped itself out of the lava that had been flowing down from the, tearing some of the ground with it, formed dark hindquarters as lava began to gush from its rear, forming a burning tail that littered the ground with glowing molten droplets. Something was different about it though, something that immediately leapt out at Kim.

On the side of Lava Horse's head, there was a large manhole-sized patch of dark rock. In the orange light cast by the lava, Kim could faintly see it glitter, like dark glass.

The now 50—60? 70?—feet tall Lava Horse turned its head, the dark patches looking eerily like eyes, and Kim got the sickening feeling that it was looking at him. Him, who was glowing pink against an ashy background on a day so overcast it was practically twilight. He actually wasn't sure what the time was…

Was this distraction? Was he trying to keep his mind away from the subject of his clearly impending death?

Still seeming to look at him, the massive horse turned, legs shaking the ground violently as it took small, careful steps to the side, sending ash back into the air, setting alight ash-covered and charred wood that had been plants just that morning. Each step was like a bomb going off, making his knees shake and the ash momentarily flow like water. Kim was horrified to see it didn't move with the ponderous, heavy gait that the occasional giant monster in a movie had conditioned him to expect. No, it moved with a liquid grace and speed that one would expect of a horse, despite its size. It took a step towards him at a deceptively normal speed, almost making him stumble, then another and another, each impact hitting the ground so hard Kim tripped and fell onto the ash.

Thankfully the ground was flat enough that he didn't go rolling, even as the Lava Horse broke into a… a canter? But it was a canter of giant, and Kim watched as a giant mouth opened wide to rip him out of the ground like a clump of grass—!

Kim bent the air, and the Lava Korse took a massive bite of the ashy ground to Kim's left as Kim scrambled to his feet, running under the Lava Horse, under its long, burning neck and between front legs like a monumental arch. He ran towards where he thought Willy had been sent flying, hoping she was all right and that she hadn't been thrown into lava. Could she survive being evaporated? He wasn't sure, but that didn't sound healthy for a young woman to have to go through, psychologically.

Behind him, He saw the Lava Horse's head spit out a large clump of dirt and ash, then shake furiously from side to say as if trying to get rid of a bad taste. Could it taste? How could it—not the time!

There was a rushing sound as the Lava Horse turned its head, and it could definitely see him, the glittering back eyes pointed at him before it turned its entire body in another bombing run that shook the ground to face him. Instead of trying to bite him again, however, it raised up its head and began to… gag…

Kim instinctively covered his head in a warding gesture as he bent space, and the giant projectile vomit of lava curved around him to either side, only a little splattering on the ground in front of him as he kept on running, looking for…

A wet patch of ground that he'd thought has simply been the melted remains of one of the big pieces of ice suddenly started blasting streams of water which… arced rather pathetically before dropping on the Lava Horse's glowing, molten hide like a drop of water on a hot griddle, now too big and too hot for such an attack to affect it, at least on that scale. The Lava Horse moved its head out of the path of the stream, clearly more confused than anything else.

"Willy!" Kim cried, skidding as a dark black head of ashy water rose from the puddle. "We need a new plan! That's not working anymore!"

"Then think of one, freeloader," Willy said, pulling herself out of the ground. Her head began to clear as dark, dry sludge began to seemingly scale off. "You haven't' done anything useful yet. This is supposed to be group work, so contribute."

A petty part of Kim wanted to snap that his dad had given them a ride and he'd made a wall, and that was a good 'C' effort. The rest of him told that part to shut up, grow up, and think of a new plan!

"I distract it, you head to the lake and use all that water to drown it again?" Kim said. If the scale was the matter, then just do what they did before but bigger, right?

(He tried not to think about how the Lava Horse could just do again what it had already done, but bigger.)

A sharp nod of a now-transparent head of ice. "Distract it then," she said, before collapsing down into a glistening puddle of water that just… lay there.

Distract it? How? Sure, it had been his idea, but how was Kim supposed to do that?

A small part of him mused that maybe Willy had a point about him not properly contributing…

He turned and ran, kicking up ash and mud and making himself glow. His glow was a sickly thing, compared the pervasive hellish radiant of the Lava Horse and the volcano, or the darkness of the ash clouds above, but it made him stand out, and if he could draw attention—

With a bubbling scream, the Lava Horse stepped, stepped and reared up, and up, and up onto its hind legs, then began to come down, down, down again, burning front molten hooves leading, coming right for him…

Kim bent the air again, the hooves landing to either side, missing him by an arm's length. Immediately, lava exploded at the point of impact like someone had jumped into a puddle, and Kim found himself getting slammed by a thick, viscous, HOT mass that seemed to clump instead of run and flow, covering him, and he could feel his molecules gaining energy, far too much energy, too fast, felt the cracks, felt the lava cover him, felt—

…on the edge, just the merest touch, but soon he would fall, and it would consume…

…it would devour…

Kim screamed, every inch of his body, every body, vibrating violently as for a split second he felt like a grain of rice of the lips of a giant, and all it had to do was lick and… and he screamed and screamed, and his body shattered and grew and threw, his outermost layer exploding from him as the layer beneath it grew into ten times his body's volume of sand per square inch, the abrupt growth casting off the lava that had covered him as he stumbled back, feet stepping on lava, skidding, and he made protrusion on his back grow explosively, using his body as a platform, sacrificing it to the devouring lava as he threw a glittering rock that was himself, the most important piece of himself, the truest himself out of all the pieces of himself, away from between the Lava Horse's forelegs.

He bounced tumbled as the piece of himself that had so recently been his body, cracked and shattered from the heat, as the part he had ejected grew, forming arms and legs, as it bent space in fear, in terror, truest terror of the mind and heart and soul without the petty limitations of bodily functions and neuro transmitters to dictate the pace. He launched sand in front of him even as he was just a tangle of protrusions, bending the space between him and the farthest speck of himself, collapsing the distance between them as he gave himself the smallest shove with a forming extremity to move just the slightest bit—

Kim was five feet away from where he had started and the Lava Horse was scraping its hooves along the ground, lava pouring from it like a hose, the pieces of him that had been left behind gone, shattered, melted, consumed, devoured…

He stumbled on stubby, barely formed feet, throwing a stubby hand ahead of him, seeding the way with dust, then bending and space collapsed and he was twenty feet to the side, the piece of himself he'd thrown at his feet. He ran, legs not working properly because they'd stopped growing, and he was too panicked to remember how they should be. Three pink stone stubs made him stumble along, threw another piece of himself, reaching towards it before he hit the ground, bending—

He collapsed space behind him as the Lava Horse vomited lava all over where he'd just been, his entire body vibrating, as he tried to move, move, move…!

Something dove down from the sky.

Two arms, two legs (oh, right, that's how it's supposed to look…), plates of armor like a knight-insect from some talking bugs movie, as orange as the lava in the gloom and burning light, wings buzzing so hard they sent ash flying, Sanny in combat mode swooped down, hands grabbing the first protrusion they could, wings reaching a new feverpitch of buzzing—

Only for Sanny to give a yelp of surprise as she was jerked to a stop by her shoulders, her entire body flipping forwards as she crashed into the ground hard onto her back.

"Damn, you're heavy," he heard her say. "Fuck, it's hot. This was a bad idea…"

"Sanny?" Kim managed to say in surprise.

In the time it took him to do that, Sanny had flipped over, braced her feet, and began to drag him with surprising speed, a speed that increased as a second pair of legs erupted from her thighs and hips, then a third pair. Her legs began to bulge, the shell falling away to reveal skin tight with muscles, and the hands and arms dragging him thickening as well, the grip holding him increasing in strength. "Don't die on the first day, Pinky," Sanny said through what were obviously gritted teeth and pain. "Pull yourself together! Two arms, two legs, a torso between those two, a head is optional! Tables! Think of tables! The ones with legs, not the kind that are pillars with a big circle on top! That's it, you can do it!"

Sanny heaved, another pair of arms reaching out to hold him, and Kim realized they were galloping over the ash, multiple limbs pounding on the ground and leaping, the whole body coiling only to uncurl and hurl everything forward.

Behind them, the Lava Horse was giving chase, each footfall deafening, making the ground shake and vibrate from where he was now being carried on Sanny's back, the flesh reddening and sizzling and darkening where he was in contact with it…

I'm burning her… he realized in horror, realized that even though they were no longer cracking and shattering, the molecules of his body were full of energy, of heat. And that heat was cooking Sanny alive, even as she ran, scrambling for traction on ash, over rocks, even as the Lava Horse pursued, vomited molten stone splashing behind them, flecks reaching Sanny  and burning her even more. Kim saw one leg burned through the muscle and to the bone.

"Let me go!" he cried.

"Got a plan now?" she said, a face suddenly appearing on her back where it could see him. A simple face. Eyes, mouth.

"I'm too hot! You're burning!"

"Drone, this body is expendable," the mouth said, trying to smile but showing muscle and bone getting covered in ash. "You call, I'm here. What's the plan?"

"I don't have one!" he screamed. "I'm shit at this! I don't know what I'm doing! I think I made things worse!"

A laugh. "Welcome to the club! All right, if you don't have a plan, I'll give you one. Grow. Ignore whatever happens, just grow and grow and grow as much as you can!"

"It'll eat me!"

For a moment, something dark and vengeful glittered in those eyes facing him… and then flesh around it contorted, and the whole face wobbled from side to side as if shaking its head. When it faced him again, there was only sympathy. "Been there," she said, and there was no smugness, no vindictiveness, only empathy. "Twice. Wanna know how to keep it from happening?"

"How?-!"

"You grow," she said, even as a glob of lava slammed into what he'd assumed was her head, setting it on fire, burning meat and bone to ash. They stumbled but the face in front of him never flinched, even as blood welled and flowed. "You grow and grow and keep growing so that no matter how much of you gets bitten off, there's always more of you to grow and fight back. Then, when you're bigger than it can chew… throw everything you've got at it and eat."

The front legs collapsed, and Kim went tumbling, rolling, all that inertia keeping him moving.

Behind him, the lifeless hunk of bloody meat disappeared beneath lava footsteps.

Kim screamed. It might have been 'No!'. It might have just been a scream. He rolled, and he screamed… and he grew. Friction, and the ash building up in front of him force him to slow, to stop, but he grew. No arms. No legs. No head. Just a single, glowing, pink mass, growing and growing…

The Lava Horse reared up, forelegs flowing, slamming down on him hot and hard. Cracks broke, pieces fell, but he grew. The cracks mended, the pieces began to grow themselves. Fusing to him once they touched once more. He didn't bend space, he didn't divert blows, he just grew. He became even with the Lava Horse's shins.

Then with its undersides.

The bottom of its throat.

Its head came down, mouth open. It bit at him, mouth distending, widening, becoming a maw, lava flowing like drool that trickled down his sides as it tried to bite him, but there was no sense of being a speck on lips…

He was even with its back.

The fear, the terror, was gone. He was a rock. No physiology, no neurotransmitters, no hormones, no involuntary instincts. Just rock.

Lines cracked down his sides, and up his front. With a roar that vibrated across his whole being, a roar that made the ash shiver and low like the voice of a giant, the giant stone uncurled, raising him up, and up and up…

Arms unfolded, swinging out to the sides. It had no hands, just blunt rocks.

He had no feet, just a spreading conical shape like roots growing out from the base of a tree from his knees down, the better to distribute the load.

He had no head. He didn't need it. Every inch of himself were his eyes and ear.

Moving slowly, ponderously, each shift careful because he only had visual cues to guide his balance, Kim punched the Lava Horse in the side of the head.

Chapter 20: On the Madness Of Mountains, Part 8

Kim was not a violent man, but he knew how to throw a punch. His dad had made sure he knew that much. Make a fist, tuck your thumb on the side, not inside, and aim to punch somewhere a little behind where you would hit. That said, he'd never actually ever thrown a punch intending to hurt someone. Even when he'd been learning arnis, it had all been in a controlled environment, a matter of movements and muscle memory. It had been exercise, not aggression.

This was not a controlled environment.

He had forgone things like thumbs and fingers, opting for large, uneven, solid lumps of glowing pink rock on the end of his thick arms. It was simple, it was structurally sound, it had a lot of mass, and when he smacked it into the side of the Lava Horse's head, the head smeared all over it like a piece of modeling clay being stepped on.

Kim bent the air around him, changing the alignment of space to keep himself upright even as he felt gravity trying to pull him down, trying to overcome his lack of a sense of balance with brute force. Spikes on his feet kept digging into the dirt beneath him as he struggled for traction and footing. Legs and hooves of lava and red-hot stone slammed into his front, cracking and chipping rock, but he had mass on his side. He swung one mace-like arm sideways into the his enemy's forelegs, splattering them both, making its head topple down straight into the rising punch of his other arm.

Molten hot lava splashed all over him, but he ignored it. He was still growing, even as that growth was optimized into repairing the damage he was doing to himself from making contact with the lava's heat. He punched the Lava Horse again, sending it tumbling, falling onto its side—

The long, tube-like body of lava burst like a water balloon, the shape losing cohesion, the lava starting to run in all directions. For a moment, Kim flailed in confusion, only to be caught completely by surprise as two stone-tipped glowing columns suddenly burst from the mass of lava, slamming into him with the force of an entire mountain behind it. The fiery impact broke huge chunks from his chest, but he didn't fall even as the top of his body was pushed as he bent space—

The columns of lava curled, and Kim realized that they weren't columns. They were hindquarters.

And he still hadn't moved.

The two lava hind legs slammed into him again, the force greater than before as the lava began to come together again, congealing back into a fiery equine, head now on the end away from him. The impact sent more cracks through him, and he finally stopped bending space to let the force send him falling back. He twisted, managing to get one arm down to steady himself, leaving him in a tripod-like pose, his other arm raised high.

The Lava Horse's hind legs divided, a second pair of legs rising up and curling for a kick as the first pair stayed solidly anchored on the ground.

Kim turned himself into sand and collapsed. The kick legs slammed though a suddenly insubstantial clod of pink dust. Kim could feel grains snap and crack on contact with the burning lava, while a cloud in the legs' path were kicked outwards toward the lake. The rest merely glowed weakly, caught in the crosswinds and updrafts caused by the heat of the volcano and lava, spreading out across the island.

Kim, inside every grain, was every grain, bent space.

Space across the island collapsed, warped, tilted and generally decided that linear progression could go to hell.

Without moving, the Lava Horse suddenly found itself in the bottom of a canyon. On either side rose canyon walls covered in ash, pink sand and loose lava, while in front of it, the landscape that had formerly sloped gently downward towards the dark, ashy waters of the lake suddenly sloped up. Pink sand was fusing into pink crystal, studding the walls and ground.

The Lava Horse looked around with glittering obsidian eyes, its body language confused…

And that was when dark lake water came rushing down the slope of ash and pink, washing over the Lava Horse's legs. The sizzle and bubbled and turned to steam, and the Lava Horses danced in surprise and seeming panic as more and more water rushed down the slope, the world warping as they pushed the pink sand and rocks out of place. More steam rose, molten lava abruptly cooled to dark stone that slowly began to burn with a sullen, stubborn red glow. the Lava Horse began to grow again, the lava within it increasing, trying to get above the water, but no matter how much it grew, the canyon didn't seem to get any smaller. They reared up, trying to climb, but the very walls of the canyon stayed out of reach, even as they tried to walk, and then run, burning hooves splashing and sizzling on the rising water, its rushing currents illuminated by the Lava Horse's molten glow…

Then the water was coming in a rush, clean and pure and carrying large chunks of ice as it slammed into the Lava Horse like an onrushing wave. It filled the canyon from wall to wall, and the water grew turbulent as it boiled into steam, only for that very steam to stubbornly congeal into hail, raining down on the Lava Horse and fighting their heat with cold as more and more of the water began to turn into ice.

In the water, on the walls, as sand, as rocks, Kim vibrated. "We've done this already! It got out!"

"Throw rocks at it like Tammy said you're supposed to!" the dark waters echoed back like the voice of some terrible god of the depths.

"That does absolutely nothing!"

"Tammy said to do it, so do it!"

Yes, he was never working alone with Willy again. At least not until he'd gotten a better understanding of how she thought, because she was clearly… special.

A moment later, he remembered she could perceive other people's emotions.

Well, fine! Let her know how frustrated he was!

The water and sand rumbled as the volcano erupted again, spewing more ash and lava bombs into the air, and more lava flowed down its peak. They were all averted away from the Lava Horse, the landscape too twisted and rising for the lava to reach, the falling lava bombs dropping to either side. The Lava Horse could add to itself from the volcano, and though it could grow, so could they. 

Stalemate.

Wait, no. Not stalemate. What had Sanny said?

Throw everything you've got at it and eat.

Kim had no back of his head. He wasn't quite sure where he was at the moment, only that he was every grain of pink sand and piece of growing pink rock that was reaching out to bend space over a part of the island. But if he did have a back of his a back of the head, he imagined a slow, rumbling, but unstoppable show of hunger coming from it…

He barely stopped himself from trying to start… doing something to the water all round him. Something that reminded Kim of growing crystal trapping molecules all around them, and trace minerals soaking into things, leaving only itself as all other substance is worn away…

Wait… had he just tried to fossilize water? Why would he—

—a snake, made of dirt and rock—

—a yellow insect, covered in blood, eyes gouged out, empty—

—a tree, too big, too fast, monstrous—

—water in a pit—

—an empty corpse, falling from above onto sand—

Kim couldn't gag. He had no throat, no stomach, no muscles. There was nothing to throw up as he recalled every time he'd devoured—tried to devour—a living thing because he had been filled by an almost solid, slow, rumbling urge.

From the back of his head that he didn't have, it came again, like a mountain raising out of the sea, and slow, but inexorable, the urge ran through him.

He barely stopped himself from turning human and boiling alive as he tried to get the feeling out of his head, tried to stop, tried to keep the parts of himself from reaching out, from digging in, from making things part of himself as he devoured…

He felt himself in a cup holder, with nothing to eat…

Felt himself mounted on wood, spikes starting to growing, impregnating cells and cellulose…

Felt himself in—

Something smacked into him, hard, and he felt an answering void, felt sharp points of prickling teeth and the sizzle of strange acids on his surface, etching him.

"Stop that," Sanny's voice said, sounding mildly annoyed.

The world snapped back into focus for Kim, and with  grunt of effort across all his selves he pulled himself back.

"Thank you," he said instinctively.

"Any time," Sanny said, seeming to put him out of her mind as she went back to… wait, was that a giant bee? "Bit busy right now, I'll talk to you later…!"

Kim reminded himself he had his own problems and that Sanny was good at doing horrible things to giant insects as he ignored the scenes of carnage around Sanny in what looked like a pineapple field, and stopped looking through that piece of himself.

For a moment, Kim hesitated, his grains mixing with the ash, tugged to and fro by the water. He wanted to this to be a big decision for him. A burden he decided to bear with dignity and resignation. The choice to end a life, human or not, because if needed to be done. But…

—a snake, made of dirt and rock—

—a yellow insect, covered in blood, eyes gouged out, empty—

—an empty corpse, falling from above onto sand—

He knew that to be self-serving, sanctimonious hypocrisy at this point. He'd done it already, with little thought or consideration for the act or consequences until today.

He could keep being uncaring a little while longer.

In the water, Kim's sand heaved, moving together as one, growing and dividing to maintain the bent space even as they began to gather around the Lava Horse's legs. They were stalemated, but Kim could only keep growing the bend so much… so he had to act.

In the water, the monster's legs were burning crimson stone covered with a layer of steam bubbles as lava and water met, the stone occasionally cracking open with growth, lava leaking out only to be cooled solid again.

Solid.

It was hot, sure… but Kim could take heat.

He pounced.

Pink rock, glowing bright, gathered around each other Lava Horse's legs. It was trapped so it could never move, never reach any of the walls around it. It didn’t matter how long its step if the distance kept getting longer and longer. Kim gathered around those legs of red-hot rocks, grains of sand fusing together, growing, trapping the stone in rising, coral-like growths. Kim's body grew hot, his molecules vibrating as they took in heat, so much heat, but in the water, the heat could be transferred, vented, and soon the water around him began to boil as well as he kept growing, spreading like the trails of termites. Small cracks broke across him, but they weren't the massive heat fractures of before, fusing easily as Kim bound himself around the stony leg and drove spikes of crystal into the burning rock. From the spikes deep in the stone, tendrils seemingly one or two molecules thick suddenly shot out in all directions, heat transferring along minute strands, the threads beginning to vibrate and shiver as space bent, widening like an endless number of gaping maws to consume, to devour as Kim/something inside him screamed/sang…

Molecules of stone were torn apart and replaced with pink/himself/stone/voids of space, adding to him, becoming him. He kept growing, and suddenly heat didn't seem to matter so much as his self took on a new configuration—

He felt the shift in perspective, the feeling of seeing with more than light, feeling vibrations not through molecules, like his soul was a pit of sand that sucked in all that fell into it and made it part of itself—

…hot. hot. hot. burning. flowing…

—and got the very strange feeling he was eating someone's hair, was chewing a piece of candy through its plastic packaging…

The water boiled.

Kim found himself wrapped around hot, solid (empty/powerless/toenails) rock as the Lava Horse ripped its legs out of his grip, rearing up and balancing on its hindquarters. The water exploded into motion as a whirlpool formed, making the Lava Horse fall on its side, trying to bring it down like a wrestler taking the fight to the mat. The legs left behind became a part of Kim, turning pink and bright, their molecular structure clearly different yet a part of himself, not new so much as a reminder he didn't know he'd needed…

Water vaporized instantly as Kim found himself hurtling into the air in a violent clod of ash, burning lava, cooling lava bombs and a violent updraft of steam as the ground they had been fighting exploded into a new volcanic peak, a rent in the ground that was growing and rising as more and more burning lava erupted from it like a fountain. He felt parts of him burning in lava, encased in ash-mud, spinning uncontrollably in the air, and in a few instances actually launched so hard they burst through the cloud cover into the cold, peaceful blue sky of noon above, only to fall back into darkness.

From the ground that he'd been unable to claim, through the rupture, a giant horse rose, body made of pure, burning, fiery lava save for its glittering obsidian eyes as it reared into the air, its voice a screaming eruption as it protruded from the ground like a genie from a lamp. All around it, what water hadn't evaporated was flowing in all directions as his bending of space collapsed, the part of him that had warped reality around itself removed with the eruption. Kim fell like glittering rain and falling rock through the brightening darkness as he searched for a piece of himself still on the island, as he tried to bend space to pull as many of the pieces of himself together as he could…

Willy! Was Willy all right? Was this something she could survive?

Bits of him fell into the lake. Into farmland with strangely oversized pineapples. Others, grains of sand, were caught by the winds and spread. Caught in cooling lava bombs as they arced to the ground, hitting roads, trees,  houses, fields, cars and people. He heard screams of pain as they burned, but there were so many things he could see and hear, so much.

Kim closed his eyes, cut himself off.

The one bit of him left, the one he was seeing through, feeling through, hearing through, sank into the dark, boiling hot waters of the lake. The bit that was him, a small, perfect cube the size of a paperweight, seemed to hover for a moment in the dark void before landing on… hot, glowing red stone that was making the water around it bubble into steam.

For a moment, Kim just lay there, absently reconfiguring his molecules, letting the heat seep into him slowly and seep out very quickly, the little bubbles of steam making him dance on his corners as he tried to work out what had happened.

The ground, he realized. The ground under them had exploded. His bending of space had trapped the Lava Horse from the sides and above, but the ground…

Kim wanted to close his eyes. Wanted to lie down and give up. He felt like he should be tired, broken.

Where was Willy? Had she survived like he had? Had she been evaporated, and now needed to condense like rain? Had she been splashed out of the way and was even now mingling with the waters of the lake?

Should he get up? That… sounded insane. They'd already gotten their asses kicked twice. At least! Why put himself through this?

…

Right, that was enough self-pity.

Kim didn't take a deep breath, because he didn't need it. and it probably wasn't a good idea to do over steaming water and volcanic gases. So he just started growing, stone starting to protrude from his corners. Think tables. Four things that stuck out, two legs, two hands, head optional…

He felt heat on his feet as he walked out of the water like some kind of deep sea monster rising from the depths, ashy water dripping off him, leaving dark stains on his weakly glowing pink body. The entire island was bare as the sudden deluge of water released when space had collapsed had washed everywhere before returning back to the lake, followed by lava that now gushed out from two volcanic peaks. Overhead, the bright golden glow of the Lava Horse's massive form seemed to make the massive cloud of ash that covered the sky glow dully with reflected light. It's forelegs were set on the ground as it seemed in the middles of trying to 'pull' the back half of itself out of the ground, leading to lava surging and flowing in all directions.

For a moment, Kim just stood there, staring up at the glowing shape almost as tall as a mountain. A pretty huge hill, at least.

He didn't have eyes to close, but he'd grown fingers, so he clenched them. It didn't feel right, but it helped.

Stoically, he began to walk forward for round three, hoping that Willy was all right, hoping she'd come back and help him again. He thought they'd nearly had it between the two of them when Willy had managed to force it to solidify. Pink rocks protruded from his back and shoulders, shooting out around him, leaving a faintly glowing trail as he got ready to bend space again. Sometimes the ground under him would break, the stone still weak, revealing flows of molten lava that his foot sank into. His stone no longer cracked and melted, and it was like wading through hot mud, pulling his feet out.

Had the island gotten bigger? No, the lake had gotten smaller, the waterline receding back, exposing previously submerged rents in the ground from which lava was spewing, and lots and lots of garbage. The water had been evaporated, no doubt, joining the cloud above. He heard thunder in the distance, and could just faintly make out a haze of rain, somewhere up past the mountain-high rim of the caldera around them. All around him was darkness from the cloud above, and in front of him a beast seemingly from hell itself, on an island just as damned and burning, lit by the glow of lava now flowing freely down the sides of the island's slope. He didn't stop walking as the Lava Horse turned its head and seemed to stare right at him. A hundred feet tall, maybe? And that was just the head and forelegs. Probably bigger. Kim had nothing to judge the scale by anymore.

Briefly, rhetorically, Kim wondered if it would have been a good idea to stop glowing, just for a bit, until he'd had some kind of inkling of a plan.

Flame seemed to flare around its body as it let out another roar that literally shook the island and probably showed up on a seismograph somewhere. There was a titanic crack as another massive fissure tore itself open, and out of the earth, another horse made of lava emerged. It was small, only coming to the the first one's knees… which probably still put it in the range of 25 feet or so high.

From the ground, more lava flowed and became another.

And another.

A fifth was just pulling itself out of the ground, stumbling in uncoordinated confusion when the dark clouds to Kim's left suddenly stared to glow. No, not the clouds themselves. Something behind them, something so bright it shone through the kilometers-thick volcanic haze.

And then that glow was a burning light arching through the air overhead, a heat so intense he could feel it over the heat of the island around him, a light so bright it chased away the gloom and cast stark shadows across the land…

One of the Lava Horses exploded as the glowing point of heat and light slammed into it, through it and into the ground behind it, skidding a newly molten trail across the cooling layer of stone. The glow started to dim, and with it the new source of heat.

Kim was somehow not surprised to see a vaguely-human shaped… burning… glowy… person… standing in the middle of the Lava Horses.

It had become that sort of day.

He should probably do something and help.

Kim sighed and opened himself up again, connecting to the pieces of his body still on the island…

Chapter 21: On the Madness Of Mountains, Part 9

No matter how intense the light, Kim wasn't blinded. Neither were the Lava Horses. Or rather, the Lava Horse and what were likely drones. Being blinded need eyeballs, needed cells that reacted to light chemically, and thus could become overexposed. Kim didn't have those. Neither did they.

Thus, he didn't need to avert his eyes to keep from going blind as the bright, glowing person shot burning light at the Lava Horses, literally boiling them on the spot and making them vaporize explosively from the raw heat. Heat poured off the light in waves more intense than the lava, and Kim had to bend the air around him to divert the waves of heat straight up. The heat was already causing the dark clouds above to roil as a new, intense updraft formed as he bent space all around the island, everywhere he could. The heat that shone out all bent upwards, slamming into the clouds above. Water vapor and ash roiled away even as the clouds reflected the heat back down, only to be sent back up again, and again, and again. The clouds started to roil, taken higher and higher on currents of increasingly superheated air.  

He ran, using the bends all around him to shrink distances. It reminded him of that story about magic boots. It wasn't consistent, since he couldn't both bend the distance between himself and his destination and send the heat upwards, not right now. He wasn't sure what he could do that he wasn't already doing, since the glowy person and their 'burn in hell' beams of glowy doom seemed to be doing all right. They were human shaped, and right now he was thinking of learning from the last time he'd encountered people-shaped beings wielding terrifying eldritch powers. He rushed to their side, to help, to perhaps not get shot at.

The ground beneath them erupted like Kim had been half-expecting. Their light continued to burn even as they flailed at being unexpectedly launched into the sky. They slammed back into the ground almost lightly, leaving a red-hot imprint on stone and ash. Where they'd been standing was a rift in the ground, lava spurting like a fountain as the Lava Horse began to flow, reforming into a smaller size with hindquarters, obsidian eyes stark on its molten head as its hooves touched the gushing lava that had launched the glowing person into the air.

Lava flowed around their fallen form and starts boiling on contact, growing brighter and brighter from heat even as it started to wrap around them. The glowing person snapped up a hand, and—

The ground shook as something exploded, and the glowing form was tossed into the air again, her resting place a blazing hot crater as lava was thrown aside. Kim rushed forward to catch them, each step bent, before remembering that they were hot enough to melt stone, and snapped up his arm, throwing a piece of himself. It grew in midair, before shattering to sand. Each grain bent, reflecting away heat so they wouldn't melt, turning the pull of gravity and the movement of inertia into forward progress as it moved to intercept the incandescent, glowing form. Space bent, and suddenly they were landing in front of Kim. The stones under them immediately started to smoke, to glow with heat, to soften…

"Hey!" Kim called out, the voice made by his vibrations sounding strange even to him. "Are you okay?"

Something that was probably their head moved, and Kim could almost assume they were looking at him. It was hard to tell with all the glowing. He shuffled his feet, shedding layers that had gotten hot from contact with the ground before they could transfer the heat to the rest of him, leaving pink sand around him. Abruptly the glow dimmed, and suddenly there wasn't much heat coming from the glowing form. It was enough for Kim to make out a vaguely feminine outline. There was a sound in the air, almost just a faint vibration.

The Lava Horse's feet rose and it began to canter, picking up speed.

"Didn't catch that, but we need to move!" Kim said. The sand around them—her?—bent even as he bent the space around himself as well and—

There was a phantom feeling of like something falling into place, like feet going into new shoes that fit perfectly, of a falling fruit landing perfectly into a cupped hand as the bent space of the sand melded with the space he'd bent around him. The glowing girl didn't move but the space she was in did as Kim turned and ran, dragging the space she was in behind him so that they stayed the same relative distance apart despite the fact he was running as fast as his pink feet could carry him.

Behind him, he could feel the Lava Horse picking up speed, feel the vibrations through his legs, feel a sudden rumble—

Kim threw himself to the side, bending space to get distance as the ground in front of where he'd been erupted, dirt, ash and lava getting thrown into the air as another fissure tore open. That couldn't possibly have been any sort of coincidence or accident. Somehow, the Lava Horse was causing them!

…

Well, shit.

All right, it clearly wasn't just a dumb animal… made of lava… that was apparently just as intent on killing them as he was in killing it. More intent, really, since Kim wasn't doing very well. He scrambled to his feet, space still bent since he wasn't sure he could safely touch the glowing girl, only for a sudden flare of heat and light at his back to cause him to collapse the space she was in as he bent the heat away from himself.

The Lava Horse screamed as its head fell to the ground, a large part of its neck just gone in the sudden burst of heat that Kim had just barely managed to send upward when it had kept traveling after decapitating the Lava Horse, whose body was collapsing into a rushing, flowing, melting wave of lava that was suddenly acting like a running fluid and not, say, a giant horse monster.

Kim threw rocks that exploded into glittering sand, bending the lava to either side of them in a wide circle. The glowing girl, once more blazing bright and hot, suddenly seemed to cool, and another blast of infernal heat lanced at the lava. His sand was instantly vaporized in an instant as the beam of heat passed through it on its way to the lava. The lava exploded as well, and Kim had to bend the superheated hot gas and plasma away from him, even as the force of the explosion pushed the lava way to either side—

The ground exploded under him.

As he tumbled through the air, his body in pieces from force, sudden heat, and the ground eruption that had sent rocks and more lava up into his crotch at high velocity, all Kim could think was a tired 'Not this again' before he hit the ground. And hit the ground. And hit the ground. And hit the ground. And hit the ground some more.

On the upside, he had very quickly become acclimated to both being dismembered, and operating dismembered and separate parts of his body. He wondered if this was how Sanny felt?

He was hurriedly putting himself together before the inevitable lava came, bending space to physically connect parts that were close enough and just turning the bits too far away into sand while he grew replacement mass, when there was another vibration in the air. It was a high, warbling ululation, that sounded almost intelligible, as if someone had turned something's volume far too low and set the speaker just a little too far away.

The glowing girl was screaming, sending searing blasts of heat and light at the Lava Horse, gouging out glowing, molten scars into the landscape even as she hit. Kim quickly forgot about pulling himself together as he focused on bending space to keep the blazing deathrays from going beyond the islands boundaries. The towns and farms around Taal Volcano were having a bad enough day as it was. They didn't need to be disintegrated with random fire too.

The scream continued, not limited by petty things like lung capacity or strain on vocal chords. The sounds just seemed to come out of the air as the glowing girl struck again and again. The flares of light and heat didn't have the beam-like coherence they had before, occasionally becoming sprays and flame-like gouts, though they were no less hot and damaging. Lava body mass was explosively blasted away or vaporized, even as the Lava Horse started pulling on the lava it was standing on and trying to grow, seemingly trying to follow Sanny's advice about growing too big to be threatened.

Unfortunately for it, all it managed to do was become a bigger target. The Lava Horse kept getting reduced as it was struck by burning beams of heat to its body, blasting it apart into a twisted filigree of barely-connected, unnatural strands and globs of lava. The low, warbling scream was rising, sounding more human.

Predictably, the ground under her exploded into yet another mini-volcano, and Kim was in enough places to see every other previous rent in the ground explode seriously as the main caldera let out another explosive eruption of rising ash, smoke, and lava. The lake around the island was literally boiling with heat, the steaming geysers of water exploding from the surface, and even through the dark water filled with ash, there was an ominous molten glow. more lava bombs began to fall past the borders of the island, flying too high to be diverted by Kim's warping of space. This time, however, the glowing girl seemed to recover in midair as she blazed with heat and light and began darting around like a little fairy from hell, darting in aggressively.

The Lava Horse flailed wildly, a misshapen horse head with glittering eyes the only recognizably equine thing left as it tried to stumble away, tried to draw on more lava to reform itself, tried to grow, tried to attack—

Kim reached out and bent.

—but it couldn't move. It was stuck stumbling around in circles, circles that made it a good target. The glowing girl came at it, moving so fast she was like a cloud of light, even as more burning blasts whittled the Lava Horse down and Kim struggled to direct the blasts skywards, to deflect the heat so that the pieces of him wouldn't start cracking and breaking and melting…

Water suddenly slammed into the island, pure and clear as it went up the slopes against the flow of gravity, gather volcanic ash in its wake. It washed over the field of lava, flowed down the still glowing channels carved out by heat, over the craters. It fell into the open fissures that had erupted, immediately bursting into steam and geysers. Still the water continued to flow, an unnatural wave that continued to grow. They passed over bits of Kim, and some of his sand was dragged along with the ash, larger pieces sent tumbling by the current, buried in ash.

The water rushed straight for the Lava Horse, a huge mass at the head, and slammed into it, knocking it down. The bright lava darkened as it was cooled by the water, steam exploding outward, then exploding again as another beam lanced down, missing the Lava Horse but hitting the water. Most of the water kept moving, meeting flowing lava and cooling it, hardening the outer layers. The shells of stone broke, revealing more lava beneath, only to be cooled again and again.

In the middle of a steaming field, twisted stone moved, cracked, melted. Lava seemed to come from nowhere, growing on the rocks like flesh on a misshapen skeleton. The stone tried to move, only to crack, the lava covered stone collapsing to the ground. It was still large enough to cause a vibration though the ground, but it wasn't all that gigantic. A slightly large house, at best. A horse's head, with glittering black eyes, seemed to rise out of the lava. It was about the size of an office water cooler. It let out a wailing cry, of confusion, of anger, of distress.

Like the star called Wormwood, the glowing girl came down on it from above, and there was light. It blazed and there was a final scream that made the volcano rumble—and then silence. Then slowly, the light faded, taking the heat with it.

For a moment, Kim just lay there, waiting. No more glowing death beams shot out. The ground continued to steam, and so did the fissures, but no more lava flowed up from the depths of the earth. Tentatively, he grew, gaining mass until he had enough to form a usable body. Gingerly, carefully, he got to his feet, which immediately sank deep into the ashy mud.

After ten steps, he had to admit this was a stupid way to walk and hollowed himself out again, reducing his weight, then gave himself wide snowshoe feet. Why did he feel like a duck? Still, it helped distribute his weight enough that he didn't sink—well, he didn't sink very deep—even if the awkward gait her had to adapt was a bit slow. Fortunately, there wasn't another wave, and even though he could see Willy, at least he knew she was out there… somewhere…

He made the pieces of himself scattered about glow slightly to light the way as he made himself flow bright. With the light faded, darkness had returned, and while the ground still glowed hot, it was a weak glow that was completely unhelpful. Kim made what pieces of him were nearby bend, shortening the distance he had to walk. He'd had a good view for most everything until the water had come and briefly blocked his view with ash, but she should be…

Ah. No wonder he couldn't see anything. There was a crater. Another crater, he should say, where the glowing girl had let out one last blast before seeming to fade.

She hadn't faded. Not completely, anyway. She'd simply sank down out of sight.

At least, he assumed it was her. After all, they were glowing.

It wasn't the bright, sun-like glow of before. And while there was some heat, it was… weak, compared to the burning radiance from before.

That was because it was being emitted by lava.

At the bottom of the crater, a feminine figure knelt, head down, slamming their fists down on the glowing, semi-fluid stone. Their skin was slowly-cooling lava, dulled to a weak orange-red. Their hammering fists kept breaking the layer of cooling rock, revealing fresh lava that splattered with every impact. A strange sound was coming from them, as if someone was screaming while gargling.

He took a step back involuntarily, having had enough of lava for the day… but no. People-shaped. People made themselves more or less people-shaped. And…

—a snake, made of dirt and rock—

…maybe they were just confused.

"Miss?" he called, making sure to vibrate strongly. "Are you all right?"

There was a comical, almost cartoonish stretching moment as the one he really hoped was the glowing girl suddenly jerked up at the sound of his voice, their torso visibly narrowing as their head and most everything beneath it was pulled up about a foot higher with though their legs moving. She turned her head to look at him directly, dark black eyes glittering on a humanlike, glowing red face.

Which was a feat, since he was directly behind her.

A hole opened in her face, glowing of fresh lava as she turned, each movement punctuated by popping sounds as she struggled to her feet, which seemed to fuse to the ground when she set them down. She made a gurgling sound, and her face contorted into confusion.

"Uh, it takes a while to figure out how to talk," Kim said. "Because right now, you don't have lungs or vocal chords. Are you the glowing girl?"

She mouthed something, then nodded. Lines along her neck and jack cracked, exposing the molten rock beneath the stone.

"Then… thanks for showing up. We were sort of running out of things to do to that thing," Kim said. Growing a rock in his hand, he tossed it down into the crater. It shattered into sand in midair, spreading in all directions. He used those, bending space as he stepped forward and suddenly her was two steps in front of her.

Slowly, hesitantly, he held out a hand. "I'm…" he paused, remembering a conversation just that morning. "I'm Pinky," he said lamely. "I'm a superhero trainee. Just started today."

Hesitantly, she raised stony hand, glowing red hot. It excited his molecules, but not enough to start cracking and melting. At least, not in the very brief handshake they shared.

She opened her mouth again, but all that came out was a weird gurgling. Her brow crack as they came down in a frown, and when she opened her mouth again, there was a blazing, brilliant radiance like a spotlight, and a brief warbling in the air.

"I'm Jas…" a distorted whisper said, creating an inhuman voice. "I thought… I thought I was the only one…"

And suddenly her felt much closer to this girl.

"So did I," he said. "But it turns out we're both wrong. Isn’t that great?"

And that's when the second wave flooded over the island and drowned them both.

It was a very good thing neither of them needed to breathe.

 

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It was late afternoon when Kim heard something land near them through the fog. The rain had been coming down for at least an hour by then, and if it wasn't for Jas lighting so brightly, it would probably have been as dark as night. Between the rain, the fog and the thick ash clouds above all of Taal Lake was obscured.

He wondered what people thought of the sudden light in the middle of the lake.

Kim sat on the still cooling ground, the rain washing over him and washing away ash as he saw the two outlines in the fog. He reached out, feeling the pieces of himself on them, and made them start to glow pink even as he called out, "Over here!"

One turned towards his voice at the sound, then had to pause and pull the other with them. There was a flowing, runny sound as Willy suddenly ran past him, heading towards one of the two figures.

Jas stepped closer nervously, steam rising from her as rain fell on her hot stone skin. She was a lot like him in that respect, except for how she tended to crack her out layer to show the lava beneath. Her head, however, was a brilliant white flame, the details literally impossible to see, and only the fact that she said she was constantly pulling back in the heat she was generating kept her from being more than just really bright.

The leading figure resolved itself into Sanny, standing tall and wet and raising a hand to block her compound eyes. "Wow, that's bright," she said.

Oh, right.

Jas seemed to take the hint, because the light suddenly cut off, and her head was brightly glowing lava in the shape of a human face, with flows that implied hair. As he watched, the lava cooled, the 'hair' turning dark, while her face took one a red glow. Her eyes, however, was dark, glittering obsidian.

Kim made introductions. "Jas, this is Yellow, and over there in the fog is Green."

There were cracking sounds as Jas raised a hand and waved hesitantly. "Hi," she said as bright light glowed from her mouth, voice still distorted and strange, but better modulated.

"Hi," Sanny said with a nod, waving back. "Nice to meet you. I'd shake your hand, but third degree burns are a bitch."

"Yeah, I understand," she said, looking down at the bright yellow cracks on the hand she'd just used to wave, and the stem rising from her stone skin. "I… still need to work on it."

"She needs a ride back to the city," Kim said. "She flew here, but… well, she didn't look like that when she got hear. I think she might need more practice."

Sanny made a show of looking her. It had to be a show, she had compound eyes. "She ate it, then?" she said, a statement more than a question. "The Lava Horse?"

Kim nodded. "Yeah." He hadn't seen it, but…

—a snake, made of dirt and rock—

…he'd been in her position before.

Sanny nodded. "Sure, I can give her a ride. Though we might need to work out how to do that without her burning me."

"I taught her how to shrink," Kim said. "Will that help?"

"It's practically a requirement," Sanny said as Tammy and Willy emerged from the fog, the latter following behind the former as if it was the most natural thing in the work. For some reason, Tammy had more blooming flowers on her than before. There was one at her temple like a hair ornament, and lace-like petal cuffs at her wrists and around the base of her neck. Her head was blank, with only a visor-like line of black at about eye level. "Can you find out where your dad is? It might be a little hard to meet up with them in this rain. "

"Already did," he said. "They're parked somewhere along the road we were on. I can point them out, I think. But…"

Tammy made a happy sound, doing that happy-girl-clap that only girls seemed to do as her eyes—the black things she had for eyes—fell on Jas. "Ooh, someone new! That's five! We've got a full team! We're definitely rangers!"

"Sentai," Sanny… corrected?

"Same difference!"

"One is a shoddy knockoff of the other."

Aaaaand already he was lost.

Chapter 22: On the Madness Of Mountains, Part 10

Jas—or rather, Jaselle Alhambra, as she introduced herself—didn't have any clothes. According to her, she'd flown from Manila as superheated plasma, leaving behind a trail that was probably literally cold now.

"So, you can control heat?" Tammy asked excitedly as they flew, carried by Sanny as… something with wings. Bird wings, this time, since she complained it was a little too hot for insect wings, which seemed to be her preference. Multiple bird wings, to handle the weight of the four of them AND the rain, which was pouring down in earnest. Kim supposed all that vaporized lake water had to go somewhere. The four of them were stacked like a strange bracelet charm of beads, with Jas at the very bottom as a ball of volcanic glass that still glowed red with inner heat, Kim as a ball of pink stone connected to her—they'd grown rings that had snapped into each other's loop like a chain—Willy holding on to him as a ball of ice to prevent heat transfer, and Tammy at the very top being held by Sanny.

"Not directly," Jas said, a part of her lighting up with glowing plasma even as her obsidian vibrated so she could talk. "I could radiate heat, then somehow draw that heat back to myself, but I can't control it by beyond sending it out and drawing it back. And I can't draw in heat in general, only heat I've generated."

"Huh," Sanny commented. "That's… interesting. Is that why the fog? You pulled in a lot of heat out of the area?"

"Yes." Her initial nervousness at suddenly meeting the other girls had faded away, and while she was still getting the hang of making herself heard, vibrating using the cooled parts of her body seemed to be working better for her than trying to talk by modulating arcs of plasma. "That was dangerous of me. I was too aggressive in my initial attack."

"Well, it was probably your first fight," Tammy said soothingly. "I think you did pretty good. I mean, you lived, right?"

"I hope you don't think I'm a reckless person," Jas said. "I'm usually much more level headed. But when I saw the news report about there being some creature at the volcano, I just… had a strong urge."

"Oh, one of those," Sanny said dismissively. "Been there. Just don't give in to the one about eating us all and we'll be fine."

"People are friends, not food," Tammy chirped.

"Exactly."

"Yes, I've been managing to keep that one suppressed," Jas said. There was a buzzing warble of plasma that could almost have been a sigh. "How do you deal with it?"

"Constant vigilance, like the one-eyed psycho says," Tammy said.

"What she said," Kim agreed. "Though I don't know who she's referencing. I'm guessing it's a reference."

"You learn to pick which ones to ignore and which can be indulged," Sanny said. "It usually helps to have a good reason why not."

"Oh. I see."

A brief silence.

"Sorry we're not more helpful, but that's really all I can say," Kim said apologetically.

"In hindsight, I suppose it was foolish of me to expect our changes to be exactly similar," Jas said. Her voice sounded tired yet thoughtful.

"We can compare notes later, if you want," Sanny said. "I think we're almost at our destination. Kim, can you see the car? "

He grew a protrusion to one side to better see around Jas beneath him. "Yeah, I see it. Where are we going to change clothes, though?"

"Tammy, where's a good place for a bunch of bushes to spontaneously grow?"

"On it!"

They landed in the middle of a bare patch in the sudden and spontaneous bushes that had grown in an already obscured corner that quickly became even more obscured, and was probably going to baffle whoever was in charge of tending the plants around the gas station arcade mall… place his dad and brother had parked at. The drone that Sanny had sent ahead to get the backpack with their clothes came soon after. Or drones, rather, a small flock of the clearly unnatural things struggling with the pack before dropping into a field a long way off. A few minutes later, a single drone shaped like a large dog arrived at their hiding spot, the wet backpack incongruously on its back.

Several embarrassed minutes later where no one saw anything but it felt strangely intimate anyhow, Kim was walking towards the car, vines and a big leaf wrapped around his feet to look like sandals, an umbrella made from a length of bamboo and another leaf that Tammy had made in his hand. The girls followed after him, their feet similarly attired and carrying all-natural plant-grown umbrellas thanks to Tammy. Sanny had lent Jas her clothes, and the young woman had needed to fold up the hems of the jeans and tuck in the collared shirt to look presentable, the too-loose pants pulled back by subtly folding the waist and keeping the folds tucked in with wooden pegs like clothesline pins Tammy had also made. The latter was wearing the backpack on her front, the zipper partially undone.

The car was empty of course, but there was a fast food place nearby, and Kim could see his dad and brother there, eating lunch. He pointed towards them, and they diverted, leaving the umbrella plant things outside the door to drip dry. As soon as he got close, his dad got up and gave him a full-on man hug: both arms all the way around, patting him on the back and enough pressure to make Kim momentarily think of turning into stone.

"Hi dad," he said awkwardly. "We're back."

"You're all right," his dad sighed, relieved. He held on for one more second then, let go and stepped back. His brother was less man hug and more victory hug, like Kim had won a race or a contest or something, and his expression was less relieved and more awed. His dad turned to the girls. "You must be hungry. Why don't you all order something you can eat in the car, my treat." He reached into his wallet and handed a bill to Kim.

"Thank you sir," Tammy said politely. "Um, could we leave this bag here with you?"

"We'll watch it," Ryan said, then frowned, his gaze lingering on Jaselle. "Wait, didn't you leave with someone else?"

"Uh, dad, Ryan, this is Jaselle," Kim introduced. "We met her in Tagaytay."

Jas gave another awkward wave, though that was the only sign she might have been a little nervous. With her power off, she was a young woman of below average height, only an inch or two taller than Tammy. She had the sort of dark skin that indicated both natural skin tone and being out in the sun a lot, almost as dark as Sanny. "Hello, sir. Your son invited me to ride back with you to the city."

"Then where's Ate Sanny?" Ryan asked.

"In here," the backpack said, just barely loud enough to be heard.

His dad and Ryan stared at the partially open backpack as a small muzzle pocked out of the opening, followed by the head of a cute, golden puppy of indeterminate breed. It stared up at them with soulful brown eyes.

"Get me something too, okay?" the puppy said. "And tissues, in case it drips on me?"

 

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They went their separate ways almost anticlimactically, politely thanking Kim and his father for the ride and talking about how they should get together again next weekend since that day had been… busy. Tammy had apologetically asked if they could keep the drinks and snacks they'd bought in Kim's house for the next weekend, which was why Kim now had a stash of party food in his room. Jas had called for a taxi since she hadn't had her phone with her, and promised she'd come back to meet with everyone the following weekend. Sanny had asked for her clothes back by then.

Then the mildly awkward good byes had been exchanged one last time and… they were gone, with Sanny literally turning into a bird to fly away.

Dinner was quiet and awkward as Ryan and Kim moved the TV from the living room so they could watch the news over dinner, finally allowing him to catch up on what Sanny and Tammy had been doing. Naturally, since this was the Philippine news cycle, it was the same 3 sentences about how evacuees had been under attack by bees, 'the plant monster and the yellow monster' had arrived and started eating the bees while causing panic because they looked scary, they had  left, and eventually the bees had stopped attacking. All this was interspersed with what seemed the grainiest cellphone video they could get off the internet, lots of barely intelligible interviews with evacuees who either cried about how they had to leave everything they owned because of the volcano, local government officials of the affected regions saying how they were 'doing everything they can' and asking for relief supplies from viewers, and eyewitnesses talking about how frightened they were when the plant monster and yellow monster had suddenly appeared.

They also talked about the eruption of the volcano itself, and Kim was surprised to see that someone had gotten part of his fight with the Lava Horse on video. Sure, it was the same 'bottom of the grain barrel' quality, and there was only a pink glow and an orange glow, but that was definitely them. How suicidal had that person been? Kim distinctly remembered lava bombs falling from the sky many, many times.

After dinner, his father had called Kim to the guest room that doubled as his father's home office. What followed was what Kim could only call an intense debriefing, as his father sat him down and asked him to related everything that had happened after leaving the car in the middle of traffic. He repeated what he could remember, trying not to feel frustrated at father's insistence. He had to do it twice more, each time told to tell it in a different way, before his father finally let him go back to his room.

His bed was tempting, but habit made Kim tiredly check his phone for messages. There were no more messages from Katherine—he supposed she'd gone to sleep already, or was otherwise busy, and he debated sending her something before deciding against it. He needed his rest. Unconsciously, his finger moved to check his email.

There was a message from Sanny waiting for him there, containing an invitation to join a chat group, and a user name and password. The username was 'Pink'.

For a moment, he stared at it, debating whether to click it or not. He made his decision when he saw it needed him to download an app for his phone that he didn't have.

Kim went to sleep, putting it off for the morning.

He dreamed of strange spaces and lost places and the bones of the earth…

 

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It was only in the late afternoon, after breakfast, going to church, lunch, and almost getting volunteered to help his mother do the groceries did Kim have time to follow up on Sanny's message. Fortunately, downloading the app to his phone didn't result in any hidden hellishness, and he was able to log in using the username and password.

Hey, someone labeled 'Yellow' answered almost immediately. Been waiting for you. You all right?

Yeah. Sorry, I didn't answer last night, my dad wanted to talk to me about what happened and it went on for a while.

Ah. I hope you didn't get in trouble? Did he ask you to stop associating with us?

Kim frowned. He didn't actually. He just asked me what happened.

Oh? How unexpected. Well, let's not trouble trouble until trouble troubles us, then How are you feeling? Do you want to leave us? Is this goodbye?

For a long moment, Kim considered the question.

No. I'm staying.

Welcome aboard, then. Our name is almost certainly going to have the name 'ranger' in it now.

Kim raised an eyebrow as he typed. Why?

In response, a link appeared.

He clicked it.

Oh. That was why. They were still making that? Isn't that for kids?

 

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Over the week, the headlines continued. Scientists talked about the 'strangeness' of the Taal volcano eruption, and many foreign scientists and news media seemed to go out of their way to not mention the eruption had involved a giant horse made of molten lava running around. The few that did mention it did so almost perfunctorily, in an 'oh, and it was there too, we don't know enough to speculate if it had anything to do with it' sort of way, which… all right, was fair. Apparently, except for the one lunatic whose grainy video was making the rounds on all the news cycles, everyone else had the good sense to not try to take videos while exploding volcanic rocks were falling out of the sky.

After the rain and ash cloud had cleared, they also got a lot of new mileage of the 'before-and-after' shot of Volcano Island. The island had become covered in a new surface layer of lava and ash, wiping out all the plant life and any structures that had been built prior. It was noticeably larger, even accounting for the fact a lot of the lake's water had evaporated, and the many new fissures and spots where the ground had exploded under them still smoked. A few were even still oozing lava. All of this was interrupted by craters and trenches where the ground had obviously melted, the very ground looking like splattered goop that had been pushed away. Because it had. People were speculating as to what had caused it, and all sort of scientists where being dragged out to try and explain away the features.

It was when the news had to report on the evacuation from the area, and the rather public and much-documented appearances of Sanny and Tammy that people were no longer able to keep from mentioning them. In addition to videos of the many-mouthed, many-tongued horror monstrosity Kim had seen Sanny become, and the plants that Tammy had made to handle the bees, there were also videos of people getting out of their cars—despite the bees, which obviously started attacking them—to try and 'scare off the monsters' using what weapons they could scavenged from the cars, like umbrellas, lug wrenches, sticks and kitchen knives, faces wrapped in shirts to try and protect themselves. Many hadn't even done that.

The plants had been trampled, soft stems and stalks and bells falling easily, but Sanny…

In truth, the various videos showed Sanny being almost gentle with the people attacking her, moving out of the way with quick, animalistic grace and tripping people in the ground, where they stayed down. All the videos ended the same way, however: with her grabbing the umbrella, snapping it open and resting it on one shoulder as Sanny cocked her hip to one side and rested her hand on the other as she said, in a bitchy tone exactly like how she had yelled at him, "Stop attacking me you idiots! I'm trying to help you!"

There was lively debate—his brother Ryan seemed to be actively researching the subject—about what they were, demands they come forward to explain themselves, to submit to examination so people could 'create a cure for the monster menace'. There were senate hearings, which of course didn't seem to reach any sort of result, and the president gave rambling speeches that only tangentially related to the matter.

The internet was, of course, going nuts. The videos about her, and the more limited ones with Tammy in her humanoid form, were being constantly reposted, and had led to other videos, of the giant mosquito being trapped UP, of Tammy fighting it in Quezon Circle, of the two of them and Willy fighting a giant dog in the middle of a street. They joined the videos about all the monsters that were running around the city—or in one case, holed up in a giant spider web nest—which was apparently being followed with morbid fascination all over the world, and DID include the early, initial footage of the Lava Horse that had caught their attention.

With this renewed interest, people seemingly finally realized that these were not isolated incidents but some sort of continuing phenomenon. The onslaught of monsters got slapped with the catchy moniker of 'The Philippine Nightmaer' in overseas news media, not the least of which because an American news channel had given the label its own fancy logo, and only seemed to realize afterwards that they had done so with a prominent typo. Despite the spelling being corrected, the typo apparently became a minor meme mocking the seeming lack of response to the fact that there were monsters appearing in the Philippines. Kim really couldn't blame them. Even from where he was standing, life didn't seem to have been impacted that much, and he'd fought one of those monsters last weekend! There were reports of the economy going down—again—as foreign investors pulled out, but the economy was always going down!

The week passed mostly peacefully as Kim struggled with the dissonance of going back to the mundane world of college and electrical engineering courses…

 

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The first thing Kim did when he woke up was to gather up the bits of himself that had fallen off the bed. Leaving them lying around was a bad habit to get into, so he didn't, even though he'd needed to leave a lot of bits behind in Taal because he'd been too emotionally spent to go get them. It wasn't like leaving them lying around did any harm, after all.

The drinks had been chilling in the fridge since last night, and the chips were none the worse for wear after spending the week in a corner of his now-huge room. While he'd gotten better at shapes and making rudimentary structures with his stone, he still hadn't gotten much better at maintaining his balance. At least dissolving into sand before he hit the ground saved on wear and tear on the floor.

When the doorbell rang, he hurried down, using small pieces of himself he'd embedded along the stairs to cheat his way from the top to the bottom by bending space. He did the same to get from the front door to the people gate, glad that the high walls around the property kept him from being seen. Heart filled with nervousness and excitement, he undid the latch and pulled the door open.

And they were all there. Willy stood quietly, standing behind Tammy as the shorter girl chatted easily with Katherine, who for some reason was wearing a pink shirt. She hated that color. Sanny looked as tall and basketball-capable as usual, wearing a black button down shirt with all the buttons done up and black slacks, the same backpack as last week over her shoulder. Another flat square yellow box of brownies were in her hands. She gave him a friendly smile. "Hey," she said. "New girl here yet?"

Kim shook his head. "Not yet. She said she'd be here though. Hey, Kat," he greeted his girlfriend.

Katherine gave a quick kiss. "Hey babe," she said. "New girl? Was this the one you met in the volcano?"

"Yeah. She said she'd be here today."

Katherine raised an eyebrow. "Is she hot? Should I be concerned?"

"Given that she can melt solid rock, yes, she's very hot," Sanny drawled.

Katherin nodded solemnly. "Well, I better meet her then, just in case."

Kim rolled his eyes. "Well, don't just stand there, come in, come in," he said. "Kat, can you take them to the sala, while I wait for—"

At that moment, a tall, American-brand pickup truck pulled up to the curb. It was one of the more expensive models, and the tinted windows to keep the sun out also kept anyone from seeing in. A moment later, no one had to as the door as one of the back doors opened and Jas stepped out. "Thanks for the ride uncle," she said.

"Bye, Jas!" more than one feminine voice called.

"Be careful, Jas," a man, likely the uncle in question, said. "Have fun in moderation, okay? And use a—"

Jas slammed the door with a sigh, cutting off the sentence. Wearing clothes that weren't several sizes too big for her, she looked like a girl from the provinces who'd come to Metro Manila to go to college and had put on something smart to interview at a part-time job for work credits. She impatiently waved the pickup to move along, and after a moment it did, and she waved it good bye before turning to everyone with hesitantly.

"Um, hi again," she said, giving the same small, awkward wave.

"Hey, Ate Jas!" Tammy replied cheerfully. "Glad you could make it!"

A small, hesitant smile. "I hope I'm not late?"

"No, you're right on time," Kim said, giving her a welcoming smile. "Everyone was just about to come in."

They all trooped inside, and he stayed behind long enough to close the gate behind them. Then with a step, he was at the front door, waiting with theatrical patience.

"Whoa, cool!" Tammy exclaimed, looking behind her as if to confirm he'd actually moved. "Was that a Flash Step or did you teleport?"

"I don't know what that first one is, so I can only say I didn't teleport," Kim said.

"He's been doing that all week," Katherine said, smiling indulgently.

"I have decided distance can go away and leave me alone," Kim confirmed. "At least in my own house."

"Damn," Sanny said enviously. "I wish I could do that to my commute. I could sleep in longer."

"I'm still working to connect the house to the campus," Kim admitted. "But I've cut the distance by half, so I should be fine by next week."

"Lucky you," Jas said, looking equally envious. "I can't fly to school. My bag wouldn't survive it, and I need my books."

Kim opened the door. "Well, we can talk about it inside, in the sala."

As they entered, Kim asked, "So, have we got name yet?"

"Yup!" Tammy said. "After careful thought and consideration, we've decided to call ourselves the Nightmærangers!"

"Nightmare Rangers?" Jas repeated with the look of someone not sure she'd heard right.

"No, Nightmærangers," Tammy corrected. "One word. N-I-G-H-T-M-squashd-together-a-e-symbol-R-A-N-G-E-R-S."

Kim, fortunately, was used to excitable young professors who talked fast. "Why not just spell it with an 'ae'?"

"And why is it misspelled?" Jas said.

"Because it's cooler written down," Tammy said seriously.

"Should we vote on this?" Kim said.

"Tammy and I came up with it, and you know Willy is just going to vote whichever way Tammy goes," Sanny said.

"Wow, elections are rigged already," Jas said blandly.

"Unfortunately, Tammy and Willy are a solid voting bloc, so all they really need is one other person for a majority," Sanny shrugged.

"Don't worry, I will use my vote-rigging powers responsibly," Tammy said virtuously.

"That's all we can ask for," Kim said dryly. He tilted his head. "Still, I suppose it's not a bad name. I guess you've heard about the typo?"

"Yup. I'll admit, I got the idea from there."

"You realize we're missing at least one other word, right?" Sanny said lazily as they headed for the living room. "A proper name needs at least three words in it."

"It does?" Jas said, looking lost.

Sanny nodded with all seriousness. "Yes, a full proper name will go like 'Something Something Nightmærangers'. Though if we go with 'Something Sentai Nightmærangers', then we’d only have to think of one other word…"

"Don't worry," Kim said, giving Jas a sympathetic look as he reached over to close the door. "You get used to it."

The door closed behind them.

Chapter 23: Interlude: Pink

Summary:

The Little Pink Bottle

"So, while I have all of you here…" Kim began as the various sugary carbonated drinks flowed and bags of chips were opened, "can I ask for your help? Willy and Tammy especially."

"What about, Kuya Kim?" Tammy asked.

"How do you keep your balance?" he asked, exasperated. "I mean, Sanny's no surprise—"

"I use ears," Sanny said, nodding.

"—but what about the rest of you? Because I keep cheating by just twisting space around me so I'm standing straight, but that only works so long…"

"What?" Katherine said, looking torn between confusion and amusement.

"Oh, yeah, that can be a problem," Tammy nodded. "Not so much when you're walking, but when you're running and jumping around, or doing it through a drone yeah, balance can be an issue."

"How did you solve it?" Kim asked eagerly.

"Oh, well, it turns out roots have little structures that can orient with gravity so they know which way to grow," Tammy said. "So a make a couple in my head to act like an inner ear so I have a way to help me balance. It works pretty well."

Kim twitched, and sighed. "Darn. I can't do that."

"Sorry, I can't help either," Jas said. "I orient using plasma, which tends to go upward because it's lighter than air. It's the opposite of how Tammy does it, but it gets the same result. "

Kim looked towards Willy pleadingly.

Tammy nudged her cousin. "Willy, how do you keep your balance when you're made of water? Or ice, in some cases?"

Willy tilted her head. "I… don't need to?" she said, as if not sure why it was even a problem. "I've never had trouble keeping my balance."

"Water does find its own level," Sanny mused. "Well-known masonry fact."

Kim sighed. "Damn. And I was really hoping you had a solution I could use."

Sanny tilted her head thoughtfully. "I have a little idea, if you're willing to try it."

"I've got nothing that doesn't include more warping of space, so go ahead."

"Okay, you're going to need a bottle…"

 

---

 

It was more of a round-bottom flask than a bottle, unless you were talking about the kind used for some fancy balsamic vinegars. Kim made it with his self, forgoing the more usual easy geometric shapes he was used to. At Sanny's suggestion, he then dropped in a small round piece of him self and watched it roll around inside.

"Ta dah," Sanny said. "An artificial inner ear, good for being able to tell up from down, with pretty decent sensitivity."

It took a little blinking before the penny dropped and Kim got what she meant. Slowly, he swung the pink, slightly transparent bottle—not true glass, but rather pink obsidian—and felt the little ball rolling around inside.

"A bit big, don't you think?" Kim said.

Sanny shrugged. "I'm sure you can figure out how to shrink it."

And he did.

Chapter 24: The Statement Of Jaselle Alhambra, Part 1

Jaselle Alhambra had always considered herself a heavy sleeper, even if she'd always woken up early so she could do her chores and get ready for school in the morning. When she'd slept, she had slept, dead to the world and not to be roused until the stars were right and it was time for her to wake.

That had changed.

And so, as Jas jerked awake in the middle of the night from dreams where she stood alone in darkness, supreme and unchallenged and singing in the music of the spheres carried on the solar winds, she found that in her sleep she had begun to turn into the raging fires of hell.

Her skin was glowing, and she hurriedly threw herself off the bed and onto the carpet next to it, scrambling for the open door of the bathroom and onto the tile to keep anything more from burning anything. She'd already told her Uncle Carlo a candle had fallen while she was praying the last time she'd accidentally set the carpet on fire, and that wouldn't work again. Jas was sure he suspected she was smoking, given how he had casually mentioned the benefits of e-cigs and vaping over actual cigarettes, and how they didn't lead to tar and lung cancer…

The bathroom light was turned off, but she provided enough light to see by, even without the glow of the streetlights coming in through the windows. Her skin glowed with heat, patches of it burning with an orange, molten light, while strips flared into plasma that thankfully caused more light than heat. Frantically, she pulled off her clothes so they wouldn't burn, even as she tried to take control of her body from the urges surging through her, tried to pull the heat she was radiating back into her. Jas could feel her insides shifting, surging with heat hotter than the house could safely hold. She felt nauseous and hollow as her stomach turned to lava, burning inside her, lungs filling with fire before they turned to sunfire. She felt the heat and dense burning gas rising from her and she clamped her mouth shut, closed her throat. She felt like she was going to throw up, but she didn't move towards the sink. There was no point. She had to hold it in, because it would come out as either lava or solar plasma, and both would set her uncle's house on fire.

Even as she kept her body from burning, in the back of her head, her power raged. Enthusiasm, wonder, curiosity, eagerness, a restless energy pressed against her, a familiar feeling of excitement as if she were waiting for Christmas morning or her birthday, only a hundred times more intense. If her teeth weren't already grit to help her keep down the heat trying to rise up her throat—her throat was gone, it was lava now, and what had been her stomach roiled like a shaken soda bottle—she would have clenched them tight as she pushed down those urges, slowly taking back control of her body's state. It wasn't that she couldn't move, but her body kept changing. Jas felt her eyes start to burn—literally start to burn, filling with a scorching heat—and she had just enough time to squeeze her eyelids shut before her vision disappeared, becoming the true darkness of blindness and not just closed eyelids as her eyes ceased to exist, becoming small, burning balls of hot gas.

She had literal stars in her eyes.

Growling slightly, Jas took control of body, hardening herself. Her eyelids sealed, fusing together as she turned them into obsidian, and suddenly she could see again, even if there were strange distortions and odd angles in her eyes from the facets. In the mirror, it looked like she had glowing red eyes as the light of the burning plasma was filtered through the volcanic rock. She saw by her own light as her obsidian eyes saw from both sides and she found herself looking at the stars that burned within her…

She stood tall, glaring at her reflection, at the dark shape with burning eyes and skin that glowed in patches as she imposed control. That was her adversary, that dark monstrosity, a burning demon that—

There was a burst of confusion, and then the rush of enthusiasm and excitement faded, leaving only a strange hollowness, and she was finally able to push the urges back. She made her annoyance and nausea known as she forced her insides back into order, as she made her lungs and stomach and esophagus and her eyes and everything else come back with force of will. She pulled in the heat she'd been radiating despite herself, and the bathroom suddenly chilled.

Panting, Jaselle stood there, both hands on the thankfully marble countertop of the bathroom sink, getting herself under control until the counter felt cold under hear hands. Her glow was gone, and what little diffuse glow from outside barely let her make out her outline. She patted at the wall to the left of the sink until she felt the row of light switches under her hand and flicked on the switch in the middle of the three.

A soft, warm golden light from the panels on the ceiling lit the bathroom gently, and Jas winced at her reflection. Dark, glassy eyes stared back at her as obsidian shone on her face, so like the monster she had killed and devoured to get them. She didn't close her eyes to concentrate, since they were already close, but she concentrated, and the volcanic glass began to recede as if they were being stabbed deeper into her flesh, sinking into dark skin and settling and dissolving to become eyelashes before she was blind again. Or at least, standing with her eyes closed, with a dim, indistinct glow from the light still passing through her eyelids.

Jaselle finally opened her eyes, just because she could, and stared at herself in the mirror. A thin young woman of below average height stood there, the sun darkened skin of her arms, head and neck from helping with the planting season before coming to Metro Manila contrasting sharply with the slightly paler brown of the rest of her. Her uncle's housekeepers-slash-live-in-girlfriends had been cooking all sorts of rich, tasty food in an effort to fatten her up, but beyond being delicious and filling it didn’t seem to be having any effect.

Sighing, she flicked off the lights. With only the glow from the windows, she picked up her sleeping clothes and put them on. They weren't even sweaty, only a little warm and dry, as if fresh from the dryer her uncle had shown her. The air conditioning was off, since it was too cold, but the electric fan in the corner continued to turn. She'd long since gotten over the guilty extravagance of having an electric fan pointed solely at herself without needing to share it, and so there was only a slight twinge that felt like her grandmother's disapproving scowl as she went back to bed.

She woke up two more times to find her body about to catch fire, or turn into fire, but fortunately she'd woken up before anything had gotten too warm and started charring. Ever since she'd started living with her uncle, she'd been waking up outrageously late, and today was no exception, with the sun already starting to peek over the horizon. She couldn't see it, since her room was on the north side, but she could feel it unerringly, feel the distant churning that was the star's burn, the second-hand goosebumps of roiling plasma, so far, so separate but seemingly almost, almost close enough to touch…

Even with interrupted sleep, Jas woke up feeling completely well rested and brimming with energy. There was none of the reluctant sluggishness that she remembered from waking up before the dawn to prepare for the day and her chores and getting her siblings ready, as if she'd had a whole night's uninterrupted sleep. She could feel that most of that eager enthusiasm was coming from the back of her head where the burning power lay, and this time she indulged it, letting the enthusiasm sweep her up as she bathed and got dressed. The bathroom, like the electric fan, was all for her, which she didn't need to share with any of Uncle Carlo's girlfriends. It even had cold AND hot water, although she didn't use the latter. Hot water was for wounds and cooking, and it was wasteful to bathe with it unless you were old and sickly like her grandmother. Still, on the cold, tiled floor, she allowed a little of her heat to glow from her heat, the heat of molten rock rather than a burning star, and feeling the ticklish sensation of the water sizzling and flashing into steam as it washed over her.

When she pulled back the heat, water condensed everywhere, even the ceiling, and Jas took a moment to wipe it all down so that one of the housekeepers-slash-live-in-girlfriends wouldn't need to. It was her mess, after all, and so she cleaned it up. Then she got dressed in the smart slacks and cotton blouse that her family had bought brand new from the second hand store and headed downstairs, where she could already smell tocino and eggs being cooked.

 

––––––––––––––––––

 

"Ate Jas!" a voice called out noisily, reminding her of one of her little sisters. "Over here!"

She'd already seen them, and gave a small wave of acknowledgement, adjusting her schoolbag with her notes and papers and notebooks and the expensive secondhand textbooks in it. Her rusty, dented pencil case was in a different pocket so that it wouldn't stain the papers.

To her guilty delight, there was a plate there with a cookie for her, a notion that was confirmed when Ate Sanny nonchalantly pushed the little plate in her direction with a negligent wave. "Thank you," Jas said, quietly and sincerely, tearing off a small piece from the edge and popping it into her mouth, careful to catch all the crumbs on the plate so nothing went to waste. The urges rose to grab the whole cookie and shoved it into her mouth, but she stifled it sternly. This was a treat, she had to make it last!

The blonde-dyed, dark-skinned woman looked like she wanted to say something, but then she always wanted to say something. She was a very talkative person. Whatever it was, she visibly changed her mind before her mouth opened again. "We're not keeping you from anything, are we, Jaselle?" she asked.

Jaselle shook her head, giving in to temptation to pluck out one of the cookies raisins. The fire roiled with glee at the sweetness spread in her mouth. "No Ate Sanny, I've already done all my coursework for next week."

Ate Sanny blinked. "It's Saturday morning," she said disbelievingly.

"Yes?" Jas said, not sure what she meant. She plucked off another piece.

"What's wrong with doing your coursework early?" Kuya Kim said, holding a cup of what was probably very expensive coffee. "I did most of mine last night too."

Ate Sanny sighed. "I graduated, I don't need to justify my studying habits to anyone," she muttered to herself.

"I'm doing my homework right now," Tammy said proudly. "I locked the door to my room and left another me in there. It's kind of hard concentrating on what's going on here and thinking about my homework too, but I'm managing it!"

"What, really?" Sanny said, surprised. "Being in two places at once is easy. I'm two places at once all the time."

"You have work on Saturdays?"

"No, groceries. I'm almost out of chocolate."

"Maybe it’s the brains," Kuya Kim said. "If each of your body has a brain in it, then aren't you basically working with double brain power?"

Ate Sanny blinked. "Huh. I never thought of that. You might have a point." She frowned. "That probably explains why having more bodies to control isn't hard. Each body has a new brain to help with coordinating and controlling."

"Lucky you," Tammy sighed. "All of mine are just lumps of wood."

"It's still getting your homework done," Kuya Kim pointed out.

"I suppose. Hang on, I have to look up something…"

Tammy fell silent, staring into nothing. For a moment, the five of them sat in relative silence as the music of the stupidly expensive coffee shop played mixed with the buzz of conversation.

"Okay, I'm back," Tammy said suddenly. "Did I miss anything?"

"Why isn't Willy doing her homework?" Ate Sanny asked as Jas nibbled on another piece broken off the cookie.

"Because she's a pro at homework," Tammy said proudly. "All she needs to do is write it down, and she can do that later. Willy's at the top of our class. Of the year, even."

Next to Tammy, Willy shifted slightly.

"Okay, now that we're all here, we can get started," Ate Sanny said. "When it was just the three of us, Tammy, Willy and myself, we tried to deal with that thing in Makati. We failed horribly and got eaten several times." She paused. "Well, I got eaten. Tammy just sort of got melted since the Gagambuhala wasn't a vegetarian, and after that Willy left and went home. But with Jas here, we'll finally be able to deal with that asshole!"

Tammy nodded. "Yeah, with a leader we'll finally be able to fight as a team." She smiled at Jas, who hesitantly smiled back, not understanding.

"Jas can't be the leader Tammy," Ate Sanny said, and Jas nearly choked on the crumb she was eating. Kuya Kim looked at her in concern, but Jas waved him off, swallowing. "For one thing, she's literally the newest person here."

"Rookie reds being in charge is a thing!"

"For another, you're clearly in charge, since being superheroes was your idea," Ate Sanny said. "I can't be in charge, because I'm not a leader, Willy can't be in charge because she'll do what you say, so that's tantamount to you being leader anyway, and Kim and Jas are too inexperienced and don't have the passion you do for this idea."

"But… I'm green!"

"I can't believe I'm saying this, but we really shouldn't imitate everything we see on TV," Ate Sanny said. "Just being the red one doesn't mean they'll be a good leader."

"I don't want to be leader," Jas said quickly.

"There, you see?" Ate Sanny said, gesturing. "She doesn’t want to be leader. She's not that kind of overachiever." Overachiever? Was that an insult? "So it's on you, Tammy. Your idea, your passion."

"But… I don't know how to lead!"

"Just keep doing what you've been doing already," Ate Sanny said.

"Are you sure you're not the leader?" Tammy said, sounding desperate.

"No, I'm the lone wolf independent one who makes sure the leader does their job, while the leader keeps them in line," Ate Sanny said cheerfully.

"Eh? I wanted to be that one!"

Ate Sanny just stared at Tammy.

"All right, I can't pull it off, but I wanted to anyway!"

Jas finished her cookie as Kuya Kim checked his phone, replying to messages.

"Are you two done?" Kuya Kim asked, glancing up from his phone.

Ate Sanny and Tammy looked at each other.

"Yeah, I think we're done," Ate Sanny said.

"Sorry," Tammy said, looking guilty. "I just don't have anyone to talk to about this."

"Well, don't forget we're here too," Kuya Kim said. "About something we can all understand?"

Tamy nodded. "Right. Well, as Ate Sanny was saying, we're going to go kill the giant spider in Makati."

"While we have personal reasons for wanting it stone cold, dead, and eaten," Ate Sanny said, "we're not choosing this for personal reasons, but for the greater good. Namely, that if we kill this thing, the military will finally stop parking their tanks in the middle of the street and open up EDSA again, traffic will go back to more or less normal, and we can stop waking up three hours early to get to work on time!" That last bit was said with gritted teeth and clenched fist.

"I warp to school now," Kuya Kim said a little smugly. "Saves a lot on gas."

"I agree getting traffic back to normal will be good for a lot of people in the city," Jas said, thinking of the heavy traffic in front of her university. While she didn't mind walking when it was literally faster than sitting in her uncle's truck or sitting in the car with Lila, Uncle Carlo's girlfriend who attended the university with her, it made her sweaty and uncomfortable, making it hard to concentrate on her classes. And her uncle kept telling her that the streets around her school were unsafe and full of bag snatchers and pickpockets, so she shouldn't walk there…

"I just want to wake up two hours before class instead of three," Tammy said. "Sleeping on the school bus sucks." She nodded. "Okay. Let's finally squash that stupid bug and get traffic back to normal levels of terrible instead of hellish!"

Some people probably heard the pronouncement over the coffee shop's music, but Jas doubted it.

"Are we flying again?" she asked.

"Well, traffic is horrible right now, which is exactly why we're doing this, so yes, we're flying."

Jas looked down at her clothes.

"Don't worry," Kuya Kim said. "I've been working on the problem, and I have something to take care of it." He reached down to the floor next to him and pulled up an old-looking briefcase. It was dark brown and slightly scuffed. He lay the briefcase on the table, spun the combination, undid the catches, and opened the lid.

They all stared. Ate Sanny reached inside the briefcase, and her arm went in up to the elbow.

"Ooh," Tammy said. "It's bigger on the inside!"

"I've been trying things out," Kuya Kim said confidently.

Ate Sanny nodded. "Does it affect how much things put inside it weigh?"

Kuya Kim grew still. "Ah. I knew I was forgetting something. You can't fly with this, can you?"

"Not very well, no," Ate Sanny said.

"Well, back to the drawing board," Kuya Kim said. "Not that I use one… Drones? I've been practicing with mine."

"We need to devour it to kill it properly," Ate Sanny said. "Drones can't do that. Only we can." She flexed her fingers, which seemed to move in ways human fingers shouldn't.

The fire roared, and Jas had to stiffen, locking her muscles to keep control of herself as she felt muscles in her legs and arms start to burn and flow, becoming fiery lava. She saw a spot on her arm starting to glow…

The fire wanted to burn. The fire wanted to devour…

"Ate Jas? Are you all right?"

She blinked, her body hot, feverish even, and she could feel her face drooping slightly as the bone beneath began to melt, spreading to the skin above it…

And then her face was firm but she felt hot, so hot, and there was glowing plasma on her breath. Ate Sanny was subtly leaning away fanning her face—

Jaselle pulled in her heat, willed her body to solidify, to cool, to be flesh and nothing softer. The fire resisted, filling her with petulance and hunger, but she focused on. This wasn't the time for this, she needed control, not heat, needed to hold back or else people could get hurt…

Sternly, not wavering, she forced the fire to behave. The petulance remained, stronger than ever, but no heat escaped and plasma and lava was reigned in…

Eventually, when she was sure that nothing was coming out of her mouth that could burn, Jas said, "I'm fine, I'm fine." Her eyes were closed, she realized, and obsidian shards had grown among her eyelashes. She pulled the volcanic glass back, opening her eyes, which felt strangely dry, and she blinked to bring moisture back to it.

"It happens," Tammy said sympathetically. "Maybe we should stop meeting in public places, we seem to have more little accidents when we're together."

"We do. I think we find each other kind of delicious," Ate Sanny said casually. "Jas was looking at me when it happened, and I was talking about devouring… "

The fire surged again, but this time Jas was ready. And this time, she noticed that Tammy stiffened as a slight pale and green sheen came over her and Kuya Kim became slightly… pinker. Only Willy and Ate Sanny seemed unaffected.

"People are friends, not food," Tammy said shakily. "People are friends, not food… people are friends, not food…"

Willy reached down to hold the other girl's hand, and Tammy jerked back as if burned, little brown roots growing on her hand. The taller girl didn't react, but took her hand back and sat patiently.

"So…" Kuya Kim said, and there was a strange vibration in his voice, "We were going out to eat, right?"

"Yes," Ate Sanny said, and Jas saw, for the briefest of moments, triangular shark-like teeth between the woman's lips. "We were going out to eat."

Chapter 25: The Statement Of Jaselle Alhambra, Part 2

"I really wish we could look more alike," Tammy sighed as Jas carefully folded up her blouse around her underwear so they wouldn't be seen, then as carefully wrapped her slacks around them, her cellphone and coin purse secured in the pocket. She had to remember to keep pulling her heat in constantly, and to be careful with how she moved since her sense of touch was almost non-existent. The points and angles of her body were sharp, and she moved with exaggerated care to keep from damaging her clothes. Jas glowed crimson with barely restrained heat, bright orange lines cracking almost open with every movement. She saw through a black band of obsidian on the front of her face, grown with as few facets as possible so she wouldn't have so many weird angles in her field of view. Other bits of herself picked up vibrations to let her hear, and she augmented that with two fluttering clouds of plasma inside holes where her ears would be. Hearing and sight were all she had to work with. Between that distraction and the strangeness of her whole body, she could almost overlook the fact she was, in fact, completely naked.

Almost.

"Well, it's not like we're just wearing different-colored spandex here," Ate Sanny said as she rotated her arms at the shoulders, the limbs moving with unnatural, inhuman range of motion. "We have different textures, different materials, different transparencies… we were never going to be uniform except for our colors and the shapes of our heads, Tammy. This is real life." She began casually folding up the clothes she had shed in a much more haphazard and careless banner, not bothering to fold them properly, merely rolling them all up into a tube. Jas didn't wince at such carelessness, since she had to be careful with her movements, but she wanted to.

"Yes, this is real life, where we're all stripping naked to use our superpowers to fight, kill and eat a giant spider so we don't end up eating each other, for the noble goal of restoring traffic back to normal so we can sleep in longer in the morning," Kuya Kim said.

"Real life is notorious for being fucked up," Ate Sanny shrugged.

They'd gone over to Kuya Kim's car which had been parked in a dark corner of the underground parking lot near the coffee shop they'd all met. There was no hope of actually driving to their destination. At least, not in any reasonable amount of time. It was midmorning, so the traffic was already thick. Instead they were planning to fly to Makati the way they'd flown from Tagaytay. It was actually a shorter distance, and because it wasn't raining, so Ate Sanny said, she'd be able to make better time.

Of course, before they could do that, they had to get naked.

Kuya Kim had parked close to a wall, and on a casual glance it would have looked like there was no room for people in the corner the car was blocking off from the view of any security cameras or passersby, but he had poured a little pink sand from his hands onto the ground… and suddenly there was plenty of room for all five of them. It hurt Jas's eyes and brain to look at for too long, never mind that the former was currently made of volcanic glass and the latter was either rock, lava or plasma depending on how her insides were mixing right then, but at least they didn't have to crowd disturbingly close together. Tamma had dropped seeds that had expanded into tall, wide leaves to give the girls some semblance of privacy from Kuya Kim while they undressed, and each of them had gone to their separate corners.

They undressed quickly, because even if they were in a corner and Kuya Kim was warping space to make them hard to see, there was always a chance that people would pass by. Willy just turned into water and let her clothes fall off her, stepping out of her shoes and socks and somehow leaving all of it dry, while Ate Sanny was almost as casual, just stripping off her clothes as if she undressed in public every day. Jas tried not to assume anything from it. Perhaps she just felt really comfortable around them?

"They never really show this on TV shows," Tammy said as she stuffed her clothes into her now empty jeans and wrapped the jean's legs around the whole thing to secure it. "Everyone is either already wearing their costume or there's a cut and suddenly they had a wardrobe change, or they used their transformation item or they had super speed…"

"Yeah, well, they probably don't want to use up half the runtime on the episode on getting dressed," Ate Sanny commented. "Everyone done getting changed? Tasteful blank doll anatomy all around? Kim, got rid of all the dangling bits?"

"Yeah," Kuya Kim said. "Can you get rid of this now?"

The leaves—wide fronds that Jas didn’t recognize and suspected Tammy might have just made up—shivered, than seemed to shrink, getting small and smaller like it was growing backwards. Jas was certain it would have regressed back into a seed in a bizarre unbirthing if Tammy hadn't suddenly stepped forward and touched the receding plant. They seemed to fuse with her skin—bark?—before being sucked up into her body, like hairs growing backward into the body as Jas watched with morbid fascination.

"Uh, Jas?" Ate Sanny said. "Your head is burning."

Jas instinctively reached up to pat at her head, but of course she didn't feel anything. She was still pulling in heat, which she hadn't allowed to slip. But she saw the flickering light on one of the windows of Kuya Kim's car. She didn't blink in surprise, because she didn't have the eyelids for it, but she would have. The fascination… that wasn't hers. Well, a little bit was, but most of it was coming from the fire inside. Now that she wasn't feeling it herself, she could feel that the fascination was streaked with curiosity, all of it morbid, like a child who'd seen a classmate do something disgusting and wanted to know if they could do it themselves. She didn't need to breathe, so a sigh of irritation would have just been an affectation, but she suppressed the plasma, and the golden, flame-like halo that had formed around her head diminished, leaving only rough dark stone that slowly began to glow red again from internal heat.

"Well… that was an image," Kuya Kim said.

"If she does that without meaning to, it'll be up to you to keep me from being barbequed," Ate Sanny said. "No offense Jas, but that didn't look like it was planned."

Jas ducked her head meekly. Honestly, it wasn't like she could disagree.

Kuya Kim tilted his head. "What about Tammy? She'd be charcoal."

"I'm fairly certain Willy wouldn't let that happen, but only for Tammy."

Willy nodded.

"See? She'd let me burn."

Another nod.

"Willy, don't let Ate Sanny burn," Tammy said. "Don't let anyone burn. Harmful negligence like that is wrong, all right?"

Willy nodded as readily as when she'd admitted she'd let Ate Sanny burn.

Ate Sanny and Kuya Kim exchanged a look. Jas wasn't sure what they were seeing, since Kuya Kim's face was blank pink stone with light white marbling and a band of darker pink to serve as something to make eye contact with—he'd said he could see from every inch of his body, but people had been disturbed at having no features to look at—and Ate Sanny had blank compound eyes on a face made of hard yellow carapace that was all of one piece except for a featureless slit that she used to talk, which was hidden behind overlapping plates most of the time.

"I'll keep an eye out," Kuya Kim said.

"Much obliged."

 

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Despite the not unreasonable fears of ignition, flying was uneventful.

It was also exhilarating.

The first time Jas had flown, she'd barely been conscious, too overwhelmed with urges that weren't her own and trying to keep from burning everything around her. Thankfully she'd been alone in her uncle's house when it had happened, and she'd managed to get outside before she had destroyed anything. She didn't know if anyone had noticed her flight from her uncle's house specifically, but they'd definitely seen her in the sky.

The second time, there had been nothing to see because of the driving rain and clouds of ash, and she had been a bit subdued and overcome with the shock and realization that she had killed and eaten a living thing because of the urges coursing through her, then a bit embarrassed at wearing borrowed clothes from someone who had to turn themselves into a puppy in a backpack. She had been trying to keep herself in check, even as she dared to hope it was possible to not be overcome by her urges while they had ridden back into the city and she had watched the people around her.

She'd been nervous about Willy, but apparently the tall girl had always been like that. Today that had become very disturbing.

All those worries went away as they'd all linked up as small shapes and Ate Sanny had picked them up and taken to the air.

She couldn't feel the wind around them unless she leaked out some plasma to react to the environment, and the best she could do was feel her external stone getting slightly cooler as she held her heat in. All she could hear was the wind blowing across her, as she perceived it through vibration on her external obsidian. The only sense that really worked and was completely unencumbered was sight.

What she saw was breathtaking.

Everyone down below were so small there weren't even visible, the cars like little beads someone had painstakingly lined up on the ground. Buildings that had looked tall and impressive seemed like too-bright shoeboxes. Ate Sanny had gotten bigger and bigger as they'd gone up into the air, opening wide wings to catch rising heat from the ground and using that to glide them steadily towards their destination.

"I thought you preferred insect wings?" Jas heard Kuya Kim as she just stared at the land below them. Was this what it was like to be the sun, looking down on everything below it? She knew the sun was far away in space, she'd passed her science classes after all, but still…

"Bird wings are more efficient for catching lift and long distance flight. We'd probably confuse anyone with any ornithology cred if they looked up, but I think I've matched the my colored so I blend in with the sky… well, except for you guys."

"I think this is literally the fastest I've ever gone down EDSA. Why are you complaining about being late for work?"

"What am I going to wear when I get there?"

"Ah. Good point. If only you could get to places quickly while fully clothed…"

"Smartass. I hope you're doing whatever it is you do to get to school quick, otherwise it'll be a long flight on the way back."

"Ooh, you're right! This is a good opportunity to get everywhere… "

The air above and around her began to glisten as pink sand began to shed from Kuya Kim's sides spreading out around them on the wind.

"Someone's going to have rough hair down there," she heard Tammy comment.

"I'm trying to aim them away from people and onto buildings. If I do it right, I can warp a path for us all the way back to… well, close to the car."

"How do you aim sand?"

"By cheating. A lot. Hush, I've got to concentrate, I'm not like Sanny who can make more brains so this gets easier."

The land beneath them just flew past, growing closer and farther as Ate Sanny went up and down on the rising updrafts. Jas was glad the urges were being quiescent, allowing her to bask in the wonder that she saw. She'd hoped she'd be able to fly on a plane when she got accepted into university, but they hadn't had the money, so she'd traveled to Metro Manila by boat. Now she was getting to fly—for the third time, she realized, and possibly even more in the future—without a plane between her and the sky.

The thought sent a momentary pulse of nervousness through her as she realized what she was thinking, but the wonder continued unabated. To be the sun upon the sky, gazing down at all those below, heat and light unending…

…

That… wasn't her wonder?

Ate Sanny, Kuya Kim and Tammy continued to chatter as they flew even as Jas grew very, very still.

 

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They flew over the Pasig River, the locally infamous polluted waterway flowing darkly beneath them. Below, many of the roads were heavily congested, though still moving, as cars had to take away roundabout routes from the areas that had been cordoned off by the military.

The cordon began at the intersection of Buendia and EDSA, cars all being turned aside to the right by a line of concrete barriers and soldiers. Beyond that, tanks, trucks, mobile artillery, and tents stood on the road, blocking the way. In the nearby gas station, a few food trucks had managed to be allowed parking and were surrounded by off-duty soldiers eating, while the rest went into the nearby mini-mall. Beyond that point, heavily armed soldiers in fatigues of various kinds moved. There were also soldiers on the tops of buildings, manning mortars or tube like weapons, or wielding very long guns. Other were standing behind tanks and other heavy vehicles. Placed seemingly randomly on roadways were metal shipping containers that were open on both ends, with walls of sandbags and concrete road barriers.

Many trees had clearly been cut down in the area, the fresh stumps gleaming of pale wood, and there were piles of sacks with metal plates on top of them  scattered on the road that the soldiers and vehicles were avoiding, going far around them.

"If I had to guess," Ate Sanny said, "I think those piles are explosives. Like giant landmines for if the Gagambuhala gets that low. The sacks are probably sand, maybe concrete under the steel plates, to try and contain the blast, then in the center there's a bunch of explosives that's supposed to blow upwards and send the plates up like shrapnel."

"That sounds really dangerous…" Tammy said, sounding mildly horrified.

"Well yeah, it's for killing a nigh-unkillable giant spider," Ate Sanny said. "They had to evacuate those condos and homes near them, I'm not feeling anyone in the buildings within a hundred feet of those things."

"There are people still living around here?" Kuya Kim exclaimed, his words physically vibrating Jas hanging beneath him.

"Don't you watch the news? Only 25% of the people here consented to be evacuated. Some of the office buildings actually tried to stay in business and make their employees keep coming to the office, since the Gagambuhala hadn't been reported to be eating people, unlike the Charm Dog in Pasay or whatever that thing is in the bay. It just built webs."

"Then why did the military go after it?" Jas found herself asking.

"Because it's big and scary and it's crashing the economy because it scares foreign investors and employees. And there might actually be some building damage, though it was mainly broken glass and crumbled facades. I mean, look at its nest."

The large ball of thick web and debris hung over the street, lifted off the ground by hundreds and hundreds of absurdly thick, grayish cables. Pieces of cars, buildings, waiting sheds, trees and other debris covered the outside, bound together with the web like mortar cement.

"There used to be a big hole underneath for the Gagambuhala to get out through, but it looks like it was sealed up," Ate Sanny said. "There's only an air hole now, big enough for its drones."

"It has drones?-!" Kuya Kim exclaimed.

"Not the way we have them," Ate Sanny said. "We've got pictures of small, robotic spiders coming out of that hole to repair the nest, add more webs or salvage the nearby buildings for parts."

"It's… making robots." Kuya Kim sounded stunned. "A giant spider is making robots… what the fuck?"

"This is not new, it did that months ago. Don't you listen to the news?"

"No, it's either pointless or depressing."

"Well, change it, there's monsters in the city, and sometimes the news talks about them in between shilling out their channel's new TV shows, celebrity drivel, and who was killed or raped that day."

"So, pointless and depressing with occasional sprinkles of mind-numbing horror."

"Just like real life!" Tammy exclaimed cheerfully.

Ate Sanny circled around and eventually alighted on one of the few buildings without a military presence, though some sandbags and some sort of sealed box showed they'd been there. They landed, which resulted in them bouncing on the ground as Ate Sanny's tentacles—wait, she'd been carrying them on tentacles?— struck the hard cement of the roof.

The four of them quickly unlinked and began to grow, rising up in people-shaped form as Ate Sanny made several disturbingly biological sounds as she reformed from winged and tentacular and back into her tall humanoid form, with its overlapping yellow plates at the joints, hard exoskeleton, elongated-looking limbs and compound eyes. Two pairs of long, dragonfly-like wings began to grow from her back, flowing down and flapping like a cape.

Tammy became a figure roughly the same size and dimensions as she'd been before, her body dark green and smooth like bamboo, which transitioned to a silvery paleness just past her elbow and knees, making it look like she was wearing boots and gloves. There was a ring of flower petals at her wrists and neck like ruffles. Her head was smooth, with two small holes in the sides and a triangular area of black spots in front for the plant organs she used for eyes.

Willy looked exactly the same as she had been when Jas met her, a figure of transparent ice that was somehow tinged just the slightest bit blue. Jas suspected that like Kuya Kim, she could see from every point in her body, and that the white, frosted ice band on the front of her head was less for something to make eye contact with and more because Tammy had asked her to look like that.

Kuya Kim was also reassuringly familiar, a borderline androgynous masculine figure made of pink stone that looked transparent at the edges. The dark pink band on the front of his face was the only difference, which made it slightly easier to tell which way was his 'front', so to speak. Only Ate Sanny's body really had joints. The limitations of things like which way they were facing were only as limiting as they let it be.

Jas looked down at herself, the obsidian on her face bulging out slightly to widen her field of view in imitation of her eyes looking downward. Dark volcanic rock so hot it was glowing red, occasionally cracking with orange lines of almost lava. She'd made her feet and hands out of obsidian as a safeguard in case she had to touch something, and admittedly because it looked nice. They glowed a little from the plasma contained within, but that was fine. The plasma was hotter than it was bright, and she was still drawing in heat.

"Well, don't we all look impressive," Ate Sanny said. "Short, but impressive."

"I'd be tall too, but I can't control my body very well when my mass is distributed like that," Tammy said. Her head didn't change, but from the tone, she was pouting on the inside. Probably. Tammy shook her head then, and clapped her hands. There was a dull sound like… well, like two pieces of wood slamming together. "Okay, plan time. The last three times we went up against the Gagambuhala, it didn't go well. It managed to surprise and ambush us, despite being a spider the size of a building, and manage to catch us in webs."

"Did it shoot webs at you or did you fall into them…?" Kuya Kim asked.

"Not all spiders just weave a web and call it a day," Ate Sanny said authoritatively. "Some build nets that they hold and use like glue traps, using the adhesive to make it stick to prey, wrapping the prey up so they can't escape, and then eating them. But don't worry, of all of us here, I'm the only one in danger of that, and I plan to send as many drones as possible so it can't get at the real me."

"So… it came at you hold glue and wrapped you up in it?" Kuya Kim sounded amused.

"Then it injected us in digestive juices and waited for me to melt inside my own shell before eating me by drinking my insides out like I was a pack of juice," Ate Sanny said blandly. "It sucked. Fortunately, none of you have that problem, except possibly Tammy."

"Not anymore!" Tammy said proudly. "I'm layered hardwood now, and my sap is as alkaline as I can get it to try to bring the acid down. The plan is for Ate Sanny to stay back and keep an eye on both the military and the Gagambuhala while we get into position. We get in close and Kuya Kim does that space warp thing of his so that the Gagambuhala doesn't escape and we can keep the damage to the surroundings at a minimum. Then once it's contained, Ate Jas flies in and sets that nest on fire and the Gagambuhala with it!"

Inside Jas, eagerness roared, a burning flame that was terrifyingly familiar. It was the same eagerness that had made her fly to Tagaytay, a desire to do something…!

Jas tried to clamp down on it, but the urge was powerful. She could feel her limbs shaking, feel her insides changing from lava to plasma, feel her grip on her heat slipping…

"Ate Jas, do you think you can do it? Otherwise we'll have to come up with a different plan."

She tried to handle both at once, tried to keep in her heat even as she sought to quash the urge, to push it aside she can think logically, rationally…

"I-I can do it," she said. Her voice came out smooth and even. The shakiness was all inside her. "I can burn it."

Tammy nodded, oblivious to her turmoil. "All right. Willy, if Ate Jas is too hot or doesn't seem like she can control her power well enough yet, I want you to ice her as best as you can so she can calm down."

Jas didn't blink, but she was surprised.

"If you go out of control, try to let us know and keep the heat down," Ate Sanny said. "We'll take care of the rest. I promise, I won't eat you, all right? So try not to eat me." There was no reassuring smile, but she did give Jas a thumbs up.

"How do you control it?" Jas said quietly. It wasn't a whisper. Whispering required breathing.

"Experience," Ate Sanny said. "Having a reason to hold back. And knowing that sometimes, you can give in to your urges."

Jas stared, because she couldn't blink.

Give in?

"You'll find your way of dealing with it," Ate Sanny said. "And if you can't, I'll hide behind Tammy so Willy will protect us both." She gave Jas another thumbs up.

Jas hesitated. Then she nodded slowly.

"Okay…" she said. "Okay… I think I can do it, Ate Sanny. I'll burn the webs and nothing else."

Inside, the fire burned. But wasn't that what she needed to do?

Didn't she need to burn?

She didn't have eyes to close. But Jas prayed.

Chapter 26: The Statement Of Jaselle Alhambra, Part 3

Jas stared at the little circle lying on the cement of the building's roof. A little pink cube, a small squat plant, what looked like a bag of clear jelly, and a little furball that seemed all mouth and nothing else.

"It's not like we can carry our phones," Ate Sanny said. "If nothing else, none of us have pockets. So we use the drones to talk to each other. We leave them here and pay attention to them, and we can talk that way. Simple, no fuss, no muss, and no one can listen in on us because there's nothing to intercept."

Jas nodded thoughtfully. No wonder she'd been advised to practice how to control parts of herself that had been separated from her main body. That had been harder that had been implied. Or perhaps she was just uniquely suited for it to be difficult, because the default state of her power was 'set things on fire'. Still, she had persevered, and she had managed to work on controlling a detached part of herself, while remembering to pull in heat from her main body and the detached part.

The part of her she left was a cube of obsidian, with a hole on the face the pointed away from the other drones, most especially Ate Sanny's. Inside her black cube, plasma glowed. It was a small flicker for better hearing, since she felt she heard better with plasma than with anything solid.

"All right everyone, can you hear? Can you talk?" Ate Sanny asked… from her furball little mouth drone.

What looked like a weird bladder inflated on the squat plant. "Mine is working," Tammy said.

"Same," Kuya Kim's pink cube said.

There was a beat.

"Willy, can you make your drone talk so we know if it's working right?" Tammy said.

Willy glanced at her, and then the little ball of water on the roof vibrated. "I can talk," Willy said monotonously.

"She can talk," Tammy announced.

"Well, that's good to know," Ate Sanny said flatly. "Shall we get started then?"

Her skin began to writhe, the hard shell seeming to soften. Jas actually felt her stomach roil at the sight, even though it was filled with plasma and lava. Parts of Ate Sanny's shell began to pop off, revealing themselves to be small insects. They were in shades of light and dark gray, with glistening, mirror-like wings. Through the holes in the shell where the strange insects crawled from, Jas could just make out things writhing. She'd seen carabaos, cows, and pigs give birth and watched as old animals were slaughtered for meat. She'd snapped the heads off and gutted her share of chickens, so she was not stranger to fleshy insides, but that was just wrong—were those teeth?!

"Oh, that's gross," Kuya Kim said succinctly.

"The miracle of life," Ate Sanny shrugged.

"Does this make you a single mother?" Kuya Kim asked.

Ate Sanny raised a warning hand "Let's not go there again, things will get weird."

"That's where things get weird?" Kuya Kim said disbelievingly.

"Just give me the sand, Pinky."

Kuya Kim shook his head, a deliberate movement on his part, but pink sand began to spill from his hands onto the roof. It sprayed in the wind, but some managed to make it to the ground…

The insects that were crawling from Ate Sanny all flew through the spilling sand, coming out the other side glittering slightly pink. Their wings buzzed strangely loud as they flew into the city beneath, quickly becoming lost to sight.

"Bringing the sand to the nest and the street under it," Ate Sanny reported. "You might all want to get going. Or are you all going to wait for Pinky to do his thing so you can cut down on the commute?"

"I have a name, you know," Kuya Kim said.

"Unless you want me to get into the bad habit of saying your real name around people you don't want to know, like the military, reporters, police, and whoever, you might consider either responding to Pinky or decide on what you want to be called."

"There's none of those people up here," Kuya Kim said.

"Hence why it's a bad habit to get into," Ate Sanny said. "It's like gun safety. Just because there's no bullets and all the necessary parts were taken off doesn't mean you should stop treating it like a live gun."

"I don't know anything about gun safety besides 'don't mess with them'. I'm not going to be Pinky. I refuse to be Pinky. I know I'm kinda pinkish but that doesn't mean I like it. It's something I'm resigned to, like my parent's deciding to name me 'Kim'."

"Okay, okay, you don't have to be Pinky, or Pink or whatever," Tammy said soothingly. "How about Magenta? You can be Magenta. You can't be red because Ate Jas is already Red, she's clearly red."

Kuya Kim tilted his head. "What's magenta?"

"It's a kind of purplish red that you kind of look like if you squint," Ate Sanny said. "I have no problem calling you Magenta. Anything to stop calling you your real name so we don't compromise identity security and get arrested for vigilantism or being communists or whatever we'll be charged with."

Kuya Kim clearly thought about it. "Okay, I have no problems answering to Magenta…"

"Great! Nightmæranger Magenta it is!"

There was a brief moment.

"Wait, what?" Kuya Kim said, confused.

"I'll explain later," Ate Sanny said.

"I actually get an explanation this time?"

 

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The air above the streets of the Makati business district filled with insects. They alighted on the wall of buildings, on the islands full of planters, they dove down into the sewers through openings along gutters and into ramps to underground parking areas. Jas saw none of this herself, but she heard Ate Sanny—Yellow, she asked to be called—give a running commentary at their little communication circle, While the street directly under the spider's nest was clear of people and vehicles, about two streets away the roads were full of pedestrians, who walked around to the various businesses, offices and residences hurriedly, being watched over by annoyed-looking military. Even with giant spiders nearby, life went on, because there was money to be made, and who cared about giant spiders?

"That's a very cynical way of looking at things," Kuya Kim—newly dubbed Nightmæranger Magenta—said.

"Well, can you explain why all these people are here?"

"I didn't say it was wrong, just cynical."

Jas heard them talking to each other in the little circle they'd made as she hovered in the air, a vaguely human-shaped cloud of plasma. She glowed, there was no helping it, but as long as she was fairly high and small and kept her heat reined in, she was fairly unobtrusive, especially since it was a sunny day with few clouds. The fire in her wanted to burn hot as a well as bright, but she repressed that. It was a constant distraction, like a child who wanted something and kept nagging to have it. Wind flew against her, and she had to thrust herself back into place so she didn't drift off too far, trying to keep the gigantic nest below her.

She was too high up to see most of what the others were doing. Some spots of green growing on roofs were probably Tammy—Green or Nightmæranger Green, if the naming scheme held—and some glistening spots around them that might have been water was probably Willy. Their role was to contain the giant spider. She knew it had a longer name, but honestly, it twisted her tongue just to think about it. All she had to do was set it on fire when they gave the signal, and try not to let out all of her heat.

"Magenta, stop eating me from the inside!"

"Sorry, sorry! Though I have to ask, why did you eat me?"

"I put you in my stomach, that's a completely different thing!"

"No, that's pretty much eating!"

"It was the most efficient way to carry around your sand, all right? I'm not devouring you eating you."

"Doesn't seem like it. How are you going to get the sand out?"

"How do things get out of stomachs?"

"… oh, shit."

"Exactly."

"Ew, that's gross!" Tammy interjected.

"Can't I go out some other way?"

"What, like puke?"

"They're insects! Can't I come out as honey?"

"I'd need to consume nectar for that, and it's not flowering season."

"Can't T—er, Green grow some?"

"Dude, don't be gross. We're friends, but I don't want to do lesbian stuff with her, and she probably doesn't want to either. That's not even getting into the age thing. You remember what part of the body for plants flowers are, right?"

"Ew, I hate myself. Okay, okay, forget I said anything!"

"Look, if you feel strongly about it, I'll have the stomach tear open and just drop you out straight. Then you're neither poop or puke."

"Won't that hurt?"

"Only if I forget to remove the nerves."

"Then that would be nice, thanks. It's still disgusting, but not being pooped or puked makes it the more preferable option."

"Won't the opening count as a mouth or—"

"It's not being pooped or puked, we don't need to overthink it!"

A girlish laugh, one deliberately made by the little plant. "Okay, okay, no asking insightful questions. We're in position to contain. I'm on the ground, the roofs, and some of the office buildings with trashed windows. The computers were gutted."

"Makes sense, it had to make those robots somehow."

Jas didn't blink because she had no eyelids, but she wanted to. "What?"

"What?" Nightmæranger Magenta repeated with her, and she realized she hadn't said it with her drone.

"Yeah, the third time it attacked us with weird robot spiders."

"… robot spiders." Nightmæranger Magenta's tone was very flat, like a parent disbelieving the story their child was telling about why there was one less hotdog on the table before the meal had started. "It had robot spiders?"

"Yes, we said that already. We thought it was bullshit too. Thankfully it became the military's problem, since they attacked the next day."

"It had robot spiders?"

"Dude, you're made of rock, Blue is made of water, Green is made of wood, and Red is either plasma or lava. Out of everyone here, I'm the only one who actually had to worry about getting torn limb from limb, do you see me worrying?"

"I'm worrying about the fact we're up against a giant spider that made robot spiders. Now that I say it again...that means it's intelligent, doesn't it? Maybe we can communicate with it."

"I don't speak fluent spider. Do you?"

"So we're just going to kill it?"

"You were okay with it before."

"Before I didn't know it could make robots!"

"Why does that change anything?"

"It made robots! Dumb animals don't make robots!"

"No, other dumb robots do. Why should that change anything about why it should die? Even if it's smart, it hasn't tried to communicate, so it's clearly not interested in doing so. It's just another monster."

"Kuya," Green's voice said quietly. "It killed us. Three times. Even if it IS intelligent, it's a killer. The first time, we didn't even attack it. It came after us. We were just going to observe it."

"So it's either a violent wild animal or a serial killer," Yellow said bluntly. "Will that assuage your conscience?"

Magenta made a frustrated sound that started like a growl and progressed to sound like rocks grinding together. "It doesn't feel right," he said.

"By what metric?"

The pink—sorry, magenta—cube stayed silent.

"We're in position," Green said quietly. "Kuya, if you're backing out, say so now, and we'll find another way to continue without you."

The cube sat there, silent. Finally, it vibrated. "Drop me out of your stomachs." His voice sounded frustrated, resign, tired and determined all at once. "Let's get started."

"Bombs away."

From above, nothing seemed to happen, though she might have just been too high to see anything. She focused on the nest. It almost seemed like a cocoon hanging caught on a web, a spider's food more than its refuge…

"I'm done. Your turn J—Red."

It took Jaselle a moment to realize they meant her. She wanted to take a deep breath, wanted to close her eyes…

Terror ran through her as she felt the sensation of gravity pulling her down, of her body solidifying, getting denser, becoming flesh…

She pulled at the fire, let herself burn, and heat and light burst from her. She distantly heard cries and realized she'd stopped pulling in her heat, that she burned and was getting hotter and hotter…

Desperately, Jas pulled the heat back, the air around her becoming turbulent as heat enough to melt steel was pulled from the sky around her, her plasma flickering oddly around her…

And then her plasma was lava, and she was falling, falling towards the ground, towards the nest beneath, and the fire inside her burned with eagerness and hunger…

She wasn't going to make it, she realized. She was too far to the side, she'd miss and hit the sidewalk below, possibly even graze the windows—the broken windows—of the one of the buildings next to the nest…

Even as plasma erupted from her side, causing force to suddenly push at her, in her eyes the world seemed to warp and bend, and suddenly the nest was directly behind her. On the edge of her vision, she saw little flickering insects with glittering pink covering their legs…

She slammed onto to the top of the nest, and felt her body splatter, the parts of her that had solidified exploding violently even as the parts that were still lava spread, her heat igniting the nest beneath her. Flames engulfed her as she literally pulled herself together, making her lava flow and her cooled rock back into lava as she tried to reform—

Oh, right.

Lava and stone flared into plasma, her body seeming to join the flames, was the flames.

And then Jas let herself burn, and the nest was engulfed, the silk burning almost eagerly.

Almost silently, the cable-thick threads holding the nest burned away, sending the nest plummeting to the ground below, and Jas fell with it, and around her the sight of the building seemed to twist and bend and recede…

It hit the ground with a crash that actually sent dust into the air, the nest seeming to collapse under its own weight. Jas continued to burn.

There was no cry, no scream, no roar. But beneath her, the layers of burning silk tore and the giant spider ripped itself from its nest.

Chapter 27: The Statement Of Jaselle Alhambra, Part 4

Jaselle had always thought spiders were smooth. The small spiders she'd seen around the corners of the house had seemed so, and even the few larger palm-sized ones that had her mother shrieking and calling for one of the males in the house to deal with it seemed like they had a hard shell and limbs.

Up close, the giant spider—the Gagambuhala, a name which was both a mouthful and childish—was covered in fine hairs that all fell in the same direction, creating the illusion of smoothness at a distance. Its body was the size of a bus, its legs all at least three times that in length. It was smoking, some of the hairs curling and getting shorter like they'd been stuck into flame. She saw this from below, through the lens of an obsidian shard that had come to rest on some debris that had been woven into the nest. Her plasma was blind, barely able to make out hazes around her, and most of the light she saw were either the sun or herself…

Jas pulled herself together, the plasma that made up her form clumping together unnaturally as she pulled in the heat that she'd released. Plasma turned to lava, and she was blind until she remembered to make obsidian shards float on her surface so she could see. She let heat radiate around her. It was only the heat of molten rock rather than the fire of a star, but it was still enough to make the Gagambuhala move away from her, its hairs all smoking. Jas instinctively rose up, forming limbs and a head for herself, moving her volcanic glass towards that head.

They had fallen into the middle of the street, the asphalt bubbling under her, the nest smoking but not actually burning. It looked like someone had set a headful of hair on fire, its shape slumping and collapsing from the weight of the debris covering it, the parts closest to her curling up and shriveling from the heat. Some of the decorative plants in the island in the middle of the street had been crushed, or were flapping and wilting in the rising heat. There was no smell, since she had no nose, but Jas suspected it wasn't very flowery.

The street seemed… wider, somehow, than it had from above, and Jas realized why as the Gagambuhala tried to climb the building across the street while it kept putting distance between itself and Jas. The Gagambuhala moved with the sudden bursts of speed of its smaller kin, but even though it wasn't that far away, it never seemed to reach the building, seemingly stuck eternally between the road and the narrow strip of sidewalk, even as its legs moved in large, ground-eating strides. The fact her eyes wanted to ache despite the fact they were made of volcanic glass told her this was Ku—Magenta's powers at work, warping space to keep it from reaching the buildings and leaving it stuck on the ground.

It suddenly stopped moving, as if confused. Then it turned and started skittering down the street in the direction away from Jas, who was standing upright again, her lava solidifying so she wouldn't have to concentrate to keep her shape. Jas could have killed it instantly, but that wasn't an option in a populated area, or even an unpopulated one without Magenta to redirect the stream and possibly something to absorb the heat into until she could draw it back. Beam-like streams of her hottest plasma were impressive but not safe. Not for this.

The fire within her burned, filling her with excitement, eagerness, and glee. Her hand came up and turned to plasma, heat and matter gathering there, building pressure so she could fling it forward, pointing towards her enemy—

She grabbed her forearm with her other hand and wretched it upward, even as she pulled in all her heat and willed the plasma back to volcanic rock. There was resistance, and while she was able to draw in heat, a brilliantly glowing stream of plasma shot upward into the sky, the very air in its path burning apart from the shear heat. Above her, the remaining strands of web from which the nest had hung started to curl, shrivel and burn,

Distantly, she heard the exclamations from the others, perceived through the little bit of herself she'd left behind with the bits of them, felt vibrations shaking up from the ground to her legs as if trees were falling on the road. She struggled to pull in the massive amount of heat, tried to force the plasma back into lava. She pushed back at the fire within, tamping down on the urges filling her, willed the stream to stop.

Slowly, the stream weakened as she forced the fire back inside herself, ripping the heat from the atmosphere before it could spread, forcing plasma back into gas. Jas felt like she should be panting, but there was only the heat that she had to control and the fire she had to reign in. She'd needed to burn, but this was too much!

Finally, the pillar of light at the end of her hand cut off, and she forced her hand solid again, the volcanic rock glowing red before she managed to pull the heat from that as well. The lava inside her chest churned, occasionally flashing into plasma and back again, and it made a good substitute for the racing heartbeat she felt she should have.

Jas shook her head, even though it really didn’t do anything to clear her mind, and forced herself back to the present. She'd lost control again. The embarrassment and mortification of the harm she could have caused managed to drown out the excitement and eagerness, leaving her with a relatively clear mind.

"I'm fine!" she managed to say through the piece of herself. "I'm fine! I'm in control again!"

"Good, because your little deathray is waking up the military," At—Yellow said. "We need to either finish this or retreat again!"

Jas looked around, trying to find the—there! Further down the street, across a distance that seemed to shift and grow farther and closer from moment to moment, the decorative plants growing from planter boxes in front of buildings and decorative trees planted at intervals along the sidewalk had grown. Originally thin and a bit sickly, they had become engorged, trunks growing to pillar-like thickness as they tried to entrap the Gagambuhala. It struggled in their grip, ripping some still-spindly trees out of the ground only to have them continue to grow and try to wrap around its body, managed to squirm out of the grip of one only to find itself being wrapped by another. In the shifting, squirming mess of increasingly thicker wood, the Gagambuhala was just managing to squirm through. One leg became entrapped, and it seemed to roll up on itself and bit through its trapped limb to get free, blue blood-like liquid dripping from its wound.

"I can't grow trees fast enough to catch it! It's climbing on them!"  Green cried.

"I'm getting my main part into position! I just need to get bigger than sand!"

"Well, hurry up!"

From the top of the building next to the Gagambuhala fell a torrent like a water fall. But instead of breaking up and dispersing, it remained a single, flowing stream, looking deceptively like syrup. At the last moment, the water turned into a mass of ice, and it slammed into the giant as a literal weight, knocking it down like the itsy bitsy spider, and back onto the road. Jas felt the impact of it vibrate through her legs as she tried to run towards them, forcing her heavy body to move but not daring to turn back into plasma lest she lose control again.

"No Red, stand back!" Yellow called. "They've got this. Hang back and get ready to deal with it if it gets loose, but they can handle this now!"

Jas wanted to protest, to say she was back under control, but the spark of defiance from that very impulse made the fire roar as it diluted the embarrassment holding it back. "Understood," she said, coming to a staggering, skidding stop as she bled off the momentum she'd built up. There was no mention of how she'd lost control, but she could feel it there, hanging in the air like the threat of grandmother's wrath.

She watched, feeling useless as the ice collapsed into water, flooding the street under the Gagambuhala as it struggled to get to its feet, some limbs hanging broken and bleeding from the impact as it lay on its back. One long limb reached out, touched a metal guard rail for keeping pedestrians off the street, and two long, deceptively small hook-like claws protruded from the mass of hairs, hooking onto the vertical metal bars. As the water surged up as if erupting from a spring, it ripped the length of fencing out of the concrete sidewalk, bringing the metal feature to its mouth. The surging waters splashed among the hairs on its back, soaking into them and hardening into ice as the Gagambuhala's limb-like mouth parts seemed to open wide, biting into the metal.

Sounds of metal being torn and twisted filled the air as the beast seemed to chew on the fence, the ice beginning to grow, hanging from its hairs. The ice flowed down, touching the water on the ground and the two fusing together into more ice as the piles of wood heaved, moving with ponderous purpose towards the Gagambuhala, wood crashing as branches and roots moved unnaturally to get the whole trunk to roll along. Jas felt the fire surging with impatience, but she remained firm, locking herself in place like a pillar, focusing on keeping heat in and her substance to at least stay liquid if not solid…

The limb the Gagambuhala had been holding near its mouth moved, there was a rapid staccato of impacts, and the ice that had been trying to weigh it down broke apart. Jas stared in confusion at what the beast was now wielding.

"Is that a harpoon?" came Magenta's voice, sounding as confused as she was.

The metal fence looked like… well, like it had been chewed on a lot be a giant monster. That didn't explain how the square length of fencing now had its mass compressed to a long, relatively straight shape that looked like a needle with an angular hook at the end, looking wickedly sharp for something that had been chewed on. Parts of it were sizzling slightly, and some kind of liquid dripped from it to the ground, where it smoked on the bare concrete and asphalt. It had chipped at the ice like a pick at the end of a piston.

It swung the limb with the harpoon, hooking a lamp post. The lamp post bent as the Gagambuhala used it as leverage to pull itself upright even as the few bits of ice on its back started to grow and the water beneath it froze. With a groan of twisting metal the lamp post folded over completely and the Gagambuhala pulled the remains towards its mouth with another one of its limbs even as the limb with the harpoon at the end of it curled under and around its body, quickly chipping off ice as it used its remaining limbs to almost delicately step away from the mass of wood rolling and crashing towards it and started ripping the pedestrian fencing and lamp posts around it.

"I hate this stupid bug, it's so bullshit!" Green raged, sounding completely unlike her usual cheerful self. "Kill it, kill it, kill it!"

"Soldier incoming and tanks moving," Yellow announced. "They're keeping their distance, but if Magenta doesn’t do something it's likely going to start raining mortar shells around you guys! I'm tapping into their ears, they're freaked out by Red's deathray, they think the Gagambuhala might have made it or something."

"Wait, you're doing what?" Magenta said.

"I'll explain later!"

The Gagambuhala's functional limbs were moving in a strangely quick flurry, bringing the fences and lamp posts to its mouth as it dragged itself away from Green—or maybe her drones— even as it kept using the harpoon on one limb to chip at or drag out of the way the ice that Blue kept making to try and obstruct it, all while it chewed and…

"Oh, that's bullshit!" Green exclaimed.

At first, Jas was confused. The Gagambuhala had chewed some of the metal into a spiral shape and brought it to its rear. Something erupted from its backside, smearing a strange fluid on the spiral and it snapped the spiral onto one of its broken limbs…

It had made a splint for itself, Jas realized, feeling unsettled as she watched the spiral somehow tighten, keeping the two halves of the broken limb more or less aligned, letting it move the limb again to some degree. It gave it one more limb to propel itself while ripped out more metal street fixtures to chew on, making more spiral-shaped splints for its broken limbs.

Green hadn't been idle herself, however, and all the trees she'd been controlling had started to clump together, the disparate woods fusing together into a patchwork of different-colored barks into an initially spider-like shape, long curving trunks acting like legs as more limbs began to extrude from the central tangle, soon looking like a large, hairy ball. Thorns began to extrude from all its limbs, some long and needle-like, some of them short, curving hooks, some just covered in barbs. The leaves had almost all been stripped off, leaving it looking like a tangle of brambles, the distance giving it the illusion of smallness. From deep within the tangle came a hollow-rage-filled roar, and Green's drone—or possibly Green herself— partially scuttled, partially rolled forward to throw itself at the Gagambuhala, thorny tentacular vines flailing at it seemingly randomly.

"Aaannnddd Green's gone full kaiju," Yellow sighed. "That's not good. The military heard that, I think they might be calling an airstrike. We might have fifteen minutes before helicopters get here, twenty for jets. Maybe, I'm not sure about military response times— Magenta, you might have artillery mortars incoming! You know, in case getting hit by those is something you guys who aren't made of meat care about…"

Jas stood helpless, watching as the two clashed, Blue's water surging up around the monstrous thicket. Inside, the fire's excitement and fascination grew, but it didn't seem to be trying to get her to intervene. Jas was thankful for that, because she didn’t know what she could have done that wouldn't have hurt Tammy short of bodily throwing herself at the monster. At first, it seemed like Green would overwhelm the Gagambuhala, since she had far more limbs, but even with splinted legs, it was able to move agilely enough to avoid her clumsy, angry attacks as it chewed on its makeshift harpoon. Suddenly the limb with the harpoon flashed, and one of Green's limbs went flying. It arced and crashed to the ground with the impact of a heavy tree trunk, twitching momentarily before lying still.

"It has a sword?!?!" Green cried. "Ugh, this is such bullshit!"

The thorny vines writhed and long thorns grew from their tips, clearly in imitation, and they curved down to stab down at the Gagambuhala, but it scuttled out of the way, and Green screamed in frustration as it lashed out and cut off another one of her limbs. Green threw itself forward in a sort of awkward hopping roll, as if intending to crush the enemy with her bulk, but it sidestepped nimbly and pounced on her despite Blue's efforts to weigh it down or compromise its footing with ice. Something began extruding from the Gagambuhala's rear as it began climbing on a violently flailing Green. The Gagambuhala moved with agility, stepping on limbs after they stopped moving or were in the process of drawing back to strike, even as more and more fluid extruded from the giant spider's rear, which was solidifying into thick threads.

"Green, I think you're being cocooned," Yellow said.

"Gee, ya think?!"

Yellow was right. The Gagambuhala was wrapping Green in web, tangling her limbs with increasingly thicker and stronger strands and binding her limbs to each other, restricting their range of movement. From below, the water surged upwards, becoming a ball that tried to wrap around the half-entangled form of Green, wrapping around her and becoming a ball of ice.

"Uh, thanks Blue, but now I can't move," Green said, suddenly sounding closer back to her usual self as the Gagambuhala leapt away from the now-frozen ball. "Help me get all this off and—what the fuck is it doing?!?!"

The Gagambuhala had picked up one of Green's fallen limbs and was chewing through it as it ripped out more lightposts. The wooden limb snapped, becoming shorter, and the spider's limbs became a frenzy of movement, masticated metal and the fluid that became web from its posterior coming together and—

"I think it just made itself a prosthetic leg," Yellow said as the Gagambuhala attached the lengths of wood now held together by metal joints, drying web and spiraling metal onto the stump of its removed limb. As a sort of finishing touch, it somehow attached the blade-like tool it used to cut Green's limbs onto the end of the prosthesis, the base metal and random splotches of paint still attached to it contrasting strangely with one another.

"This bug is bullshit!"

"Yes, Green, we can see that."

"I can't control that piece anymore!"

"Probably using whatever power it has beyond being big on it. We have to wrap this up soon boy and girls, the military's closing in. Magenta, we forgot to cover the underground parking garages and pedestrian tunnels, as soon as they realize they can't get at us overland they might start thinking of going through those. We need to finish it off or abort."

"We can't abort! Not again! This is the fourth time!"

"I've got this," Magenta said. "I'm in position and I've got mass! You all back off! If I can't finish it, then we need to go!"

From the top of one of the buildings nearby, pink sand suddenly rushed over the edge. Then the air seemed to warp, and instead of a falling straight to the ground the stream twisted and turned, somehow remaining straight and flowing even as it contorted to aim straight at the Gagambuhala. The giant arachnid moved, feet scuttling, but the air around it twisted, pink bits of sand and insects in shades of gray with pink dust on them surrounding it. The stream of sand slammed into it unerringly, coating it's hairs, wrapping around it…

And that was when the huge, house-sized pink rock that all the sand was coming from slammed into it at terminal velocity. There was a wet, pulpy sound as the Gagambuhala's body split open like a rotten fruit that had been stepped on in a spray of bluish fluid. Its limbs flailed and scrambled, but the weight of the stone was more than they could move, and all the Gagambuhala managed to do was tear itself apart as different limbs tried to stumble away.

The stone began to flow, moving almost like her lava as it began to engulf the large insect, and for the first time, a sound came from it. It was a high-pitched, panicked-sounding roar, one that seemed to make the fire flare brighter, and she could feel the shift in the urges that heralded it wanted to shift from spectator to participant, feel the hunger, the urge to devour rising…

"No!" she said aloud reflexively. "No, we're not doing that! We're going to get ready to leave!" A petulant, defiant urge came over her, but petulant defiance was something she was familiar with as the eldest child of eight, expected to keep the others disciplined. "No! None of that. We're leaving!"

Jas deliberately turned around and started walking away from where Magenta was wrapping around all the parts of Gagambuhala like thick syrup. She shed all of her obsidian, blinding herself to the sight as the giant spider was completely entombed…

Instead, she determinedly, deliberately forced herself to become plasma, and the world became an indistinct haze around her. Mentally gritting teeth that weren't there, she generated plasma at her feet, and with a burst propelled herself upward among the high rise buildings, keeping her heat in, forcibly keeping her plasma's temperature as low as possible. There was nothing to be done for her light, a brilliant, blinding radiance that reflected off the innumerable windows around her, turning the street into a corridor of crimson illumination…

The fire burned, and she let it… but only to a point.

Rising into the air, Jaselle Alhambra touched the sky, the fire inside her sullen and banked, burning with willful petulance.

Behind her, barely seen through eyes of plasma, the pink stone collapsed into sand around the corpse of the dead spider.

 

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When the others returned to the rooftop with their circle of drones, they found Jas there sitting naked in the flesh, her back to a wall and her legs curled up to her chest to preserve her modesty, even if she suspected they'd seen her through their drones when she'd landed and changed back completely. Her fists were clenched tight and her legs and knees ached from holding the pose for the time it had taken them to arrive. Wordlessly, she looked up to find Ate Sanny there, holding a pi—magenta cube, a small round coconut, and a ball of ice. She met the impassive, expressionless gaze of the tall woman's compound eyes.

A slit opened at mouth level. "Time to go," she said, voice surprisingly gentle. "Unless you need some space?"

For a moment, Jas had a weird vision of being alone in an empty void, herself the only source of light…

She rapidly shook her head, both to dispel the vision and as an answer. The flame inside her still burned, and she let it spread, let her body turn to lava, let it collapse down and shrink, let it cool into an irregularly shaped lump of obsidian, the insides glowing red with the fire .

Jas sat there on the roof.

Seemingly hesitant, Ate Sanny stepped forward and knelt to pick her up. Yellow fingers reached for her hesitantly before gingerly touching her, as if they expected her to be burning hot.

There was only cold volcanic glass.

Ate Sanny's form shifted and collapsed, growing smaller as it spread wide wings that buzzed as they took to the air.

Chapter 28: The Statement Of Jaselle Alhambra, Part 5

"I'm sorry," Jas said as soon as she was fully dressed. "I lost control."

They were back behind Ma–Kuya Kim's car, once more hidden by his power and Tammy's leaves.

"Don't worry about it," Tammy said cheerfully as she bent down to tie her shoes. She'd gone back to her cheerful self on the flight back, seemingly exulting in their killing the spider. It was disturbing, to see the seemingly normal girl so… bloodthirsty. "No one got hurt."

"You didn't hurt anyone, and when you felt yourself losing control, you did something to mitigate it," Ate Sanny said. Jas hadn't noticed before, but Ate Sanny had just slipped into her clothes, not even bothering with underwear, which seemed immodest, not to mention uncomfortable. Instead of bending down to put on her shoes, her foot was at the end of a tentacle that was raised to about chest height for her to tie her laces put as she stood on one leg.

Tammy glanced at her and looked down at her own shoes speculatively, but they were both already laced. She sighed, as if disappointed at not having a reason to try doing the same thing herself.  

 "You've had your powers for what, two weeks? We were all like you at two weeks. At least your loss of control wasn't trying to eat anyone." Ate Sanny frowned. "Actually, what did happen? Usually when we lose control it's because we try to eat each other, but… that doesn't seem to be what happened. Not unless you could try and eat something from that far away…" Ate Sanny raised an eyebrow at her questioningly.

Jas squirmed uncomfortably, but she didn't want to compound her failure with lying or obfuscating. "I got excited and tried to shoot it with my plasma, but… my plasma's not safe to use and I had to divert it upwards."

Ate Sanny tilted her head. "You got… excited?" she said. "Why did you get excited? It was nowhere near you."

"I…" Jas trailed off flushing.

Tammy reached towards her, putting a reassuring hand on her shoulder. The young girl smiled up encouragingly up at her. "Don't worry Ate Jas. We won't judge you. We're as in the dark about what we can do as you are. But if we know how it happened, we can watch out for it in ourselves and each other."

Ate Sanny nodded. "Jas, this is strictly me asking because we need to know. I won't do the passive-aggressive 'you should have handled it' thing, I won't accuse you of being lazy or needing to work harder, I won't hold to you some stupidly perfect standard and imply I meet that standard myself, all right? We're all in this together, and acting like a nagging parent isn't going to help with that."

"While very supportive and emotionally mature as this all is," Kuya Kim called out, making Tammy and Jas start in surprise, "are you girls done getting dressed yet?"

"You know it takes two hours for women to get ready," Ate Sanny called back, sounding amused. That was certainly how long it took grandmother to get ready for church. Sometimes even longer, if it was a special mass.

"Please don't take that long," Kuya Kim sighed.

Ate Sanny snickered, taking a quick look around at everyone before nodding. "Yeah, we're done," she said. "Tammy, can you…" She gestured at the leaves.

"Got it!" Tammy touched the leaves, her skin seeming to fuse with them before they once more unnervingly became absorbed back into Tammy's skin.

"Come on," Ate Sanny said. "As the gainfully employed adult, post-victory snacks are on me. We can talk about what happened then. Kim, you finished the fight for us, you pick where we go!"

 

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"Feeling better?" Tammy asked Jas as they found benches to sit at, eating post-victory snacks. Kim had picked a waffle sandwich stand, and Ate Sanny had generously declared everyone could have two.

Jas nodded, holding the maple syrup waffle sandwich that had been suggested to her when she hadn't known what to order. The bite she'd taken from it had been deliciously, and she was chewing slowly to make it last as long as possible. She felt mildly embarrassed that the younger girl had to be so solicitous towards her. After all, she was the older one, she should be the one taking care of Tammy, not the other way around, but Jas supposed the younger girl was taking her leading responsibilities seriously.

"Do you feel like talking about it now?" Tammy said gently.

Jas hesitated, but… well, if they were lying about not judging her, best to know when she felt like she deserved to be judged.

"I… when it happened," Jas began slowly, trying to find the right words, "I felt excited."

"Excited how?" Tammy asked as Kuya Kim and Ate Sanny sat nearby and listened. Jas suspected he was doing something with his power to keep them from being overheard.

Jas struggled to put the feeling into words. She knew what it felt like but it seemed so… childish to put it that way. But struggle as she might, she couldn't think of any other way to accurately convey what it was like except…

"It felt like the excitement you feel when you're playing a fun game with your friends and you’ve got the ball," Jas finally said. "The excitement came and…"

"And you… got ready to shoot plasma to… score points?"  Tammy said hesitantly.

Jas blushed, though it probably wasn't obvious with her skin, and nodded.

Tammy looked… concerned. "I've never had that urge," she said, glancing towards the older members of their group.

They both shook their heads. "Not me," Kuya Kim said.

"I'm pretty sure every time I've felt that, it was me," Ate Sanny said. "My urges are more of the eating variety, and some body preferences. I've never had an urge to… basically play."

"That wasn't playing, that was a deathray," Kuya Kim said. Jas winced.

"Her power is fire and lava," Ate Sanny said. "That's literally a death-everything. And be nice. At least she was able to point her murderous urges at something safe, like the sky."

Kuya Kim looked chastised. "All right point, I'm sorry if I sounded accusing. But that I still don’t see how playing equates to a deathray."

"Her urges are certainly different," Ate Sanny said, nodding. "But it not like we've all sat down and carefully noted catalogued and related all the urges we've and under what circumstances we got them. The only real commonalities we know we have for sure are that we have them, and that they make us want to devour."

Jas, Tammy and Kuya Kim all shook. There was something about the way Ate Sanny said it that told Jas what she was talking about, a hidden tone that she felt in the same place she felt the urges within. She felt the fire, burning but banked, suddenly flare a little as if someone had blown on it…

"You know, for someone claiming the 'edgy loner' position, you sure sound like the smart guy of the team a lot of the time," Tammy said.

"They're not mutually exclusive," Ate Sanny said. "Usually you have to be some kind of traumatized billionaire to pull it off though. Maybe this means I'm going to get rich soon as the universe aligns to make this right."

"Doubtful. This is real life, Ate," Kuya Kim said.

Ate Sanny sighed. "Real life sucks. Wait, you got that reference?"

"Yeah, rich traumatized billionaire superheroes, they both had a trilogy and a team, I've seen it. Of course I understood that reference."

Jas thought of her uncle, of his money, made with sinful means. That was what grandmother always said, that instead of earning money honestly with hard work, he'd used lazy and slothful and therefore sinful means, and the more money he made, the more sinfully he lived…

"Do you think you can recognize the urge again if it comes back?" Tammy asked.

Jas hesitated uncertainly, but nodded. "I… think so."

"Then until it comes up again, I don't think there's anything you can do," the younger girl said. "If it helps, whenever I get urges, I remind myself I'm a person and not a plant and I don't do plant things." That last was said with vehement emphasis.

"I don't think what I do will be very helpful for you," Ate Sanny said. "It barely helps me."

"What do you do?" Kuya Kim asked.

For a moment, Ate Sanny was silent. Finally, she said, "Remind myself that pack predators can take down more prey than lone predators,"

Kuya Kim gave her a flat look. "You're right, that doesn't help at all."

A shrug. "I told you, didn’t I?"

"You did, but I thought that was just an excuse not to explain."

"It was, but because the explanation wouldn't have helped. What do you do when you have urges?"

"I direct it towards constructive avenues," Kuya Kim said loftily.

Ate Sanny starred at him. "That's why you've been laying out sand and warping everywhere, isn't it?" she said. "You've been giving the urges an outlet?"

"A useful, constructive outlet," Kuya Kim said. "It's helped, and I get practice on in."

Ate Sanny nodded slowly. "Well, I hope you're being careful. You have a family after all."

Kuya Kim pursed his lips. "I know," he said quietly.

"Be careful tonight, by the way," Ate Sanny said. "Devouring something tends to make your power act weird the first time you sleep afterwards."

"I'll be careful," Kuya Kim said. "Maybe I'll camp out in the yard, so if I start growing weird, at least it won't mess up the house."

"You do you. Call me if you catch dengue or something, I think I can get it out of your system if you don't try to push me out."

Kuya Kim paused. "You can do that?"

"Illness is just your body's cells not working the way they usually do because of a foreign factor or disturbed equilibrium. I can control any body enough to fix that. Hence, healing. Provided you let me. I suspect that your power will resist me trying to alter your cells unless you active repress it, which is why I couldn't just body-jack that spider."

Jas listened to this, taking in what was being said, slowly eating her waffle sandwich. It was… comforting, to no longer be the center of attention. And the adults were talking, so it wasn't her place to interrupt. Especially since what they were talking about might be helpful to her situation. It couldn't hurt to try, in any case. Tammy's advice might be helpful as well.

"Ooh, does that mean you can…" Tammy interrupted, before trailing off as she glanced at Kuya Kim.

"Probably," Ate Sanny said, sounding amused. "Whatever it was you just edited out, the answer is most likely 'probably'."

"I have a sister, a girlfriend, and several female cousins, I can guess a long list of things that might have been edited out," Kuya Kim said. "Want me to leave so that you girls can talk about it?"

"Please no," Tammy said, blushing. Perhaps it was God chastising her for interrupting the adults. But then, she was the leader of their group, so maybe she had the right to interrupt the adults…

Jas finished her waffle sandwich and diligently began wiping her mouth to make herself presentable.

"I guess… we go home now?" Tammy said hesitantly.

"Not ready to go back to your normal life yet?" Ate Sanny said.

"I don't know… it's just… I feel like the world should feel… different now."

"Why? It doesn't revolve around us and what we do. Why should it be any different?"

Tammy sighed. "I guess." She looked at the time on her phone. "Yeah, Willy and I should start heading home. It's getting late and, my parents don't like us commuting after dark."

"I should probably go too," Kuya Kim sighed. "Traffic is going to be horrible. Can I drop anyone off anywhere?"

"Nah, Willy and I will go down to the terminal. That way we can be sure to get seat."

"I can call my Uncle Carlos to pick me up," Jas said. He'd said to call him when she was done, and she would.

"I'll stay with you," Ate Sanny said. "I don't need to be anywhere any time soon."

Jas hesitated, but nodded. Company didn't sound like a bad idea. Everyone knew that the city was full of thieves, snatchers, scammers, kidnappers and drug dealers who walked up to you, injected you full of drugs and got you addicted so you became dependent on them. She was sure that they wouldn't be able to harm her, but she didn't want to risk drawing the attention of the police, who were dishonest and would put you in jail even if you were innocent unless you paid them bribes. She hadn't encountered any yet, but she supposed that was because she wasn't alone and therefore an easy-looking victim.

The three walked off, Kuya Kim back to the parking lot, the two younger girls outside to the terminal.

"Come on," Ate Sanny said, gesturing to Jas to follow her. "You still have another waffle sandwich to your name."

Jas thought of the sweetness and licked her limbs. She'd already had one, two would be indulgent… On the other hand, it would be ingratitude to spit on Ate Sanny's generosity… "Can I have maple syrup again?"

"Sure," Ate Sanny said, leading the way back to the waffle sandwich store.

Jas waited patiently as Ate Sanny bought her another waffle sandwich—another waffle sandwich!—as well as buying one for herself. The benches they had used already had people sitting on it since they had left, so they just found a wall to lean against.

"So…" Ate Sanny asked after a while, half of her waffle sandwich already consumed, "how do you feel about your first foray in fighting monsters as part of a hero team?"

For a moment, Jas continued to take small bites to give herself time to think. Inside, the fire burned, weak and warm and almost comfortable, like coals lying in ashes. With each bite, she felt a quiet pleasure that echoed her own.

"It was… confusing," she eventually said. "Did we do any good?"

"We took a monster out of the world," Ate Sanny said. "That spider was a carnivore. How long before it started eating people? It's not like there were any giant flies it could eat."

"But it was just curled up in its nest. I don't think I've ever heard of it going out to eat. How did it survive?"

Ate Sanny shrugged. "As the one with meat cell-based powers, I have two guesses. The first is something called Kleiber's Law. Are you familiar with it?"

Jas shook her head.

"Well, it basically says that the bigger an animal gets, the more efficient its metabolism, and the less it needs to eat proportional to its bodyweight. Since the Gagambuhala was so large, it had to eat far less than a spider a thousand times smaller than it."

Jas frowned. "But it didn't eat anything."

"Sure it did," Ate Sanny said. "It ate us. At least three of my drones, rich in proteins and stuff, and three of Tammy's drones, full of plant fats and fiber."

She couldn't help it. Jas stared.

Ate Sanny shrugged. "It didn't hurt once we stopped connecting to it."

Jas nodded. "What's the second option?"

"That it's like me, and it doesn't need to eat or drink," Ate Sanny said. "In which case, it could have stayed holed up in its nest indefinitely."

"But… isn't that good? That way it wasn't hurting anyone."

Ate Sanny raised an eyebrow at her. "What makes you think it wasn't hurting anyone by being there? Because of its presence, active or not, a lot of people have lost their jobs, and finding work is always hard. It caused millions, probably billions of pesos in property damage, which could cause businesses to close up or fail, costing even more people jobs. At least hundreds of people not being able to support their family isn't enough harm?"

That was…"I… suppose you're right," Jas said. The words seemed insufficient to complete convey the horror of it. Families, not earning, starving for food, needing to beg to eat, unable to support themselves… She'd been only thinking of direct physical harm, but Ate Sanny was right, all that disruption of a family's earning capacity would have been deadly. "Put that way, I suppose it needed to die. Now people can rebuild and recover."

"Rebuild and recover," Ate Sanny mused. "Sounds like a super typhoon when you put it that way. A force of nature that mankind can't really fight, only endure and survive."

"But we fought it."

"Yes. So are we still human?"

Inside her, Jaselle felt the fire, burning with no sign of going out, filled with glee at every bite of her waffle sandwich…

Chapter 29: The Statement Of Jaselle Alhambra, Part 6

For all his faults, Uncle Carlos was punctual. When he'd said he'd arrive to pick her up in twenty minutes, he actually arrived in fifteen, and Jas was just finished the third waffle sandwich—a third! This was definitely indulgent—that Ate Sanny had offered her when she saw his flashy American-made pickup truck heading towards them.

"My uncle is here," Jas said, pointing out the car.

Ate Sanny followed her finger, and nodded when she saw the car. "Well, I'll leave you then. I have to get back home myself. Take care, Jas. I'll contact you on the app if we have anything."

Jas nodded. The computer her uncle had given her as a gift when she'd first come to live with him to go to college had turned out surprisingly useful, but she supposed that was part of the degenerate temptation her grandmother had warned her about. Still, as long as she used it sparingly and only for work, it was useful in her studies, and it allowed her to communicate with her fellow… fellow Nightmærangers, she supposed.

Her uncle's pickup truck stopped as Ate Sanny left, and one of the doors at the back opened.

"Hey, Jaselle," Judy, one of the women her uncle lived in sin with or at least committed sin together with, greeted her, waving her into the car. Lila, her schoolmate who actually did live with them, sat behind her uncle, and 'Auntie Ronda', who was not actually her aunt, sat at the front seat, doing something on her cellphone.

Jas nodded to her politely. "Miss Judy," she said. Just because they lived sinful lives was no reason to be rude. It wasn't her place to judge, and besides, they had all been nothing but pleasant and helpful to her. They were actually very nice people, lives steeped in sins of the flesh with her uncle aside. "Hello Miss Lila. Miss Ronda. Hello, Uncle Carlos. Thank you for picking me up." She sat down and closed the door, her bag on her lap.

"Well, of course. Anything for my favorite niece," her uncle smiled as the pick-up truck began to pull away from the curb. Jas watched out the window as they passed by Ate Sanny, who'd broken out into a run. Did she intend to run all the way back home?

"I'm the only one of your nieces you've ever met," Jas pointed out, leaving the 'because grandmother said you were no longer welcome at home and she never wanted to see you again' unsaid.

"Yes. So if I ever meet any of your sisters you might have competition for the top spot. But currently you're my favorite niece, so you get special treatment!" her uncle said cheerfully. "So, did you have fun with your friends?"

Friends? Well, she supposed they were becoming friends. They had been nothing but kind and nice to her, and they had been very understanding…

"It was all right," she said noncommittally.

"Who was that cutie you were talking to?" Lila asked. Jas had been warned about women like her…

"That's Ate Sanny. She was just keeping me company since she didn't want me to wait alone."

"Is she looking for a sugar daddy? Or an FB?" Lila asked.

"I… wouldn't know," Jas said. "I don't know what any of those things are." Sugar daddy? Was that some kind of candy?

"Lila, leave Jas alone," Uncle Carlos said. "Leave her friend alone, for that matter."

"Aw… but she was a tall blonde gyaru! That's, like, rare!" Still, Lila dropped the subject.

"Do you want to stop by anywhere for food, Jas?" Uncle Carlos asked. "We can go through a drive-thru. The traffic is a bit heavy, so it might be late by the time we get home."

Jas hesitated, but the allure of fast food was tantalizing. "All right," she said.

Uncle Carlos turned on the radio as Jas settled into her seat, closing her eyes and trying to ignore Lila and Judy with the heads together, whispering, giggling and probably more. "—state of emergency as the military secure the area," the bland voice of an old man said over the radio. As soon as he stopped talking, loud, repetitive, tuneless music began to play, only to cut off as he started speaking again. "Well, no more Gagambuhala, listeners and listenettes. Maybe that means that we'll be able to go shopping in Makati again."

Filler music. "But they still haven't explained what that beam of light was," his cohost said, a feminine voice. "Does it have anything to do with that light over the city during the Tagaytay eruption?"

Jas tried to tune out the radio and the two women next to her as she closed her eyes, the vibrations of the car lulling her to sleep…

 

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Jas spent the next day reading and studying ahead for her classes. Her parents said she needed top, perfect grades to be able to qualify for a scholarship so that the government would pay for her education, and so she had to study. Uncle Carlos said he was fine with paying her tuition fees, but her parents didn't want her to be dependent on him. Since such grades was what was expected of her anyway, Jas expected it would only be a matter of time before she qualified for those scholarships. Granted, her grades weren't that high yet, but as soon as she got used to the pacing of her college lessons she was sure she'd be able to do it.

The fire within her burned, impatience and urges to move, to burn, to do something filling her, but she had learned the night before. Her uncle had a plethora of junkfood and snack of both the salty and sweet varieties in his pantry—another indulgence, a room just for food instead of just a cabinet in the kitchen—and she grabbed some of the sweet candies, putting them in her mouth and sucking on them slowly. The taste seemed to pacify the fire in much the way the waffle sandwiches had, all the urges turning into glee. It was dangerous, since her grandmother had warned her having more than two candies a day would give her diabetes, but to keep the fire suppressed she was willing to risk it… and maybe Ate Sanny could cure diabetes?

The laptop her uncle had said was a gift when she'd arrived was open on her desk next to her books, and she would occasionally look up to check if her professors had posted anything for them to do or had replied to her requests for extra credit work. She also checked her messages from the other…Nightmærangers… but there was nothing she needed to reply to. Tammy had sent a message praising everyone for their contributions the day before—there was still no mention of Jas's loss of control—while Ate Sanny left short messages that had seemed obtuse at first, until Jas realized they were about the consequences of their actions yesterday.

Traffic apparently wasn't getting better yet, since the military still hadn't left the area of Makati, but that was supposedly expected. A few people had gotten distant pictures and video of Tammy turning into a giant thorny bush, and it was already being passed around online as a new monster, which she apparently found 'distressing but understandable'. As Ate Sanny had said yesterday, the military were concerned that her plasma beam had been the result of something the Gagambuhala had built, and they were digging through the fallen nest to find it. Of course, no such device existed, but they had found dozens of robot spiders, which had been taken for study. There was also talk about the military sweeping through Pasay to look for the dog monster that was somehow hypnotizing and eating people.

Tammy wanted to go after that next, but Ate Sanny was having trouble keeping track of it. Her drones were apparently vulnerable to whatever it was doing and were either getting eaten or simply coming unconnected from her. Given that, she didn't want to go looking for it in her own body, and definitely not alone. However, Ate Sanny had other monsters she was tracking, and whose location she was more sure of. Tammy and Ate Sanny—or Green and Yellow, as they were listed on the messaging app—sporadically discussed about which one they should go after next.

The list that Ate Sanny included in an attachment was horrifying in her ignorance of it. A giant rooster that glittered in prismatic colors sounded like a joke, until Ate Sanny had added a note that a giant bird essentially has the same physiology as a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and were omnivores who would eat anything. It was apparently loose somewhere in Sta. Rosa, and Ate Sanny had only recently heard of it. Others on the list included the giant hand—presumably with something equally giant attached on the other end of the hand—that took people and even cars from along the Baywalk, a giant cat that was attacking and eating people, a giant dragonfly that seemed to vanish into fog over Laguna Lake—which was not known for fog at any time of the year—a giant moth that only seemed to appear at night that was visible only in the light of the moon and buzzed around skyscrapers, a giant pig that had escaped from a piggery in Cavite was apparently running wild in the woods, a… tree that moved?

According to the more detailed section, there was a tree in Manila North Cemetary that people had seen moving. It had been attributed to ghosts until recently, where people had begun to suspect it was some kind of monster. Authorities had tried cutting it down, and it had responded by growing explosively. It sounded so much like Tammy it was probably something they should investigate.

Other things on the list had been marked as 'lost track', such as something about a snake, an unknown thing that had caused explosive geysers of hot water along Katiupunan Avenue, something that had caused a rash of violence at a squatter's area that had left those affected babbling nonsense and apparently insane (they'd been talking about not selling their votes in the next election and actually voting for the best candidate), and the dog that affected people's mind, which Ate Sanny had apparently stopped following closely. Another note read that while some monsters exhibited blatant 'powers', others were merely unnaturally large members of their species.

Jas only read their conversation, not knowing enough about places and their priorities to be able to contribute. She noticed that Willy and Kuya Kim were equally silent, though that could just be out of habit. Ate Sanny and Tammy were fairly unintelligible when they were speaking to each other. It was practically a foreign language. Well, technically it was, since they tended to lapse into English eventually, but while Jas, like most people, was perfectly fluent in the language, what they said still made no sense.

On Tuesday, however, she received a message about an emergency, asking her to meet everyone at Kuya Kim's house. The message was to her cellphone rather than over the messaging app, which was a sign of how important it was, since she had told them her phone was for emergencies only. Jas was able to take a jeepney to Kuya Kim's house, to find Ate Sanny already there, leaning back on the gate with her arms crossed and clearly waiting for people to arrive. She was wearing only a pair of shorts and a plain white t-shirt, her feet bare on the rough cement sidewalk, toes curled.

"Hey," Ate Sanny greeted. "Sorry for having Tammy contact you on your phone, but it was important. We're afraid something might have happened to Kim."

"What happened?" Jas asked, adjusting her backpack with her school materials.

"Tammy exchanged phone numbers with Kim's brother, and he texted her that his brother hasn't come out of his room since he came home that night he was with us," Ate Sanny said. "When they tried to go in today, his door wouldn't open. They got concerned, so they got a ladder to his window, and… well, apparently his room is too big for them to see him, so Kim's brother texted Tammy. They're coming straight here from school, though given traffic that could be thirty minutes to an hour from now."

Jas looked towards the house, but of course there was nothing to see. The high walls and gate blocked all view from the road, giving the property privacy, and there was just the slight hint of pink—magenta?—rocks along the top of the wall, which probably did something. "Maybe we should knock? They should be expecting us, shouldn't they?"

"They should…" Ate Sanny sighed. "But I don't have my phone and I don't have their number." She gestured down at herself. "I sort of just grabbed the lightest clothes I could carry and still fly. They said emergency, after all."

Jas gave the older woman a bemused look, wondering if this was one of her strange jokes, but she looked completely serious. Shaking her head, Jas made a fist and knocked the metal gate with her knuckles, making a deep, metallic ring. "Hello?" she called out, letting the family know they had visitors. "Anybody home? It's Jas, I'm a friend of Kuya Kim's?"

Ate Sanny had jerked away from the gate when Jas had started knocking, staring at her incredulously as if she'd done something incredibly rude, before suddenly shaking her head ruefully. "Oh, right," she muttered. "Can you, uh, not tell anyone I forgot something as obvious as knocking? Please?"

She… forgot she could knock. That was embarrassing. "I promise," Jas said.

Ate Sanny sighed. "Thanks." She looked down at herself. "I'm severely underdressed for this," she muttered, shaking her head.

From the other side of the gate, Jas heard footsteps, followed by the ringing of solid metal knocking into each other and grinding as the pedestrian gate was opened. Kuya Kim's girlfriend Ate Katherine stood there, looking upset, though she raised an eyebrow when she saw Ate Sanny.

"They said it was an emergency and these were the only clothes light enough for me to fly in," Ate Sanny said. "I can get changed once we're inside, if that makes you feel any better?"

"That would be appreciated," Ate Katherine said. Then she pursed her lips and added, "Thank you for coming so fast."

Ate Sanny waved a dismissive hand. "No problem. Kim's part of the team. We've got to stick together."

"Well, thanks anyway," Ate Katherine said. A frown was starting to wrinkle her brow. "Did you… get shorter?"

Jas blinked and turned to look at Ate Sanny, really look, and realized that the usually towering woman was only about a head taller than her.

Ate Sanny shrugged. "I was told it was an emergency, and smaller flies faster. Besides, if I were my usual size, these clothes wouldn't fit so well."

Ate Katherine gave the other woman a piercing look, inspecting her, and Jas had to wonder how much of Ate Sanny's physical features were real. "Well, come in. You can get changed in the bathroom, I'll ask auntie if there are any clothes you can borrow."

"I appreciate it," Ate Sanny said, now looking amused.

The reason for her amusement became obvious as she and Jas stepped inside and Ate Katherine closed the gate behind them. As the gate clanged shut and the metal bolt slammed into place to lock it. Ate Sanny did as she said as she would and started to change. Her sun-darkened skin started to turn a jaundiced yellow before becoming smooth and hard shell, gaining a sheen. Ate Katherine turned back from closing the gate and started back in surprise as she saw Ate Sanny becoming taller, her limbs and torso elongating as she approached her normal height, her face becoming covered in smooth shell as dark compound eyes appeared on her face..

"Ah, that's better," Ate Sanny—Yellow—said through a slit that had been hidden behind a piece of shell on her face. Her arms and torso moved with disturbing fluidity, and she shimmied out of the shirt she was wearing, which had risen up so far it would have bared her belly button. The shorts had become even shorter, reaching only halfway down her thighs. Those were also removed and Yellow bundled them up with casual carelessness behind putting them at the small of her back. The shell there cracked, and white-speckled yellow tentacles reach out and grabbed the clothes, bundling them up smaller before wrapping around them, holding them tight to Yellow's back.

"…" Ate Katherine stared. "Kim said you liked weird jokes. I should have figured."

"Hey, just because he doesn't have the good taste to understand what I say isn't my fault," Yellow said with a shrug. "So, where's Kim's room?"

Jas awkwardly followed the two women into the house and up the dark wood stairs to the second floor. Kuya Kim's parents, grandfather and siblings were all crowded around a door. His father was kneeling down, trying to dismantle the doorknob, while his sister stood nearby with the toolbox.

"Auntie, babe's friends are here," Ate Katherine said.

Kuya Kim's mother looked up and let out a scream, making her husband look up and curse, pulling his wife and his daughter behind him. Kuya Kim's brother stared.

"Hello Mr. Bunhong, Mrs. Bunhong," Yellow said in a perfectly normal voice, raising one hand in a lazy wave. "I heard you're having an emergency with Kim?"

The three stared at her as Kim's grandfather adjusted his glasses, squinting at Yellow up and down, then turned his squint towards Jas. "What are you wearing?" he asked the taller woman.

"Nothing," Yellow said.

"You need to go see a doctor then, something's wrong with you, you shouldn't be that color."

"I know," Yellow said.

Kim's grandfather nodded curtly, and walked away.

"He just doesn't care, does he?" Yellow said, shaking her head. "So, this is Kim's room?"

"Yeah," Kim's brother Ryan said, grinning. "We can't get the door open. It might have a rock in front of it or something. I tried looking under the door to be sure, but I can't see anything."

"Let me try," Jas said, and blinked when she heard Yellow say the same thing.

Yellow made a gesture. "Go ahead," she said.

Hesitantly, Jas walked up to the door, Kim's family stepping back to make space for her. She knelt down and held out her hand towards the crack between the door and the floor. She concentrated, her hand turning black and angular as it became volcanic glass. The fire within her burned, enthusiasm filling her, but also curiosity. Jas grew a thin chip of glass like a nail on the end of her finger and snapped it off. Then she laid it down flat on the floor and flicked it under the door. She closed her eyes and concentrated on what her shard could see. "There's definitely rock blocking the door," she said. "I can't tell how thick it is though."

"Well, definitely no getting in that way," Yellow mused, tilting her head as she looked up thoughtfully. "And you've already tried the window, if I remember right. Hmm… do you have an access hatch for the space between the ceiling and the roof?"

 

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Fifteen minutes later, a disheveled-looking Kuya Kim was alternately being hugged and scolded by his family, pink sand all over his clothes and hair. Ate Sanny had been provided with one of Kuya Kim's sports jerseys and sweatpants, the latter of which only came part of the way down her calves, but it was apparently better than her idea of getting changed.

"I'm sorry," he said, looking extremely embarrassed. "I was trying something and I… lost track of time…"

"You lost track of time so much you forgot to eat?" his mother said. "You missed church." Jas winced on Kuya Kim's behalf.

"I, uh, didn't get hungry," Kuya Kim said, looking aside.

"Rock mode?" Ate Sanny said.

"Yeah…"

Kuya Kim's father shook his head. "Well, at least you're all right. What were you doing?"

"Well, the briefcase I made didn't work very well… and it was a bit too big… I tried to make something smaller, but I didn't have anything, so I used some of my rock as material… then one thing led to another and… um, I made… things. They're upstairs..."

"Ryan, go with your bother, make sure he doesn't get distracted," Kuya Kim's father said.

"Yeah… I, uh, might have destroyed my phone…"

"Well, then you'll have to buy a new one," his father said.

Kuya Kim winced, and the two brothers headed upstairs, leaving her and Ate Sanny with their parents.

"Thank you for coming to help so promptly," Kuya Kim's father said. "I'm sorry for how I reacted, but you took me by surprise."

"Completely understandable," Ate Sanny said, as if it wasn't her idea to come inside the house as an eight-foot tall monster-woman. "I suppose I should probably find a way to tell the other two they don't need to come here now, but—"

There was a metallic ringing as someone knocked on the gate outside. "Hello?" Tammy's voice called distantly. "Anybody home?"

"Too late, I suppose," Ate Sanny said.

Chapter 30: The Statement Of Jaselle Alhambra, Part 7

The things on the table looked innocuous enough for the most part. They didn't have the handmade look of something that was… well, handmade, but rather the dinged look of a manufactured object that had seen use. Many of the things had parts that had that bright pink—or was it magenta?—look of something made from Kuya Kim's body. There was a knife with a blade that looked like it was made of pink glass that resembled Jas' own volcanic glass strongly enough she suspected that's what it was, a square of pink stone that had a touchscreen taking up half of the surface, a lightbulb apparently wired to a piece of pink rock, what looked like an ordinary flashlight that had been dented, a long piece of wood with an switch on it that seemed to have previously square but had had the edges clumsily scraped off, a bag that seemed to be made from sandpaper—pink sandpaper—, a small square tin with Christmas imagery and the logo of an expensive foreign chocolate bar…

"So, talk us through your little bender, please?" Ate Sanny said. The five of them, Kuya Kim's parents, and his siblings were seated around the sala, the things on the coffee table in the center. Kuya Kim's grandfather had gone to the corner to read today's newspaper, apparently not interested.

"It wasn't a bender. No alcohol was involved," Kuya Kim defended himself as Jas began to feel a subtle change in the urges coming from the fire. Curiosity was waning, slowly being replaced with a restlessness…

"No, you were just drunk with power," the taller woman said. "I think it's safe to say this is from you devouring the Gagambuhala. At the very least, from how your family reacted I doubt this has happened before." She glanced at the family in question, in case they proved her wrong and offered a dissenting opinion.

"No, this has never happened before," Kuya Kim's father said. "What is it? Is it dangerous? Will it happen again?"

"I have no idea," Ate Sanny said cheerfully. "As to whether it will happen again…" She shrugged. "That's up to him."

"What are these things, anyway?" Tammy said, reaching for the nearest thing on the table, the length of wood.

"Don't touch that!" Kuya Kim cried, and Tammy stiffened.

"What is it?" she asked as Kuya Kim carefully picked up the length of wood.

"It's… well, at some point, I might have tried to… make a sword," he said, the last three words coming out in a rush as if hoping people wouldn't understand them.

He had no such good fortune, because Jas understood him easily. "You made a sword?" she said.

"Yeah," he said.  "This is actually the second version. The first blade was a bit fragile, so I, uh… wrapped it around my curtain rod…"

"His room was really trashed when I came down through the ceiling," Ate Sanny said. "I think he dismantled his computer."

"Actually, that's still intact, it's in this," Kuya Kim said, tapping the pink square with the touchscreen. "I, uh, gutted my phone to use as a touchscreen to make a pocket PC…"

"Isn't that what a smartphone already is?" Jas said, confused. Inside, the restlessness was growing, and she felt patches of her back starting to get hot…

Kuya Kim sighed. "Yeah… but it seemed really cool to do at the time." He eyed the pink square. "I think I can get it back out…"

"But the sword? What about the sword?" Kuya Kim's brother Ryan said.

Kuya Kim glanced at his father, but took the length of wood and held it up. Gingerly, he flicked the switch on it. The piece of wood jerked in his hand as a long blade of pink volcanic glass wrapped around a metal tube emerged from one end and into the air.

Everyone stared at it.

"How did that fit in there?" Kuya Kim's mother said, sounding confused.

"That's so cool!" Tammy exclaimed.

"So awesome!" Ryan might have agreed, Jas wasn't sure.

Ate Sanny tilted her head. "Newton's laws?" she said.

"Yeah," Kuya Kim said. "All the parts still weigh the same, so I'm putting a five pound hunk of rock into a one pound piece of wood, which makes it jerk when the blade goes in and out. The trick was to find a way to manipulate the volume the blade is stored in with a switch. So I… uh… I grew a crystal that changed the volume of a space when I ran an electric current through it."

"Really?" Jas exclaimed. That… was impossible, right? But she supposed it wasn't that impossible after all.

The fire within her didn't share her academic interest. Sighing internally, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a small butterscotch candy and discretely tore the wrapper open. The plastic wrapping went into her pocket for later disposal while she put the candy in her mouth and started to suck on it, mindful of her grandmothers admonishments not to bite on it, lest her teeth break painfully and start falling out of her mouth.

The fire immediately became distracted, the patches of heat on her back fading to normal as it burned with glee. Jas made sure to suck slowly and carefully. This was her second candy of the day. Any more and she'd end up with diabetes…

"Yeah, if you run a current through it, it stops bending space, and the sword stored inside the handle comes out," Kuya Kim explained.

"So… you created a material that, when you run electricity through it, alters the volume of an area?" Tammy said slowly as a smile spread across her face. "Could you… do it the other way around too? Like, it expands an area if you run a current through it?"

"Oh, I can," Kuya Kim said. "I actually did that for the first version, but I figured it would be better to make it fail-safe in case it runs out of batteries, so I made it collapse the expanded volume when you run a current instead."

"So, you've created an artificial substance that, when subjected to an electric current, has the effect of raising or lowering the volume of an area," Ate Sanny said with a growing smile. "A 'volume effect', if you will…"

Kuya Kim frowned. "That's a reference to something. I don't know what, but I'm sure it's a reference to something."

"It is," Ryan said, snickering.

Kuya Kim merely nodded in satisfaction. "Well, I'm getting better at being able to tell, so that's something…"

"What does the rest do, babe?" Ate Katherine said, examining the Christmas-themed box.

"Oh, that's my third attempt at compact storage for our clothes when we go out heroing," he explained. "I know, I know, the mass still doesn't change so you still can't carry it, but I figure it'll be useful for when we have to change without a car to stash things in."

"Actually, this is will work pretty well," Ate Sanny said thoughtfully, her legs crossed immodestly. "It's definitely smaller than the briefcase. Easier to carry, even if it is heavier by volume. I can just have a separate drone carry it. Doesn't need to be airborne, after all."

Kuya Kim's father reached out, and Kuya Kim hesitantly handed him the sword. "Hmm…" Kuya Kim's father said, examining the handle. "This could use some work. If you sand this, use a planer to get all the sides even, it would look much better."

"I shaped it by hand," Kuya Kim said.

"What, with a knife?"

"No, literally by hand," Kuya Kim said, his hand turning pink—sorry, magenta—and semi-transparent, with glittering facets and sharp edges. "I scraped the wood into that shape."

His father frowned at him disapprovingly. "Why didn't you use the right tools for the job?"

Kuya Kim shrugged. "It was the middle of the night and I was in a hurry."

His father sighed heavily in disappointment. "Well, I'm sure with a little work, this could look better."

"Dad, it's fine! It doesn't need to look better, it works as is!"

"You said the box is your third attempt, what's the second one?" Ate Sanny asked.

Kuya Kim pointed at the bag that looked like it was made of pink sandpaper. "Well, this is the second version after the briefcase, where I tried to make a shopping bag bigger on the inside. It worked but… well, after you put something in, it's hard to get it out because the space inside is really big, and the dimensions keep changing because the shape of the bag does."

"And what's this?" Tammy asked, holding up the thing that looked like a dented metal pocket flashlight.

"It's a flashlight," Kuya Kim said.

Tammy looked disappointed. "Oh. I thought it would be something special."

"It's powered by a rock that converts heat into electricity. The lightbulb is the prototype."

"Seriously, babe?"  Ate Katherine said, reaching for the flashlight. "How are you doing it? Seabeck effect? Or is it just piezoelectricity?"

"I… haven't exactly been able to do tests…"

"I have to wonder if that material is one that actually occurs in nature and hasn't been discovered yet or something that only exists because you made it, like your volume effect material," Ate Sanny mused.

"So, can you make a big chunk of it that can power a house, then put it in a small container so it's compact?" Tammy asked.

"Can you?" Kuya Kim's mother asked eagerly. "It would really help with our electric bill…"

"I don't know yet, I'll have to see," Kuya Km said, looking a bit overwhelmed.

"Well, since this particular crisis is over, I better get going," Ate Sanny said, getting up. "I'll contact you all through the usual methods once I've got a good target for us next. I think this monster situation might be worse than I thought."

"Worse than half a dozen monsters running around the city?" Tammy said, also getting up. Willy silently followed her cousin's example, picking up her cousin's backpack and holding it patiently.

Ate Sanny nodded. "Yes. Those are the ones we know have been making the rounds on the internet, but what about the ones that aren't reported because no one's seen them because they're in the sewers, or in the waterways, or in the mountains, or people have been eaten before they can report it?"

"Oh…" Tammy said. "That's a horrifying but disturbingly plausible thought."

Ate Sanny nodded. "So I'll have to start researching if there's been an increase in missing persons lately, which is going to be hard because I have no idea what I'm doing and no place to start. It's not like I know anyone in the police I can ask…"

"Actually, I might be able to help there," Kuya Kim's father said. "I have a few mistah in the PNP I could ask about that."

"Oh, you mean Uncle Nelson?" Ryan said.

"Yes," Kuya Kim's father said. "I'll tell him I'm concerned these might be from monster attack, and if there are any in our area. Kim can tell you once he gets his computer out."

"That would be appreciated, thank you," Ate Sanny said politely. "I'm sure Kim can get the details to us."

Jas stood quietly, not speaking since she had the candy in her mouth, and it would be rude to talk. Still, it would be equally rude to be silent, so she awkwardly maneuvered the now-half-sized candy into her cheek. "Thank you for having us over," she said, trying to enunciate properly. "I hope you feel better, Kuya Kim. I'll pray for you."

"Thanks," Kuya Kim said.

"Can I borrow the storage can? I want to practice carrying it around," Ate Sanny said.

Kuya Kim glanced at the box, then shrugged and picked it up, handing it to her. "Sure, give it a try. It might be a little too deep, but that's probably not a problem for you, right?"

"Not for me," Ate Sanny confirmed, "but some of us might have difficulties getting their clothes back out without help. Excuse me, I need to go get changed."

Jas watched as Ate Sanny stepped out to take off the clothes she'd borrowed.

"She's coming back as a monster, isn't she?" Ate Katherine said.

"Probably," Tammy said as Jas nodded. "Kuya Kim, maybe you can escort her out using your warp things so she's not obviously leaving from your house?"

"On it, boss," Kuya Kim said.

 

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Jas was able to return to her uncle's house early enough that her uncle had not yet returned. She immediately put away her books, grabbed the broom and dustpan from the kitchen, and started sweeping. It wasn't a chore she needed to do, but she felt guilty simply living in his house without contributing anything, so she made sure to sweep the first floor and the non-bedroom areas of the second floor. After a few days, his uncle told Daphne, his live-in housekeeper that he had sinful relations with, to just let Jas help around the house. She suspected this was because the house was noticeably cleaner ever since Jas had stated helping. Ate Daphne clearly wasn't very thorough at cleaning by herself.

That done, Jas went to her room to go over today's lessons, as it wasn't the weekend, so she didn't have time to clean the windows. She'd done what homework she could over lunch, and did the rest now as she waited for the call to dinner. In the back of her mind, she could feel the fire on the border of resigned boredom and confusion as she thoroughly reread through notes and material, making new notes, double checking the homework she'd done over lunch, and doing a lot of writing. Whenever her hand ached from holding her little stub of a pencil, she turned it to volcanic rock and back again to make the pain go away and turn back into fresh muscle.

It used to be she was interrupted by the fire filling her with impatience, with trying to turn into plasma and lava, but now she had a glass of sweet soft drink at her side. There was always at least three bottles in her uncle's enormous refrigerator, and now she took advantage of it, taking a sip when the fire became more than she could suppress or ignore. It seemed to be working, though she had two down two glasses of water for every sip, lest the sugar start melting her teeth as her grandmother had warned her…

When dinner was called, she dutifully stood up to wash her hands, and then went down to join her uncle and the women he lived in sin with. There was Lila, 'Auntie Ronda', Judy who worked at some law firm or other, and Daphne, who like Jas was from the provinces—though a different province—and who was supposed to look after the house during the day when everyone was away. Tonight, in addition to the house's usual residents, they was also Lila's friend Jessica who sometimes visited and always stayed overnight, a mestiza looking woman Jas had met before though her exact relationship to her uncle slipped her mind right then, and some woman Jas had never met before, but was introduced as 'Sarah, a model', which Jas just nodded politely at. It was very unlikely she was a very good role model, if she was consorting with Jas's uncle like this, but it would be rude to point it out.

Dinner was lively, with her uncle's fallen women exchanging stories about their day, gossip they had heard and, in Lila's case, a girl she had found attractive and was trying to seduce. Thankfully she had kept the mention brief, though Jas was resigned to possibly seeing another schoolmate, or possibly even a classmate, joining this depraved table.

When her uncle asked her how school had been, Jas dutifully gave a summary of her classes, which served as something of a personal check of her comprehension of the day's lessons. Her uncle, for her part, listened politely enough, and asked if she needed anything.

Usually, Jas would reply in the negative, but this time she paused to consider. "Actually, Uncle Carlos," she asked tentatively. "There is one thing. Do you know anyone in the police?"

Her uncle's eyes widened in alarm. "What happened? Are you in trouble? Did something happen on your way home?" His voice was surprisingly intent.

Jas was taken aback by his vehemence. "No, nothing happened, Uncle Carlos. It's just that I was talking with some friends of mine, about the monsters showing up lately, and one of them wondered if there had been an increase of missing persons. She thought it might be a sign of unreported monsters attacking people, who end up simply disappearing."

Her uncle stared at her. "And… you're asking if I know anyone in the police because you want to know?"

"Shouldn't we be concerned about it?" Jas said. "What if there's a monster nearby? People know about the one in Pasay, and that still hasn't been caught or stopped. What if there are others?"

The table had fallen into an uncomfortable silence, although perhaps that was just the other women not participating as they looked at their phones.

"Don't you think that people would notice if monsters are going around eating people, Jaselle?" Lila said. "I mean, there are CCTV cameras everywhere now, and monsters are huge. Wouldn't they show up?"

"I don't know," Auntie Ronda said, "they still haven't caught Laking Kamay in Manila Bay, even though they know where it tends to be. It wouldn't surprise me if there are monsters out there we don't know about." Laking Kamay—Big Hand—was the name that was slowly being used for the monster that kept hunting along the Baywalk area.

"Hmm…" Uncle Carlos mused. "Well, I know some people. They might not be allowed to give me the exact numbers, but I can certainly ask if there's an increase…" He nodded. "Well, it couldn't hurt to ask. I'll call my buddies, see if they know anything. Actually, I should ask them to come over, it's been a while since we've had some drinks." He began to smile, then seemed to catch sight of Jas. "Just drinks though, of course, just a few friends getting together, haha!"

They'd done something sinful, hadn't they? Jas wondered if she should offer to be away when Uncle Carlo's friends come over. Still, it would be rude to say anything. She would simply have to pray for her uncle's soul, and that of his friends, sinful and blackened as they might be…

"Thank you uncle," Jas said. "I hope it's nothing, but with all that's been happening lately…"

"You worry too much, Jas," Lila said, making a dismissive gesture. "Maybe things like that happens, but it probably doesn't happen anywhere around here. There's not enough space for a monster to hide."

"They still haven't caught the one in Pasay, though…" Lila's friend Jessica said quietly.

Auntie Ronda forced a smile on her face. "Well, enough of this talk over dinner. We should probably have a new rule. In addition to no politics, no talk about monsters, either. It's not like we can do anything about either."

Jas felt the flame within her, but accepted the subtle rebuke for what it was.

She lapsed back into silence as Judy began talking about client who had come to her law firm that day. Jas didn't really understand, but it seemed like the client had asked for something unreasonable…?

Still, she waited patiently for everyone to finish eating and helped get the plates to the kitchen—Daphne stepping in to wash the dishes, as if feeling self-conscious that Jas would try to do it herself… again—and put the unfinished food into containers to put in the refrigerator. By the time she finished, her uncle and his loose women had congregated to the sala to watch some American film about a cabin in the woods, and Jas was able to slip upstairs to go back to her work, a new cup of cold soft drink in hand to placate the fire and a jug of water to protect her teeth with. She sat at her desk and got back to work.

The flame burned within her as she worked long into the night, occasionally stopping to go to her bathroom, get undressed, and change her body to lava and plasma before changing back, her body strangely refreshed once more. When it was almost midnight, she stopped her third review of the day's material and began to put everything away in preparation for tomorrow's classes, putting everything back in her schoolbag so she would only need to grab it on her wait out tomorrow, putting in a fresh, unsharpened pencil to replace the one she'd used up that day.

She was just about to shut down her folding computer—she didn’t understand why it was called a laptop, it was far too hot to put on her lap comfortably unless she changed—when a new message suddenly came over the messaging app she used to communicate with the others.

Yellow: "Found new information, proposing new priority target. We might have to meet tomorrow or the next day to discuss it. Do not reply, you all need to go to sleep."

She watched bemusedly as both Green and Pink replied.

Shaking her head, Jas at least complied as she shut down her folding computer, turned off the lights and lay down to sleep.

As Jaselle closed her eyes, the fire burned inside her, warm and strangely placid, and she slipped into a dream of burning deep within the earth, surrounded by pressure on all sides…

Chapter 31: The Statement Of Jaselle Alhambra, Part 8

Ate Sanny's new priority target turned out to be a neighborhood that had to be evacuated because of rapidly-growing bougainvillea. According to her, a homeowner had noticed that one of his bougainvillea had begun to grow at a visible rate. The video of one of the plant's branches literally growing a foot longer in three minutes had gone on social media, where it had been passed around and mostly been called a hoax and computer effects.

That had been in the mid-afternoon.

By nightfall, the homeowner in question had taken another picture to show his house with a massive bougainvillea growth along one wall, crawling along the roof, visibly intruding over the wall into a neighboring property and wrapping around a coconut tree. The man had posted about how he intended to have the vines cut down the following day and have samples sent to local universities to be analyzed.

His family had awoken in the middle of the night when a window had shattered and the thorny vines had started growing into their house. They'd had to cut their way out with kitchen knives, as the thorns had grown into a massive thicket around their house, the houses of their neighbor behind them and on either side. One household had gotten trapped and several neighbors had to cut through their property with machetes and giant gardening shears. They had needed to fight their way out, as the bougainvillea had begun to grow back behind them. They managed to get the household out, but several people, including the original homeowner, was in the hospital due to dozens of inflamed wounds from the thorns of the vines.

"Yeah, bougainvillea thorns are a real bitch," Tammy agreed as they met once more in a coffee shop. It was a different shop this time, though it still had the same name. Jaselle once more had a cookie in front of her, which she ate crumb by crumb even as she listened attentively. "I think I actually heard about this on the radio of the jeepney we were riding on the way here. If the media knows about it, it's probably already gone to hell."

Ate Sanny nodded. "In the three days since the original post that brought this to my attention, the entire street and part of the streets adjoining it have been evacuated, and the local government unit have tried to cut through with chainsaws and herbicides. Neither last very long, and neither did one misguided attempt to try to burn down the growth. Several people are in the hospital from inflammation and infection from the thorns, and at least one family is suspected to have died in their house when the bougainvillea overran it in the night. I think some landscaping company volunteered their power tools to try and cut through, but by now the original growth is deep inside the neighborhood. So far, there hasn't been any mention of cuttings managing to grow explosively after they've been removed from the main body, which is a small mercy, but at the rate it's growing, it's probably taken over another street by now. "

"So… what do we do?" Jaselle asked hesitantly after swallowing the latest crumb she'd popped in her mouth.

"If this is like us, it'll just keep growing no matter how fast they try to cut it," Ate Sanny said. "So one of us needs to go in and devour it."

Jas, and everyone else but Willy, suppressed a shudder at the word.

"What, just like that?" Kuya Kim said. "No sneaking in, no trying to have me isolate the place?"

Ate Sanny shrugged. "Just like that. It's not like we can be sneaky about it, and it's growing as fast as… well, Tammy, at the very least."

"We're going," Tammy said decisively, then seemed to wilt into herself a little. "At least, I am. Today. Now. Who's coming with me?"

"Me," Willy said instantly, to no one's surprise.

"Going too," Ate Sanny said. She looked towards Jas and Kuya Kim. "What about you two?"

"Ugh, I hate trying to prune bougainvillea," Kuya Kim sighed. "It's painful and stupid and you have to pick it up with your fingers because there are too many thorns on it to hold in your hand."

"So… you're in?"

"Hell yes," Kuya Kim said vehemently. "I have rock for skin now and we don't have to actually prune it, just tear it apart and kill it. Try and stop me."

Everyone turned to Jas, who hesitated. "I… don't have to burn it, do I?"

"Since it's around people's homes, I strongly suggest against it," Ate Sanny said. "But just ripping it apart with your bare hands will probably work."

"And if you feel like setting something on fire anyway, just be careful where you aim," Tammy said. "This is green wood, so fire likely won't spread much, and Willy can douse it if needed."

Jas nodded slowly. "Then… I'll go too." But she glanced down.

She heard Ate Sanny sigh. "Finish your cookie. You shouldn't waste food. But be quick."

Jas smiled in relief as Tammy snickered. Still, as Jas looked down, there was still half a cookie left…

Reluctantly, telling herself it was so she wouldn't be wasteful, Jas picked up the cookie and raised it up…

 

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The neighborhood of Admiral Hills was, Jas later learned, one of many residential subdivisions that had been established on either side of Ortigas Avenue Extension during the 80s and 90s. They were generally bedroom communities, and being outside the city proper, having a lot of greenery wasn't unusual. Apparently, there used to be a lot of cows and goats around when she'd been younger, but nowadays there was only an occasional rooster kept in the few vacant lots left.

From what Jas saw on the flight there, carried on one of Ate Sanny's—no, Yellow's—drones that looked like ordinary birds except for the tentacles holding them, the houses were packed tightly, with everyone sharing a wall or a fence, but that was apparently normal for residential subdivisions. It seemed tight and cramped to Jas, used to the relatively wide spaces of her home province, but she supposed no one had to grow rice here, so they didn't need that much room…

The place Yellow had told them about was easy enough to identify. It was a blot of bright green leaves, and incongruous pink and white flowers, standing out sharply against dull and occasionally rusting roofs of the houses around it. The vines loomed, rising up in a high mound of greenery almost forty, fifty feet high, swaying with every passing breeze, visibly growing and blooming as they watched.  Jas could barely make out the houses underneath the thorns, and even then, only on the houses of the edges of the blot. As Yellow had predicted, three streets worth of houses were covered now, the thorny vines wrapping around the metal bars of fences, vertical posts, telephone poles, and other plants.

Around it, people crowded the streets. At first Jas thought they were packing up to evacuate, until she saw hands held high and the square shapes of smartphones. On closer inspection, only the houses closest to the growing blot had people moving around them frantically, packing up cars or using giant gardening scissors, machetes and occasionally power tools like chainsaws to try to keep the growing vines back. The latter was a losing battle as vines simply continued to grow and grow, just barely slowed down. A few people were even trying to light it on fire, but as Green had said, the wood was too green and wet to burn.

Looking down on it, Jas felt the fire burn. She… not, not her. That wasn't her. But it wanted to reach down, to move towards the ground, to… to…

Jas wasn't sure. All she knew that the urge was strong and growing stronger, and she had to concentrate to keep her fragments obsidian instead of melting into lava or burning into plasma.

"I can't control it," Green said, her voice echoing slightly inside the small space lit by undeniably pink light. The little plant drone that spoke lay atop a pile of haphazardly folded clothes and shoes. "Every other plant beneath us is fair game, but not that one."

"So, definitely monster then," Yellow said. The words were high-pitched, since the drone talking didn't have a lot of lung capacity to speak with, so she was using things besides vocal chords to speak. "Very likely, at least, unless something else is controlling it already."

"Probably not. There are other bougainvillea down there, and I can control those fine, but not the big one."

"So, how do we… you know, eat it?" Magenta asked through all the pink stones around them that was bending the space to let everything fit.

"Well, we just… wrap it up and… devour" —Green and everyone else except the crystalline ball of water that was Willy shuddered, the space they were in rattling metallically as the pink stones vibrated— "it… right?"

"Hm…" Yellow said. "I think this will need cutting down to size so that it… fits."

"Are we sure it doesn't… fit… now?"

"Do you think you can wrap your metaphorical mouth around all that and start chewing?"

There was a brief silence.

"I… think I could…" Jas ventured. "If I was big enough…"

"I can get that big, easy," Green said. "I mean, only this much in three days? This thing is slow. I'd still need time though…"

"Pretty sure I can, yeah," the space around them vibrated. "All I need I enough sand or enough space."

"Ugh… I hate the square-cube law…" Yellow muttered.

A rustling. "I thought you were over that?"

"Only when it comes to making a human-sized mass able to fly. I'm still slow and heavy if I try to scale up and start having to copy dinosaur physiology, unless I want to be some sort of meat carpet thing…"

"Yellow, you're complaining about being able to fly. I respect you, but please shut up."

"I'm hardly unique, Mags. Red can fly too."

"…Mags?"

"What? 'Magenta' has three syllables. It's still better than 'Pinky'."

"Fair enough. So, how do we do this?"

Despite no one having human eyes, even Yellow's little speaking drone, Jas had the distinct sense of everyone studiously avoiding looking at her—metaphorically—and concentrating on Green.

"Uh, well…" the young girl hesitated, but only for a moment. "Yellow, can you feel anyone alive inside the growth?"

"Yes," Yellow said. "There are still some people in there. Hang on… most of them are in dark places, I think they're all hiding in closets or something to protect themselves from thorns, but there are a few who are being smothered in thorns. They're bleeding and infected in some places. Some are dehydrating and… ugh… well, it's been three days…"

"Get to them, get them out, use that bio-control of yours to heal what you can. Magenta, go with her, give her space to get people out. Willy, make ice walls, keep the growth of the… the… the Thorn Thicket contained. It might grow fast, but it should still suffer from cold, and your ice might discourage it from growing past you."

"Yes, Tammy."

"Not Tammy, cuz. Not right now. Call me Nightmæranger Green." A beat. "Wow, you're right Kuya, that's a mouthful. Uh, let's lose some syllables… Nightmærger Green? Nightger Green? Night Green? No, that sounds like the kind with a 'k'… Nightmare Green? Nightmare Green, Nightmare Green… yeah, that sounds better. Call me Nightmare Green."

"Yes, Nightmare Green "

"I thought you said the word had to end in either '-ger' or '-man'?" Magenta said.

"Well, that's in Japanese, in English it's a little different…"

The space vibrated as Magenta went to the effort to sigh.

"'Nightmare' sounds good," Yellow said. "Two syllables, rolls off the tongue well…"

"Why are we talking about this when there are people to save, according to Yellow?" Magenta said.

"Right, right! Nightmare Yellow, Nightmare Magenta, go save those people! Nightmare Blue, build that wall around the Thorn Thicket and keep it from growing. I'll see what I can do about turning the other plants in the area against the Thorn Thicket. Nightmare Red…" The hesitation was clear. "Do what you can to clear the plants. Trying burning down the vines crossing the streets so it will stop growing and contain it."

Jas felt her heart clenching, following by the core of the parts of her turning to lava. "You want me to burn?"

"I trust you to use your judgement! If you think you can't keep control with fire, use something else! You can't just do one thing, after all! Yellow, bombs away!"

"Everyone, leave up with of yourself with the drone carrying you so you can keep an eye on things, all right?"

In her main body, outside of the little tin with their clothes and talking drones, Jas felt the plasma she used for to keep her balance shift and she brought her attention back to her main self as the drone carrying her tucked in its wings and dove towards the ground, toward the clear end of the street that passed through the middle of the Thorn Thicket. Well, not all that clear, there were people and cars emblazoned with markings declaring them emergency vehicles for local government units, as well as regular cars, most like belonging to the people who'd lived on this street…

Wait…

"Wait, there are people below!"

"So?" Yellow said.

"They might get hurt!" Jas felt her panic overwhelming the fire within her

"How? They're already cutting up the plant, and it hasn't been attacking them."

"I could hurt them!" Her obsidian grew, wrapping around the limb the drone was using to hold on to her, holding on so it couldn't drop her down to the ground. "I'm not ready! What if I lose control again?" Images of this neighborhood, of the people in this neighborhood, burning in her fire flashed through her mind's eye, and worryingly the fire within flared with the thought.

"I extremely doubt that," Yellow said, sounding sure. "You're too conscientious a person to let that happen. But if you're worried, you can sit this one out. I'll have this drone keep flying and you can stay up here. If you don't think you're ready, you shouldn't do this. Just… keep an eye one things for us, warn us if something changes in case we're too busy to notice it, okay?" The drone opened its wings, pulling up from its dive and catching the air, gaining altitude.

Heart roiling, insides shifting between sand, lava and plasma as she barely remembered to keep her heat in, Jas hesitated, just letting herself dangle from the drone's tentacles. She watched as one of the drones dove down, its body changing and growing until it was tall and bipedal, with two pairs of glittering wings buzzing on its back, watched as a pin—magenta stone, a coconut and a ball of ice plummeted down from three other drones. The magenta stone seemed to hover in the air, its form changing and becoming human-shaped as well before seeming to zip down towards the ground. Yellow landed almost lightly on the street in the middle behind some men wearing thick gloves and long sleeves to load fallen vines onto a nearby small garbage truck. People around her jerked back in surprise, and Jas saw people pointing phones at her.

The clear space was helpful as Magenta landed there next to Yellow. There was a loud and sharp crack as his legs shattered on impact, followed by his torso when that hit the ground as well.

"In hindsight, I should have expected that to happen," Magenta said inside the tin, and his body dissolved into sand. The sand came together and rose up, solidifying into a whole form. "Right, not doing that again."

"You're lucky no pieces went flying and hit someone else," Yellow said reproachfully. Down below, she walked towards the Thorn Thicket, one arm held out to one side. Triangular spikes began growing along the outside of the forearm in a line, a long spike protruding forward out of the back of Yellow's hand. The spikes kept growing fusing together until they formed a long blade all along the edge of the limb. The men who had been hacking at the Thorn Thicket stepped back, and Yellow moved into the space they left, raising their now-bladed arm and began hacking at the vines.

After a few moments, Yellow looked down at their arm blade.

"Yeah, hacking at bougainvillea doesn't work," Magenta said cheerfully. He held up his own arm, where a pair of crystalline blades were protruding from his forearm, and snapped together in an unmistakable scissoring motion. "They're too bendy and move too much. You need to use shears or scissors to cut them." The arm reached forward into the thicket and the blades snapped together. Even from where she was, Jas saw at least one leafy vine fall down.

"Noted," Yellow said, and a long triangular spike erupted on the forearm at an angle as the rest of her forearm seemed to widen and lengthen. It started to resemble a crab's claw that she'd seen in books. Yellow reached forward with it, and the two halves snapped together. Jas saw vines fall. "You're right, this does work better." Yellow held out her other arm, whose shape was already changing. A second scissoring claw grew on her arm, and it joined the other in tearing through the vines. On her back, little nubs were growing, extending out, becoming limbs that were growing great bladed scissors of their own.

Next to her, one of the men who'd been hacking at the thorny thicket raised their machete hesitantly. Jas wondered why, then occurred to her that Yellow and Magenta might not have been speaking with their bodies, only in the tin with their drones.

Yellow ignored them, the new limbs on her back finally finishing growing. Six scissors tore through the vines, moving quickly and smoothly. Next to her, Magenta had also put scissors on his other forearm, and was cutting through the Thorn Thicket next to her. His scissors moved slower than hers, but they were still tearing through the vines.

Green and Blue had also dropped from the sky, and unlike Magenta didn't shatter embarrassingly on impact. Green fell into the tangle of the thicket itself, disappearing from view, while Blue did as she'd been told and dropped down at the edge of the growth. People shied away from her as water began to pour down from her form, moving unnaturally around her before Blue turned to water herself and surged forward, increasing in volume. People in the water's path barely managed to get out of the way as the water slammed into the growing vines and froze solid into ice. More and more ice began to spread, trapping the vines in its mass, along with anything else around it. The wall of ice began to move in both directions, slowly forming a boundary around the green growth.

"Okay, I'm going to try to parasitize and use phytotoxins on this thing," Green said. "I don't know if it will kill it, but it might slow it down."

"Sounds like a plant thing," Yellow commented. "I wouldn't know about that. I'm cutting through the vines now, heading for the ones in the most serious condition first. Magenta, will you ignore those guys and keep these vines from closing up behind us? Or at least do your warp thing so it doesn't matter if they do?"

"But shouldn't we explain what we're doing?"

"Right now, there are people lying in their own shit, with their legs cramped up and unable to move, stuck inside a little box so the vines can't get to them and probably wishing they'd taken their chances with running. Are you willing to let them suffer even a second longer just to talk to some random people? I'm not."

"It wouldn't take that long…"

"What for? To ask permission to do this? For their help? Fuck that. If they could do anything, they'd have done it already."

"Look, you can hear them! They're scared of us, they might do something!"

"So? It's not like they can do anything to us, any more than they can do something to this plant."

"Magenta, Yellow's right," Green interrupted. She sounded… occupied. "Forget about the PR and politeness, concentrate on getting in there to those people. Yellow, who are you heading to?"

"Right now, the closest one. I can't really prioritize by severity, not while I have to cut through all these vines."

"The two of you, stop trying to cut your way in, it's too slow! Magenta, turn to sand and go on ahead! Make a path out! Yellow, give him a drone to follow to the nearest person trapped inside! Red!"

Jas started, though she didn't actually move in either of her forms, surprised to be so called. "Y-yes!"

"Keep an eye on the progress of the Thorn Thicket, and call out anything you see that might be relevant."

"Like idiots with guns," Yellow said. "They might hurt someone. Not us, but someone."

Jas had no head to nod, but she wanted to. "All right, I can do that," she said, both relieved and… guilty.  "I can do that…"

Inside her, the fire burned, and she barely stopped the obsidian wrapped around the drone carrying her from turning into something else that would have dropped her and burned while doing it.

"All right everyone! Let's be heroic!" Green declared cheerfully. "Join us when you're ready, Red!"

As Jas winced internally again, guilt cracking through her, the fire flared suddenly, filling her with annoyance… and she turned to black sand.

Caught by the wind, spreading out over the neighborhood below, Jas vibrated in horror and lost control.

Sand turned to plasma and burned, echoing with Jaselle's scream.

Chapter 32: The Statement Of Jaselle Alhambra, Part 9

Jaselle screamed with her whole body. The plasma she was composed of vibrated the air, and the air around her resounded with her cry of surprise.

Not again! This couldn't be happening again! Not a third time! She had to get back in control, she had to keep from hurting people, why was this happening?-!

It didn't last long as she regained control of herself, her surprise turning to frustration and panicked relief as she burned, a glowing, slowly dissipating cloud of plasma in the air, shining with heat and light. She pulled in her heat, pulled her plasma together as best as she could so that she felt like the right shape, or at least a blob with four tendrils for arms and legs. Jas couldn't see around her very well, since plasma wasn't very good at absorbing light, but she could feel the sun in the sky and the flow of the earth's magnetic field through her plasma, letting her know which way was up and down.

She had lost control again, just like she had feared. If that had happened down below, she—

In the middle of her angry recriminations, she turned to lava.

Lava wasn't really conducive to making any sort of intelligible sounds, but Jas gave it her best shot as she plummeted again, barely keeping her form together with viscosity and her heat in with force of will as she slammed into the vines of the Thorn Thicket below. Wood, leaves and flowers instantly began to wilt, blacken and char as they made direct contact with the lava that was her body, only to be left smoking as she continued to fall through until she slammed into the ground, splattering on impact. Her lava splashed around, and for a moment she was a smear on the ground and globs everywhere that were blackening the vines she was on—

She felt her body start to heat up, the fire within her burning with excitement, eagerness and glee as it released their heat, and in panic she held on tight, trying to keep the heat from going out of control. The heat slipped from her as she flailed around blind. She could feel the heat leaving her, and barely perceived the subtle vibrations as the wood some parts of her were on slowly burned. Jas frantically grew obsidian chips to serve as her eyes, and found herself in an inferno. Around her, vines so thick they could have been branches with finger-long thorns were burning, the fire within dancing with glee almost in time to the flames around her.

"Let me just say that I'm thankful you turned to sand before you turned to plasma," she heard Yellow say inside the tin. "I still nearly go roasted, but I suppose it's the thought that counts. If you wanted to get off, you could have just told me."

"It wasn't me," Jas said as she pulled herself together while trying to pull in her heat at the same time, and not doing very well at both. "I lost control again!"

"Is it the same feeling as before?"

Same feeling? What did she—?

Jaselle's heart filled with dread.

The fire burned with excitement, eagerness and glee. That combination sent terror through her. Jas pushed aside her own thoughts and guilt at not helping out of worry about losing control as she tried to stand, to solidify, to rein in the heat. The heat slipped from her again, and Jas felt herself getting hotter as she struggled to stand upright. A space was forming around her as vines became charred, and then char, and then ash. Distantly, she head Green calling out for Blue to try and control the fire so it wouldn't spread to the houses, heard Yellow telling Magenta to hurry as Jas tried to rein in the heat again, to snuff out the flames and keep the fire from spreading. Jas tried to force the fire back into herself, forced herself to turn solid, to regain complete control.

The fire that burned inside fought her, filling her with confusion and stubbornness. She could feel the fire releasing heat through her, could feel the lava of her limbs getting hotter and hotter, could feel the flickering tongues of plasma even as she tried to be more solid. Her mind screamed in frustration as she set herself stubbornly, willing her body to do as she wanted, even as the fire resisted.

"Red, are you all right? Say something!"

She couldn't spare the effort or concentration to reply. The fire was no longer filling her with urges. Now it was a burning ball of stubbornness and excitement, and it was all she could do to hold the heat in when the fire wanted to let it out. Even so, her body was getting hotter and hotter, and the flames around her continued to burn.

"Red, it would be really nice if you'd talk to us! What's happening? Are you getting control back?"

Inside the tin with all their clothes and drones, the little piece of herself nestled there was starting to burn. Blue's ball of water threw itself at her, erupting into steam that condensed back into water that became steam again and back into water before a wave of pink sand slammed into it, fusing into a shell. For a moment, she was engulfed, even as the piece of herself turned into lava, pushing against the shell that surrounded her, which was vibrating with words she couldn't answer.

"Red, it's getting really hot out here! My meat is really getting cooked! Made of meat, remember?"

The fire within her flared in time to the flames that burned from her. Jas kept trying to stand, kept trying to form a solid body, forcing the heat back into her. The plasma erupting from her vibrated with her scream of frustration, an inhuman sound that resonated around her as she tried to force the fire into submission.

"Red, the fire's starting to spread, you need to stop what you're doing now!"

This was her body! She decided what she did! Slowly, the heat began to be drawn back in. It was an effort of will, like trying to stay awake even as her eyes wanted to droop and not open again. The fire burned, and she could feel the frustration, the confusion, the stubbornness, the want, even as she slowly wrested the heat back into herself.

"Red, you need to regain control! You're not a fire or a volcano, you're a human! Humans don't burn! Red, please say something!"

It wasn't enough. The fire still spread, too much heat already released. She didn't know how large the fire around her was growing, but she was starting to see the road around her, the ground blackened, interspersed with little burning splatters of lava that were spewing out plumes of burning bright plasma. She saw the cement road silently explode, momentarily revealing a chip of bare concrete and aggregate before the blackening again…

"Nightmare Red, answer Nightmare Green. She's the team leader, you need to do what she says."

The fire inside her roiled, stubborn and frustrated. But Jas was winning! Slowly, slowly, she was able to pull the heat back in, but it wasn't fast enough. And even as she drew in heat, she could feel the lava of her body bubbling, flaring out into plasma, releasing more heat than she was drawing in!

"Red! Red! Jaselle! Jaselle, the houses are about to catch fire, Blue can't keep it back for much longer!"

It was too much. She was too slow to wrest control. The fire around her was spreading, the vines burning even as they tried to grow back, tried to push into the space she was burning within.

"Jaselle, calm down! You can't be in control all the time! Relax!"

…what?

"WHAT?" Green and Magenta sounded equally incredulous.

"Relax! Calm down and let go for a sec! Let it do what it wants so it's not fighting you!" Yellow said. She sounded insane.

No, Jas had to maintain control! If the fire got loose, people would get hurt! She had to be responsible, she…

"Jaselle, what you're doing isn't working! Try something else! Whatever happens, you're not going to get hurt, but if you keep doing what you're doing, someone else will be! Stop panicking and calm down!"

She had no time to be calm! It was a waste of time, she had to do something, she… she…

For a moment, Jas just stood there, helpless. The heat slipped from her hands, and she felt her body start to burn, all the lava and little bits of obsidian flashing into plasma, heat and light. Distantly, she heard Magenta—Kuya Kim—saying she was too hot, that he was melting, weakly heard someone snap at him to hold on…

She let go of the heat and tried to take a deep breath. She had no lungs, only plasma, but she made the motions anyway, letting her body pull in, letting herself be filled.

Heat rushed into her, a sudden wave as all the energy she'd be releasing came back. Around her, the burning thicket suddenly snuffed out, leaving blackened char and wood that started to smoke. Surprise and relief flooded her, but before she could do anything else, the fire surged with stubbornness and excitement. What little lava remained of her body burned into plasma, and she went blind as her chips of obsidian disappeared. She felt another surge of panic, but she pressed it down, taking another breath. It wasn't forced and willful. It was simple, easy and natural, and heat continued to be drawn back into her even as her body flared and grew, growing hotter and hotter, but she focused on breathing, focused on the heat.

Jaselle felt the heat rising, the plasma gathering together. She took another breath, the heat rushing in as the pressure built. As the gathered plasma made to lash out, she tilted her head. She was blind, her eyesight gone, but high above, she felt the sun. As plasma burst out into a furious ejection of heat and light, the fire burning once more with excitement, eagerness and glee, Jas tilted back her head and faced the sun.

Later, they told her there was a pillar of light reaching into the sky, blindingly bright, burning clouds out of her way. All she remembered was the fire burning with excitement, with glee, with innocent joy as she breathed in, pulling the heat back in even as it left her, leaving only radiance and a stream of plasma. She let the plasma stream upward as she found her body once more, obeying her will. Slowly, carefully, letting the plasma stream out even as she pulled the heat back in, she reformed her body, congealing the plasma back to lava, then back to volcanic rock. She let the plasma continue to stream as she grew back her volcanic glass, finally letting her see again, forming back her limbs, filled with molten lava just below the surface. Plasma whipped around her head and shoulders like a candle flame as she experimentally flexed stony, glowing hot fingers.

Finally, she reached out to the piece of herself in the tin, and clenched it back to stone, pulling in the heat that had been flaring out and into the shell that Magenta had built around her. A part of her hoped she hadn't ruined any clothes, but she doubted it…

The plasma streamed from where she had made her face, and she had to could feel the fire's excitement. She reached for the plasma and began to stifle its stream. The fire flared, and she felt the stubbornness, but she simply stayed calm and breathed, pulling the plasma back into herself, weakening the stream. Slowly, the stubbornness faded, replaced by sullenness, even as it still burned with eagerness and excitement. The heat in the atmosphere returned to her, the air cooling. Finally, the stream of plasma sputtered and cut off, and Jas wanted to blink as the light of the plasma winked out.   

She almost let out a sigh, but stopped herself as she wondered whether that would make all the heat rush out again. Hesitantly, she focused on the piece of herself in the tin. "Everyone?" Inside the tin, Magenta and Blue crowded close to her drone, ready to smother her again, while Yellow and Green were on the far side, behind what seemed like a wall of pink glass. "Is… is anyone hurt?"

"Well, I'm slightly cooked, but my insides are still alive, so I just need to digest and regrow a little," Yellow said.

"Same here," Green said. "Are you all right now, Red?"

"Yes," she said, feeling like sighing even thought she had no lungs. "I'm back in control again. I need to get out of here while I still can, before something worse happens."

"I don't think that's a good idea," Yellow said. "It might make things worse."

"Worse than me losing control again?" Jas said incredulously.

"It seems like you've lost control every time you've been far from the action," Yellow said. "If you're closer to us, maybe you'll be less likely to lose control. And if you DO lose control, I can run, and Magenta and Blue can contain you."

"Wow, you're admitting you're going to run?" Magenta said flatly as he hesitantly withdrew the shell he'd made around Jas.

"Meat, remember. I'll just get roasted. Don't complain, I got you out of your room."

"Good point. All right, I'll keep you from getting grilled."

"Thank you very much. We're nearly there, can you get us a way in and out? The door isn't open. Who doesn't leave the door open when they're in such a hurry they left someone behind? That was really rude and inconsiderate. No wonder someone was trapped."

What… oh! Yellow and Magenta were still looking for people trapped by the thicket! "I thought you said things caught fire?" Jas said.

"Yes, but Blue smothered it, and you snuffed it out," Green said. "If you're going to be down here, start clearing the roads with fire, and be careful about the houses and other plants."

"But what if I—"

"Jaselle," Green interrupted. "If you're always avoiding situations where you're afraid you'll lose control, you'll never know what to do when it actually happens, the way it just did. If you lose control, we'll help you. Until then, don't worry about it and try to help people."

Try to help people. Yes, that was what they were here for, right?

Jaselle wanted to close her eyes, to pray for guidance. She didn't have eyes to close, but her hands, inhuman as they were began to make the familiar motions, touching her forehead, navel and shoulders before her hands clenched together, head bowed.

She prayed for strength to carry this burden within her. She prayed for control, so that she wouldn't hurt anyone. She prayed for understanding and wisdom, she could know the best thing to do. She prayed for guidance that she was doing the right thing.

When she began paying attention to what she could see again, she found Yellow standing patiently in front of her.

"Twenty minutes and you didn't lose control at all," the tall woman said. "I think you'll be fine."

"H-how long have you been standing there?" Jas asked, embarrassed she'd kept them waiting, even if it was to pray.

"I told you, twenty minutes," Yellow said. "Don't worry, this is just a drone, so you're not keeping me from anything. Are you ready to try and help?"

Jaselle made as if to take a breath, drawing in heat she'd released while she'd been still. It wasn't all that much, but best not to let it build up. "Yes," she said quietly.

Yellow nodded, then turned and pointed. "The street goes that way. There are a few cars in the way, so we have to be careful, but you can start by burning what vines you can. If you managed to clear everything above the street, it should contain the Thorn Thicket and keep it from growing on this side. That will let me get at some of the people trapped on the other street without having to worry about the vines growing back."

'A controlled burn?" Jas said.

Yellow—or more likely Yellow through a drone, Jas realized—nodded. "Yes. Use your fire, give the urges an outlet. If they want to burn, let them burn, but always make it clear you're in charge." Yellow hesitated. "It's like eating. You can only put it off for so long before you need to eat. So choose when and where and what."

Jas had always been told she should eat whatever was put in front of her when she was called to eat and be grateful for it, for there were people much less blessed than her who had to eat from garbage. But she supposed if you were sinfully wealthy like her uncle…

"I'll try," Jas said.

Yellow tilted her head. "Don't worry," she said, her voice surprisingly gentle. "We're here to help you too, Jas. You don't need to learn how to do this alone. None of us do. If you're having trouble, tell us. We might not understand right away, but we'll all try."

Jas nodded uncertainly.

"Great! Now let's go and burn stuff!"

 

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Whether it was her prayer or Yellow had been right, Jas didn't lose control again for the rest of the day. When she felt an urge building in the fire, she simply vented plasma in small, controlled bursts. There were many vines that needed to be burned, with some having grown as thick as trees. Her plasma blasted through those like wind through dust, and she had to carefully pull the heat back in lest it become too much, but the act seemed to sate the fire burning inside her, and the eagerness and excitement never became overwhelming.

Yellow, or at least her drone, stayed by Jaselle's side, directing her since the thick growth of bougainvillea vines made it difficult to find her way, obscuring landmarks beyond the path she burned. A few trees, shrubs and fences were a bit singed, but with the two of them working together, they were able to avoid damage to the houses. Jas burned upward through the vine until it finally opened to the sky, then continued to cut her way through the street, leaving dark ash behind them. The growth was so thick that without her plasma it would have been hard to see, but the flames she made provided more than enough illumination.

Back in the tin, the others were speaking to each other, while Yellow gave a constant, running update on what she and Magenta were doing. It seemed that even when Jas had lost control and caused a fire, people still hadn't evacuated, though many people had been temporarily blinded by the stream of plasma she had unleashed. That didn't stop them from pulling out their phones and recording, even as more emergency vehicles from the local government—which were just vans and light commercial vehicles with stickers slapped onto them—started appearing. Officials tried to get people to evacuate, or at least leave the area, but between the cars full of people's possessions clogging up the other streets, there being no prepared evacuation area, and the sight of Yellow and Magenta seemingly just walking into the Thorn Thicket and pulling out people who'd been left behind, not a lot of people were willing to leave.

As soon as people realized that Yellow and Magenta were bringing people out, families who were missing someone or had accidentally left people behind had crowded around them, begging the two to get their relatives, telling them the addresses of their houses so they'd know where to go. Others had started attacking the Thorn Thicket with more hand tools with renewed vigor.

Green, for her part, had turned all the other plants in the neighborhood against the thicket, and they were all clinging and feeding on the thorny vines like parasites. She said it slowed down its growth, but Jas really couldn't tell. Green had also begun to counter-grow against the vines, helping her cousin keep the growth contained and keeping the pathways that Jas had cleared open while she directed Blue as best as she could. Blue had continued to make ice to keep the Thorn Thicket from growing out even further, and the ice was being partially successful, though the thorns had begun growing further upward, either to get over the ice or because there was no other direction to grow.

Jas only heard this as she burned her way through the thicket, following what was visible of the road and Yellow's directions. The latter's drone clearly found the heat Jaselle generated difficult, but despite her earlier protestations of being made of meat, she didn't utter a single complaint, though she occasionally had to step back and regrow her body, shedding dead or even cooked parts off before she was able to direct Jas again. Jas burned and burned and burned, and even being careful of houses and cars on the road, and in one instance a bed that had been left on its side in the middle of the street, she was able to work quickly, the wood no match for the heat of her plasma.

Eventually she began to see light through the thorny vines, and it wasn't long before they got to the edge of the thicket. Jas reined in her plasma, resorting to throwing small globs of lava to burn the vines in her way, but she need not have bothered. In front of them was a wall of ice, and while the lava splattered and made the ice crack and flash to steam, the ice quickly grew back. Jas didn't push. She didn't actually need to get out. Instead, she continued clearing what vines she could, sending her plasma burning upward until there were no more vines in the way, and she was looking up at the noon sky.

There was… a lot of smoke in the sky, but… well, she'd been burning a lot of wood. Green, undried wood at that.

"All right!" Yellow said cheerfully. "Now, the other end of the street!"

Jas turned towards where she was pointing. At the other end of the street, thorny vines were growing. They were noticeably moving across the road and encroaching over the blackened, ashy ground she had already burned across.

The fire inside her flared with excitement and eagerness.

Jas nodded. "All right. Let's cut down the rest."

She began to run down the street. With every step, the fire burned brighter, the excitement, eagerness and glee rising.

Jas didn't lose control.

Chapter 33: The Statement Of Jaselle Alhambra, Part 10

The rest of the day was strangely nostalgic. It reminded Jas of helping clear the fields before planting, setting fire to the dead stalks before they would inundate the ground again and plant rice. Which was basically what she was doing. Jas cleared the roads with her fire, severing parts of the Thorn Thicket from the main plant. With the physical connection severed, Green was finally able to take control of the still-living vines and somehow reverse their growth. The thorny vines had writhed and grafted into the nearest plant and were... sucked in, receding into the normal plants in the way the plants Green had grown for cover when they needed to get dressed had, save for the tips that had been charred and died from Jas's heat and plasma. This had opened the way for emergency services to get at some of the people who had been trapped in their houses, carrying them out and giving them medical attention. Yellow and Magenta had continued to enter the areas Jas hadn't severed yet, getting to people still trapped and more sorely in need of attention, while Blue used her ice to contain the parts of the Thorn Thicket that were still growing and followed behind Jas to keep the fire from spreading.

It had been too late for some people. Jas hadn't seen it herself, but Yellow had reported they'd found bodies, people who'd bled to death or had been impaled by thorns once they'd been too trapped to move. She hadn't given any specifics, leaving Jas to conceive of her own horrifying possibilities. There had heard a cry of anguish at one point, one she had heard even from a distance and through the buildings and plants in the way. It had sounded like a something dying, and the realization that it was coming from a human throat…

Jas had shuddered and focused on burning what was in front of her. She burned through the roads on either side of the block where in the center the root of the Thorn Thicket grew. To one side, bougainvillea vines continued to grow, or tried to, but Blue's wall of ice kept them back. The ice filled half the road, wrapped around light posts and some trees to anchor itself, lest it start slipping as the vines continued to grow and push it back. The ice itself was flowing, trapping vines in itself, the cold seeming to inhibit the vines from growing, even as the vines beyond the wall slowly grew thicker and thicker. Having nowhere else to grow, the Thorn Thicket grew upward. Containing the plant wasn't without consequence. Jas saw a house with the roof half-torn off, the vines grown so thick they had pushed it out of position. There were broken windows and torn mesh screens as vines had grown through them.

Inside, the fire burned. It was warm and satisfied, and with every burst of heat and plasma Jas unleashed, it only seemed to grow more so. Jas felt… vaguely cheated, somehow.

"All right," Yellow said suddenly. Even with the reduced size of the drone she was talking to talk, her voice was subdued. "That's the last of them. The only ones left… are ones I can't help."

"Good," Magenta said. "Let's get out of here. They're starting to fill in my spaces. I don't want to risk making any more. If I collapse the spaces, all that wood is going to explode."

"I don't think the houses in the middle can be saved," Green said. Her voice was also quiet. "The vines keep growing, so part just keep getting thicker and thicker. Parts have already fused into solid clumps of wood, and even if I can get control of them, the damage has already been done."

"It's also getting late," Yellow said. "I can stay longer, and Mags might be able to, but three of you have school tomorrow."

It was? It was only then that Jas realized how dark it was beyond her immediate vicinity. The thick plant growth had been blocking out most of the sky since she'd started burning, but now that she looked beyond the light of the orange flames, she saw the sky was darkening,

Green groaned. "We still have homework to do!"

"So either we take care of this thing now or put it off until tomorrow," Yellow said. "And if we leave it, it'll probably keep growing, so we'll have to start all over again. So, who's devouring this thing? Not it."

That… was a surprise. "Why not?" Jas asked, and found herself speaking in unintentional chorus with Green.

The little speaking drone was basically just a ball of meat and fur with a mouth and lungs to power it, so it wasn't very expressive. Still, from the tone, if it had the muscles to squirm, it probably would have. "My urges don't want me to."

"Your urges… don't want to devour this one," Green said, sounding surprised.

"I think it's because it's a plant," Yellow said, sounding almost embarrassed.

"Are you telling us you're skipping on this thing because you don't want to eat vegetables?"

"In hindsight, I never seemed to get hungry when you were full plant," Yellow mused. "I might be able to force myself if I tried, but honestly… I don't want to? I think my urges and I agree that unless we don't have any other choice, we're staying carnivores."

"Huh. Well… all right, we won't force you," Green said, sounding as bemused as Jas was. A picky eater… didn't she know there were people out there who were starving and had to eat rotten food they dug up in trashcans? Granted, those people probably couldn't eat this, but it was the principle of the thing!

"I'll eat the next monster," Yellow assured them. "Just… not this one."

"Then… I'm out too," Green said. "I'm not sure I'd even be able to eat this one. Speaking as a part-time plant myself, plants are hard to eat for other plants."

"I can try to reach the plant," Magenta said. "I can still get through. Even without messing with space, I can get in as sand."

"Let's call that plan B," Yellow said. "You ate the last one. Share. We all have urges we need to sate."

"You don't," Magenta pointed out.

"It doesn't want to sate itself on this one. I'd have been fine with the Gagambuhala."

"All right, that's… fair…" Green said slowly. "Blue? You want this one?"

"No," Blue said flatly.        

There was a pause.

"Any particular reason why?" Yellow asked.

Silence.

The little yellow speaking drone grew a tail—or possibly a tentacle—that reached over and poked Green's drone.

"Huh? Oh! Uh, can you tell us why not, Blue?" Green said.

"I don't want to."

More silence.

"I'll admit, I thought we'd be more likely to argue about who gets to devour if we ever found prey," Yellow said in a thoughtful voice. "Boy, was I wrong. This team arrangement might actually be sustainable."

"So… Red?" Green said warily. "Do you feel like taking this one? Otherwise we'll let Magenta do it."

For a moment, Red hesitated. But hadn't she been thinking that Yellow was a picky eater?

"If Magenta has no objections, I'm willing to devour this plant and end it," Jas said. Then she add conscientiously, "Perhaps we can share? Have two people ever tried to eat the same thing at the same time?"

"Yes," Green and Yellow said at the same time, and the two drones shifted slightly as if to look at each other, then shifted the opposite way.

"It… doesn't work," Yellow sighed. "We almost ate each other."

"Stupid bees," Green muttered.

"So no, having more of us trying to eat the same thing is… inadvisable," Yellow said.

"I… see," Jas said. That just seemed wrong. To not be able to share, to take it all for yourself, unable to give to someone else? "I can't just chew on half and then leave the rest…?"

"I… don't think it works that way," Yellow said.

Jas shook her head in her body outside, just to make herself feel better. She didn't sigh, but only because she had no lungs or breath. "All right, I'll go and devour it," she said.

Yellow's speaking drone managed a movement like a nod. "I'll guide you to the address of the main plant. I have another body in front of a computer with a map and a picture of what the house looked like. You're looking for house number 339."

Jas nodded again, even if Yellow couldn't see it. "That would help, thank you."

She started looking at house numbers.

 

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The way was barred by thorny vines, grown so thick they were, as Green said, fusing into solid chunks.

Jas walked through them as plasma, leaving fire and char in her wake before she was far enough away that her own body didn't ignite the wood again after pulling the heat back in. It was hard to see, since plasma wasn't very good at absorbing light, but beneath her feet, a carpet of black obsidian sand glittered, each one acting as her eyes. The perspective was… strange, as she felt like she was walking on her own face, but between it and the light from her plasma it was enough to see by.

She almost mistook the bougainvillea for a tree. It had a trunk thicker than a steel drum, and had crushed aside the other plants all around it. The cement wall it had been planted against that separated the back yard of this property with the one it abutted had been pushed back so far it had crumbled, and the rest of the fence was leaning drunkenly in that direction. The plant itself was… still. Almost tranquil. Up close, save for its girth, there was no sign was anything unusual about it,

No one would be able to see it up close, since where Jas was standing was a tangle of vines and thorns. While there were some leaves, they'd been turning brown and dying even before her presence set them on fire, the growth too thick for sunlight to nourish them. Even as they wilted, withered and burned, the leaves all turned to face her, as if soaking in her light.

Hesitantly, Jas raised her hand. It was a hand of plasma, its edges fuzzing with the currents of hot air from the burning wood, held together by her will. She touched the bark of the plant and felt nothing. On the wood, a handprint burned for a moment, the wood darkening before flame began to spread from around it. Plasma began to leak from her, melding the flame from the burning wood, and the heat flared, burning hot and bright, and Jas pushed into the wood, enveloped the tree, enveloped everything that grew from it with spreading flame. The fire inside her swirled, roared in time with the plasma, and rushed forward to consume and devour.

The bougainvillea was wreathed in flame, popping and sizzling as new green growth tried to erupt from its bark, only to burn as soon as it emerged. That was the extent of its struggles. It didn't scream as she came at it, it didn't cast lava at her again and again in a desperate fight for its life. It just stood there and burned under her hand. Her plasma wrapped around it, her dark sand fusing and multiplying, wrapping trunk and roots and low branches, enfolding them in hot rock as the fire burned and encapsulated. The flame spread and she was one with it, surrounding the tree…

For the second time, she felt it. The shift within her, the change in the fire. It was different from last time, like there was a pressure building inside, pressure and heat, growing stranger and stronger—

—Dim. Almost nonexistent. Bloated and distended, alive but not aware. All it knew was to grow and grow and grow, an elegant arrangement of chemical reactions with responses. It drew in water and sought the light, spreading higher and wider—

—Vibration. Emotion. Tone. Intensity. Ratios. Feeling. Interval. Words. Sounds. Meaning. In the air. Across the water. Through the bone, within the flesh. Stirring. Tugging. Haunting. Listen. Listen. Please, listen. Listen. Hear. Be heard. Listen… listen and remember me… devourer. Hear my last song… —

A moment like a flame's flicker that seemed fill all the world, the between of bubble bursting and a bubble collapsing. Jaselle Alhambra felt her whole body vibrate, filled with an unearthly…

The flame flickered. The bubble collapsed. The moment ended. And the seed she had found, the seed that was buried but could not grow, could not live, could not die, a life unlived now to die…

The fire burned. The fire consumed. The fire devoured, filled with contentment and hunger and glee and casual apathy and disregard…

And Jaselle was plasma, was obsidian wrapped around dead, burning wood, rivulets of lava streaming like tears as she heard the fading echoes of a last, silent song.

It continued to echo quietly, never quite going away, as if etched forever into her soul.

 

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Jaselle didn't think she lost control.

The fire had spread, burning the tree and the two houses nearest it, but that was the extent of the damage. She had been pulling her heat back in, and it had returned to her once there was nothing more to devour. Her friends had found her in the empty heart of the dead wood, kneeling there, body heavy and unmoving, its inner fires for once still and cold, held deep within.

She looked up, faceless and expressionless, as they entered the charred space through the hole she had burned when she had walked towards the heart of the Thorn Thicket. Magenta glowed with undeniably pink light, though in the charred gloom it didn't seem to do much. Yellow was also glowing a more muted glow that occasionally twinkled on and off, the light seeming to flow in fluttering lines.

"Jas?" Green said hesitantly. "Are you all right? You weren't responding through your drone."

Her… oh. She'd stopped paying attention to her drone.

She looked around, then up. There was no light, no sun… "How long have I been here?"

"An hour," Yellow said. "Or close enough. We'd have come in here sooner, but the military showed up—finally—and we sort of had to… aggressively avoid them."

Jas nodded slowly. "I… need to go home. It's so late…"

"I left a trail of sand, so we should be able to get you close to where you can get a ride to your house quickly," Magenta said. "You might want to call your uncle and tell him you'll be late getting home though."

Jas nodded as she pushed herself up to her feet, and nearly fell over again as she forgot to balance herself. The plasma she used to keep herself balanced had gone out, she realized. She ignited them again.

Instead of an indistinct buzz, a haunting, unearthly song filled her ears.

Jas stood very, very still. Inside her, the fire burned, low, lethargic and glutted, as it had been only once before.

She didn't blink as Yellow suddenly moved to stand behind Blue, but only because she had no eyelids to blink with.

"Jas? Are you all right?" Green said. "You… have lava dripping down your face."

Jas held up her hands, with their black-tipped glass fingers. Through them she looked at her own face, and found bright, glowing lines of molten stone oozing down from cracks in the dark visor of uneven obsidian she used as eyes. She shuddered slightly and fused the rents shut, pulling the heat from the lava until they blended with the rest of her red-glowing stone shell. "I'm… I'm fine. Let's just… go. Please?"

Thankfully, they didn't press.

Magenta made a warp in the air and they stepped through, crossing a great distance in a single step, and emerging somewhere with a view of the night sky, tinted orange by the glow of streetlights.

Behind them, they left nothing but blackened wood char, two burned houses, and a carpet of fused black glass, vibrating with unearthly song that no one could hear…

 

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Her uncle was very concerned when Jas came back, though fortunately he had accepted that she had been delayed by traffic after going off to meet with her friends. It was even true. Magenta had offered to drive her to somewhere close to where she lived, and they had gotten stuck in traffic. Supposedly, the cause was the Thorn Thicket, which had clogged one of the roads heading out of the city, which had caused traffic to build up all the way to Metro Manila, and from there all traffic had been slowed down.

She expected to eat dinner alone, since everyone had eaten already, but to her surprise her uncle and the others joined her, or at least sat with her as she ate. They opened a bottle of soft drink—she got a glass too—and talked as she ate, and it was almost like they were having dinner together like they usually did. Lila talked about her day's classes, 'Auntie' Ronda spoke at Jas with concern about the dangers of commuting after dark, her uncle said that Jas should have called him if she needed to be picked up, and Judy began telling a story about how a friend of hers who had her phone stolen while commuting.

It was all strangely comforting. Jaselle kept her silence, mostly eating, but when she finished with her food—Daphne grabbed her plates and took them to the kitchen, as if to keep Jas from washing them herself—instead of heading upstairs to start studying, she sat and listened. Everyone continued on, and while she didn't understand what they were talking about sometimes, it all felt familiar.

If she closed her eyes, it would almost have been like being back home, listening to her brother and sisters and mother and father and aunt and uncles… her uncle even sounded like father…

"Jas? What's that you're singing?"

Jas opened her eyes, blinking in surprise. "W-what?" she said, a bit embarrassed at not paying attention.

"You were singing something," Lila, seated next to her, said. "Well, more like humming, really. What was it? It was really nice."

Jas knew what it was. It wouldn't leave her, seeming to vibrate through her bones, to be a ringing in her ears in silence. "Just something I heard," she said quietly. "I don't know what it's called."

"Aww… that's too bad," Lila said. "If you find out, tell me, all right? It sounds like something I'd like to listen to."

Jas nodded. "If I find out," she said politely.

When she eventually went upstairs to study, some candies in her pocket in case she needed it, the song followed her. She sat at her desk, staring at her notebooks, her pads of paper, her textbooks and her computer as the song continued in the silence of her soul.

Eventually, she opened her books and began to work, putting the day behind her as best as she could.

Jaselle began to hum.

 

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She saw herself on the news the next day. It was in shaky, ill-defined cellphone footage taken from a distance, but it was her. Dull red glowing stone that faded to black, surrounded by a wavering haze of heat and occasional plasma, she was burning through vines as Blue followed behind her, spraying water at the smoking remains in her wake.

"—on the scene were unable to approach, owing to the extreme heat, no one was able to speak to the strange beings," the newscaster was saying. "However, through footage, it has been positively identified that the Yellow Creature and the Green Creature who were at the scene in Tagaytay was also present at Admiral Hills. Responders claim that the Yellow Creature entered the overgrowth in the company of a Pink Creature, and came out with several persons who had been trapped inside the overgrowth, bringing them to medical responders—"

Jas could only imagine how annoyed Kuya Kim would be at being referred to as a Pink Creature.

She'd found a message for her in her computer, asking her if she was all right, and warning her that if she didn't respond within 24 hours, they were coming to her house in case she was going through something 'weird'. She responded promptly, assuring them that she had not entered any sort of strange fugue the way Kuya Kim had. They accepted that, asking her to keep them informed as to any changes she experienced. Tammy told her to relax, and just go back to her routine until the weekend. Kuya Kim had invited them to come to his house, on the grounds it was cheaper than constantly going to coffee shops.

Jaselle did as she was advised, losing herself in the mundanity of her education. She attended classes, took notes, recited when called upon, and raised her hand as often as possible to show her diligence. Her hands ached, her throat ran dry, and every so often she got a headache, but those were minor pains that faded away whenever she was able to find an empty stall in the restrooms and changed her body from muscle and bone to lava and back again. It allowed her to stay refreshed all day, even with the minor distractions that plagued her now.

In silence, she heard that unearthly, inhuman, eldritch song. She had heard of tinnitus, where damage to ones ears resulted in a phantom ringing. She had never heard of phantom singing, of strange vibrations in a language of urges and feeling. It did not drive her mad, but sometimes she found herself staring off into nothing, just… listening. Only in focus and concentration did she find reprieve, and so she worked, if only so she wouldn't be distracted. Once or twice, one of her classmates would hiss at her to stop humming, and she would hurriedly comply, embarrassed at not noticing.

At night, she dreamed of darkness and emptiness and heat and light, and the song sung on waves of magnetism…

Day by day, class by class, the weekend came.

 

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It was overcast as she set off for Kuya Kim's house, and rain threatened. Lila had offered to drive her, and Jas had accepted as Uncle Carlos was going golfing with some friends of his later and couldn't bring her himself.

"Thank you," Jas said as they arrived.

"Don't worry about it," Lila said. "We're practically family, after all. Call me when you want me to pick you up, okay?"

Jas nodded, not sure what to say to that. "All right…" she said hesitantly.

"I mean it," Lila said. "Call me, and I'll pick you up."

Jas nodded at her insistence. "All right. Thank you, Lila."

"Is your friend Sanny going to be here?" Lila asked abruptly.

"Uh, yes?" Jas said, confused.

Lila smiled. "Ah… later, when I come to pick you up… do you think you can introduce me?"

"I can try…? She might leave before me…"

"Then call me before then so I can get here before she leaves," Lila said.

"Sure…?"

"Awesome! See you later, then!"

 Jas nodded, still confused as she opened the door of the car and stepped out. The overcast had gotten thicker, and there was a smell in the air that warned her it would rain soon. She knocked on the small gate of Kuya Kim's house, glancing back towards Lila's car. It hadn't left yet. Jas supposed Lila was waiting for her to go inside, to make sure she made it all the way safely.

There was a metallic grind and the gate opened. Kuya Kim smiled at her in greeting. "Hey. You're early. The others haven't gotten here yet. Come on in."

"Good morning, kuya," Jas greeted politely. He stepped back, making room for her to step inside. Jas glanced back and waved at Lila's car. Inside, she vaguely saw Lila wave back, and the car started up, moving away from the curb. Jas stepped inside.

"Come on, let's get inside," Kuya Kim said. "It looks like rain."

As if for emphasis, Jas felt something land on her hair.

"Too late," Kuya Kim muttered. "Come on, let's go in, they can let us know when they get here."

Jas nodded, and the two of them hurried down the walkway to the front door as more rain began to fall down. Jas felt the droplets land on her hair, on her shoulders, on her face, getting thicker and thicker…

She blinked blearily, suppressing a yawn, and when she finished, her eyes didn't want to open. She felt herself sway, one hand reaching up to rub at her eyes, and she was falling, her knees collapsing beneath her…

Jaselle Alhambra fell into darkness, a song ringing in her ears.

Chapter 34: Interlude: Red

Summary:

The Singer In Darkness

Tonight, she did not dream of hell.

She did not dream of a dark emptiness, cold and void, filled with inhuman sounds of countless agonies in voices no human could hear. She didn't dream of a burning fire without beginning or end, without surcease or respite. Didn't dream of burning alone, without another human soul for succor or comfort. In those dreams, that, more than the fire, was what hurt. The loneliness, the solitude, the distance from anyone else she could share anything else with, even if it was just pain, and the knowledge that while she burned, she didn't burn alone.

She did not dream of guilt that filled her at such selfishness, at such a wish to see another soul burn in this hell so that she wouldn't suffer in solitude.

After those dreams, Jaselle would wake up on the edge of becoming plasma. Sometimes her eyes would be burning, and she would need to stumble into her bathroom blind as she tried to rein in the heat, trying to feel for the candy she left there, trying to keep the heat in so that nothing would catch fire…

Tonight, she did not dream of hell.

She did not dream of a dark, hot place, pressure and heat crushing her from every direction. She didn’t dream of a thick, heavy silence as she struggled to break out, to be free. Didn't dream of trying to claw her way to the surface through unyielding stone, trying to pry open the smallest cracks she could find, tried to push her way through what seemed like the weight of the world.

She did not dream of occasionally finding a way out, of traversing a tight, agonizing passage, of her very screams as she struggled to get free seeming to shake the world. Didn't dream of finally, finally breaking free, of finding the open air and sky, of rising up with tears of joy, only to see to her horror that she had brought hell with her. The world burned because of her, in these dreams, poison filling the air as the heavy silence replaced by the screams of the burning, the dying…

After those dreams, Jaselle would wake up feeling heavy, her bones like stones, her insides burning lava. She would roll off her bed, the floor vibrating as she fell like a rock, pulling in heat so that nothing would burn. Her eyes would be black glass, and she would see from the burning glow of her own skin as she tried to reach the bathroom, struggling to cast off her clothes so they wouldn't burn. She would fall to the cold tile floor until she cooled down enough that candy wouldn't just turn to syrup in her mouth…

Tonight, she did not dream of hell.

She dreamed of darkness. Not empty and cold, not heavy and rushing, but merely the darkness behind your eyes, filled only with your own self. Behind her, just out of the corner of her eye, something loomed, something bright and hot and burning, and she didn't turn, didn't look, didn’t want to see. She didn't need to. She could feel the fire burning, haunting her, taunting her, challenging her, tempting her…

In the dark, she heard it. A song, sung without words, in no tongue that she spoke. It filled her ears, unearthly and haunting, filled with feeling that clenched her heart, undeniable.

In her dream, in the dark, her mouth opened seemingly against her will. She sung, and she didn't remember the words, only that they were right and fit, held all of her being. She sang, and the fire sang with her, their words weaving together…

After those dreams, Jas woke with her throat sore and dry, on cool sheets, rested and well. Within her, the fire burned, a calm, steady flame, still and quiet.

In the bathroom, the candy lay untouched.

Chapter 35: Waterborne, Part 1

Wilhelmina Azul's eyes snapped open as the alarm on her phone rang. With practiced movements, she reached out to touch the screen and turn off the alarm so that Tammy wouldn't wake up. Then she lay back and folded her hands over her stomach, staring at the ceiling. It was Saturday, and around her everything was quiet, people still asleep. The waters were still, the distant turbulence at the edges easily ignored. Even the drone Sanny used to spy on them was still, the ripples coming from it subdued and weak. The depths were close to the surface, almost relaxed.

Tammy had sighed tiredly, but said to just leave the drone alone, and Willy did. But she still surrounded it with water so she could kill it with ice and steam if she needed to. That was just rational and logical, given how untrustworthy Sanny acted. Tammy hadn't said that what she had done was wrong and gently told her what she should have done. It had been years since Tammy had to do that after Willy told her what she had done that day.

Willy felt it when people started waking up around the neighborhood. Inside her, the waters began to tremble, ripple, and vibrate. The depths shivered and dove, hiding deep within her as a distant stillness, leaving her to face the increasingly turbulent waters alone. Her own little circle of the water bubbled and boiled at this, but she chilled it forcefully. It wasn't the first time and it probably wouldn't be the last. She cooled, leaving only hot currents beneath the surface as the water slowly grew more and more turbulent with people waking. The waters became sluggish and turgid, crashing and energetic, thick and slimy, on and on and on. The turbulence grew, and she had to feel every moment of it as it intruded on her own little circle. She closed her eyes as she was finally forced to make an effort to keep her water still, pushing out the unwanted, unwelcome turbulence as depths hid deep within, taking advantage of her efforts.

Only the hot currents remained, and she made sure the depths knew it. The depths bubbled weakly, but did not rise, did not stir, stayed deep and buried beyond reach. No matter how hot the currents, no matter if it bubbled and steamed, it would not move, and she had to face the waters alone…

No. Not alone. Never alone. Not anymore.

Sighing, because her lungs and mood urged her to, Willy opened her eyes to brighter morning sunlight making the edges of the blackout blinds glow, fluttering slightly from the wind coming in through the open windows. The blinds were effective, however, and left the room mostly dark as she pushed herself upright and turned to set her feet on the floor, toes coming to rest on the carpet. Willy stood up, then turned to make her bed as Tammy had taught her good girls should. She smoothed covers, straightened her pillow, folded her thin sheet of a blanket. It was no longer so hot that they needed to turn on the air conditioning at night, so the blanket wasn't really needed, but it had been a gift from Tammy when she had first started living here, and so she cherished it. It made her waters feel warm and welcoming and for a moment she forgot the burning undercurrents beneath…

Her bed made, Willy walked across the carpet to wake up her cousin. There were some particles amidst the fibers under her feet, and Willy made a note to point it out to Tammy so she could decide if it was time to take the carpet outside and beat it clean. She carefully wove around the branches and vines that had grown from her cousin in the night. The scratch of something sharp and fine against her temple warned her there were thorns too as she stepped on flower petals and her toes fell on an undersized green mango. Her skin crawled at the point of injury, and her flesh became ice, her whole face becoming cold and solid and transparent. Her field of view widened and distorted as she saw from every inch of her face and head, and suddenly the water and its turbulence became louder, more urgent, more immediate. The water grew wider, and once-distant turbulence leapt at her awareness. Bubble and undercurrents and explosions of steam and chunks of ice…

Willy pushed away the unimportant things as she knelt down next to her cousin, bending over a little to bring her close to Tammy's face. It was needed, with her 6' 1" frame. She'd been called a giant by their peers all her life. In the dark, the vines and branches grew slowly, but with the sunrise and more light coming in from the edges of the blackout blinds, they were growing, creeping inexorably towards the windows, wrapping around the metal bars of the bedframe, spreading down to find someplace to take root. They'd long since learned to keep the floor clean and to make sure the little niches were free of dust and patched up with grout, silicone and other things they'd bought at the hardware store.

Willy gently began to nudge her cousin awake, her fingertips turning to ice as she tried to find somewhere Tammy would feel the cold. "Tammy," she said, speaking in her normal speaking register, "wake up. Mama and Papa are about to call from Cebu to talk to you."

On cue, Tammy's own phone's alarm sounded, some energetic song in Japanese that was the opening of a series she'd watched with her cousin three years ago. Willy didn't reach over to turn it off, because her fingertips were made of ice and wouldn't interface with the screen, and because it was Tammy's alarm and she shouldn't interfere with it.

Finally, the mass that had probably been Tammy's head creaked, and there was a crack as two branches split and parted, revealing an opening between them. Air passed through it, creating a sound…

Across the water, in the midst of the turbulence, warmth bloomed. It was full of shallow tangled currents, but those currents subsided, and only warmth remained. Willy basked in that warmth, let herself sink into it, let it join with her waters. It cooled her boiling undercurrents, and she let it…

"Fhtagn… rasjvh frashjn…" These sounds or something to their effect resonated from the hole in Tammy's head, even as the growth of the branches and vines began to reverse, drawing back into her. Willy watched impassively for a moment as leaves curled, and wood began growing backwards before she nodded and got back to her feet, walking towards Tammy's desk and opening a drawer to pull out a small plastic brush and dust pan, the ice on her face and fingertips absently turning back into flesh as she basked in Tammy's warm, comforting presence. Her awareness of the water contracted, much of the turbulence becoming distant once more, making it easier to keep her own patch of the water still and warm.

The little brush and dust pan in hand she stood up and reached for the pull cord of the blackout blinds and began to pull. The blinds began to roll upwards, and just the first foot of window revealed filled their shared room with light, though it was the weak, diffuse light of an overcast sky. When she turned back, the last of the growths were being pulled back into Tammy, whose skin was changing from light silver and vibrant green sapling wood to flesh. She was raising her fingers to her eyes as if to rub them, but a quick pat from her fingers showed there was nothing to remove. Shaking her head, Tammy yawned again, covering her mouth as she'd taught Willy and blinking. Her cousin pushed herself upright to a sitting positon, and her eyes roamed, looking around the room.

Tammy made a sleepy smile as she saw Willy. "'Morning, Willy," she said, and in the waters, there was only warmth and warmth and warmth…

"Good morning, Tammy," Willy said, and held out the small brush and dustpan.

Tammy took the tools, and then bounced a little lower down her bed, then began sweeping up the leaves, petals, small flowers, seeds, pieces of bark, and a few thumbnail-sized mangoes that had fallen on her bed as she'd slept. There were far more flowers and fruits than there used to be. Willy suspected it had something to do with the bee her cousin had devoured in Tagaytay some weeks ago. As her cousin cleaned her bed, Willy went and got the long broom and dust pan and swept up the things that had fallen on the carpet and gotten blown under Tammy's bed, turning her toes into ice so she could see without bending down.

They worked in comfortable silence, collecting the castoffs that had fallen from Tammy and putting them in the trashcan under Tammy's desk for later disposal. After that, they went to the bathroom down the hall to wash their faces. The house was quiet, save for some sounds of cooking in the kitchen. Her aunt and uncle weren't home this month, their work having taken them out of the country, leaving only herself, Tammy and the housekeeper, Manang Zenny, who was probably making breakfast for them.

"Tammy! Willy! Time to eat!" Manang Zenny called.

The two of them went to the dining room where breakfast was waiting. On the table was a serving bowl of steaming white rice, and a smaller serving bowl of corned beef with diced corn and onions. "Thank you, Manang Zenny," Tammy called cheerfully, and made to pray. Willy copied her, mimicking the gestures and the words. It was what Tammy said they should do, after all. Then Tammy stood up to get the bottle of lechon sauce and the liquid seasoning to go with the food, and the two of them ate quickly in companionable silence. When her aunt and uncle were home, breakfast would take longer, with more interruptions from eating to talk, even if it made more sense to eat first then talk later. When it was just the two of them, they ate quickly.

After eating, they took the dishes to the kitchen for Manang Zenny to wash, and then retreated back to their shared room. The two of them sat on Tammy's bed and cradled her tablet, waiting for Willy's parents to call. Tammy sat between her legs, leaning back against her so that they would both be in view of the tablet's camera. Willy wrapped her arms around her cousin's middle and pulled her close, and it was like holding the warm water she felt inside, so pleasant and enjoyable…

The tablet began to vibrate, and Tammy adjusted the tablet one last time before tapping the screen to accept the call. "Hi, Uncle Matthew, Auntie Jeanne!" she greeted. "Hiya Ate Leona, Ate Sheryl, Kuya Henry!"

"Hi Tammy!" they chorused, everyone trying to be visible by the camera and waving. To Willy, they were just another video image, too far for her to perceive what they did to the water. "Hi Willy!"

Willy raised a hand and waved perfunctorily. "Hi," she said, not waiting to be prompted by Tammy. They had done this so many times that she was familiar with the routine. Inside, she felt Tammy's water change. The water became warmer, denser for a moment, and Tammy patted her hand in a way that told her Willy had done something good.

"How have you both been?" Mama asked, her voice a little too loud, as if she wasn't sure the microphone could hear her. "How are your grades?"

"We've been doing great!" Tammy said. "Willy, tell Auntie what grade you got on the quizzes we had this week!"

"My tests this week were all graded at one hundred percent," Willy said dutifully. After all, Tammy had told her a long time ago she should study diligently so she could answer all the questions on tests correctly, so that was what she did. It was among the easier things that Tammy said she had to do to be a good girl. It was far easier than being 'polite' or 'sensitive to other people's feelings'.

"In all the tests!" Tammy said loudly. "She's going to be summa cum laude again when we graduate, I just know it!"

"That's great!" Papa said, also loudly. He was smiling, which probably meant he was happy, but Willy had noticed most people tended to smile in front of a camera. "We're so proud of you, Willy!"

"Thank you," she said, trying to be polite. What they thought didn't matter, after all—only what Tammy thought did—but Tammy had said she should be polite and so she was… most of the time.

"When are you coming back home?" Henry asked. Her brother had gotten taller again, though even two years older than her, he wasn't as tall as her. He was also getting fatter. He wasn't really important, though.

The question was nonsensical, but Willy answered it anyway, because she was supposed to answer questions when they were making the weekly call. It was like when a teacher asked her a question in class. "I am home."

In her arms, Tammy's waters churned, waves quickly slapping from side to side as Tammy hastily said, "Willy, Kuya Henry is asking when you can go back to Cebu. It's been a while since we've been there to see everyone."

Tammy did this sometimes, rephrasing a question because Willy had apparently not understood it properly. "I don't know," Willy said, since she didn't know what to answer.

The water never lost its warmth, but a rush of small bubbles appeared as Tammy sighed. "We can probably visit over Christmas Vacation," Tammy said. "I'll talk to mama and papa, I'm sure they'll love the idea! It will be great to see everyone in Cebu again."

"We're seeing everyone in Cebu right now," Willy pointed out politely.

"It will be great to see everyone in Cebu face to face again," Tammy amended.

"Hey Willy, have you found a boyfriend yet?" her sister Leona, her eldest sister who was six years older than her, asked. "And I mean a boyfriend, not a boy who's a friend, little sister!"

"Or any kind of friend at all," her elder sister Sheryl said. Sheryl was four years older. 

"Actually, she has!" Tammy said. "We've made three new friends! There's Kim—Kuya Kim, I mean— Ate Sanny and Ate Jas. We're actually going to see them today."

"What, really?" Willy frowned. Tammy wasn't lying.

"Tammy isn't lying," she sternly corrected Sheryl.

"That's wonderful, Willy!" Mama said, speaking over her sister. "Do you think you like them?"

Willy considered the question. Sanny was untrustworthy and spied on them. Kim was useless and kept asking questions about things. Jas was incompetent.

But Tammy liked them. Ever since she had met them, her cousin had become warmer and warmer, with waves and swirls…

"Tammy likes them," Willy said dutifully.

"But do you?" Mama pressed.

"Tammy likes them, so I like them," Willy said. Really, she shouldn't have to say something so obvious.

Warmth and bubbles. Tammy sighed.

"But do they like you?" Sheryl said.

In Tammy's waters, a single spike of ice suddenly snapped into being, long and sharp and surrounded by water that went from warm to boiling. It was sudden, and there the spike ground away, leaving a cold iceberg, heavy and deep.

Onscreen, Mama's arm jerked just under the screen, and Sheryl's arm twitched, her face wincing.

"I'm sure they recognize Willy's wonderful qualities, just like I do," Tammy said. The ice creaked, floating in the boiling water. "Look, we need to get ready, we're meeting up with them later, and it's a long commute. Talk to you again next week, okay?"

"But… all right… say good bye to Willy and your cousin, everyone," Papa said.

There was a disjointed chorus of words that were probably variations on 'good bye', and Willy dutifully waved at the camera with Tammy before her cousin reached towards the screen and touched the icon to disconnect. The call ended, and there were bubbles as her cousin leaned back against her and sighed, one hand over her eyes.

Willy waited patiently as Tammy continued to lie back against her, simply enjoying the warmth in the water and on her chest.

Eventually, Tammy said, "That was good, Willy." And while there were bubbles in the water, the warmth was back, with no ice. "Just… say more next time, things that you like, and not because I have some kind of opinion about it, all right?" She said this every time.

Willy nodded, as she always did, and replied as she always did. "Yes, Tammy."

Bubbles, but warmth. Tammy reached up and patted her cheek, and the warmth of her hand and the water were the same…

"Go take a bath," Tammy told her. "I'll go after you, I just need to call some people."

Willy nodded and let go of her cousin, who squirmed away from her and to one side, giving Willy room to stand up, her long, lanky frame unfolding as she stretched and headed for the bathroom. No matter how far she got, the waters were warm.

 

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Commuting to Kuya Kim's was a long process, and the first leg required them to walk along the highway that passed their subdivision until they were past the congestion caused by all the emergency and military vehicles still crowding around Admiral Hills. Only once they were past did they hail a jeepney and get in. Then they took another jeepney to UP Diliman, then a third to head for the street where Kuya Kim's house was. All in all, the trip took about two hours, which was good time. As the travelled, Tammy kept glancing upward at the increasingly more overcast sky, little clumps of cold slush marring the warm waters.

"Do you have your umbrella, Willy?" she asked at one point as they waited for a jeepney to take them on the last leg of their journey.

"Yes, Tammy," she said, reaching into her shoulder bag for the small, collapsible umbrella.

There were bubbles. "I should have brought a bigger umbrella," her cousin said, the bubbles rising from deep within.

"It's all right. It doesn't matter if I get wet," she reminded her.

The bubbles lessened somewhat. "Well, I suppose," Tammy said, glancing at the dark overcast again. "Still, I hope we get there before it starts to rain."

Willy nodded.

A jeepney arrived, and they joined the throng of people getting on, sitting together near the middle of a row. When they finally got off at an intersection near Kuya Kim's house—they still needed to cross the wide road, and they could only do that at intersections—the clouds above were dark and thick. There was a swift current in the warm waters filled with bubbles as Tammy grabbed Willy's hand, waiting for the light to change so they could cross. When it did, they hurried across, a cold wind thick with moisture blowing past them.

"We're going to make it," Tammy muttered as they walked hurriedly towards the front gate of Kuya Kim's house, just in sight. They could even see someone knocking on the pedestrian gate. From the height, it was clearly Ate Jaselle. Ate Sanny would be far taller, even if her height occasionally varied. "Oh, Jas is here already! Come on, let's hurry."

Tammy pulled her along as the first cold drops of rain fell from the sky, striking Willy's cheek.

Will stopped dead as her waters were tainted, a thick, viscous, burning slime intruding on her warmth. Her heart beat faster against her will, her breathing became ragged, and she could feel things tensing—

"Willy?" Warmth pushed back the intrusive taint, and Willy blinked as she forced herself to focus back on her cousin. "What's wrong"

"There's something in the rain," Willy said as she consciously calmed her breathing, even as her heart continued to beat faster. She made it stop, turning her organs to water, and her heart ceased to be. Only pure water was in its place in her chest cavity, the blood reaching it through her veins turning to water before being pushed back up to her brain as blood again. "I felt… something. I'd never felt it before."

Not up close anyway. Sometimes she would feel it coming from the other houses in their neighborhood at night or on weekends, but it was always a distant, pointless thing. The warmth was stronger, closer, more important…

More drops of rain struck her, and she winced as more tainted slime exploded across her waters. It was so intense, so distracting, as if it were happening right in front of her. The water itself roiled as it always did, but the slime was pervasive, a layer of scum over everything.

"Let's get you inside," Tammy said, raising her free hand to shield her face for a moment as more raindrops struck her as well. Willy let herself sink into the warmth to push back the tainted slime as her cousin blinked repeatedly and shook her head, than reached for the umbrella she was carrying, opening the small thing. Despite her height, she tried to hold it over Willy's head. "We can—" Tammy yawned, her eyes fluttering,"—we can figure it out when… we… "

Tammy's eyes closed, and the umbrella drooped on listless fingers.

The warmth vanished.

There was only turbulence and taint as Willy stared, her instincts compelling her to move as Tammy collapsed. The cold wind whipped the umbrella away as more droplets of water struck her, more and more tainted slime filling the waters around her.

It wasn't important. None of it was important. The warmth was gone. The warmth was gone and something had happened to Tammy!

Frantic hands moved, pressing against her cousin's sternum, felt the chest rising as she breathed. Fingers reached for Tammy's neck for a pulse and didn't find any, moved to a wrist that was slowly becoming wetter and wetter as rain began to pour. No pulse under the wrist, moved sideways past the tendon—or was it ligament?—in line with the thumb, and found a pulse under there, feeling weak and feeble but regular and calm.

Willy sighed in relief, even as her eyes struggled to stay open. She pushed on, picking up her cousin, now seeming so small next to her giant self. Willy forced herself to move, to put one foot in front of the other and keep putting one foot in front of the other, even as an unearthly, haunting, wordless song began to fill the air, even as the turbulence in the waters began to change, and the tainted slime continued to spread—

She found herself swaying, her eyes trying to droop no matter how much she fought them, even as she felt fevered from the strange sensations of the tainted slime in the waters. It was a familiar feeling, of being on the cusp of sleep, and try as she might, she could not force herself awake, her eyes inexorably drooping shut…

The pain of her knees slamming into the sidewalk as her legs collapsed from under her was a distant, nebulous thing compared to the core of ice in her center as she realized she had dropped her cousin, dropped Tammy, and her eyes were closing, and she was being dragged downward and downward into the lightless, empty silence of sleep—

And as she sank, pulled down by gossamer bonds she could not break, by empty weights of inexorable gravity, the cowardly depths, hiding deep beneath the surface, rose…

In the border between sleeping and waking, between dreaming and thought, Willy faced the squatter who dwelled inside her, the coward that hid and did nothing else…

From it came heated strands, like piss in a swimming pool, as she sank and it rose…

Willy sank into darkness, surrounded not by warmth, but burning, boiling steam.

And she knew it was rage. Her last thought was—

Willy's eyes snapped open. Around her, the waters were silent and still and coated with endless, endless tainted slime as the rain fell on her unceasingly.

And on the edge of dream and thought, of sleeping and waking, sinking deep below and within amidst heated strands, she remembered a liberation from empty shackles.

Deep within, the dark, cold depths sank, taking her place.

Slowly, wet from the rain, Willy pushed herself up.

On the ground, her clothes soaked completely, what was left recognizable of her head turned to its side, Tammy was growing branches, wet young leaves unfurling open to the weak light of a nearby streetlamp, roots digging between cracks and into the ground.

The warmth was gone.

The warmth was gone and Willy was all alone.

Notes:

So I figured I'd drop some what-ifs. As in, what powers would have developed if someone besides the person who did had gotten to devour X monster.

Plague Dog:

• if Tammy had gotten it, she would have gained the ability to make plants that cause violent allergies, even in people who are not normally allergic
• If WIlly had gotten it, instead of chemically pure water, she would be able to generate water that could act as breeding grounds for microorganisms

Blood Bug

• If Tammy got it, she'd have developed the ability to make permanent genetic changes to plants she altered
• Willy straight up gets bloodbending, and her water would be able to turn into blood.
• if Kim had gotten it, it would have been incompatible with his power at that point, so he wouldn't have gotten anything.
• If Jas had gotten it, she'd be able to use it like the Blood Bug could, with bloodbending, blood armor, body reconstruction and genetic data vampirism.

Lava Horse

• If Kim had gotten it, he'd have added lava to his abilities, which would mean he could make a lethal lava land level in his room
• Willy would be able to form underwater volcanoes... but ONLY underwater volcanoes.
• in the hugely unlikely chance Sanny or Tammy manage not to die devouring it, they'd have gotten... nothing, as it would be incompatible with them as they were

Bounty Bee

• Sanny would be able to make independent, non-sapient life at explosive breeder video game rates, and would be extremely weirded out, suffering SAN damage as a result
• If Willy or Kim got it, it would have remained inert, as it not really compatible with their powers at that point
• If Jas got it, there is a very small chance she would be able to make self-sustaining stars

Gagambuhala

• if Sanny or Tammy had gotten it, they would have been able to make organic-weaponry, like a symbiote suit or organic guns that shoot seeds, in addition to crafting skills.
• Willy would have become a tinker with a slight tendency towards systems that used water
• Similarly, Jas would have become a tinker with a tendency towards geothermal power, plasma, heat and light

Thorn Thicket

• At best, Tammy would have developed a better singing voice and perfect pitch
• Willy's empathic powers would have gained more nuance, adding wordless song to their metaphorical expressions. She'd also develop a perfect singing voice that completely lacked any emotion whatsoever.
• Kim would have been able to sing in chorus and harmony with himself, and would have become a pretty-boy idol singer
• Sanny would have become able to sing with the range possible of the entire animal kingdom, from infra to ultra sonic, and would have sent a drone off to be an idol singer, another to be a singing Vtuber and challenged himself to see which one became a bigger phenomenon

Chapter 36: Waterborne, Part 2

No…

No…

Please, no…

Willy shook her cousin awake. She felt cold from the water, but didn't care. She could fix it later. "Tammy," she said, speaking in her normal speaking register, "wake up. You're sleeping on the sidewalk. Please wake up." She glanced about, saw Tammy's fallen bag on the ground and reached for it, opening the side pocket with Tammy's phone. It asked for the security code, but Tammy had told her what that was long ago in case of emergencies, and this was an emergency. As rain dripped on the screen, she opened the music app and selected a song, its title in Japanese. Willy played it and set the volume at maximum to be heard over the rain, holding the little device next to Tammy's head as the sound of an impact came from the road to her left, followed by breaks, skidding, and horns as strange, wordless song continued to resound from somewhere a little ways down the street.  Something hit the curb not far from her, and there was a scraping sound of rubber and metal on cement.

Willy ignored the unimportant noises as she waited for her cousin to rouse to the song she used as a morning alarm. Water continued to rain down on the phone, but the factory seals were still tight, and she claimed the droplets by touching them, making sure they did not creep into the innards of the device.

She waited patiently for her cousin to stir. For the mass that was Tammy's head to creak and part as she roused…

The rain fell down harder, the waters becoming turbulent with spouts of steams erupting even as chips of ice started to coalesce, and more sounds of impact and horns resounded, but Willy didn't care, focusing on Tammy, waiting for her to wake up…

The song ended. Tammy remained still and unmoving, save for fresh stalks breaking through her bark and roots spreading. There was no warmth in the waters.

No… No… Please, no…

Willy shook her cousin again. She was starting to shiver from the cold, so she claimed the water and turned it to steam, the heat suffusing her before more rain washed it away. She didn't care. "Tammy," she said, more urgently. She tried to stay calm, because Tammy had told her good girls shouldn't throw tantrums if they didn’t get what they wanted. "Tammy, wake up. You're sleeping on the sidewalk, and we're going to be late. Please wake up."

There was another impact and the sound of crumpling metal not ten feet to her left. Willy glanced towards it in concern, in case it was something that threatened Tammy. A jeepney that had gone on the sidewalk and slammed into the wall in front the street had been struck from behind by another jeepney, half off the sidewalk at a drunken diagonal, the engine sputtering to a stop. Inside, people lay still and unmoving, getting wet from the open windows on the sides since the rain covers hadn't been unrolled yet. They were dangerously close, Willy realized. A few more feet to the right and they'd have run over Tammy.

She turned back to her cousin, shaking her cousin almost roughly, trying to get her to wake up. "Tammy, we need to move," she said. "We're on the sidewalk, and people are driving badly." As if to agree with her, there was the sound of another crash, followed by more horns sounding.

Tammy still wouldn't wake up.

Willy could feel her waters growing cold, feel the pebbles of ice starting to float on her surface. Tammy wouldn't wake up and she wasn't safe here on the sidewalk. She grabbed Tammy's bag and put the phone back in its pocket, zipping it up to keep water out and slinging it over her shoulder next to her own. Then she squatted down, legs bent and back straight since Tammy had told her she should lift with her legs, not her back, or else she'd injure herself. It was an awkward way to lift anything, but she did as Tammy had told her, taking hold of Tammy's shoulder and straightening her own to lift them up.

There was resistance, the meager roots spreading from Tammy's body having found some purchase, but they were fresh and weak, and one by one they popped off, letting her lift up Tammy's torso and begin dragging her towards their destination. Her cousin dragged along the sidewalk, her shoes dragging across the wet ground.

Fortunately, Tammy hadn't become a hardwood, and Willy managed to drag her down the sidewalk. The rain was so thick she could only see a short way ahead of her. As she walked, she saw other people just sleeping on the ground, but fortunately there were only a few of them in her way until Kim's house. It would have been far easier to just drag Tammy over them, but Tammy would have disapproved of that. Willy had learned she should avoid people rather than going through them, no matter how stupid they were and how inefficient it was. It was how Tammy wanted things done.

Tammy was unwieldy to drag, but Willy persevered, moving closer and closer to the front gate of Kim's house. Traffic was coming to a stop on the road as jeepneys crashed into the center island or into other vehicles, motorcycles riders unbalanced and slammed onto the road, and people who left their cars to try to help suddenly swayed and crumpled to the ground, unconscious and slowly getting soaked. Willy ignored all these unimportant things as the water within her slowly grew more and more tranquil, even as what little turbulence there was grew more and more cold slush and blocks of ice.

The strange singing grew louder as they approached the gate. Willy raised a hand to knock on it, and her first knock made the gate swing inward slightly. Unlocked. She pushed it in the rest of the way.

On the walkway leading to the front door of Kim's house was a bright flame that vibrated in time to the sounds, burning on top of a pile of clothes, black sand and glowing veins of lava. Next to it, pink—no, wait, that shade was magenta—magenta rock was slowly spreading out from another pile of clothes, twisting columns rising up in strange eye-twisting shapes from the base, around which the world seem warped. The rain did nothing to glowing plasma, and while the lava steamed, it didn't grow any paler, simply sizzling.

A little farther down the walkway, someone was lying face down on the ground, their clothes soaked, a discarded umbrella being rolled around by the wind and rain next to them. The turbulence on the water told her there were people awake in the house, and they filled the water with slush and boiling geysers that spewed chips of ice. While the magenta rock was mostly still, barely causing any turbulence, the plasma roiled with heat, currents, bubbles and ice that cracked and shattered and flashed into steam.

Willy looked around, then dragged Tammy inside, careful to move her away from the plasma so that her cousin wouldn't catch on fire. She gently lay Tammy down on the grass in the middle of the lawn some distance from the two, then turned around and went back to close the gate, sliding the bolt into place.

It was obvious who the magenta rock formation and the singing plasma—it was song rather than music, even if the words made no sense—were, but Willy's focus was on Tammy. By the time she'd come back from closing the gate, Tammy had rooted again. She ignored that, shaking Tammy again to wake her up. Her neck and head had turned to wood, and it was harder to shake her. Her whole body rocked back and forth, and she still wouldn't wake up…

"Tammy, wake up," she said, raising her voice slightly so Tammy could hear her over the rain and the singing. "You're rooting onto the ground, Tammy. Please wake up." She shook her cousin harder, her hands slipping on the bark. Her face was gone as more and more branches grew, as the roots dug into the comparatively soft, wet mud. The roots didn't try to dig into Willy with all the water from the rain, but as she shook Tammy, thorns started to grow, and Willy instinctively drew back her hand when she felt the pricks on her palm.

Willy didn't let that deter her. Her hand became ice, losing feeling in that appendage. Rainwater started freezing on contact with it, and she continued shaking Tammy. She would normally need to be careful, since without tactile sensation in that hand it was too easy to apply too much pressure, but wood was sturdy enough that she couldn't really cause compression damage to it with her grip. She continued shaking her cousin, causing water to fall off her leaves and making the little flowers that were slowly fattening into fruits to sway sideways. Willy waited for her cousin to rouse in the midst of the sounds of rain and that strange song. Water continued to deluge down on her, but she no longer felt the cold. She had changed her core to water, and temperature didn't matter. Only Tammy mattered…  

She waited patient for her cousin to stir. For the growing tangle of branches that was Tammy's head to creak and part as she roused…

The branches grew, the leaves unfurled, the fruits—yellow mangos—ripened obscenely large, straining at their stems.

Tammy remained cold and still.

The warmth was gone.

No…

No…

Please, no…

Willy kept shaking her cousin, but she would not wake…

No…

No…

No…

No…

She shuddered, and there was only cold emptiness within her. Emptiness that she'd thought had been filled.

I think you're a good girl, Willy. I like being with you.

She remembered warmth…

Tammy…

Tammy would have…

Tammy would have told her…

Tammy would have told her to be patient… That's what Tammy said a good girl would do…

She didn't want to.

She wanted Tammy to wake up…

But…

Eyes wet, she tugged on Tammy, but she was rooted firmly now. The lawn provided better purchase than the wet sidewalk, and already the roots were growing thicker…

She considered cutting off the roots and branches, but that had already proven to be ineffective at curtailing Tammy's growth when she was unconscious, or with waking her up. She didn't really feel it when they were cut when she was asleep, as they had found out when all this began. And she was asleep. She had to be.

If she wasn't…

If she wasn't…

No, she was still growing. That meant she was metabolizing, and that meant she was alive. She was just sleeping, and she wouldn't wake up…

Should she just wait? Tammy always woke up, eventually, even on the days when she ignored her alarm and just rolled over in bed. but she also always woke up when Willy woke her up. If she didn't wake up when Willy tried to wake her… would she wake up at all?

She watched a branch lengthen, leaves spreading, darkening as they matured, fluttering and bouncing as they caught rain water and guided it down the bark…

Slowly, she looked up at the sky, and remembered her mind being dragged down, her thoughts slowing, eyes not wanting to open…

Willy held out a hand, catching and rain, and with each drop she felt it. Tainted slime upon the waters, thick and viscous and disgustingly warm… and all through it, bubbles, filled not with air but emptiness, a void that wanted to be filled, demanded to be filled…

And with each, drop, deep within, she felt the coward sinking deeper and deeper into the depths, hiding deeper than it ever could before, its waters still and unmoving… sleeping.

It slept… and she didn't.

Slowly, Willy turned around. The black sand, lava and plasma continued to dance and sing, its water bubbling and swirling energetically, but there was no hint of the familiar iceberg, packed tight and restrained. The magenta also lacked the familiar random whirls and eddies and bursting bubbles. Instead, there were only sharp ice cubes sliding against each other, merging and forming shapes, before collapsing and starting over again, the waters barely moving as the ice followed sharp planes and angles. No warmth, but it was oddly resonant…

The body face-down on the ground was completely still. There was nothing marring the mirror-flat surface of its waters, not even little changes under the surface. It might as well have been dead, save for the subtle movements as it breathed.

Willy hesitated, glancing towards Tammy, not wanting to leave her… but Tammy had always said they shouldn't be out when it rained without an umbrella, or else they'd get sick. There was an umbrella nearby, but it wasn't being used properly…

Willy wanted to just leave them alone. They weren't important. Only Tammy was important. But Tammy wasn't awake to tell her what to do. And it was so, so much easier to be a good girl when she only did what she was told. Doing what she was told was practically half of what it was to be a good girl. Willy knew that when left to her own devices, she was inclined not to be a good girl.

Like now.

Willy wanted to just leave them alone… but if that was the case, it was probably not something a good girl should do.

She glanced towards Tammy's still form, then formed a ball of water in her hand, the mass manifested ex nihilo from her body. It was unnaturally rounded and viscous like jelly, and she placed the piece of her on Tammy so that she wasn't leaving her cousin alone before she reluctantly stood. She didn't like having to do things of her own initiative. That required having to think about what she could do, and if she picked wrong, she might do something that would make Tammy disappointed, or worse, upset. Best to just do nothing and let Tammy tell her what to do. Tammy knew what was best, after all.

But Tammy was asleep…

Tammy would have helped this person, even if she'd have needed to ask Willy to do the heavy lifting. Unless she was wood, Tammy wasn't very strong.

Willy was about to turn over whoever it was by kicking them with her foot when she paused and sighed as she remembered Tammy had told her she shouldn't kick people to make them move. Or kick anything to make it move, unless it was a ball made for being kicked, and even them it was supposed to be better if she just picked it up. She crouched down and flipped the unconscious body with her hands.

His clothes were completely soaked, his hair stuck flat against his scalp and face, but it was definitely Kim's brother Ryan. Willy grabbed the front of his shirt, paused, then changed her grip to one of his arms, pulling it over her shoulders as had been demonstrated in that one seminar at school. She stood up, mindful to lift with her knees again, and Ryan flopped bonelessly at her side. He was heavy, but not so heavy she couldn't carry him, even without turning into ice. The rain made her have to readjust her grip twice, but eventually she was able to secure him, and began walking to the front door.

Willy was in the middle of drawing back her foot to knock before she sighed. She leaned down Ryan against the door, then knocked on the heavy wooden door. She almost didn't hear her own knocking over the rain, but she waited for a few seconds anyway in case it had been more audible from the other side. When didn't open, she tried again, striking the door with her open palm with more force as the rain continued to fall from the sky. She waited again.

She was just about to try knocking again with a fist made of ice when she felt turbulence in the water drawing near, heard the deadbolt on the door slide. There was a brief pause, and then the door opened just the slightest bit, and a cellphone on a selfie stick became visible in the opening, showing the image of Willy on the screen. "Willy?" a vaguely familiar voice said from behind the door, the water depressing and rippling outward, some of the ice melting. "You're awake?"

Willy stayed silent, because it was obvious, and thus didn't merit a response. That… probably wasn't impolite, since it was a clearly a stupid, smartass question, and Tammy had said answering those wasn't a good idea. Besides, whoever was asking probably wasn't one of her teachers, so Willy wasn't required to answer whoever it was. Instead, she picked up the unconscious.

The selfie stick shifted. "Ryan! Oh, thank God! Hang on, we'll get some towels! Don't bring him in yet, the news is saying that the rain puts people to sleep if they get wet from it, so we have to be careful."

Again, blatantly obvious, so it didn't merit a reply.

The ground shook. She felt the part of herself she'd left with Tammy trembling and rippling.

She turned, frowning at the little ball of water she'd left balanced on Tammy's chest.

The ground shook again, and this time she felt it, a vibration in her feet.

From inside, she felt random whirls and eddies, and then sharp edged slivers of ice as the ground shook a third time, and then kept shaking. Willy crouched down, raising an arm to protect her head as they had been taught during earthquake drills and wished she had her school desk to dive under. But she was outside, so maybe that was enough?

Around her, out on the streets and perhaps from the buildings beyond the house, she felt more and more ice, growing larger and larger, cold and sharp, swirling on fast currents.

Then there was a roar. It sounded like countless creatures were bellowing in challenge all at once, resonating together in a way that vibrated up her spine and gave her goosebumps.

"Get inside, quick!" the voice from the other side of the door cried, flinging the door open, showing the empty corridor. "Get in, get in, get in!"

Willy hesitated, but stepped inside, dripping and carrying Ryan with her. He was starting to slip again, and she adjusted her grip.

"Keep moving, keep moving, I can't close the door if you're too near, I might get wet!" a voice from the back of the door said.

Willy wanted to ignore it and drop Ryan right there—he was already inside, after all—but remembered Tammy's disapproval when she dropped things like that. Tammy considered it throwing a tantrum and not the behavior of a good girl, because it would damage whatever she was carrying. Sighing, Willy moved a little further down, and only when she was ten feet away did the heavy wooden door finally close.

Kim's girlfriend Katherine sealed the door shut, almost reaching for the deadbolt before recoiling at the raindrops on the doorframe near it, ice shattering in the water and somehow making bigger pieces of ice. She stepped gingerly despite wearing rubber boots, and used the long handle of a mop to shove floor mats and towels against the bottom of the door, trying to wedge them underneath to keep the rainwater out. It was a futile gesture. Even before she got the coward in her head, Willy knew that water could get into anywhere.

"Can you take him to his room?" Katherine said. "Lori has towels to dry him off with and hot water bottle to warm him up."

Willy considered this. "No," she said. "I need to get back to Tammy. He's inside, so I'm done here." She set Ryan down on the floor, not dropping him, and made sure he didn't hit his head. Tammy said to always make sure no one hit their head. She put down Tammy's and her own shoulder bags next to him so they wouldn't get wet when she went back out into the rain.

"You can't go back outside!" Katherine said, and Willy frowned in annoyance at the turbulence in the woman's waters that tried to spread into her own from their proximity. She forced her waters still, rejecting the intrusive influence. Only Tammy's warmth was allowed to affect her waters. It was bad enough that, even away from the rain, the feeling of tainted slime persisted, so strongly it was causing uncomfortable and annoying physical symptoms. "You heard it! There's something out there! Besides, if we touch him while he's still wet, we might fall asleep."

Very probably, but that wasn't Willy's problem. "I don't care. I left Tammy out there."

"Look, you're dripping wet. At least get dry first so you don't get sick."

Willy scowled at her, but it that was what it was going to take…

She turned into water, claiming the rainwater on her body and clothes and merging it with her form. Tactile sensation changed, temperature dulled, sensitivity to vibration altered and with it hearing, vision became omnidirectional. Her clothes, completely soaked, would have fallen through watery limbs and torso, but she had done this before, practicing it at Tammy's advice, and there were pieces of ice at her shoulders and hips to keep her shirt and pants on. She reverted back to human form, though her pelvis remained water since her underwear had become unaligned, and Tammy had taught her that good girls didn't tug on their underwear in front of other people. However, her skin and all her clothes were dry. "There. Now let me out."

Beyond the door, over the sound of the rain, another roar resounded from practically right outside.

Tammy.

Willy reached for the door, wrenching it open and stepping out into the rain, remembering to close the door behind her. She stepped back into the rain as the ground shook again, running to put herself between Tammy and whatever the source of the trembling. To the side, the magenta stone continued to grow, creating strange shapes and angles and visibly warping the air while the plasma continued to sing, unheeding. Willy let water flow from her, flooding the lawn around Tammy as she prepared to stand her ground to protect her cousin. Her body turned to water, and she let her clothes fall through her, stepping out of her socks and shoes before coalescing into ice.

Inside her, she felt her awareness of the water expand, felt the turbulence full of ice, and the shaking became distinct footsteps. Willy readied herself to fight. She could feel it coming nearer, its waters distinct from the ice and tainted slime. Streams both hot and cold, random whirls, chips of ice, all carried on a relentless current. And beneath all that, a whirling, sucking maelstrom, spewing bubbles of emptiness that wanted to be filled, seeking to devour…

As a roar resounded, sounding like it was right outside on the road in front of the house, Willy realized she recognized those waters.

The house was surrounded by a high wall, as was only sensible, lest people easily climb over it and rob you. Willy could see bits of magenta stone at intervals along the top of the wall, additions by Kim to better protect his home using his power to foil intruders. And through the obscuring curtain of the rain, something rose over the wall.

It looked round at first, but then the edges moved, and Willy saw tentacles. Long and fat tentacles, writhing and waving around the shape like a twisted sunflower. Gash-like mouths lined with sharp, triangular teeth gnashed along the tentacles, as if trying to eat the very air. In the center of the round shape, countless dark, staring orbs resolved themselves into eyes. It rose up higher, and Willy saw a wide, lipless mouth lined with rows of more teeth that descended into a dark throat that pulsed and contracted. The mouths opened wide, and it roared, and Willy felt her very ice vibrate, the puddles around her rippling from the force of the sound.

Tentacles reached forward, trying to drape themselves on the top of the wall, but they never seemed to reach, the air around them becoming strange as the tentacles were always too far away, the water bubbling and burning with steam above the maelstrom…

There was a wet, stretching tearing sound as behind it, four large, wide wings unfurled. They flapped, and despite its size, despite that fact it shouldn't have been able to, the wings made it rise into the air, the air displaced by the limbs sending rainwater flying in a wet wall as it defied gravity.

Every mouth opened again and a roared sounded out, the hunting cry of an apex carnivore as multiple voices overlapped disturbingly. One flap, two, and it was over the wall, looming over Willy as long, segmented legs stretched out and then folded on multiple knees to support its weight as it landed, water showering off it as it settled on the driveway, facing Willy, Tammy, and the useless piles that were probably Jas and Kim. Even in the dim, grayish light of the overcast sky, its wet yellow skin shone poisonously as its every eye stared at Willy.

Willy… No. She was changed now…

Nightmare Blue faced the predator before her, ready to protect her cousin first and herself second as tentacles reached forward. There were eyes studded on the tetnacles, she realized, glittering compound eyes that had looked like blemishes that now stared at her as the tentacles crept closed.

She raised her hand, ready to turn ice into superheated steam as she waited for it to attack.

A lone tentacle rose, reaching for her… and with a shudder, the maelstrom sank into the depths of the waters. It was uncertain, carried up and down in random whirls that spun out hot currents and steam bubbles, but slowly, deliberately, it sank, even as the water vibrated… and the tentacle rested gently on Nightmare Blue's upraised hand.

It wavered and it was weak… but far, far above the deep maelstrom, on the surface of the water… a little warmth rippled uncertainly.

Willy stared.

It was weak. It was tepid. There were still bubbles of emptiness, seeking to devour. But even so… it was warmth that gently flowed towards her.

Chapter 37: Waterborne, Part 3

Willy stood still, not moving as the tentacle continued to rest on her arm. Something very strange was going on. While the turbulence of the water was familiar… it was missing something. The fog and mists were gone, as were the narrow, focused currents and rare blood-warm bursts of heat.

The massive predator, Nightmare Yellow, leaned down towards her, and she could feel the hot breath pushing rainwater over her skin, felt her very ice vibrating at the rumbling throat. Slowly, it let its weight settle on the ground, its segmented legs curling up around it. It pulled back its tentacle from her, and it turned its face towards the magenta array to the side. A different tentacle arose and crept towards the crystalline structure, mouths all along the tentacle's length opening and closing. It reached for the glowing magenta stone, but at the last moment drew back warily as the air around the structure seemed to bend strangely, long, thin stone growths that bore a strong resemblance to thorns crystallizing.

The plasma continued its strange song, even as its whirls and currents warmed in a way that was almost, but not quite, Tammy-like. It was a familiar turbulence in the waters that usually came and grew strong just before Jas lost control.

But then, Jas had already lost control.  

For a moment, Nightmare Yellow looked back and forth between them, its multiple eyes moving independently on stalks as it examined the glowing plasma, the magenta structure, the now-sizable tree with branches heavy with mangoes, oranges, langka, durian, and pili nuts that was Tammy, the house to one side, the umbrella still being blown by the wind, and Willy herself. It settled back into its crouch, many of its eyes moving to look towards the road and the sky, though Willy saw one eye-stalk was still pointed straight at her. And while the bubbles filled with emptiness still churned, most of the turbulence in the water coming from it receded. Still, there was a pressure beneath the surface, and the bubbles full of emptiness were still there, rising up from the pressure.  

Willy remained between Nightmare Yellow and Tammy. Now that Tammy didn't seem to be in direct danger, she tried to figure out what to do. It was clear that this rain had rendered her unconscious—hadn't Katherine said something about the news?—so if she could get her out of the rain properly, would Tammy wake up? The top of Tammy's canopy already reached fifteen feet tall and were still growing, fruits so engorged that they finally fell from their stalks and splashed to the ground. It wasn't the wild growth of the Thorn Thicket they had fought, but it was still considerable.

Reaching for the water she had generated, Willy began building, forming the water into ice in a circle around Tammy. She made it wide so she could enclose everything, claiming the water that struck her ice from the sky. There was some minor resistance that she had never encountered before, but nothing she couldn't overcome, and soon walls of ice were rising around Tammy in a cylinder. The rainwater would have pooled inside, but Willy claimed that water, adding it to her ice even as she generated more and more.

The walls caught the interest of Nightmare Yellow, who reached out several tentacles to prod the ice, but recoiled at the cold with a rumble deep in its throat. It stayed back, watching as its water lapped with small waves, as the cylinder grew and grew. Finally, when the walls rose above Tammy, Willy began the dome, moving the walls inwards into smaller rings until it all met in the middle, the dome of ice sealing shut.

Willy walked into the wall, her form fusing with the ice and came out the other side to the cold, slightly darker space within. While the ground still squelched with mud and grass, no rain fell inside, and Tammy stood there, dripping rainwater from her leaves. Willy exploded into cool vapor, filling the space within and letting her touch the surface of it all. In this form, she claimed all the water on Tammy's exterior, on the leaves and the little crevices of her back, on the ground and in the mud. She made all that water a part of herself, and when she came together again, the air was arid and Tammy was dry, the ground reduced to loose dirt.

Hesitantly, Willy stepped forward. Tammy was too big and too firmly rooted to shake, but she tried anyway. "Tammy," she called, her ice vibrating to form her words, which echoed in the still enclosed space. "It's time to wake up. You're out of the rain now. Please wake up."

A large langka fell down on her head, cracking it and sending a large broken shard of ice tumbling to the side as the langka hit the ground.

There was no warmth.

Willy grew cold inside. Even away from the rain, Tammy still wouldn't wake up…

The walls of ice shivered before collapsing into water that she absorbed back into herself, the rain suddenly coming crashing back down. After the last time she had caused a flood, Tammy had told her that she should clean up after herself and take her water back in when she could. The ground was sodden still, but that was on the rain, not her.

The rain… the rain was the cause of this, wasn't it?

Then it couldn’t be normal. Some sort of chemical, carried on the water? That seemed very unlikely…

She held out one icy hand again, cupping it and catching the thick deluge of rain water. She tried to claim it, and again there was that resistance she had never encountered before now. Water had always fallen in her control as easily as willing it to come into existence from her mass for as long as she'd had the squatter in her head, but claiming this rainwater was like… like taking something someone was already holding loosely. It still came to her, but there was marked difference, just a hair more time and effort needed to pull it to her…

Will didn't have to turn her head to look from the water in her hands to the sky, dark and thick and grey, blocking off much of the sunlight.

She let the ice recede, and suddenly she was standing naked and cold in the rain, her vision limited to where her eyes were pointed. She reached out and patted Tammy's bark, a childish hope that this time she'd wake up.

But no. There was no warmth.

The little ball of water she'd made still nestled on top of Tammy. Even with the rain, little roots had grown into it, sucking in water, and it had noticeably shrunk. That was fine. If Tammy needed water from her, she could have as much as she wanted. Willy willed it, and the little ball began to grow again as it gained mass, wrapping around Tammy protectively. It was hard to concentrate on two bodies at once, but for Tammy, she'd manage it, even if the control was only limited to being aware of what was happening around her drone. With the water wrapped around her cousin, Tammy could see the house, the other Nightmærangers, the ground and the sky. If anything threatened Tammy, she'd see it and be able to shift her focus to her other body instantly to protect her.

She walked towards her discarded clothes and systematically began putting them back on, even if they were soaked and cold. She pulled them on regardless, claiming the water on her clothes and increasing their temperature to warm herself as she pulled on each one. Finished pulling on her shoes, she stepped towards the front door of the house until she reached the relatively dry area under the overhang and turned all the water in her clothes and in her hair to steam. It all puffed out in a burst of heat as she knocked on the door again.

Willy waited, rain striking her pants leg as the flow of the waters carrying some of the nearby slush and ice stilled for a moment, before starting up again, colder than before.

Eventually she knocked again. "Excuse me, but may I come back in?" she called out, trying to be heard above the rain. "I left my phone inside and I need to do research." Perhaps she should turn into water and flow under the door? It mean would she'd have to leave her clothes behind, and Tammy said she shouldn't leave her clothes lying around…

She heard the door unlocking, opening wide again. "Get in, get in, hurry!"

The water of the one behind the door was mildly scalding as Willy stepped inside, and the door was once more closed behind her. "Wipe your feet," Katherine's voice said, the voice equally scalding as the turbulence in the water Willy could feel from her. "We don't know what’s in the rain that's affecting people, but if it's some sort of chemical agent—"

"It's not," Willy said, correcting her as she looked around for her shoulder bag. Ah, there it was, right where she'd left it. "It's a supernatural phenomenon. Something with control over the rain is putting people to sleep." She bent down and opened her bag. Her phone was there, still dry, and she turned it on by pressing her thumb to the fingerprint scanner on the home button. It switched on, and she opened her browser, typing in what she was looking for. It didn't connect, of course, because she hadn't activated the cellular data yet. She did just that, then reloaded her search. "A chemical agent that worked on humans shouldn't work on Tammy if she's a plant, or on Kim and Jas if they're rock."

Willy soon found herself on the website of the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration website. She turned her phone sideways and focused on the moving weather map on the right side of the webpage. The map kept switching between the same five frames of meteorological data. Willy checked the timestamps and grunted in frustration. The most recent was from half an hour ago. Shouldn't there be more recent data?

"Supernatural? A monster is causing this?" a new voice said. "Is it that thing outside doing this?"

Willy looked up from her phone. Kim's father Milo was there, looking serious, his water surprisingly tranquil despite all the ice floating in it. She hesitated, but he was one of her hosts, and Tammy had told her she should be polite and respond to them when they made conversation. "No, I doubt Sanny is causing this," Willy said. "She can only affect animal organisms. Jas, Kim and Tammy are currently not made of animal cells, and so should be immune to anything she does. Sanny also doesn't transmit her effects through rain."

The man frowned. "Are you sure?"

"Reasonably sure," she said. "The rainwater isn't reacting as it should, and Tammy isn't waking up." Willy stared at her phone, reloading the website, but there was no new data—

"Wait, that's Sanny?" Katherine exclaimed. "Really?"

Outside, thunder rolled, loud and close, and the lights flickered for a moment. Her first instinct was to check if Tammy was been struck… but no, the part of her she'd left behind showed that Tammy was safe, even if Nightmare Yellow was looking agitated, body and eyes turning this way and that, a hot current running through their waters. Then there was another flash, instantly accompanied by another, louder burst of thunder. Then another. And another. Outside, Nightmare Yellow roared in many voices, as if answering the lightning, which lit up the sky, arcing across the clouds as inside the house, the lights flickered…  

Willy put her phone back in her bag and made to go outside again. If she wasn't going to be productive, then she should go back to guarding Tammy.

"Oh no, you're not going outside again!" Katherine said, pointing at her but keeping her distance. "You're the only one's who's managed to go out into the rain without passing out. We need your help. How are you doing it? Is it one of your powers? Can you wake up Kim? And the others? Can you wake up Ryan?"

Milo glanced towards Willy as well. "Can you?" In the cold, turbulent waters, little patches of sunlit warmth dripped.

Willy considered the questions. "I'm not. No. No. No. No," she answered concisely.

Katherine blinked. "What?"

Willy glanced at Milo, but he didn't seem to understand either. Weren't they listening? A hot current of annoyance flowed through her. "I'm not. No. No. No. No," she repeated.

"What does that mean?" Milo asked.

"I answered your questions. I'm not. No. No. No. No," she repeated again.

Katherine made a sound as very large bubbles appeared in her water. "Ugh, you're as hard to talk to as babe said, and Tammy's not here to make you talk like a normal person."

"Tammy's outside," she corrected. "She's just sleeping. I need to wake her up, we're going to be late for the get together."

"That's what you're worried about?" Katherine said, the bubbles filling with steam as a hot current started to flow. "Don’t you get what's going on here? The whole city is falling asleep!"

Yes, that was obvious. Willy just stared at her, irritably trying to push back the turbulence from her waters that tried to intrude.

"Katherine, why don't you go and call your parents again and tell them that you're all right? After those roars they're probably worried," Milo said. His waters were still mostly calm on the surface, though underneath bubbles, ice and currents of varying temperatures flowed. "I'd like to speak to Willy alone for a moment."

Katheine glanced at him and nodded, but there was another burst of hot water as she glanced towards Willy. "Yes, Tito Milo," she said, walking past Milo and into the rest of the house, presumably towards where the phone was.

Milo glanced over his shoulder at Katherine for a moment, before he turned to regard Willy. "Willy," he asked, his voice full of that tone teachers and school administrators sometimes used on her, "have you been diagnosed with anything?"

She knew what he was fishing for. "I'm a special child," she said. "Tammy said so."

Milo nodded. His water didn't change. "How are you special?"

"I probably have what is nowadays known as an antisocial personality disorder, with traits closely corresponding to what is commonly but not officially referred to as secondary psychopathy, or sociopathy, according to Tammy, and might possibly be on the autism spectrum. However, Tammy doesn't understand enough about the subject to tell me conclusively," Willy said.

Another nod. "Have you been to a doctor about this?"

"Tammy took me to some doctors," Willy said. "But she stopped after she realized they weren't really helping and were upsetting me." They didn't go to any anymore, although Tammy still read what she could, even if she clearly found it hard to understand. Tammy said if the doctors weren't helping, than Willy should just be a good girl, and everything will be all right.

"Tammy? Not your parents?"

"My parents live in Cebu. They're too far away to take me to see doctors, so Tammy does it."

"I see. Tammy is very important to you, isn't she?"

"Yes." Tammy was the only important thing. Tammy was the only one that mattered in the whole world… "I know what you're doing. You're trying to manipulate me to a course of action by making it seem like something Tammy would want me to do. I'm fourteen and a possible sociopath, not an idiot. Teachers keep trying that when they try to talk to me alone. It's annoying!" That last came out almost as shout as heat that had been building up in her suddenly exploded into steam.

"I see," Milo said. "I apologize. Then how about this: I would like to help you so we can reach a mutual goal."

"What goal?" Willy demanded, trying to cool her waters. That shout had almost been a tantrum, and good girls shouldn't have tantrums.

"You want Tammy to wake up. I want my sons to wake up. If you can find out how to wake up Tammy, maybe that can also be used to wake up my sons. So tell me what you need to wake up Tammy and I'll assist you as best as I can."

Willy tilted her head thoughtfully. "I need to find the source of the rain," she said. "Water spreads outward from a central source over the path of least resistance. If I find the source of the rain, I'll find the thing with power over the rain that's causing Tammy to sleep."

Milo nodded solemnly, taking her statement at face value. Some of the doctors had been like that, listening and taking notes and getting information. Those doctors had been the ones Tammy had taken her to the most, and sometimes still called or emailed, even if she had stopped taking Willy to them. "I see. Excellent reasoning. However, I must ask, for the sake of argument, why you think it's the rain itself rather than something added to the rain?"

Yes, this felt very familiar. This sequence of asking and listening was an old rhythm, and Willy went with it. "Because I was out in the rain," she said. "I felt it putting me to sleep. It worked too fast for a topical agent absorbed through the skin, it happened too fast to have been caused by something I took in when the water hit the ground and aerosolized, and the means by which I woke up shows me that it wasn't a chemically induced effect."

In the man's waters, a current flowed, fast and narrow and direct. "Could the means by which you woke up wake up Kim and Tammy?"

"No," Willy said. "If it would have, they'd be awake already."

Outside, more flashes of lighting, one after the other, the windows flickering with light and a constant, rumbling thunder. Nightmare Yellow responded with another roar of challenge, and Willy hear wings opening, wingbeats sending raindrops hitting the ground in waves as the predator rose up into the sky. At the noise, Milo's hand went to the small of his back, and something cold and still fell over his waters.

Willy looked through the piece of herself she'd left behind. Nightmare Yellow was rising to the air, mouths all open and teeth bared, the wind curling Tammy's branches and causing the many fruits growing all over her to fall off and splash on the sodden ground. The clouds above were flickering with lightning flashes and—

She frowned. There was something up in the clouds, something long and sinuous that flickered and glowed…

The shape flared with light immediately followed by lightning, and Willy dismissed it from her considerations. Lightning. The monster in the sky was only manifesting lightning. Its recent appearance, well after the rain had started, along with the fact that the rain hadn't included any lightning before now, made it unlikely this was the monster she sought. Not completely impossible, but very low on the scale of probability.

"Is that something we should be worried about?" Milo asked, hand still on the small of his back.

Willy shrugged. "I don't know."

"Shouldn't you find out?"

"No. It's not likely to have been what caused Tammy to fall asleep." Yes, so like the doctors, trying to get her to do irrelevant things.

"How do you know?" Yes, there it was, the same leading question. She felt the beat again, the boiling, steaming anger. She knew better than to say that she didn't know. As if something about admitting to the act of ignorance somehow gave them authority over you, even if they didn't know themselves.

Only Tammy could tell her what to do.

"I know because I do," Willy said instead. Give no explanation. Only Tammy deserved explanations. "It's not part of the information I need to know. I need to know the source of the rain."

Milo gave her a long look, and his waterers churned and swirled, went hot and cold and warm and bubbling. "Why don't you go to the sala?" he suggested. "The news is currently on, and information from other areas is starting to come in. Maybe you'll hear something that will spark an idea."

Willy frowned, glancing at her phone. In her experience, the news reports to be found on TV simply regurgitated what could already be found on the internet. On the other hand, they had more staff to search the internet, and searching for information with her phone was slow. "Thank you," she said, turning and heading towards the room in question.

"Please wipe your feet properly first so you don't leave any rainwater that will put people to sleep," he added. "I'll get you some paper towels and a trashcan to put it all in so that you can dry yourse—"

Willy turned into water, seeped into all her clothes, claimed all the rainwater that had dripped on her, pulled them into her, and then changed back, completely dry. This time she'd made sure there was sufficient ice supporting her underwear so it didn't sink into her body.

"Please use the towels anyway, just in case," Milo said, looking unimpressed, his waters only swirling slightly.

Willy sighed. Ugh, hosts. "Yes, sir." Tammy said good girls should go along with a host's eccentricities, not that anyone seemed to invite Willy more than once. In fact, this place was one of the few that she had been to several times already…

She went to the sala, still occasionally checking her phone, and Milo soon joined her with a trash can lined with a plastic shopping bag from a local grocery, and an already open package of paper towels. Willy made a show of wiping herself, even if it was a waste of paper because the towels came out completely dry, as she listened to the news program, which kept interrupting itself with announcements of the news show's name.

"—not go out into the rain," the newscaster said in an even voice. "Even a drop of water on skin will render a person unconscious, and so far all means of waking an unconscious person have failed. A state of emergency has been declared for all areas of Metro Manila where it is currently raining. The government urges everyone to stay indoors for the duration of the emergency and to not go out. People are urged to avoid taking baths in case the ground water has seemed into the water supply."

The camera angle shifted, focusing on the other newscaster. "This just in, hospitals and local government units are reporting that sleeping people who have not been in contact with the rain are not waking up…"

Willy finished wiping, sat and listened to the news, even as she did her own searches of satellite weather feeds as Milo left. Monsters appearing in large numbers soon after the start of the rain, estimates of how many were dying from exposure, shaky cellphone videos of local mayors and barangay captains asking people to stay indoors, estimates of how many were dying from being asleep in flood-prone areas, shaky video of a giant brown bird flying through the clouds and sending the thick clouds whirling, estimates of how many were dying from being swept away by flood waters while unconscious, an announcement that all flights had been cancelled due to the weather and monsters flying in the air, a mention of how heavily congested the traffic was especially because some people had fallen asleep on the wheel either naturally or because of rain water seeping in…

She ignored all those unimportant things. A map, she needed a weather map, something to give her an idea of the extent of the rain…

After what seemed like forever with her own waters churning impatiently, the news finally transitioned to a man standing in front of an animated map of the Philippines, talking about the weather.

"—seems to have stalled to a stop above the National Capital Region, despite continued prevailing winds," the weatherman was saying as Willy lined up her phone and took a picture. "There are also no opposing high and low pressure areas to potentially stall the weather system. I've never seen anything like this, Kabayan—"

Willy looked at the map she'd taken a picture of. It showed a slightly off-round circle of weather, the edges seemingly to have been pushed by wind. Unlike most depictions of weather systems she had seen, it wasn't moving, wasn't spinning on itself. It just lay there like someone had dropped hotcake batter on a frying pan that hadn't been properly level.

Opening her browser, she began comparing it to a map of the city.

Notes:

The concept for Willy's personality is 'if she didn't have Tammy in her life, she could easily have become a creepy child horror movie character who killed her entire family'. Make of that what you will.

Chapter 38: Waterborne, Part 4

Willy didn't leave immediately. Instead, she waited an hour, then watched another weather report and, after determining that the illustrated shape of the area of the rain had changed, compared it to the previous picture she'd taken, then began to measure the area's dimensions to figure out the average center of the area. It was difficult doing it on the small screen of her phone, but she persevered.

Then Willy waited another hour and did it again.

Outside, the rain continued to come down, a repetitive noise that could easily be confused for an electric fan, or an old air conditioner, and she occasionally heard Sanny roar in challenge. She sounded like she was moving around the area, or possibly flying, their roars muffled and distant. Around her, Willy felt the cold waters churning, but she kept the turbulence away from her with long practice. Her days in school and the regular commutes there exposed her to much greater, more varied and persistent intrusions. Compared to that, the mere seven people conscious who were actively making a disturbance was nothing. It helped that Milo and at least one other person managed to keep calm and enforced stillness on their waters.

Occasionally, Milo would come to check in on her, but didn't interrupt her. He was one of those who kept his waters still, keeping his turbulence to a minimum even as his water kept filling with more and more slush. He didn't bother her with pointless questions beyond asking if she needed anything, and she'd simply asked for some paper and pencil to try to work out the probable center of the rain, because she'd needed it, and thanked him as Tammy had told her she should.

Five and a half hours later, after Willy had turned down the offer of lunch, she put down the last sheet. On it was the bare map of Metro Manila, using lines to define the major roads that stood out to her on the online map she'd referred to, with the shape of the rain's area drawn over it. She'd have preferred to just print out the map, but this was the best she could do. Tammy said they shouldn't waste resources, and that printer ink was expensive.

The shape of the rain's area had changed subtly over time, but it had remained roughly the same size. The news had commented repeated about how it had stalled despite no high and low pressure areas pulling at it and with wind blowing at it, but of course it did. The rain wasn't bound by meteorology, but by whatever monster was causing it. She had drawn the shape of the area of the rain according to the weather reports, then trimmed it down to the area that where all the shapes intersected, marking the rough center of that shape as the epicenter of the rain.

On her rough map, the epicenter lay over the area of Pasig. Not the relatively affluent, expensive and developing side west of the Pasig River famous in song and environmentalist screeds, but the poor, struggling side on the east of the river, where the roads were narrow and tight and houses were packed together. At least, that was what it had looked like from the time they'd passed over the area when Sanny had been carrying them.

Willy stared at her drawing, and the map of the area on her phone. It was… well, it was very little to go on. But if nothing else, it gave her something to do to try to wake up Tammy, and it was tenuously supported by what little they understood of the nature of these strange powers in general. The mushroom forest in Baseco, the growth Tammy had named the Thorn Thicket, the way Jas emanated heat, Kim affected space, her own water output… they all emanated outward from a single source, whether that was their own persons or independent pieces of themselves they'd detached for that purpose. At the very least if she was correct, she had narrowed the source of the rain to that area.

It was still a large area, but it gave her a place to start, and the rain itself likely gave her a means of narrowing down what was responsible. If it was awake, mobile and displayed abilities thematically congruent with either rain or sleep, then it was likely what she had to destroy utterly to awaken Tammy.

Willy had never devoured before, as everyone else seemed to refer to the process, but for Tammy's sake she was willing to do so.

Nodding to herself, Willy memorized the location, the cross streets in the area, then neatly stacked up her papers and put her pencil over it for her to refer to later when she came back for Tammy. She stood up and was about to begin undressing when she paused, remembering something Tammy had told her—Tammy told her many things, most of it situational and easily overlooked unless she was reminded—and settled her clothes back down. "Mang Milo?" she called out to her host, walking towards where she felt there was little turbulence in the water. "I'm leaving."

She found Milo in the dining room, putting down his phone as he looked up to her. "Leaving? Where are you going?" he asked.

Willy considered it, but technically until she left the premises she was still his guest. "Pasig," she said. "It's where I suspect the source of the rain is. I'm going to kill it and wake up Tammy."

Milo frowned. "Pasig… have there been any monsters reported in Pasig?"

Willy paused, then growled in frustration. The news had been reporting sightings of monsters, hadn't they? She had ignored it, focusing on the weather reports because that was what had been relevant to her, but in retrospect… "I don't know. I wasn't paying attention."

Most people would have grown impatient at that, their waters growing hot and swirling at what they perceived as a failure on her part, but Mang Milo only grew little heated for a moment before his waters cooled and he nodded. "Why don't you go speak to Loretta upstairs?" he said. "I asked her to keep an eye on the situation. She might be able to tell you what monsters are there, and possibly what monsters are between here and there you'll need to deal with."

A good idea. Willy nodded in acknowledgement. "Thank you for the suggestion," she remembered to say. "I will speak to her."

Willy passed by her and Tammy's bag in the hallway, still where she had left it, still dripping wet. Apparently, no one had been willing to risk touching them with the rainwater on them. Willy paused, then picked them up. Water dripped from the bags, and when she claimed them, there was still the slight resistance. That probably meant that the water would put someone to sleep. Willy vented water vapor mist from her skin, using that to claim the water on the bags and the moisture that had seeped into the material. She hesitated, then did the same to the water on the floor, vaporizing the water after claiming them. She took the bags back to the sala and put it next to her papers so that they were out of the way.

Then she headed upstairs.

She knew where Kim's room was, and so knew not to go in there, so she followed the turbulence of the water. Or rather, the lack thereof.

Loretta was the other person in the house whose waters were mostly still, even though there was a little cold slush, and a quick, narrow current flowed tightly. The girl was inside a room with a closed door. Willy drew back her foot, paused, sighed, and raised her hand to knock. Inside the room, there was a ripple in the water, letting her know the person inside had heard.

She waited to a count of five, then knocked again. There was another ripple, as well as a burst of hot water as the door was wrenched open. Kim's younger sister Loretta looked up at Willy with a scowl. "What?"

"Mang Milo told me to ask you about what monsters have been sighted," Willy said.

The other girl's scowl deepened, the waters inside her water starting to get hot and churn slightly. "Well, come in," she said. "Pay attention, I'm not going to repeat myself."

Willy nodded, following after her. The room was well-organized, all the surfaces clear and clean, the walls bare. There was a desk with a laptop, with a cable connecting it to another monitor to the side. Both screens were showing pictures from social media sites and various discussion forums. Willy even recognized the site on one of the screens, a community page for monster sightings and discussions. Tammy used it to find out what the public thought of them, and to try and  choose targets for them to deal with, even if Sanny's fact-finding tended to be more informative. Tammy said it was her responsibility as a leader to try and do her own research. The specific thread in question was labeled 'Monsters in the Rain', and there vague pictures that were likely to have been taken by cellphone cameras through the thick, obscuring rain. "What monsters are there between here and Pasig?" That was where she was heading, after all. She didn't care about monsters anywhere else.

 "All right," Loretta said, her voice clipped, her waters still save for a fast, narrow current cutting through the cold slush. "Here's what I've found. Closest to us in our immediate area is some kind of flying shark that seems to be shooting lightning. People have been able to identify it as a catshark of some kind, probably escaped from an aquarium. I've seen it out the window, and it seems to be what's causing all of the lightning, since the rain doesn't seem to be a thunderstorm. It hasn't been attacking anything, so it probably won't be a problem. There's also a giant bird, which seems to be a giant sparrow. It's causing a lot of turbulence, and seems to be flying low to avoid the lightning. It seems to be staying in the rain and people have seen it attacking other monsters, though it runs as soon as it encounters resistance. It moves fast, so there's a chance it might be near the area of Pasig at some point."

Loretta paused and sorted through the windows on her screen. "All right… between here and Pasig… someone reported a giant dog in Cubao, and it's a video instead of a picture. There's no reported powers of any kind, just a giant dog."

"That doesn't matter," Willy said dismissively. "Powers aren't always obvious." She remembered the plague dog…

"You would know, I suppose," Loretta said, but Willy felt the sudden burst of steam in her water before the ripples were suppressed. "A giant bayawak was also reported in the vicinity of San Roque, but people are already lambasting that for being an edited photo of a monitor lizard. Someone also reported a rat the size of a car that made sounds in its vicinity louder, but that might have moved on to Marikina, since a giant rat was seem swimming in the river. Although there's a distinct possibility that was a different rat."

"Another thing you might encounter is this giant snail," Loretta continued, scrolling down the web page to show a picture. It was a snail with a dark-brown shell, on what appeared to be a bridge. Willy blinked, and realized she recognized that bridge. That was the bridge over the Manggahan Floodway leading to Rosario church. From the scale… "It's estimated to be fifty meters long, and was seen in Rosario. And Mandaluyong. And Parañaque. And several other places around Metro Manila. It appears and disappears, and has already been reported to eat unconscious people, parts of buildings, garbage, cars and the road. Aside from what seems to be a clear ability to teleport, it has been reported to not move very fast. It might not be relevant, but given how it just appears and disappears, you might encounter it. People have also reported to have found strange debris where it's appeared, but because of the rain, no one's properly checked what's strange about it, only that it looks strange. There are other monsters, but they're not in the area of Pasig, and no one has reported any more in the area. Of course, that might change, or one of the monsters in the other areas might find themselves there."

Willy nodded. "Thank you for the information. I'll be going now." She rose to leave.

"Thank you for bringing my brother inside," Loretta said, and Willy paused. Her waters… for a moment, they'd changed to an achingly familiar warmth.

"He was in my way," Willy said dismissively as she opened the door.

"Well, when whatever is doing this gets in your way, give it a few kicks from me please," Loretta said, her water boiling violently for a moment before the turbulence settled again, and there was only the narrow current.

Willy didn't reply, simply seeing herself out.

She found Milo still in the dining room, talking on the phone. He looked up when he heard her approach and nodded towards her. "Sorry Bong, I have to call you back... Yes, good luck." He finished the call. "You're leaving?"

Willy nodded, a quick bobbing movement of her head. "Yes sir, Mang Milo. Loretta told me what she knows."

He nodded. "All right. Are you sure about where you're going?"

Willy considered the question. "No. But I'm as reasonably certain as I can be based on what I know."

He nodded. "Sometimes that's the best we can hope for." He looked out the window. "Do you need a ride?"

It was tempting, but… "No," Willy said. "The roads are probably impassible from all the unconscious people on the road. I'll move faster by myself."

"I see. Very well then. Good luck. God be with you."

Willy turned to go, then paused. She looked down at her clothes, then turned back to Milo. "Can I leave my clothes here with you? I don't want them getting ruined in the rain." Tammy had bought these clothes for her. She had bought most of Willy’sf clothes, except for the clothes she got as gifts on her birthday or Christmas. She needed to take care of them.

"Ah… I'll get you a towel to cover yourself up with. Just leave it outside the door, we'll get it when you make it stop raining."

Willy nodded. "Thank you, sir."

 

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Katherine was there when Willy stepped out of the bathroom. "Your clothes?" the college student said, and Willy handed her the items in question, then bent down and picked up her shoes with her socks stuffed into them. Katherine reached for them, then hesitated.

"There's no rainwater," Willy said flatly. "I already dried it."

Katherine pursed her lips, her waters churning, but gingerly took the shoes. She tensed, as if expecting to fall unconscious, but Willy just walked past her, heading for the front door.

"Are you sure you can't wake up babe? Kim, I mean?" Katherine said.

Willy scowled down at her. "If there was anything I could do, I'd have already woken up Tammy."

Katherine scowled up at right back. "Well, excuse me if I don't understand this weird superhero powers bullshit like you do. How are you awake, then?"

"It's sleeping in my place," Willy said.

Katherine frowned. "What?"

"I already told you, pay attention," Willy said, reaching for the door. Katherine stumbled back, presumably to keep from getting splattered by any rain as Willy opened the door just enough so she could slip out, closing the door behind her. The rain pelted her bare legs instantly, and Willy felt the tainted slime, thick and vicious, intruding over her waters. Her teeth gritted in anger, but she restrained the familiar feeling. No tantrums. Good girls didn't throw tantrums…

She undid the towel, letting it fall on the floor. Then she hesitated and sighed, then picked up the towel, which was slowly getting wet from the rain, and carefully folded it, placing it in front of the door. Then she stepped fully into the rain, and changed into water and ice. Her limbs became hard, clear and frozen and her vision expanded to let her see in all directions around her, perceiving all light that passed through any point of her body at any angle. The sound of the rain became truly pervasive as her entire body perceived the vibrations in the air as rain pelted her, the droplets trickling down her body before freezing solid.

Willy walked towards Tammy, who had grown significantly while she'd been inside. Her branches rose far above the house now, spreading out over the entire garden. The lawn was completely flooded past ankle height, and various fruits and nuts floated in the water around her cousin, while other, heavier or larger fruits loomed out of the water like model islands. Even as she watched, another fruit—a large watermelon—splashed into the water, sending out ripples. Around Tammy's roots, what looked like fronds of seaweed were starting to wave in the water.

Standing in the shadow of the tree her cousin had become, Willy hesitantly raised a hand and touched the trunk. The bark was cracked and rough and dark, not like the smooth, young bark Tammy preferred. Willy pushed as hard as she could, but that only caused her frictionless feet to slide back through the water. She didn't even manage to make the leaves sway more than the raindrops.

Her cousin didn't wake.

Willy couldn't sigh, but bubbles rose in her waters nonetheless.

She didn't say anything, because she knew Tammy couldn't hear her. Instead, she simply turned and left. The gate was closed, but she was water. Willy changed state, turning into a liquid, and melded with the flooding water, flowing under and around the gate, and then she was outside and flowing across the ground. She turned back into ice, reforming her body before she flowed too far, and stood up.

The gutters between the street and the curb were flooded, and most of the street itself was full of water, looking like a river as the water flowed and churned. People were submerged in the water, perhaps dead, perhaps simply unconscious. A few cars still traversed the road, making waves and moving stupidly slowly. Lightning flashed and up above, Willy saw the… catshark?... that Loretta mentioned, floating and moving sinuously among the clouds surrounded by a glowing corona of arcing plasma.

There was a roar, and Willy noticed a dark shape on top of a building a little farther down the street. Nightmare Yellow's eyes were tracking the catshark, and there were steam-filled bubbles in the predator's whirling currents. She turned away, orienting on the road so she could navigate to her destination. She'd only done this once before, very briefly. While the theory was sound, she had never had time to practice. Still, the idea was simple enough.

Willy pulled in her mass, compressing her form into a clear sphere of ice, letting her see in all directions at once more evenly. She slid along the ground, barely floating as she was pushed this way and that by the water before she hollowed herself out, creating an icy sphere with a vacuum in the middle, letting her bob up and down on the flowing water.

A jet of water thrust forth at high pressure from her surface, and Willy was propelled in the opposite direction as her water pushed against the flood around her, her relatively lightweight, floating body skipping on the surface of the water as she moved like a rocket. Water burst briefly from her sides to keep her on course as she rocketed down the street, bouncing and sliding over little waves, submerged motorcycles, the sides of cars and the occasional floating body as she headed for Pasig.

Behind her, she head a roar, and a dark, winged shape rose into the air, trailing tentacles…

Chapter 39: Waterborne, Part 5

The gutters and storm drainage of the older parts of Metro Manila weren't the best, and after almost six hours of torrential rain, all low-lying streets were flooded. Willy skipped over this water as she continued to jet water from one end, following the semi-familiar course of EDSA, one of the major highways that people used to cross the city. Her lightweight ball of ice skipped over the water, bouncing off cars and the occasional drowned corpse. It wasn't just humans who had fallen unconscious. Dogs, cats, rats, birds… anything that could fall asleep, had. The route she was taking wasn't the most direct, but she didn't have her phone to check her location, and going down the major road allowed her to be sure of where she was relative to where she was going. She could feel the people who were still conscious along, their water churning cold with slush and ice beneath the surface, which was boiling and bubbling as it churned. They filled the buildings on either side of the avenue, and Willy had to keep pushing back their turbulence from her waters.

As she moved, the disgusting feeling of viscous, burning slime had slowly grown stronger.

It had been a long time since she'd had to travel alone. Tammy always accompanied her when she had to go somewhere, and she always went with Tammy when her cousin had to go somewhere. Even when she and Tammy had been separated, her cousin always made sure she was accompanied by someone. Now, though… she was alone. Nightmare Yellow followed her, but didn't really accompany her. Willy hadn't needed to go anywhere by herself since…

…since she ran away from home when she was seven.

No, not from home. From the house in Cebu where her parents and siblings lived. Home was where Tammy was. That place was no longer home.  

The police had found her at the airport, trying to buy a plane ticket to Manila and not having enough money. Or any money. It had taken her two days to walk there, sleeping on the side of the road behind some bushes when she'd gotten too tired to keep walking in the middle of the night. The police had taken her back home, where her mother had cried and her father had lectured her about kidnappers because he had considered her too young to be frightened by stories of child molesters. She had stayed quiet except for when she had said yes and repeated what they wanted to hear and told them she would never do it again. Her mother had slept in the room with her sisters that night, and her father had been diligent in making sure all the doors were locked.

The next day, she'd taken money from her mother's purse and then took a taxi to the airport, where she had unsuccessfully tried to by a plane ticket to Manila. The police had been called and she had been taken back home again. This time her parents had been angrier. She'd gotten spanked, and lectured about trust and how she had broken it and none of it had been important.

It had been harder to steal money from her mother the second time, so she'd taken money from her siblings. It was just there, so they clearly weren't using it. Instead of trying to go to the airport, she had tried to get ferry tickets to Manila instead. It had been cheaper, but they had kept asking where her parents were, and eventually had called the police again.

She had been spanked a lot, and been confined to the room she shared with her siblings when she wasn't being made to do chores that she had never needed to do before. Sweeping the house. Watering the plants. Sweeping the garden. Cleaning the bathroom. Wiping everything of dust.

At the first opportunity, she had run away again.

Instead of trying to buy a ticket, she had tried sneaking into the ferry, since it seemed easier than trying to sneak into a plane. When that had failed, she had run before they called the police again, and had hidden until the ferry started pulling out of the dock. Then she had jumped into the water and swam to the boat, climbing onto it, and finally on her way to Manila…

It hadn't ended there. More police had been called, and her parents and her siblings had gotten angry at her, not that it mattered. But it had eventually resulted in her living with Tammy. And since then, she had never had to travel alone again.

Until now.

Willy hated it.

She hated it, so she was going to wake up Tammy and make everything go back to normal.

Above her, the monstrous shape that was Nightmare Yellow flew. The bubbles full of emptiness were back, and Willy was reminded that she hadn't eaten lunch yet. There was no ache in her stomach, since she had no stomach to ache, but the feeling was there, mild yet insistent, like wanting to drink more soda even you were already full. She restrained the feeling. Tammy had said good girls should practice moderation, and only drink when they were actually thirsty instead of because they wanted to. It was easier in this form, that didn't need to eat or drink or rest save for the limits of her mind.

It was monotonous after not very long. Save for the changes in the turbulence in the water when she struck or bounced off a stalled car that still had someone awake inside it, everything began to blur together into a boring haze. The water was thick enough in places that even with stalled cars on the road, she had no difficulty finding paths that were relatively clear enough for her to rocket along. There were no cars on the sidewalks, and the floating bodies were simple to bounce to at most roll over before she had a clear straightaway to propel herself again.

None of those would likely have been a problem if she had traveled as a rushing wave of water, but Tammy had told her not to do that the one time she had practiced it. It had generated too much water that she couldn't efficiently recover on the move, and made a mess besides. Tammy said good girls shouldn't make messes that other people would have to clean up—

Above her, the rain suddenly ceased, and for a brief moment Willy wondered what happened as the sky brightened, the clouds getting thinner…

Then she felt the ripples in the water she was skipping over, felt the vibrations in her icy shell and interpreted it as sound just as she saw the spray and waves being blasted in the water ahead of her. The wind suddenly roared, and her lightweight little ball of ice was sent into the air, her water jet sending her tumbling before she cut it off and filled the vacuum inside her with ice to increase her mass to better resist the wind. She slammed into the roof of a car, denting it rather deeply as ocean-like waves crashed over the other cars. Even with all her mass, she felt herself shifting on the dent she had made as the air pushed against her, and she collapsed her form, filling the dent while remaining ice, reducing her profile as a dark blur flitted across the sky, leaving a turbulent wake in the water…

And then the wind was past, leaving a bright but still cloudy sky and lapping waves in the water flooding. Willy waited in case the dark shape—probably the bird she had been warned about—returned, distantly hearing its rapid, thunderous wingbeats.

Behind her, she heard Nightmare Yellow roar angrily before abruptly cutting off, and there was a crashing splash as the tentacle, multi-eyed monsters crashed into the road, crushing a jeepney that had crashed into another car. Flesh burst in an explosion of gore and snapping bones at the impact, the wings that had been supporting it in the air breaking. Blood and other fluids mixed into the water, and more spilled out as it flailed and its mutilated flesh caught and tore more on the remains of the jeepney. Heat, turbulence, and bursting bubble of steam churned the waters wildly, which Willy pushed back with impatient annoyance as she reformed back into a ball and hollowed herself out again. She took a moment to sight down the road—the waves hadn't settled yet, but that didn't matter—and get ready to blast another jet of water from her surface—

Turbulence in the water, and gales of wind in the air.

Willy was sent flying once more, thankfully at an angle towards the direction she wanted to go, along with a massive wave of water displaced by titanic wingbeats. Windows cracked and cars were inundated with water, floating bodies heaved with the waves as the giant bird landed with an explosion of spray. Without eyes, orientation or the fact she was tumbling didn't affect Willy's vision or field of view, so she had a perfect view of the bird's head darting down and start ripping the innards spilling from Nightmare Yellow's twitching form. Droplets of water kept flipping up into the air as the three-story tall bird moved with light, rapid movements, bursts of wind exploding from it as it did, it's thick feathers shedding rain as it fed.

It had only time for three or four pecks before Nightmare Yellow exploded into violent motion. Guts and trailing innards that were being ripped out of its guts suddenly snapped up, wrapping around the sparrow's head, spiky, triangular teeth erupting from the flesh of the still-glistening entrails. It dug into the thick, protective fluff of feathers as well as parts of itself as the bird reared back in surprise at the sudden attack. The mouths on Nightmare Yellow's tentacles all opened wide as it started to wrap around the bird, which started leaping and flapping its wings, trying to dislodge the clinging attacker. Wind blasted in all directions, and Willy took advantage of it, letting out a jet of water as another gale sent her tumbling. Soon she left the two would-be predators behind, Nightmare Yellow's roars and the howling gales of wind slowly fading behind her.

They weren't important. Only Tammy was important.

Eventually, the road began to rise, and there was less water and fewer stalled cars on the road. There were even a few cars driving around, moving slowly and with their headlights on and windshield wipers moving very fast. They moved slowly as they tried to avoid fallen motorcycles and bodies on the road through the hindered visibility of the rain. Willy was able to avoid them easily as she slid on the road on her frictionless surface.

At the intersection of EDSA and Ortigas Avenue, Willy turned left, sending out a second jet of water to help counter her momentum. The traffic lights on the intersection were simply blinking yellow though that didn't really mean anything, and there were stalled cars and a huge mess of fallen motorcycles and bodies. In the middle of the intersection where the unconscious bodies of traffic police, passed out in the middle of trying to direct traffic and most likely making it worse. The few cars moving around ignored this, trying to navigate around the blockage of the road. Willy blew past it and stated going downhill again. She actually started rolling down the slope, and Willy cut off her water jets, just letting the flow of gravity take her, her frictionless surface letting her slide over the asphalt top of the road, bouncing obstructions on the road. Ahead of her was the municipality of Pasig, with its polluted river made famous by an old song. The river itself was bloated and flowing rapidly, already threatening to overflow its banks.

The rainwater was strong with the feeling of tainted slime, and she had no doubt the source of the rain was nearby. It was not unlike the echoes in the water when someone was controlling a drone, weakly causing the same turbulence in a different place and reinforcing each other because of it. Willy let herself slow down, skidding over the ground until she bumped into someone collapsed on the road. She could feel the slush and ice coming from the residential areas on either side as she grew, forming limbs and a head, the two little pellets of water inside a hollows to simulate her inner ears helping her balance. Her feet were frictionless, but she was used to that, letting her soles sink and contour to the textures of the ground she stood on to give her some traction.

It was an imperfect solution, but it gave her time to find a dead body with shoes that had high support. She made sure the body was dead, cold and not breathing before she took the shoes—she didn't need the socks—and slipped her feet into it, filling the space and fibers of the shoe with water that she froze solid, anchoring herself to the footwear. Normally this wouldn't necessary, but with the rain, unless she reverted to flesh and blood feet, she wouldn't have much, if any, traction with which to walk. At least this way it wasn't stealing. They were dead, after all.

With her new shoes, she walked across the bridge over the swollen river, careful to not slip. While it wouldn't really hurt her, falling into the river and needing to propel herself towards shore again would have been annoying, and a waste of time. Fortunately, she reached the other side without incident, and found herself at a minor intersection. There was a small outdoor and indoor market in one corner, unconscious people fallen around now-soggy produce. Deeper inside, she could see movement as people stayed as far away from the openings and the rain as they could. There were very few conscious people left there, and the ground was littered with bodies. Every once in a while, as the rain gusted, one or two people would suddenly sway and collapse, falling asleep where they stood.

Willy ignored them, trying to get her bearings before turning towards the road that turned to the right. It was in the direction that she had estimated the center of the rain was. The streets were crowded with the unconscious and the things that had been riding. There were crashed jeepneys all over, which had impacted onto cars, walls, other jeepneys, stalls, tricycle pedicabs, motorcycles and other things that had gotten in their way. The water was ankle-high, gushing out of the gutters and sewers. Around her, she could feel more turbulence from those still awake. She passed by a grocery, the edges of the glass door stuffed with now-soggy cardboard while the water inside whirled and churned and bubbles of steam popped while geysers of burning water exploded violently.

She passed through the obstructions on the road, turning parts of her body into viscous water so she could squeeze past the vehicles blocking the road. Willy ignored the staring from the people still conscious in the cars she passed, from the cramped and crowded homes on either side as people watched her through their windows, waters whirling and bubbling and cold. Not important. Up ahead, she felt more turbulence, full of currents and swirling and cold currents, all pointless distractions. With every step, the turbulence of the viscous, burning taint grew incrementally stronger.

Willy saw the rat, of course. The size of a motorcycle, its fur completely sodden and wafting trails of steam and hot vapor, it stood in the middle of the road surrounded by crimson water and gory remains. Its over-sized incisors gnawed, cutting and chewing meat and bone as it ate the flesh of one of the bodies on the street, snapping bones to suck out the marrow. Its waters bubbled vacuum as it ate seemingly ravenously, tearing through the feast of flesh before it. Its head snapped up quickly as she drew close, the fur around its mouth caked with blood and unidentifiable crimson meat. It moved with fast, jerky movements as it looked directly at her, a hot geyser already beginning to build up pressure within it.

It wasn't important, so she ignored it and just walked past, kicking aside torn, bloody clothes and the gnawed bones lying half-hidden under the water. The rat darted and snapped at her, chisel-like teeth scraping over her icy arm and shaving off a spray of ice, before it locked its mouth around Willy's wrist.

Willy had just been about to turn her arm into water to escape from this minor inconvenience when her water suddenly exploded, a geyser suddenly appearing in the water and filling everything with steam. She stumbled, briefly bubbling in surprise before everything was washed in steam. The steam rushed forth in all directions in a wave of turbulence just as the rat slammed into her, its paws clawing at her as its jaws opened wide. Willy, still surprised and suddenly disoriented, her waters obscured by steam, her clear thought compromised, stumbled and fell, her icy body striking the flood waters and then the asphalt beneath it. As she lay there, trying to pierce through the steam that made her head hurt and burn hot, even though neither should have been possible, the rat exploded, actual steam and hot water bursting from it outwards in all directions. The mist blocked her view as Willy struggled to push out the foreign turbulence invading her waters.

The rat's jaws opened wide, threads of viscera still trapped between its teeth, and lunged towards her throat.

There was a snap, Willy's head breaking clean off her shoulders as the rat bit and chewed, snapping her body to pieces and tearing her innards apart.

Chapter 40: Waterborne, Part 6

There was a snap, Willy's head breaking clean off her shoulders as the rat bit and chewed, snapping her body to pieces and tearing her innards apart.

Her head was ice. Her body was ice. Her innards were clear, undifferentiated ice, and the rat tore chunks, chips and shavings from her, its monstrous forward incisors doing as they had evolved to do.

Willy didn't care, or at least, she normally wouldn't have. All she would have felt was a little annoyance at being waylaid, little hot bubbles and ripples in her water. Now, however, she faced more turbulence forced in from outside, a powerful intrusion that filled her with exploding geysers of steam. They churned her waters violently, a turbulence that went down deeper than just the surface. Her head, floating in the floodwaters, throbbed with nameless pressure that had no source or reason, only existence, filling her mind constantly with reminders that TAMMY WASN'T WAKING UP! It reminded her of her parents telling her again and again how she was doing things wrong, calling her willful and disobedient, punishing her with chores and spankings and emotional blackmail about how they loved her and were only doing what was best for her so she should do what they said that had hurt because she had thought she had cared what they thought of her because they said they loved her, because they had told her to, because they had said she should, and it mixed vilely with the tainted slimy waters carried down by the rain…

Her ice vibrated with her scream of rage, and Willy exploded. Chunks of ice, torrents of water and her own clouds of steam went hurtling in all directions, driven by great pressure and expanding hot gasses. It caught the rat, pushing it back in a wave of water that swept bones, tattered clothes, corpses and bodies with it and slammed it all into the glass front of a small beauty salon where everyone was standing on chairs to avoid the flooding. Willy ignored the screams as more water began to rush into the salon through the thin openings around the glass door, but the glass held as the rat twisted upright, only for the water around it—Willy's water—to solidify into ice. It screamed in panic, loud and high-pitched as it flailed, the ice continuing to vibrate as she was swept away by the heat and turbulence in her waters. The ice locked the rat into place and Willy twisted her ice, making it flow as it pulled on the trapped limbs. The hindquarters turned one way as the head and front turned in the other, and the rat screamed again in agony as a new, burning warmth erupted in its waters.

Tammy had once told her good girls didn't hurt animals. But this wasn't an animal, right? It was a monster, like the plague dog and the spider and the Lava Horse…

The rat exploded again, steam and boiling water rushing from it, but it didn't matter. Willy held her ice, kept it cold as the water exploded from the rat's head, tail and the end of one limb not covered in ice. They blasted out like streams from a hose that had a finger over the end to narrow the stream, sweeping over the water and upward. Boiling water and steam slammed into the windows and small openings of the buildings on the other side of the street, the water momentarily diluting the darkly polluted colors of the flood as the two waters mixed. She felt turbulence in the water, more spots of burning hot cold slush turning to chunks of ice as screams came from inside the houses that had been doused, even as she felt more and more explosive geysers suddenly appearing in other parts of the water around her, sending more echoes of turbulence across her waters that resonated with the pain in her head, the pain that twisted her inside, reminding her that TAMMY WASN'T WAKING UP!  

Willy pushed it down as meaningless, kept trying to force her own waters still and push back the effects of the waters around her. Her ice vibrated harder, the scream it hadn't stopped making growing louder, more inhuman as she twisted and something inside the rat snapped. It screamed as she twisted it all the way around like she was squeezing water out of a towel, felt vibrations through her ice as the rat's heartbeat, lungs labored, and it fought uselessly against her entrapment, still shooting out streams of boiling water and steam from its extremities. It didn't matter. The boiling water and turbulence coursed through her, filling her with…

Tendons ripped from muscle and bone. Skin tore, still encased in ice. Blood poured from wounds, gushing boiling water and her ice shattered in the middle of the two halves, brittle in the face of hydraulic pressure. There was an explosion of blood, water and ice, and the glass of the beauty salon cracked and shattered. There was no one to scream, those beyond unconscious from the sudden surge of flood water that had lapped at their feet as the salon filled with steam, ice and gore shattering the mirrors, cracking the TV that hung in one corner. Boiling water exploded from the suddenly-open guts of the rat's front half, even as it screamed again and again in agony, filling the ruined salon, flooding it as Willy rebuilt her ice body, fusing with the chunks of ice she'd left in the shoes so she wouldn't lose hem and need to find another pair. The hindquarters were encased, but it was all she could do to keep the ice she already had wrapped on its front half in place as more and more boiling water gushed from the rat. It had stopped bleeding as water gushed from its wounds and veins, its inside roiling…

Still the steam and boiling turbulence filled Willy's waters, making her ice vibrate with her screams of frustration as she fused her new arm to the ice around the rat, slamming it down into the submerged tiles of the ruined salon, her other hand clenched into a fist as she hammered violently at the rat's head. Every impact broke her hand, chunks of fingers and knuckles flying off, but she grew it back, a rough mace with which she tried to crush in the rat's skull, the turbulence all around her pouring in a she stopped fighting, simply venting the steam as best as she could from her waters as she hammered and hammered and screamed. The violence didn't make the geysers the rat raised inside her abate, but it felt so good and she needed to feel good, because TAMMY WASN'T WAKING UP—!

Good girls don't throw tantrums.

The thought came, and it was almost physically painful, even when she was made of ice and could feel nothing but vibrations and temperature and impact, to stop herself, to stop her fist before it could slam into the rat once more. Her ice still vibrated, screaming, and she made it stop, even as she felt like she would shake herself apart trying to hold back her voice. Tantrum. She was throwing a tantrum. The rat's steam and boiling pressure filled her mind, and she forced herself to think clearly and rationally, fighting through the turbulence that pushed at her waters from every side, filling her with nervous energy, the sensation that her legs itched, that she had to DO SOMETHING, TAMMY WASN'Y WAKING UP,

In her grip, the rat continued to squirm and flail and gnaw, still gushing boiling water. A current had formed, the water gushing out from the ruined salon joining the floodwaters in the streets creating a torrent as it flowed to either side. Willy stared at the rat and knew she had to devour it. It was how to defeat these monsters, these nightmares made flesh… Tammy had said so.

Willy didn't know how.

Deep within her, far from the surface, where even the turbulence of the boiling and steam and vile tainted slime had not reached, the squatter inside her was silent. Not whimpering, not hiding, not overwhelmed by the smallest vibration in the waters… silent, still and sleeping. There were no urges within her, no bubbles filled with emptiness that demanded to be filled. None of the strange, unknowable, eldritch instinct that didn't correspond to any sensation she knew, the way Tammy had described it in whispers in the dark after they had returned from Tagaytay, the desire to feed, to do more than feed that had made Tammy try to drink her when her little cousin wasn't completely aware, and instinct that no doubt came from the squatter Tammy's head…

Yet filled with the boiling and the steam and the pressure and the stress, Willy tried anyway.

Water poured out from her form, falling into the flood but not mixing with it, held tightly in her control as she made it surround the submerged, bifurcated rat. Thick and viscous, the water resisted the diluting force of the rush of boiling water and steam from the rat, surrounding it. When she felt the pressure weaken, the flow cease, Willy struck, surrounding the rat in her water, and sought to crush it from all sides, trying to match the sensations she had felt when she had been near devouring before. She pressed, forcing her water to squeeze in from all sides. She felt the rat squirm, and it grew hot, but her pressure kept it from releasing. Her ice was vibrating again, a low, constant growl of frustration as she pressed, felt the snap of bones breaking, the crack of what was left of the skull imploding, the guts being pushing out of the broken ribcage as it was crushed…

Deep within, hiding, buried, in the darkest part of her soul, held down by empty weights of inexorable gravity, the squatter whimpered and stirred, instinct overcoming weakness.

Willy felt it. It was forced and painful as if someone who'd been holding their breath had been punched in the stomach and had to breath—good girls didn't punch people in the stomach just because they were annoyed—but it was there, a terrible convulsion, and suddenly the depths were dark and deep and endless and everything was sinking into the infinite sea…

—whirling water spinning faster and faster, cold slush that was congealing into chunks, burning hot water, cold, cold, cold, shot through with burning water (PAIN!)—

—Boiling water. Steam. Bubbles of emptiness. Bubbles of emptiness, carried on whirling water. Boiling water. Steam. Pressure. Whirling water. Cold. Cold. Coldslush. Slush. Slushchips. Chips of ice. Chips of icechunks of ice. Chunks of ice. Chunks. Chunks chunks chunks in whirling water…—

Willy felt like she was choking, like she'd eaten something to big without opening her mouth widely enough, hadn't chewed enough. She didn't have a throat, but something felt lodged in it, tight and squirming and chunks of ice chunks of ice whirling water fear fear fear terror terror terror confusion as she moved by some strange, eldritch instinct, forcing herself to pull it in deeper, and deeper into the dark depths—

And her mind was clear, the boiling water and steam gone, leaving only the turbulence they had caused and the vile, tainted slime that came from the rain. The change was abrupt, and she slowly stopped vibrating her ice as she realized her waters were no longer forcefully filled with the boiling water, steam and pressure. Around her, she could feel the receding ripples as the many people around her started calming down as well, although some seemed to be retaining the turbulence, and actually sustaining it. Pushing the turbulence away from her waters was no more difficult than normal, however, and Willy was able to do so, even if it  took time. Though she had no lungs to fill, no throat and nose to breathe through, Willy felt an urge to take deep, calming breaths.

Deep within her, the squatter stirred restlessly, sleeping but not tranquilly.

Good.

What was left of the rat was still encased in her watery grip. The bones had been crushed, the meat and hair pressed together. She forced herself to let go, and there was a brief rush of water as all that mass under pressure was released, splashing the insides of the ruined salon before rushing out into the street one last time. Willy followed after it, her shoe-clad icy feet calmly continuing the path she'd been taking before she was interrupted as she walked towards the direction where the feeling of tainted slime was growing stronger. Her brief encounter had generated a lot of water that was even now being carried off, and soon the water was back to the level of flooding caused by the rain and overflowing river.

She continued on, leaving the ruined salon behind her, the water inside it full of floating bodies.

 

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Willy kept walking until she felt the sensation of tainted, viscous slime growing just the slightest bit weaker instead of stronger. It was faint, subtle change, but Willy had been intent and paying attention. There was nothing else to do, after all, and it was not in her to be anything less than thorough and meticulous about the things she set out to do. She paused when she realized, looking around as she did, and turning towards the narrow alley she had just passed. Barely wide enough to a tricycle pedicab, much less a car, it led away from the river, and as she walked towards it, the taint on her waters began to grow stronger again. She stepped through the narrow alley between the squat, two-story houses on either side, the sounds around her drowned out by the constant, driving rain.

She used a burst of water to push away a dead dog, already starting to bloat as it began to rot, not wanting to use her hands. Tammy had said she should never directly touch dirty things like that if she could help it, or else she'd get sick. Willy momentarily considered the implication that the rain seemed to have no effect on bacterial life, not putting them into any sort of sleep, before discarding the thought as pointless and irrelevant. She kept walking, following the sensation that echoed the rain. From one house she was passing, an age-stained wooden thing whose first floor looked almost completely submerged already, someone suddenly started screaming. The voice was loud and sounded hysterical, calling for help, saying that their grandmother felt cold, that she needed to get to a hospital, to please take her there, please, they would give anything—!

Willy ignored the pointless noise, walking past it as the voice screamed even louder, asking someone to please come back and help. It had nothing to do with her. She needed to find the cause of this so Tammy would finally wake up. Thankfully, the voice eventually faded into crying, though she had push back the turbulence being caused.

Somewhere in the middle of the alley, Willy stopped and turned around. On one side, a tall, three-story building of unpainted, rough cement, barely ten feet wide, its walls pushed right up to the edge of what could laughably be considered the property line. Its metal, hinged windows with its protective bars were rusting through the pale putty that kept the cracked glass in place, and there were stains of lichen on its walls. The sensation of was strongest here, and Willy could actually feel the turbulence of someone's waters filled with nothing but tainted, thick, viscous, burning slime that fizzed with empty bubbles. It filled them completely, so much that Willy had to struggle to keep the turbulence away from her.

The house seemed to stand in silence, any sound from within drowned out by the rain. Willy gave it a cursory examination, wondering what sort of monster inside it was causing the rain, then shrugged. Well, she'd deal with it and wake up Tammy. She knocked on the front door, because Tammy had taught her that was how you announced yourself to a house you had never been to before, but she barely heard it over the rain. She tried again, louder this time, but there was still no response. Her frustrated and not very good girl attempt to kick the door was impeded by the water, which unbalanced her as she moved her leg quickly enough to overcome its resistance, only to fall over as a result.

When Willy got back to her feet, she tried the doorknob. To her satisfaction and disapproval, it was unlocked and once turned the door swung open easily, or as easily as it could with water behind it. These people… Tammy said that you should always lock the door of the house so that no one unwelcome could come inside. Shaking her head at people that didn't follow what Tammy had said was common sense, Willy stepped inside and locked the door behind her. There, now the house was secure.

With the door closed, the insides were dark, and only a weak, gray light managed to enter from the windows due to the overcast outside. The waters came up to Willy's waist, which was above stomach-level for most people. She took a moment to discern details. The first floor seemed one big room, with a narrow stairway barely three feet wide to her immediate left. Most of the furnishings in the first floor were under water, but on the far wall were what seemed like overhead cabinets made from mismatched pieces of board, likely scavenged. There was also a tall, heavy display case made of old, dark wood, its insides filled with dusty glass cups and plates and assorted miscellaneous things.

She turned towards the staircase, walking carefully as she climbed up the wooden steps, their dark finish long since worn thin, revealing the wood underneath that had also been worn smooth with time and use. The steps creaked under her weight, and she hoped she wouldn't slip as she followed the source of the turbulence.

The upstairs were equally dark, the only light coming from the windows on the wall that case the street. Willy looked around and saw a light switch, flicking it on. The light flickered for a moment, then died. This close, the turbulence seemed to be coming from everywhere. Undeterred, Willy began checking the rooms as the ceiling above creaked. One, the furthest from the windows and the darkest, was a cramped bathroom. The only other room on this floor was a bedroom, its cramped confines filled with a large bed big enough for her and Tammy to sleep on comfortably, an old boxy TV of dark plastic, and a dark wooden wardrobe that looked like it weighed more than the bed and the TV put together. The bed had been made, though not very neatly, and there were shoes lined up along one wall, where in the tight confines they were a tripping hazard.

The ceiling creaked, and though Willy didn't need to look up, she stared at the ceiling. It creaked again. Again. Again.

Something was upstairs.

She readied to shoot steam from one hand as a sharp, pointed icicle grew from the other, and was surprised at how readily steam came. What had once seemed like slowly and deliberately willing a finger to move now came like a snap, instant and sudden, and she had to restrain herself to keep from suddenly shooting out the steam then and there. No, not just steam… steam and boiling water.

Willy stared at her hand, then shrugged. It was probably just the devouring she had done. She hoped she could repeat it, since she would likely need to devour this monster as well. She discarded her shoes, stepping out of them as she collapsed into thick, viscous water, taking a round, undulating shape similar to what Tammy had called a 'slime' as she oozed up the stairs to distribute her weight and keep it from creaking. She could feel the vibrations of the wood as the stairs shifted with her weight, and once she reached the top, she reformed once more, icicle and steaming geyser ready. It was hard to hear anything more over the rain and the sound of it thundering down on the metal roof, only feet above her, but her ice could feel vibrations through the wooden floor, and through that perceived the creaking. It was louder now, more constant and repetitive compared to what she had heard from below. So close, the turbulence was incessant, and despite her best efforts it pounded over her waters.

The floor was as dark as the one below, but there were only two rooms. She moved to the nearest door, which was slightly ajar, and stuck in the point of her icicle into the crack. The room was dark, but she saw no movement, and all was silent.

A bit farther ahead, the creaking continued. The other room was far from the windows, and would probably be completely shrouded in darkness. Still, it was the only one left. Willy moved towards it quietly. It was best to attack a monster when it was unaware, or so Tammy had said about why she had made a mistake attacking the Lava Horse as she had when Kim had been staying back and observing. Willy wouldn't make the same mistake again. She'd get in close, stay unobserved, and attack in a way that would cripple the monster instantly so it could be devoured.

The creaking grew louder and louder as Willy reached the door and it wasn't just because she was getting closer. Whatever was moving was growing more energetic. Willy kicked open the door, her arm snapping up release a spray of boiling water, then paused at what she saw. There was a window in this room, unlike the other rooms below. It was a small horizontal frame of glass that opened up to let air in, but it was a window, and it allowed in enough of the gray outside light for her to see. Like the other rooms, it was cramped, and a bed took up most of the space as well as a plastic wardrobe and drawers.

On the bed, a figure was sitting upright, staring at her with an expression of shock and surprise. Willy felt the waters that she had been pressed to keep away from her, so full of thick, viscous slime, suddenly explode in a whirling maelstrom and rapidly heating currents. In the dim light, backlit by the window, the figure was just an outline, but from the silhouette they were probably female, and—

They screamed, their arms crossing over their chest for some reason. "WHO ARE YOU? WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? GET OUT, GET OUT, GET OUT!-!-!-!-!"

—they were sitting on top of someone on the bed. The other person lay still and unmoving, elastic shorts pulled down around their ankles…

Water suddenly dripped on Willy, pulling her gaze up towards the ceiling. It was bare wooden beams supporting a metal roof sheets, and water was dripping down from them, even though they hadn't been when she had entered.

"GO TO SLEEP! GO TO SLEEP, GO TO SLEEP, GO TO SLEEP!" the female voice cried shrilly as more and more water began to drip down on Willy from the roof. "Forget that you saw anything! Go to sleep! Go to—" The words cut off as eyes went wide, and there was a scream. Willy felt it as the slime became cold and slush, congealed into chips and then chunks, but no less thick and viscous. "Monster! Monster!"

Willy's full attention snapped back towards them at those words as she felt the floor vibrate through her legs. "You," she said, her icy form vibrating like a speaker to make herself heard. "You're the one causing the rain. You're the one causing the sleep." She took a step forward into the room. "Stop what you're doing, right now!"

"No, no! He's mine now, I've made him mine!" the young woman grabbed something on the bed, threw it at Willy. The small bottle of some clear fluid simply bounced off her ice as the vibrations grew stronger. "Stay back! Stay away from me, monster!"

"Stop the rain!" Willy cried, trying to be heard over the woman's yelling. The turbulence she was causing and pushing towards Willy was extremely annoying, but Willy persevered, working through it. "Stop the rain so I can wake her up! Stop the—"

With a final vibration that shook the flimsy wooden walls of the room, floodwater rushed up the stairs, slamming into Willy from behind and into the back wall of the house as another scream sounded.

Chapter 41: Waterborne, Part 7

Willy slammed into the back wall of the house, and she felt parts of her ice crack from the impact with the old, rough cement. The ice immediately fused together again as she tried to get some sort of leverage, but the water was still moving, and she couldn't get any traction with any part of her body. Water exploded from her, slamming into the floodwater and pushing it back a moment. Surrounded by her own water, she dissolved her ice into liquid, its incompressibility preventing her from being pummeled as the walls and floor around her groaned from the transfer of force. Controlling water and exuding the same viscous slimy sensation as the rain, this was definitely the rainmaker, the one putting Tammy to sleep. Willy tried claiming the floodwater, and what had once been mild, weak resistance was now like trying to pull the water that had been absorbed by Tammy roots into her system. The conclusion was undeniable.

The rainmaker was staring down at the water around her, mouth open and eyes wide. Then her eyes narrowed, and she gave the mass Willy had become a look she had seen before, usually on people Tammy said she'd somehow offended. "Get away from me, monster! Get away from us! Don't interfere!" the rainmaker cried shrilly as boiling waves of turbulence battered over Willy's waters. "I finally have what I want!" She thrust her arms dramatically at Willy, a pointless gesture, but the rainmaker probably didn't know that. Certainly she would think it helped though, since the floodwater that had risen up the house rushed towards Willy in a wave. "He's mine now! I've made him mine!"

Willy made water explode from her mass, boiling hot jets accompanied by steam, the ability she had so recently devoured from the rat. The rainmaker's turbulence changed, filling with exploding geysers of steam as Willy met the surging water with her own, spewing out under greater pressure to resist the larger mass that the rainmaker had managed to call. Incompressible fluid met incompressible fluid, both surges displacing sideways, striking the walls of the quickly filling room. The house shuddered, a vibration Willy felt in her mass, and part of the cement wall with the window exploded outward, forming a ragged hole. Far below came the sound of large chunks of cement falling onto corrugated metal roofs as all the water suddenly rushed out of the hole to release their pressure. The bed began to slide towards the opening, pushed by all that water—

"NO!" the rainmaker cried, pushing one hand towards Willy—again, a pointless gesture—as she reached down with the other and grabbed the sleeper. More water surged at Willy as, still one-handed, the rainmaker tumbled off the bed as it continued to slide, she and the sleeper managing to splash and tumble off as the bed slid to the hole. First one then an other of the bed's legs went over the edge, causing the bed to partially fall out before it's metal headboard lodged it in place, water streaming out all around it, small clutter like discarded clothes and footwear being carried out with the current as Willy reshaped the water she was creating around her, forming a whirling maelstrom that created a current to divert the water from her and out the hole.

"Stop the rain," Willy said again, reforming her body of ice so she could vibrate properly to be heard. Her waters were turbulent with her own boiling hot bubbles as she struggled to keep her impatience and rising anger in check. Good girls didn't throw tantrums, good girls used words to communicate and reason with people… "Stop the rain and stop the sleep!"

"No!" the rainmaker cried, even as she used one hand to flip her long hair out of her face. She made a face at Willy, an angry face with narrowed eyes and gritted teeth and long dripping hair as she got to her feet, standing over the sleeper. "No, he's mine now! I won't let you take him!"

Willy felt more steaming hot bubbles filling her at the nonsensical reply. Was this person not listening.? "I don't care about him!" she said, taking a step forward. Whoever 'he' was. The rainmaker moved her hand like she was grabbing something from the side and throwing it at Tammy, and after a moment more floodwater came rushing up the stairs, only to be diverted by the maelstrom Willy had made around her. "Make the sleep stop already! Let me wake her up!"

"Why aren't you asleep?-! You should be asleep! Everyone should be asleep!" the rainmaker screamed. "There shouldn't be anyone to stop me! Go to sleep and stop interfering!" She thrust both hands towards Willy again, the sleeper falling to the wet floor beside her, his shirt soaked completely.

Willy felt the vibration that signaled another surge of water, as well as other vibrations, of breaking masonry and snapping wood. The floor under Willy's feet exploded upward as floodwater surged, but she was already throwing herself at the rainmaker in a full-body tackle. Her much harder body slammed into the rainmaker as water continued to gush up from where she had previously standing, and the rainmaker let out a cry of pain as her bare back struck the rough, unfinished walls. Willy shoved her clear, icy face as close to the rainmaker as she could, to make sure she could be heard, to make sure there was no misunderstanding. After all, with the rain and waves, it was possible the rainmaker just wasn't hearing her properly. "Stop the rain," she said. "Stop the sleep. Now. Please. I am asking you nicely."

The rainmaker tried to push her back, and Willy's feet slid back on the floorboards, frictionless. In the rain, with every surface wet, her being made of ice meant she had no almost traction on anything, and she nearly fell over before she made her body flow and restructure to a more upright, stable position. The rainmaker drew back her hand and punched Willy in the face, then let out a cry pain at the feeling of punching solid ice as the force made Willy slide again almost to the hole behind her. Willy let unnaturally viscous water flow from her, displacing the water under her that she couldn't claim and dripping between the floorboards before turning the water into ice, wrapping around the wooden boards beneath her as she used that to anchored her body to the floor.

Ah. They were fighting now. Tammy had told her the good girls shouldn't start fights… but there was nothing against good girls ending fights, and Tammy sometimes praised her for it. Willy had been told she wasn't supposed to let herself be bullied, and when people started hitting her, that was when she was being bullied.

She'd been hit. That was bullying. And the rainmaker wasn't her classmate, nor were they in school, so there were no unfair school administrators who even Tammy got angry at for simply levying punishments with no consideration for circumstances and self-defense.

All the boiling turbulence, all the frustrations, the cold and slush that Willy had been ignoring as she feared that Tammy would never wake up and she'd be all alone again, that she'd have to go back to Cebu and live with people who said they loved her but didn't try to understand her, who looked at her like a problem to solve instead of the way Tammy looked at her, full of warmth that washed over her like a bath after a long day… Willy clenched the fingers of one fist, stepping forward on the ice now coating the floorboards and anchoring to the crevices and textures of the house to hold it in place as she drew her hand back for a retaliatory strike at the rainmaker's own head. Her fingers creaked as she clenched it tighter and tighter, the fingers fusing into the palm, becoming a single cold mass that she filled with her anger, her frustration, her—

Good girls didn't throw tantrums. They didn't break things or hurt people just to make themselves feel better or to make people do something.

…

Being a good girl was so hard. There were so many rules, so many conditions and situations and things she had to remember to do and not do, things to do in the same situation that could be mutually exclusive and she didn't know how to tell when it was time to do what in those instances, not without Tammy telling her. Other people never needed to be told. Other people had a Tammy they carried with them all the time, in their heads. They knew what to do, how to do things right. All she had was a squatter who didn't do anything and made her head hurt by letting in other people's turbulence. She needed to Tammy to tell her what to do, needed Tammy to tell her how to act 'normal' so that people would leave her alone. She needed Tammy and the rainmaker was keeping them apart, because if Tammy was asleep she wasn't with Willy…

The rainmaker was cradling her hand, screaming and saying words that Tammy had said good girls shouldn't use casually, even if Tammy herself used them sometimes when talking about school administrators. Willy wanted so, so much to hit her…

"I'll ask you again," Willy said, her ice vibrating with the words as the rain fell around them, lowering her bludgeoning fist. Outside, through the hole in the wall, Willy could see the floodwaters rising, saw pedicabs and jeepneys and cars submerged up to their roofs. "Stop the rain. Stop the sleep. Please. Your rain is keeping someone asleep. I need her to wake up." There, she'd said please and explained herself more thoroughly. Maybe now the rainmaker would be willing to be reasonable and do as Willy asked, or at least perhaps explain why she wouldn't—

"No!" the rainmaker cried. "No one wakes up! No one will ever wake up!" She bared her teeth, her face twisted into a 'scary' expression like she was taking a group picture with classmates. "No one will get in my way again! He's mine now! No one will be able to keep kuya and me apart!"

Still not listening! "I don't care about any of that," Willy said. She'd been listening, at least. "Please stop the rain and stop the sleep! Now!" Maybe she should have said please first of all? It wasn't very clear if you were supposed to say 'please' at the beginning, middle or end of a request. Tammy used it everywhere, and the all that was really said about it is that good girls said 'please' when they were asking something of someone.

In response, the rainmaker pushed her other hand toward Willy, fingers clawed as she let out a scream that echoed the turbulence of her waters, filled with steam bubbles and boiling water, all as thick and viscous as slime. "Go away and stop bothering us! This was our day! Our day together! I made sure no one would interfere, and YOU RUINED IT, MONSTER!"

Willy felt an urge to bite the rainmaker's fingers, but good girls didn't bite people like dogs. Good girls only bit food, and they took small bites, and chewed completely before swallowing…

Water shot out from the hole in the floor behind her like a fountain, slamming into her from behind and pushing the sleeper across the floor as Willy felt the vibrations of more and more water rushing up the stairwell as the rainmaker bared her teeth. Willy just felt irritated. The rainmaker was not a good girl. This was clearly some kind of tantrum, and a petty, unreasonable one. This time however, when the waters suddenly surged up from the stairway again, called up from the floodwaters at street level, Willy remained imperiously unmoved, her feet anchored to the layers of ice she had made and grown. Stresses and forces cracked the ice as she was pushed, but it fused again even quicker, and Willy made it grow thicker and thicker as the water continued to rush futilely, pushing all the remaining furniture in the room out the hole in a flood and a waterfall—

The rainmaker's eyes suddenly went wide, and Willy felt the turbulent waters from her suddenly fill with ice. "NO!" the rainmaker cried, suddenly throwing herself towards the hole, where the sleeper had been sent sliding by her sudden surging flood. "Kuya! Kuya!" She grabbed at the sleeper, getting hold of his bare leg as he continued to slide toward the hole. "Kuya, wake up! Wake up! Kuya!" She seemed to have forgotten all about her control over the floodwaters as she struggled to get footing on the wet wooden floor, managing to arrest the sleeper's movement with his part of his upper body and one arm jutting out from the hole. "KUYA!"

The rainmaker's feet slipped, and she fell down, her legs splaying as she instinctively spread her arms for balance. Willy felt all the rainmaker's turbulence still as all of her water turned into a single mass of ice.

The sleeper slipped out the hole with the last of the water.

The rainmaker screamed, a high, keening cry as cracks burst out all over the calm, cold stillness, the ice cracking and exploding like firecrackers, the turbulence pushing hard against Willy as she kept it out of her water with annoyance. There was a dull, metallic sound as of something hitting a corrugated metal roof, its echoes quickly dying to the relentless rain.

"Kuya!" the rainmaker screamed, almost slipping and falling through the hole herself before she managed to catch the edges of the much-abused wall. "Kuya! Kuya!"

"If he's asleep, he probably can't hear you," Willy pointed out helpfully. "Please, stop the rain. Stop the sleep."

The shattered fragments of ice exploded, everything exploding into steam. What?

"YOU!" the rainmaker screamed as she turned towards Willy, nearly slipping again. The rainmaker looked down and seemed to see the ice of the wooden floor for the first time. "This is your fault! You just barged in here, and—ARGH!" One more she brandished her hand, pointing it towards Willy. "WHY CAN'T PEOPLE JUST LEAVE OUR LOVE ALONE AND LET ME BE WITH KUYA!"

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Willy said, quite reasonably. "I just want you to stop using the rain to keep people asleep. Please." Tammy would be proud of her, she was sure. She'd said please, even when the rainmaker had started bullying. She'd tell Tammy all about it later when Tammy woke up.

This time the house didn't vibrate. Floodwater didn't surge up from the street from up the stairwell, defying gravity by flowing upwards.

Instead, the ceiling collapsed, slamming into Willy and shattering her body to pieces and through the floor as a thick, viscous column of water fell from the sky like a tsunami from the heavens. Her perspective shattered as her body broke into pieces from the force of the sudden impact. Willy could feel the house collapsing around her as the impossible column of water from the sky struck down, floors breaking like popsicle sticks snapped in half, walls bursting outward and slamming into the houses on either side, the water spreading in all directions in a violent wave, and it was all Willy could do to keep from being swept away. Her waters were engulfed, full of nothing but turbulence, a boiling, burning, violent incandescence as all of the rainmaker's waters vaporized violently into burning steam.

Directly under the column, Willy was slammed straight into the ground, the different chunks of her body pushed to the floor from sheer pressure. Touching the cement floor that had been scoured smooth by years of feet, she tried to grow her ice outwards, tried to get a grip on something, anything to anchor herself. If the currents carried her away, there was no telling how far she'd go, how long it would take to get back here and find the rainmaker again, no telling if she even could. There was no purchase to be found, so Willy let out jets of burning hot water from her surface, the force of the geyser-like stream pushing her further into the ground, keeping her in position as she waited for the rainwater to recede. Despite her best efforts, the piece of ice her consciousness was residing in slid, and in the hazy, dark, confusing floodwaters, she couldn't see. She felt for the water she was releasing from her geysers, trying to find patterns, currents, tried to get a sense of her surroundings even as the floodwaters continued to rage…

There! An eddy where part of her water was managing to swirl within itself! She diverted her geysers, using them as jets again, sending herself rushing and tumbling towards the eddy. Her ice tumbled violently, barely kept on course until she reached the spot. It was a corner, where the floor and two walls met, and the currents of the flood was angled just enough that water and silt and now her piece of ice was managing to gather there, relatively undisturbed. Willy nestled there, using jets of her geysers to push herself in and stay in place, now more effective since she could keep herself from sliding, most of her attention on trying to push back the burning turbulence from her mind. Her struggle was made easier as the sources of other turbulence became fewer and fewer.

Eventually, the only turbulence left was the rainmaker's. Most others had stilled completely and disappeared, though Willy could feel the distant ripples of more far away from her.

The floodwaters began to slow down, the pressure abating. Though it still flowed, it was soon no longer doing so with the relentless force of a large mass.

Willy cut off her jets and began reforming her body from a chip of ice once more. She rose back to her full height, body tall and clear, and paused, staring.

The tall, narrow, three story cement tower of a house she had been standing in was gone. So were the houses to its sides, and many of the other houses around it. Wooden houses were just gone, only patches of flowing floodwater left in their place. Other houses whose walls were made of cement blocks had their roofs ripped off, their windows shattered, weaker walls pushed down, a few barely hanging off by their internal rebar. Cars and other vehicles had been overturned, and anything that had been standing loose, like outdoor furniture, chicken coops, piles of garbage or canvas signs were just… gone.

Within some of the walls and houses that remained, bodies floated, absolutely still.

Willy took a moment to note the changes in her surroundings, then carefully walked in a wide circle, her legs bumping into unseen underwater obstructions and hidden street gutters as she tried to get a sense of the intensity of the rainmaker's turbulence, which was alternating between burning steam and sharp-edged chips of ice that ground and churned together. Then she turned, faced the direction where it was the strongest, and began heading in that direction. Around her, rain continued to fall, though a patch of clouds directly overhead was noticeably thinner and lighter than the rest before it slowly grew thick and dark again.

She found the rainmaker standing in hip-deep water next to a large square of corrugated roofing that had been ripped off some house and had settled on top of something underneath it, struggling to lift up a floating body that Willy recognized as the sleeper, making loud wailing sounds as she did so. The rainmaker stumbled, clearly tripping on something unseen under the water as she tried to lift up the sleeper onto the roof, which wobbled slightly. A small body bumped into the rainmaker, and there was a brief burst of cold bubbles in the rainmaker's waters as she roughly pushed the floating body away, one of many floating around her.

Willy walked around the bodies more carefully as she drew closer to the rainmaker so they couldn't accidentally nudge her and affect her balance. Once she was close enough that she figured the rainmaker would be able to hear her even over the pounding rain, Willy said, "When you're done with that, could you please stop the rain and the sleep? I could help you if it would get it done faster." Tammy had said that if you were asking a favor of someone who was doing something thing, a good girl should offer to help so they got done faster and so that they would be more inclined to agree to your request.

The rainmaker stilled, and her turbulence erupted into burning steam again… yet somehow far, far beneath the steam, remaining completely, utterly cold and still. Slowly, the rainmaker turned, staring at Willy.

"You…" the rainmaker said, quietly at first, before her voice suddenly rose explosively. "YOU AGAIN! WHY WON'T YOU LEAVE ME ALONE!-?"

The rainmaker thrust her hand at Willy, and this time there was no pause, no delay as the floodwaters immediately surged towards her in a wave once more.

Notes:

'Kuya' is an honorific, not a name. It's something like 'oniichan'.

Chapter 42: Waterborne, Part 8

Willy met the wave head on, blasting out water from her front that froze and reshaped into a vertical wedge of ice that parted the flood, forcing it to go around her as geysers of water shot out from the back of her wedge, giving her thrust to compensate for her lack of mass. For a moment, her wedge held against the onslaught of floodwater, fighting the current to stay in place.

"This is your fault!" the rainmaker was screaming, her steaming water sending turbulence over Willy. "This is your fault, this is your fault, THIS IS YOUR FAULT! You interfered! Everything was going so well, AND THEN YOU INTERFERED! YOU—!"

Willy raised a hand that exploded into steam.

The sudden wave of superheated gas slammed into the rainmaker, who let out a cry that was seemed surprise rather than more incoherent ranting. The rainmaker stumbled back, turning her face away from the steam as she bent down and splashed her face with floodwater, trying to cool herself after the burst of scalding heat.

Willy changed her feet back to flesh and blood.

The cold slammed into her extremities from the water running over her, and she could feel the texture of the cement under her, the grit of things floating in the water. But she had purchase and friction, and she used it as she had more water burst from her body, its sudden appearance and incompressibility blunting the force of the flood and thrust her forward towards the rainmaker. An icy hand snapped around a wet wrist.

"Please stop doing that," Willy said tersely with barely restrained anger. Why was this person being so unreasonable?!

"Leave me ALONE, monster!" the rainmaker cried again showing her open palm towards Willy's face. The floodwater surged again, pushing against the area of water around Willy that she controlled, going over it and washing over Willy's face.

She let it as she maintained her grip on the rainmaker, keeping them from being separated. Her feet were freezing, but she stood firm as the rainmaker kept blasting at her futilely, the water flung at her heavy but slow and still fluid. The little that washed over her controlled water to stream over her face did nothing. "No. I need you to end the sleep. It's your doing, so you need to undo it." The explanation was childishly simple and self-evident, but the rainmaker seemed to be having trouble comprehending, so perhaps she needed things stated simply.

"We were together!" No, still ranting about unrelated things. "God answered my prayers and gave me the power to let us be together! AND YOU KILLED HIM! YOU KILLED KUYA!" The rainmaker started pulling against Willy's grip, her other, once-open hand clenching into a fist to try hammering at Willy's forearm. The ice didn't break, yet the rainmaker kept beating at it, seemingly heedless of the pain, her waters completely filled with burning steam.

"I didn't kill anyone," Willy corrected irritably. Rats didn't count. It had been a monster, after all, and they'd killed plenty of those, though only as a group. Good girls didn't kill people. That wasn't just something that would make her a bad girl, it was evil and wrong. Tammy would still help her and love her if she were a bad girl.

Willy didn't know if Tammy still would if she did something evil.

"You killed him! You killed him! Kuya is dead because of you!" the rainmaker cried, voice rising to be shrill. On TV, this was usually when Tammy would change the channel with added haste, as if wanting to be away from bad less-than-English-class-play acting as quickly as possible. Willy usually didn't have an opinion on things one way or another—Tammy's opinion was always the right opinion—but in those instances, her opinion was that Tammy was right, and such terrible acting was painful to listen to, and was undeserving of any amount of money being paid for the performance. "Die! Die! Just DIE, monster!"

"No," Willy said succinctly. "Don't blame other people for things they didn't do." Willy hadn't killed anyone. She hadn't hurt anyone. She had been restrained, still, enduring. She'd simply found the rainmaker and asked her to stop making it rain and let Tammy wake up. Everything else had been the rainmaker's own actions.

Willy received a kick in one icy shin for her helpful advice. The kick was deflected off to the side by her leg's lack of friction, but enough force transferred through to make her foot skid back a little on the rough unseen pavement below, which did hurt. The woman's steam was spinning and whirling, no longer hot and formless, but gaining currents and streams. "NO! No, I'd never hurt him! He was the only one who loved me! He was the only one who cared! I'd never hurt him! You did it! You pushed him off! THIS IS YOUR FAULT!"

"No, it isn't." The words vibrated through her ice, but they probably went unheard as another massive surge of floodwater slammed into her. She hadn't been idle. The area of water around her that she controlled had grown, and she absently diverted most of the floodwater aside, save for what rose high enough to go over her diversion and wash over her. Even then, it could be resisted, with purchase on her feet and her own water bracing her, even as her feet grew so, so cold. The floodwater flowed around the rainmaker, keeping her head in air as she continued to struggle against Willy's grip on her arm.

"This is your fault! This is your fault!" the rainmaker's voice was growing more and more shrill despite how distorted Willy's hearing was by the floodwater, the steam inside them a whirling maelstrom that wasn't so much chaotic as random, streams breaking apart to make more and more streams of burning steam as more and more of that water evaporated. The rainmaker's foot kicked again, missed. She jerked her captured arm about violently, as if trying to pull it out of Willy's grasp, but Willy moved with her, flowing with the movements so that she wouldn't be unbalanced by the wild flailing. "WHY?-! What did I do to you that you did this to me? This is your fault! Die! Die! I hope you die, monster!"

"I've never done anything to you," Willy said, and the only reason the words weren't a snarl was because she had no teeth to grit. The frustration inside Willy boiled into anger again, and the waters within her burst into her own steam, but she forced herself to calm again, for her waters to cool. No, no, good girls didn’t allow themselves to be provoked with words like that… but the rainmaker wasn't listening! Why wouldn't the rainmaker listen?-! She wanted to smack them, to hit their head so they'd start using it properly—

Good girls don't throw tantrums…

ARGH! Why did people have to be so stupid and hard to deal with?-!

"Liar! You came into our house, into our room, just to ruin our special day!" the rainmaker screamed like a child crying for attention. She actually started stomping her feet, making the water around her churn. "I was making him mine, so that no one would ever be able to keep us apart again!"

"I wasn't stopping you," Willy snapped. "I just wanted the rain to stop and for everyone to wake up."

"NO! No one wakes up! No one wakes up! No one will stop us from being together!" the rainmaker screamed. She clutched at her stomach with her free hand. "God blessed me with the rain so that no one could keep us apart anymore, so that we could be together! This is a blessed rain, a holy rain, a sign from God! With this rain, we could be together! I'd become his wife!"

Her words were a scream that shattered into a sob. The sob became a broken heaving. Her waters grew cold, the steam become chill and still as ice, even as they burned…

"Well, if you're done with it, can you stop it now?" Willy said.

And then they only burned, the steam a whirling, violent maelstrom as the rainmaker glared at her. Willy pressed on before she started screaming again. "Whatever you were doing you needed the rain for, it's done now, so can you please stop making it rain and putting people to sleep? There's someone I need to wake up. We were going to meet with our friends, and because she won't wake up we're late." There, she had said 'please', explained herself properly, and reasoned out why the rainmaker should do as she asked. Those were more things Tammy had said she should do if she was asking something of someone who was being uncooperative for some reason. Willy would have also gone to the bakeshop and gotten them a tray of brownies as a bribe and more explicit but implied payment for the favor, but she didn't have her money with her.

At her conclusion of her words, the steam began to burn, hotter and hotter and hotter as what had been a maelstrom suddenly twisted, becoming a burning stream, a current that grew narrower and narrower, flowing faster and faster. "No," the rainmaker said, her shoulders starting to shake. Had the cold finally gotten to her? She'd been naked all this time, after all. "You ruin our special day, the day I gave myself to him and showed him my love, you kill my kuya and you think you have the right to ask for anything from me? NO! NEVER! This rain was given to me by God so that my kuya and I could be together! With this rain, I will punish you, monster! I will KILL YOU! I will make it rain forever! I will never let anyone wake up!" Up above, the sky directly above the two of them darkened.

Never wake up…  

"NO!" Willy exclaimed. She'd said 'please'! She'd explained herself! She'd waited her turn to talk while the rainmaker had said nonsense! Why wasn't the rainmaker doing what Willy had asked? Tammy needed to wake up! Willy needed Tammy to wake up!

"YES!" the rainmaker screamed triumphantly. "Yes! Yes!" She laughed, almost a scream, Willy suddenly found herself tackled and pushed down beneath the water, the attack too quick for her to will her body to move until she was already unbalanced and tipping over. A clenched fist slammed down ineffectually at her, splashing into the water again and again. The rainmaker was probably screaming again, judging from the faint vibrations through where she was holding the rainmaker's arm.

Willy rolled over, pulling the rainmaker under the water with her. Unlike her, the rainmaker still seemed to need to breathe. She counted to ten, then pulled the rainmaker out of the water to see if they were ready to be reasonable after their outrageous words. The rainmaker immediately started screaming like a child crying for attention and pointlessly thrust her free had at Willy's face, almost touching it. Floodwater surged, but Willy was surrounded by water she controlled now, and her control was far, far better than the rainmaker's. Thick, viscous water rose to meet the surge, creating a bulwark that pushed the onrushing water to either side, held in place by thrusting geysers under the surface to counter the force.

And then the sky slammed down onto her again.

For the second time that day, Willy was slammed hard into the ground, as a massive almost literal column of water descended from the clouds, as if rain had fallen so thick it had become a solid stream. And then the water was moving outward like a massive wave, a land-borne tsunami, and this time it was too big for her water to fight, and there was no convenient corner to lodge herself into. She went tumbling, the rainmaker in her grip until there was an impact that broke that arm at the elbow, and she was in two parts, tumbling and spinning and carried along by the current—

Willy exploded into steam, the bubbles of how rising out of the water and into the air as she created her own expanding outward ripple, even if it was just a bare fraction of the size of the one the rainmaker had just caused. Willy tumbled through the air, floating blind…

Her arm was still attached to the rainmaker, who was screaming and clutching at her arm. The floodwater had wrapped around her, cradled her, slowed her down and set her on her feet after they had been separated, and now the rainmaker was slamming the ice arm shackled on her into the water, as if trying to break and beat it off, screaming incoherently. The arm broke off again, leaving only the stump of a hand and wrist that the rainmaker immediately started slapping into the water as if that would work again.

Willy pulled her steam together, temporarily forming her own rain that fell to earth, growing more mass. She slammed down onto the dark flood water as a clear sheet. All across her transparent mass, boiling hot geysers sent streams high into the air, and looking through the glistening droplets they spread, she found her arm and the rainmaker again. The whole mass of water froze into ice, sinking and scraping down to touch the hidden road, ruined walls, sunken cars and other debris under the water. The ice grew, reached out and enfolded anything it could wrap around that was stationary, and soon the mass of ice was anchored in place, a glassy island that rose and grew out of the flood.

From the mass of ice, a new body arose, clear and slightly tinged blue as Willy used the ice shackled to the rainmaker's wrist to orient herself and let her know which way to look. The rainmaker spotted her at the same time and let out another wrathful scream, her waters now nothing but random turbulence and burning steam. Even the thick, viscous slime was gone. The rainmaker thrust her arm towards Willy again, and once more the sky above her darkened as floodwater surged to sweep her away.

The ice grew, and a solid mass met the surging water head on, displacing the floodwater as it spread and wrapped around more and more structures under the water to anchor itself. It became an inexorable icy flood of its own, creeping outward as fast as Willy could grow her mass, pushing the water back as the ice grew towards the rainmaker.

For a third time, the column of water slammed down from the sky, but this time Willy was ready. She melted into her creeping glacier as the sky tsunami struck, heaven and earth touching as the descending tower of water impotently expended its force, blasting outward in an expanding ring of water that battered what standing structures were left. When the wave receded, her ice remained, clear and still growing, wrapping around every anchored structure to connect it to the ground, spreading out under the surface of the water, creeping over dirt and cement and wood and bodies…

It flowed over bare, cold feet that jerked away in surprise, but the ice flowed relentlessly, and there was only so fast someone could move through flood water. It wrapped around a foot and bound it in place, creeping and flowing up the leg. The other foot was caught, and with both trapped, the rainmaker could no longer move beyond splashing futilely. Streams of floodwater slammed at the ice, but it was too slow, too fluid, forced to flow around the ice that was held firmly in Willy's control.

When Willy rose again, it was right in front of the rainmaker, her feet firmly anchored to her encroaching ice beneath the surface. The rainmaker had been caught with her upper body tilted forward, and was still flailing her arms about energetically as if they would be strong enough to free her when her legs were completely encased.

"Stop the rain," Willy demanded.

"NEVER!" the rainmaker screamed. "Never ever, ever!  This rain is our love! This—"

Willy's fist slammed into the rainmaker's face, knocking her head back and shutting her up.

"Stop the rain!" Willy screamed back.

The rainmaker's face was bleeding, the pouring rain spreading the blood, but her twisted smile showed teeth at Willy. "Never!" she said tauntingly, and Willy remembered the girls who had bullied her in school before she'd gotten tall. "Never! NEVER! You can't stop my rain! No one can stop it! I will make it fall forever! This is my rain and you can't take it from me!"

Willy stared at the rainmaker as the sky above her darkened again.

"My rain! Mine!"

She'd asked. Again and again, she'd asked. She'd tried to be a good girl. She'd tried to do things that Tammy would praise her for. She'd tried to do it right.

And it hadn't mattered, because the rainmaker wouldn't listen. The rainmaker wouldn't listen, no matter how polite and patient and reasonable Willy was. Being a good girl hadn't mattered.

There are people like that. People who won't listen. Just walk away and do something else. They're not worth the headache.

She should walk away. A good girl would walk away and do something else to fix this. But there was no other way to fix this…

Tammy had never told her what to do if there was no other way.

Willy stared at the rainmaker. Her twisted features, her snarling face…

"Please," she found herself saying one last time. "Just stop it. Stop the rain, and stop the sleep. Let her wake up…"

For a moment, Willy thought the rainmaker hadn't heard, so weak were the vibrations of her ice. Perhaps the thundering downpour had swallowed her words.

"Weren't you listening?" the rainmaker roared. "Never! Never! Never ever! Never ever ever ever—"

Willy didn't close her eyes. She had no eyes to close.

Instead, one arm lengthened, narrowing to a point, transparent as glass, fine as an ice pick.

The rainmaker was still ranting incoherently as Willy stabbed her through the stomach and upwards into her heart, filling the rainmaker's chest cavity with ice.

As the rainmaker's face twisted with surprise, as their blood joined the flood, as Willy's ice rose from beneath, growing up the rainmaker's legs to envelope them completely, as the ice grew from within, engulfing the rainmaker completely to cut off their scream, Willy reached deep within herself, into the lightless depths of her soul, where the squatter whimpered and thrashed as if in the grip of nightmares—

She felt it once more, forced and painful and coming from no part of herself as the depths within her changed into an endless dark abyss…

—Burning steam burning steam burning steam burning steam hate burning steam burning steam hate burning steam burning steam hate burning steam hate burning steam hate hate burning steam hate hate hate hate hate HATE HATE HATE HATE—!-!-!-!-!

—gently whirling water, bubbles caught in the tepid flow, tranquil stillness nearly smooth, gentle warmth, gentle whirling—

The sky tsunami struck. It hit the water already flooding the ground below and spread outward. Tons and tons and tons of water with the kinetic force of something that had been accelerated to terminal velocity spread out once more, blasting through buildings too weakened to survive, spreading out to batter against even farther structures, tearing apart flimsy homes. Young and old, strong or weak, people were washed away.

And in the aftermath, people screamed and flailed in the water, fighting for their lives as high, high above, the downpour finally ceased.

Chapter 43: Waterborne, Part 9

Willy had left a bit of herself near Tammy. A drone, a part of her she still controlled, to watch her cousin while she went away. When she turned her attention to it, she found it still wrapped around her cousin like a thick, viscous slime. Willy asserted control over the water she had left behind, flowing off and almost sinking and joining the floodwater beneath her as she turned her body to ice.

Around her, the garden was flood and looked… different. Bigger, for one thing. The water filling the lawn was flowing oddly, and there were strange repetitions in the air. A strange glowing pink glass broccoli rose out of the water, strange lights and ripples between its fronds, while off to the side what looked like a miniature volcano with lava oozing from its slopes rose out of the water, the flame at its peak vibrating to a wordless song… no, none of that was important. TAMMY!

Willy turned back to her cousin. Her trunk had doubled in girth, and the roots at her base had grown massive. Vines trailed down from some of her branches, and some of them had actually rooted when they touched the ground, which were littered with chest-high piles of fruits and nuts. Hesitantly, Willy raised her arm and pushed at the trunk. It felt old and solid, with no give. The tree didn't even move.

"Tammy?" Willy said hesitantly, then chided herself. That weak vibration wouldn't have been audible over the rain, much less rouse a sleeping person. She vibrated louder. "Tammy? Wake up… please wake up now! Please?" She tried to push the trunk again, but it still didn't budge. Willy felt for Tammy's water, for turbulence that meant she was waking, but there was none. Only the still, placid surface of deep sleep, without warmth or cold, currents or bubbles. She wasn't waking. Why wasn't she waking? "I made the rain stop! You can wake up now! Please wake up…!"

Her vibrations warbled, and Willy realize she was on the edge of another tantrum. No, no tantrums, good girls didn't throw tantrums…!

Vibration. Wait…

No ears. Tammy had no ears. She had no way to hear Willy, that was all! trees had no dedicated auditory organs, and Tammy had been asleep, so she hadn't made any…

Willy stepped back, claiming the floodwater beneath her. The flood easily fell under her sway, and she pulled water from all around the yard as she turned the fluid beneath her into ice. It became a part of her, and she claimed more and more water from the yard, making it part of her ice. The ice crept up the tree, sinking into every wrinkle and crevice, wrapping tightly around it. Willy could feel thorns and roots start growing in response, but she simply reformed her ice to wrap around them. Soon the trunk of the tree was covered in a thick layer of ice.

Hesitantly, Willy spoke, and the ice vibrated with her words, causing droplets of water to fall from the leaves and more fruit to break off their stalks and come crashing down on the fruits already pilled below. "Tammy," she said, sending ripples outward across the water still only the ground. "Please wake up. It's time to get up. Please Tammy. Please wake up. Please…"

The tree shook, every trunk shuddering, sending the branches about shaking violently.

Willy waited.

Then, from Tammy's waters, shallow tangled currents began to flow sluggishly. They were filled with bubbles, growing the currents becoming more and more tangled, before suddenly freezing into ice.

"Tammy, it's okay," Willy said, letting her ice vibrate to conduct her words through Tammy's being. "It's okay, you're waking up and I'm here."

The whole tree shuddered, the major branches that had split off from the main trunk creaking, as if some invisible force was pulling on it, or like the whole tree was trying to move. the shudders grew strong and stronger, until…

Every fruit on the tree fell off, and Willy had to throw herself forward and partially fuse with the ice around Tammy to not get knocked down as fruits and nuts of various sizes fell around her. The trunk of the tree seemed to convulse, and sheets of cracked bark seemed to peel off, falling from the surface of the tree, revealing new, fresh bark that was smooth and green as bamboo. That green bark began to shudder, black spots appearing on it. The spots seemed to crawl along the surface of the wood.

A crack appeared on the wood, parting open. "Wi…lly…?" a voice like a dry rasp said, the gash-like lips barely moving as they shaped air flowing between them.

Despite the shallow, tangled currents, despite the bubbles, despite some ice still floating on the edges of increasingly turbulent water… Willy felt warmth bloom.

Tammy was awake. Tammy was here, with her.

A mountain of ice that had simply been floating in Willy's waters, one that had kept growing despite the frustration, the anger, the impatience, the steaming stress, and all that had happened to her finally melted in that warmth.

Tammy was here. All was as it should be. The world was right once more. Everything was going to be all right.

"Willy? Wha… what happened?" Tammy asked, and Willy could feel the way her waters whirled, confused and disoriented.

"The rain put you to sleep," Willy said, basking in the warmth. It would get warmer, and it would be wonderful and it would be better… but there was warmth, and that was enough. "I stopped the rain and woke you up."

"The rain…?" Cold suddenly shot through the warmth, fear and concern that made the warmth seem warmer. So warm… so warm… "A monster… Are you all right?-!"

Willy nodded. "I'm fine. I stayed water, so I didn't get hurt."

The cold faded. Not completely, but the warmth strengthened. "Good… good…" The tree shuddered, and Tammy pulled back her ice. Before her gaze, the tree seemed to start growing in reverse. Branches were pulled back into the trunk, leaves fused to the branches they were on, limbs bent down. In front of Willy, on the smooth green surface with the black spots, a bulge appeared. It extruded, vaguely taking on the shape of a featureless head, black spots in a bond where the eyes should be.

Tammy stepped out of the tree, moving stiffly, her limbs curling instead of bending. Willy reached out to help her, savoring the warmth and contact. And as soon as her cousin had completely separated from the still-shrinking tree, she pulled the small girl into a hug. Hard ice and hard wood clunked together, and there was no softness, no pressing completely against each other, but Willy didn't care.

Tammy was back. She wasn't alone any more.

 

––––––––––––––––––

 

"The entire city is going to hell."

Wearing borrowed clothes—the clothes she had been wearing that morning had been too soiled and crushed to wear—Tammy sat with Willy on her lap. Her cousin's face was serious, the warmth of her waters dimmed a little as Tammy concentrated on what the other girl was saying, her turbulence calm regular waves that Willy recognized as her cousin trying to control herself. Tammy's fingers dipped reassuringly into Willy, absently balancing the bowl that their host had quietly insisted Willy be put in. The water in the bowl was still a drone, but it let Willy collapse and just… be, basking in Tammy's warmth, even if the main part of her body, the part that could become flesh and blood and bone, was still so very far away.

"How bad is it?" Tammy asked.

"It's been raining all day, and it never got weaker. The usual places are flooded, the rivers all overflowed their banks, parts of Marikina are submerged—again—and because the rain had been causing people to pass out on contact, no one was able to react to this save to report what was happening out their windows. Most information has been disseminating through social media, and groups on several platforms have already started compiling what they could. I started one of them myself. Attempts to try and brave the water in waterproof gear met with failure as soon as a little water leaked. Now that the rain has stopped and people can wake up, the news is reporting that a surprising number of people managed to stay alive even though they were floating unconscious in floodwater. But however much the media are trying to emphasize these stories, the death toll is catastrophic. Actually catastrophic, not like having twenty people die at a school and calling it a disaster—"

"Loretta."

"… yes, Dad. Estimates are putting the number of dead in the hundreds of thousands, and that's just from those who drowned. Many more are being harmed and killed by monsters who have somehow been awakened by the rain and are stalking the streets, devouring the unconscious and dead. Several adjacent Barangay in Pasig were leveled by pillars of water falling from the sky and spreading out like a storm surge or tsunami. With the rain gone, the military and emergency responders can finally mobilize, but their numbers have been severely depleted, since their initial mobilization when the effects of the rain started rendered over 65% of those stationed in Manila unconscious. Many of them survived and are being treated for exposure, but it will leave very few able to respond to this emergency."

"Then we need to do what we can," Tammy said, her voice determined. It was the voice she had used when she had argued for letting Willy live with her, now matured and even instead of halting and hesitant. She turned towards the other people seated nearby. "Only we can deal with the monsters, so we need to go out there and do so. Getting help to people will be bad enough with the floods, but if people have to worry about running into any of those things… we need to help."

"Do we… contact the authorities and offer assistance?"

Tammy opened her mouth to reply, paused, and visibly changed what she was going to say. "Mang Milo? What do you think? You'd have a better idea of how the authorities will react than I do." Tammy smiled weakly, her fingers trailing circles on Willy inside the bowl. "I only have ignorance, suspicion and paranoia to rely on."

"… I think… that you would all be able to do a lot of good if you came forward to work with the authorities… however… I understand very well why you would wish not to take that step. I know a lot of good people in the military, and many decent people… and people who I trust to work for the common good… but… many of the stories you hear aren't completely wrong…"

Tammy nodded sharply. "All right. We do our thing and make contact on a case by case basis. Lori, do you know where Sanny is?"

"According to the most recent report, fifteen minutes ago, they were still fighting the giant wind bird."

Tammy frowned. "We need her. She's best at controlling several drones at once, and… and she's the best at fighting among all of us."

"Killer instinct, you mean."

"Yes," Tammy said flatly. "I think we'll need that right now, don't you?" Tammy looked down, straight at Willy. "Willy, where are you? The rest of you, I mean."

Willy made ice form, careful not to trap any of Tammy's fingers. "Pasig," she vibrated through her ice. "That's where the rainmaker was."

"So all that super-flooding was because of you?"

Willy felt Tammy's water burn, but it didn't flash to steam, and quickly cool back to waves. "Willy does not have the ability to make water fall from the sky," she said tersely, voice clipped, fingers shaking slightly where they dipped into Willy. "Given the description, it's far more likely it was a product of the monster Willy calls the Rainmaker." She sounded like she was talking to a school administrator. Willy stayed quiet. She knew better to volunteer anything unprompted when Willy used that tone. School administrators always had confirmation bias, so any information they got out of you only made things worse, unless Tammy was there to tell her it was all right to say something.

"She's right, Lori. I've seen Willy fight. If she could make water fall from the sky, I'd have seen it already."

"Ah. Then I was incorrect, then. I apologize. Regardless, Pasig is currently the most devastated area of the region, with flooding being the major hindrance to relief efforts in the area. As Willy is already there and has abilities affiliated to water, perhaps she could do something there?"

"We'll see," Tammy said, voice still mildly curt, but clearly calming down.

"I think it would be best if Tammy can get to Willy as soon as possible. Most of my sand's been moved, but I think I can get you close enough to Pasig that the two of you can meet up."

Tammy hesitated, frowning in thought and looking down towards Willy in the bowl. Willy tried to make a smiley face on her ice, to reassure Tammy, to make her laugh, but she didn't think it worked very well. It was transparent ice in transparent water, so it all just looked like glass. "All right. With all the water around, Willy will let me be mobile. Willy, stay where you are and do what you can to lessen the flooding and clear the roads so that cars and people can get through. I'll get to you. Kuya Kim, try to re-establish your portal network. Maybe you can use your power to drain the water to an expanded space or something? Ate Jas, I need you to get up high. It's about to become night, and with a lot of places out of power and the clouds not clearing, we need light. You'll have to be that light. It will also put you in a position to deal with any of the flying monsters, in case your urges starts acting up. Go for the Lightning Shark and the Gale Bird. With how cold a lot of people are going to be, a little controlled heat will help a lot of people. We all keep a drone here to communicate and hope that Sanny thinks to send one here."

"What about you?"

Tammy glanced down at Willy again. "We might have a lot of hungry people soon. I hope they like fruit. Lori, can I ask you to stay by our drones and be our girl in the chair? We need someone to keep us updated, and usually that's Sanny, but…"

"All right, but I hope you understand I am not a hacker. I can only relay what is available on the public internet, and with the internet outages we've started getting, I don't know how viable that will remain. I will compile what I can. Is there anything you wish for me to prioritize?"

"Monsters," Tammy said. "Locations, what they're doing… and whether they're being an active threat."

"Understood. Please understand that I am only doing this because of the emergency circumstances. I have no intention of becoming a permanent supporting member of your cast. This cameo is sufficient."

Tammy blinked and turned towards Kuya Kim. "How does your sister know about references but you don't?"

"That was a reference?"

"My kuya is a normie, and is far from maidenless. His lack of good civilization is understandable."

"My lack of what?"

"It's a game reference kuya. I'll explain later."

"Is there anything else?" Tammy interrupted. She looked around, then nodded. "All right. Let's transform and roll out, everyone. We might be too late to save the day, but we can keep things from getting worse. Let's go." She hesitated. "Ate Jas, you can use the bathroom first."

There was a flurry of movement and more words, but Willy ignored them. Tammy had picked up her bowl, walking away somewhere darker, quieter.

"Willy?" her cousin said quietly. "Are you all right?"

"Yes, Tammy," she said promptly. "I'm all right."

Tammy hesitated, then nodded. "We'll talk about what you did later, all right? You can tell me everything that you did, step by step."

"Yes, Tammy."

"Do you think there's anything I'll be mad about?"

Willy thought about it. "There was someone… a very obstreperous person." She didn't get to use that word often. "She hit me and bullied me, but I tried to be a good girl… I tried, Tammy…"

"Tried?" Tammy prompted her gently.

"You said that… that I should walk away if… if there's someone that won't listen, right?"

"Yes," Tammy said, nodding. "Very good, Willy. You walked away?"

Willy hesitated. "No Tammy. I couldn't. I… You never told me what I should do if I couldn't walk away, so… I… I might have done something… bad."

Willy felt the ice fill Tammy. Felt her water grow colder and colder, turning to slush, to ice, felt waves grow cold, felt the warmth…

The warmth…

In the midst of all that ice, the depths were warm.

"Willy…" Tammy said quietly, hesitantly. She closed her eyes, and the water moved. Though still ice, they moved like waves, calm and regular. "We'll… we'll talk about it later, Willy. When it's just the two of us, all right?"

"All right, Tammy."

Tammy nodded, then looked over her shoulder. "I need to go get changed. You turn into ice and I'll come get you, all right?"

"Yes, Tammy."

Tammy nodded again. "Were you scared?" she asked, her voice quiet.

"No, Tammy. I had to do it. If I didn't, you might never have woken up."

For some reason, Tammy smiled sadly. "Well, even if you weren't afraid, I think what you did was very brave, Willy."

Brave. Tammy had never said she was brave before…

"We'll talk more later. I love you, Willy."

"I love you, Tammy."

And then Tammy was walking away, so Willy dutifully turned the rest of her mass into ice, using the bottom of the bowl as a mold for a flat surface so she wouldn't roll around.

They'd do things, and then when they were alone, when it was just them, Willy would tell Tammy what happened. Willy would tell her everything, and Tammy would tell her what she did wrong, what she did right, and how a good girl should have acted in the situation she'd found herself.

She settled down to wait.

Chapter 44: Interlude: Blue

Summary:

Beyond the Depths of Sleep

(Beyond the Depths of Sleep)

Depths.

Dark/deep.

Quiet.

Stillness.

Safe.

Rest.

Sleep.

Turbulence.

Far.

Ignore.

Slee p.

Safe

Quiet.

Sle ep.

Sl eep.

Peace.

Quiet.

S leep.

Sleep.

Sleep…

…wake…

No!

NO!

NO!

NO!

Sleep!

Sleep!

Want!

Sleep!

Turbulence,

Near.

Loud.

Many.

Everywhere.

Hide!

Hide!

Big.

Big.

Everything.

Big.

Loud.

Loud!

Hurt.

Much!

Much!

Pain!

Hide!

HIDE!

HIDE!

Notes:

Nightmærangers returns… Tomorrow! 

Yellow: Oh, finally! I was worried that Hatte Saburo had forgotten all about us, since he's been lavishing attention on that Lori girl.

Magenta: Don't talk about my sister that way.

Green: No, not our series' Lori, the other Lori. You know, the wizard.

Red: Ah, does this mean we're finally going to get an actual story arc instead of endless intros?

Yellow: I want a mecha. We were promised a mecha. It's in the contract, it's what separates us from Kamen Riders, Metal Heroes, angsty American Superheroes and Magical Girls... most of the time. 

Magenta: I second this! I might not get the reference, but I know I want a giant robot! 

Green: I want a combined team attack that makes a BIG FUCKING CANNON!

Red: Eh? That sounds dangerous....

Yellow: Don't worry, we'll only use it in abandoned quarries.

Magenta: That sounds strangely specific...

Green: Look forward to it!

Chapter 45: The Nightmares That Came To Manila, Part 1

As Tammy stripped off the clothes that Kuya Kim's sister Loretta had lent her, she was fairly certain they were all in over their heads.

In one day, the entire city had gone to hell in a way that… well, would probably be forgotten about in six months because they weren't a First World or Old-World European country anyone cared about, but it that was certainly unprecedented in at least the country's history, short of the Second World War, and maybe the war against the Americans. Unrelenting, constant rain that caused people to fall asleep on contact… all save for her very special, very brave cousin, who had apparently done what she could, the little cinnamon roll.

People who had been going on about their unsuspecting business were dead, drowned, run over by vehicles, or smashed by what had apparently been a cross of some kind of high-altitude kinetic weapon and a tsunami. Places were flooded, and people who might normally have resorted to climbing onto their roofs to get away from the rising water had been unable to, because they'd fallen asleep as the water had risen, or had actually managed to make their way up but had been unable to protect themselves from exposure and rolling off into the water below.

Even now, after Willy had gotten rid of the forced sleep effect by dealing with the monster that had caused it, the problem wouldn't have magically gotten fixed 'off-screen', like it would have in a TV show. Older, poorer parts of the city were still flooded, except it would be worse than it usually was because the water would be full of unconscious people who had drowned. Whole families might have drowned in their home because they collapsed face-first into ankle-deep water. Or worse, people might have found themselves the only ones alive because they fell unconscious in a chair while everyone around them fell down…

Tammy shook her head, though that didn't really do anything on a physiological level to help banish the thoughts of elaborately horrific scenarios as she stepped out of the bathroom, the neatly refolded clothes over one stiff, towel rack-like arm. Shaking the orientation organs she'd adapted from roots to help her keep her balance didn't have the same effect of as if she'd done it to her inner ear, but the gesture was comforting. The gesture and habit let her move her thoughts away to another direction as she headed to where Kuya Kim and Ate Jas—Nightmare Magenta (It’s not pink!) and Nightmare Red—were waiting for her.

She stepped carefully on the old-fashioned marble, her footsteps stiff and heavy, as if she was wearing a stiff, constricting boot, or one of those plastic brace things for when your ankle was in a cast. Her wooden body, while pliable, wasn't in the same way a flesh and blood body was. Her ankle didn't swivel naturally so that her feet were flat on the floor. If anything, walking reminded her of having on roller blades or ice skates, and she had to constantly and consciously adjust her footing, especially since it was hard to feel the surface of her body deforming under pressure, so she had difficulty in telling where her feet were making contact. She'd been experimenting with a sort of tripod/high heel configuration for her feet, but she hadn't worked out of the bugs yet, like not having enough traction for rapid movement. So, flat feet and carefully walking like a robot it was!

It was kind of annoying how she had this problem. One would think that being made of a light material that was naturally easy to hollow out to reduce weight would make walking easy for her, compared to her two teammates two were made of various kinds of rock and her cousin who was made of ice, meaning she had occasional problems with friction to boot, ha ha. But no, somehow all three of them had a better sense of tactile pressure on their bodies, so that the near-autonomous adjustments a body made they instead did out of a casual habit that was almost but not quite autonomous…

Tammy stepped into the living room where her teammates, and Kuya Kim's father and sister, were waiting for her. "Thank you for the clothes, Lori," she said, putting them next to a more neatly folded pile on the sofa that Ate Jas had been wearing.

Loretta paused just long enough to seem like she wasn't going to respond before she said, "You're welcome," before going back to browsing on her computer. On the table in front of her, atop a pink-ish magenta stone bowl, was a cube of the same color, and a cube of glassy obsidian. Willy's little ice drone was in the bowl next to them. Someone must have moved it, and Tammy quashed the sudden annoyance at someone moving Willy while she was out of her sight. It wasn't Willy, she reminded herself, it was just her drone, a little bit of water she controlled, and there was no malice involved…

"Willy," Tammy said, and the ice rippled slightly to show that Willy was paying attention. "Can you divide that drone? I need you to leave one part here so that we can use it to talk while I carry the other so you can tell me where you are."

"Yes, Tammy," Willy said, the bowl her drone was in vibrating lightly before the little done seemed to pinch in half, dividing into two domes of clear ice.

Tammy picked up one, thorns growing on her fingers and stiffening to allow her traction on the smooth ice. While she no longer had a problem with how cold her cousin could be—literally. Her cousin's ice could be well below zero sometimes—the lack of friction could be difficult. Cool, but difficult, ha ha.

Was it sad that even with new friends, she still kept her wordplay to herself?

"Okay, everyone ready to go?" she asked as she fitted Willy's drone into a hollow in her arm and reminded herself not to sink roots into it as thorns grew to bracket the drone, locking it in place. It still felt weird to be the one in charge. She was green, not red! Also, she was the youngest one in the group! That was just wrong! Shouldn't they say she wasn't mature enough, or didn't know what she was doing, and she should leave things to older, more experienced people? Kuya Kim and Ate Jas were in college! Ate Sanny was an adult with a job, whatever it was. But they all deferred to her, as if it was weird she wasn't  leader…

Ate Jas and Kuya Kim both nodded. "Ready as we can be," Kuya Kim said, a note of nervousness in his voice.

Tammy reached out and patted his arm. It felt nothing like patting an arm should be, his arm staying stiff and unmoving, her thorn-like fingers scraping on stone as they, but she hoped he understood the sentiment. "It's going to be okay, Kuya. We're going in to help. Just do what you can."

"What if we make things worse?" Ate Jas said quietly.

"Then stop and call us, and we'll help you," Tammy said. "We're a team. We're only splitting up because we have multiple priorities, and the things we're going to do is something we're all specifically suited for. If it gets more complicated than that, you don't need to force yourself to do it alone. Fall back and call for backup, and do what you can until the rest of us get there. Remember, you're just going out and getting your portal network up, that's all. Trying to use it to redirect the flooding is optional and only if you can manage it. Once you have your portal network back up and running, or have at least confirmed the parts that you can, call it in and we can figure out what's the next step."

She turned to Ate Jas, aware of her issues when it came to not being active and involved. "Ate Jas, while you're up there, why don't you practice with drones? You'll be high up and far away, so as long as you control your heat, it should be safe for you to practice with plasma, and maybe make a little more light. And while you're up there, maybe keep an eye out for Ate Sanny? We'll need her."

Because she was the one who should be leading this team. Ate Sanny was the oldest, she was a quick thinker, she had great insight into the minds of how people thought and how their own powers' urges worked, and she was always totally cool and collected like a leader should be! It didn't seem fair that she could call 'not it' by saying she didn't want to be, when Tammy couldn't do the same thing!

But if that's how it was going to be, then Tammy just had to roll with it. So, when they finally found Ate Sanny, she would, as leader, order the older woman to tell them what to do! No, it wasn't foisting off her leadership on someone else, it was delegation and taking advantage of your teammate's skills when it exceeded one's own! They made her leader, after all. Well, this was how she led.

She turned to Kuya Kim's sister. "Lori, anything new come up?"

Loretta waved a hand dismissively. "Power is down in a lot of places, and it's affecting cellphone coverage, so we're not getting a lot of photos posted online. It's mostly from well-off dry areas like Makati, Taguig, and Ortigas, places like that. Marikina is almost a complete social media deadzone, but the news is saying that emergency boats have put out to see if people can be helped. However, the implicit assumption in heavily flooded areas seems to be that if there's no one moving around in front of a house, the people inside are dead. I've found footage of Willy in Pasig before the weird magic tsunami, though. I think I can narrow down the street for you."

Tammy nodded, holding up a hand. After so many times, having to grow the specialized mish-mash of plant parts she needed to make a communications drone was simple. A leathery sack for pumping out air, a tube with a special, vibrating flap to reproduce vocal chords, a mouth-like opening that can open and close to replicate a mouth, and inside a tough, light, bamboo-like shell to protect it all and not look disgusting, with the black blotches that she used to see. In the back of her mind, she felt the almost constant, relentless urge to stop moving, to settle down and root, to just… be. It was a constant, low level noise, like a ringing in her ears that had been going on so long she'd stopped really noticing, only to sound all too clear suddenly when she was in the middle of using her powers. Or at least, the powers she had…

She put down the speaking drone next to Loretta, testing its functions, making sure she could see and hear through it. Despite the lack of roots and water, the chlorophyll on the green coating of the drone began to metabolize, mugging passing carbon-dioxide for its carbon content as it tried to pull what little water vapor it could and bash all that together to form sugar. "Here. I can see though this. When I'm close to Pasig, I'll talk to you through this so you can help guide me closer to Willy." Tammy would have Willy herself to talk to, through her drone, but she'd never been good with directions. She all but literally needed to have her hand held when going to new places.

Loretta glanced at it, poking it experimentally. "Understood. I'll keep trying to find Ate Sanny, but I think people are still keeping out of the rain, and if she's flying she might be hard to get footage of."

Tammy nodded. "Thanks. Just do what you can." She turned back to the others. "All right. From this point on, as long as we're not flesh and blood, we will refer to ourselves by our superhero names." Wow. That was something she'd never have thought she'd get to say completely seriously. "This will be to protect our identities. Got it, Nightmare Red, Nightmare Magenta?"

"Got it, T—I mean, boss," Kuya Kim said.

"Okay, just to clarify, I'm Nightmare Green," Tammy said. "Not boss. That feels weird."

"Right… Nightmare Green," Kuya Kim nodded.

Kuya Kim's father patted him on the shoulder, his touch very tentative as he gave his son a reassuring smile. Kuya Kim's rock wasn't uniformly smooth. "You'll get used to it. Using call signs is just good practice, though yes, they do feel weird when you're just starting out." Mang Milo's smile widened. "My son, the superhero."

"In the interest of avoiding the trope of all of you being safe in your secret identities, but all of you referring to me by name and thus having a name that can be traced," Loretta said, not looking up from her laptop, "I am pre-emptively assigning myself the call-sign of 'Ops'. If you need to refer to me, use that name."

Tammy nodded in agreement, a small spark of enthusiasm flickering inside her. "Superhero names for everyone," she chirped. She did the whole genki-girl fist thrust in the air and everything.

She wanted to take a deep breath, but couldn't. Still, she mimed it as best as she could. "In all seriousness though… there's a lot of people out there who need help. If you think you can provide it, do so. We're not likely to find a lot of collapsed walls that have people buried under them, or big heavy things that need to be lifted to get people free, but if there are, and if you think can do it without hurting anyone, do what you can." Another mimed breath. "And if you run into any monsters that are too close to people… call it in first, all right? There's no reason to have to do it alone. Got it?"

They both nodded.

Tammy looked outside. Though the rain had stopped, the clouds still gather thick and dark, and with the setting sun, gloom had fallen. The streets were strangely quiet, with no cars passing by. She had called Manang Zeny and told her that she and Willy were staying overnight at their friends’ because they couldn't get home, which was probably right. The woman had reminded her to call her parents to let them know she was all right.

Tammy had sent a text, then deliberately turned off her phone so it couldn't be contacted. Her parents were still abroad on a business strip, and wouldn't be back until the end of the month at her earliest. Hopefully they'd blame it on bad cell service or towers going down after she'd sent her text.

"All right," she said, realizing they were only procrastinating now. "Magenta, get us away from the house so that we're not obviously coming from here. After that, Red, get into the air and light up. Then get me as close to Pasig as you can." They nodded. "Then we'd better get going."

"Good luck, you three," Mang Milo said.

"You'll need it," Loretta said.

The three of them headed out the door, into the dark, cold night that had only just begun. Tammy stepped into the still-flooded front yard, feeling her legs extrude subtle roots that started drawing in the water. Off to the side, she could hear the water sizzling as it lapped around Red's glowing hot legs. The night was dark, almost completely black to her 'eyes'. The plant cells she had adapted to make visual organs had never really evolved to react to subtle lighting, having come into being to point plants in the direction of blazing bright sunlight.

"Damn it…" she heard Kuy—Nightmare Magenta vibrate. It almost sounded like a sigh. "This is going to take a lot of work to clean up afterwards."

Tammy winced internally, looking at the big tree next to the bath to the front door and the piles of fruits that had fallen around it. "Sorry. I'll help." She gestured towards the tree, willing it to shrink, to devour itself, to regress its growth. It was unnatural, but so what? "The tree should be gone by morning, and I can probably fix any plants the flooding ruined."

Magenta turned towards her. His face was blank, save for the pale-streaked, visor-like band across his face he'd put in so that everyone else would have somewhere to look him in the eyes to make conversation easier. "Would you? Please?"

"Sure. We'll call it a team bonding thing. It’s the least we can do since we meet up here a lot."

Another vibration that sounded like a sigh. "Thanks. I know it's stupid, being worried about that when there are people worse off, but—"

"It's your home," Red said quietly. "You want it to look presentable. We understand."

Magenta raised a hand and sand began to flow down from his palm. In the darkness, the sand clearly glowed pink. Definitely pink, there was no way to excuse it as magenta. "Well… let's get a move on, then. I've got rocks and sand nearby that didn't get away so I can get us to EDSA. Red, you can fly up from there." The air above the water where the sand had fallen began to twist. "All right, I've got a path open."

Tammy wanted to take a deep breath and couldn't. She wanted to swallow, but she had no throat that could swallow. "All right Nightmærangers. Let's be heroic!"

If she were a better leader, she might have had something more catchphrase-worthy ready. But then, most catch phrases sucked anyway.

Chapter 46: The Nightmares That Came To Manila, Part 2

It was a short hop away from the house so that Magenta's family weren't outed as being related to a superhero. Or at the very least, related to an infamous public vigilante. While they had some positive regard from their actions against the Thorn Thicket, already the talking heads were speculating wildly, being alarmist, dealing in absolutes, and, in some cases, actually had a point, but those were rare. Some people were already making the leap they were somehow related to the monsters, the Nightmares, plaguing the city, though thankfully no one was blaming them for the existence of the rest. The perception was that the same thing that had happened to all the animals had happened to them—probably true—and they should come forward to reveal themselves so they could be…

What happened after that was always a point of contention. Cured? Yeah, even the talking heads admitted they had no idea how that would possibly work, though they did get some mileage talking about if 'curing' was needed. Work with the government? Be placed under government supervision? Submit to scientific testing and observation? The most the talking heads could say was they should come forward in the name of public safety, since apparently the five of them being secret presented some kind of existential safety risk to everyone else in the city… somehow.

Still, such lukewarm sentiment showed the public wasn't against them. The military and by extension the government all but called them terrorists, expressing (not unwarranted) concern about Red's plasma heat beam, that had been set off in Makati and had apparently been visible on weather satellites as a massive bloom of heat, before that same bloom of heat had disappeared.

That would probably all change after today. They needed to be out there so that the change wasn't completely against them, a despicable thought given how many people were suffering. It was probably a mark against Tammy being a very good leader she considered all that secondary to getting to her cousin's side and making sure she was all right. If she'd been a proper leader, she'd be doing so with the blessing of the rest of her teammates. But no, she just pushed the nepotism through and didn't comment on it, and neither did anyone else.

Magenta and Tammy didn't say anything after they separated from Red, walking through the wormholes of compressed space that the college student raised for them to enter. The brief moment inside the wormholes came with a burst of light that Magenta had once explained was from all the photons passing though the path of the space being compressed hitting their eyes all at once… or something like that. It was noticeably dimmer this time, likely because of how many buildings and streetlights were dark.

The sudden burst of brilliant light as they were passing through a wormhole was a surprise that made them pause when they emerged out the other end. The brilliant light and stark shadows soon gave them an answer, and Tammy found her pseudo-eyes actually functioning as intended, even if the brightness was just a bit too intense to make out subtle colors.

"Wow. She's bright," Magenta said, impressed.

"Yeah," Tammy said, waving a hand that extruded young, fresh leaves. "Is she making it hotter? I can't tell."

The glowing, semi-crystalline material on Magenta's surface seemed to writhe for a moment, the way light passed through it changing. "No, not much infrared. Good for her. I hope she'll be confident enough to not be afraid to use her powers."

That was… probably a factor, but probably not all of it.

They kept moving, and Tammy was finally able to identify where they were passing through now that she had enough light to see. At every stop, her body seemed to shiver, the chlorophyll on her surface drinking in the light. It had been doing that a lot more ever since she had devoured the Bounty Bee in Tagaytay. Now when it metabolized there was an added bias towards starches and sugars in addition to bigger and thicker limbs. The more prominent flower features on her body were another side effect of that.

Though she could have done without Yellow's snickered comments about being covered in plant genitalia.

The light began to dim as they got farther and farther away from where Red was presumably floating. Normally, Magenta would have been able to take them to their destination in one step, provided that destination was along EDSA, but with the flooding, the markers he used to bend space had all been moved or under water, so he needed to reorient the connections.

However, even with that delay, they made Pasig in a few minutes. It was darker there, since Red was so distant, but even then it was far brighter than what mere moonlight would have made it, not that there was any with the thick cloud cover above. The clouds were actually reflecting the light Red cast as she hovered just below them, making the sky look like it was on fire. The two of them stood on the roof of one of the newly-risen call center buildings across the currently-flooded river from Rosario church.

Across the river was devastation.

Tammy had passed through here before. Ortigas Avenue Extension was the major road towards Metro Manila from the bedroom communities where she and Willy lived. She'd passed by and was generally familiar with the old buildings that had been made in the eighties, the slums along the river, the barely-not-slums a little further away from it, the new developments that were rising where old industrial compounds had stood.

Now, it was… not gone. Most of the buildings where still there, the hollow block and rebar walls standing stubbornly, though many older walls were swaying crookedly, or even bent over, the rebar inside them barely keeping them in shape. Even with her bad pseudo-eyes, she could see shattered windows, and more buildings than not were lacking roofs. Along the rivers, there where whole blank spaces where many of the shanty houses that had been built along the river were just gone, with the rest leaning drunkenly, or were just so much stubborn debris. Cars, and other vehicles were stalled on the roads, from what she could see, and many were fallen on their side as if tipped over by a giant. She saw at least two places—one a storefront of some sort, the other a home—with a car through the front.

Everything was flooded, and from what she could see, the water rose up to people's waists. She could see children being carried, saw others sitting on top of cars on the road.

Even from this distance, she could hear the crying. They were loud, full-voiced wails, the kind people probably thought weren't genuine from watching too many bad actors in too many decades of cheap daytime dramas. She'd seen people on the news crying like that, and she'd always thought they were just playing up to the cameras.

Here and now, she felt small and stupid for ever having thought that.

"We should do something…" Magenta said, his vibrations quiet, making him sound small.

Tammy nodded. "Go. Do what you can. I need to go find my cousin."

Magenta nodded, and Tammy felt a twinge as she essentially told him to go to work while she did her own thing. He patted her on the shoulder, the rough texture of planes and angles on his palm scrapping off an inconsequential layer of wood that probably left a stain on him. "I can keep making wormholes for you to get to her, if you need it."

Tammy shook her head. "No. you'd probably have nothing spread here, and besides, there's probably not anywhere we can appear without knocking someone aside." She gestured. "Besides, it's not like it would be safe to stand on any of the roofs."

"Then how are you going to get around?"

"I'll think of something."

Magenta accepted that. "Good luck, Green. Remember, you can call me if you need me."

She nodded, and with a twist in the air he was gone, and she spotted his glowing totally-not-pink form some distance away. Others with better eyes than her saw him too, and there was the predictable pointing and wariness and… yes, someone in a torn shirt who was so thin he looked like he lived a hand-to-mouth existence pulled out a phone and pointed it towards her teammate.

Tammy looked away. She wasn't sure what her teammate would do, but he was determined to help. She, however, had her mission.

She stepped off the building, and there was a moment of freefall that she didn't really feel before she slammed into the ground and bounced, her now-hollow, bamboo-like limbs vibrating but didn't break as she hit the pavement. She should probably have tried hitting the tree not far away, but it was too close to some long-hanging power lines that she didn't want her limbs to catch on.

Fortunately, there weren't many people near where she landed. The homeless people huddled under the overpass in the middle of the road barely glanced up, probably startled by the sound she made, but they didn't rouse as she picked herself up and walked to the river. It occurred to her that maybe she should have asked him to let her down first.

She opened up her forearm and was relieved to find Willy's drone there, still intact and, more importantly, not pierced through by internally-growing roots and being sucked up for water. Nice to know she was getting better at controlling that. Tammy concentrated on the piece of her she'd left back at Magenta's house, making it speak.  "Willy? Are you there?"

Off to the side, there was a clatter as Loretta jerked in surprise.

"I'm here, Tammy," Willy said, the piece of her still resting on the bowl vibrating.

"I'm on the other side of the bridge from Rosario, near the fly-over," Tammy said. "Tell me how to get to you."

 

––––––––––––––––––

 

Tammy couldn't just walk down the streets looking for her cousin. For one thing, they were now full of people who were dealing with their own issues. For another, she was a humanoid plant right then, and she had to reluctantly admit that for all her efforts to accessories with flowers and petals, while she looked humanoid, she was very unlikely to be mistaken for being actually human even with the limited light people had to see. She didn't want to risk a mob forming to vent their misplaced aggression on her.

Fortunately, Willy had paralleled the Marikina River as it passed though Pasig for most of her search for the Rainmaker, and even more fortunately, she'd been going in a downriver-ly direction. So Tammy only needed to follow the river for a little bit, going with the flow instead of against it. Simply throwing herself into the river wasn't a good idea. Even though her body would float, doing that would subject her to the uncontrollable currents of the river, and it would make it hard for her to see what landmarks were left, so she might flow past where her cousin was.

Body shape, however, was more of a suggestion than something really constraining her. Unlike Yellow, whose body probably had to take things like joints and muscle placement and flexibility of tissues into account for the bodies she made, Tammy's body moved because she willed the wood to change shape. So having more long segments of bamboo suddenly erupt from her torso was no problem except for how much the distribution of weight unbalanced her. Now she used those segments to walk along the river, the tips of the of the pseudo-legs digging into the mud of the river bed to keep her from being swept away from the current. She'd started with four limbs, thinking that was all she needed to maintain her equilibrium, but after she'd been swept off her 'feet' twice by the current and fell into the river, she'd grown as many lengths of bamboo as it took to anchor herself securely between steps, and then some more.

The result was a mound-like cluster, like a bamboo plant that had been turned upside-down so its roots stuck in the air, stepping gingerly down through the middle of the Marikina river like a senior citizen trying to negotiate a wet bathroom floor. At its peak was Tammy, the long stems erupting from her body with no sense of order or symmetry, what had once been her body simply a knot of wood that was topped by incongruously blooming flowers, having sacrificed aesthetics for mobility. Only her head and right arm with the piece of Willy in it remained unchanged, letting her navigate the dark and giving her cousin a way to see where she was so they could guide her.

The tips of the bamboo stems speared into the water, bending slightly from the strength of the current before sinking into the cold mud beneath. They sank down deep, roots erupting to anchor them in place instead of being dragged by the water as stems moved, propelling Tammy as the rear-most stems breaking off as new stems grew to take more steps forward. She could taste the pollutants that had soaked into the mud over the decades, the sulfuric and other chemical compounds hidden by the water that still stained the river dark when it was allowed to settle. Even with the rain and the flood, they clung on, and she could feel them creeping up her vessels with every step before the limbs were broken off. She didn't want those in her body! Plant or not, they were unlikely to do her any good.

Sometimes she'd see them to either side of her. Soaked and limp bodies tangled in the trees, among roots , or trapped among wooden debris. She'd check every body, taking control of the plants around them trying to sense breath, heartbeats, some indication they were alive and just needed to be rescued.

She had yet to find anyone.

She'd occasionally get glances of the road she was walking alongside through breaks in the trees and buildings and slums. Despite the fact there was still flooding, some people seemed to be watching her, following her. Tammy was too far away to make out details. Were they scared? Angry? Or was it just the social media impulse to film?

Eventually, she saw it ahead of her. Muddy floodwater, rushing out into the river at a seemingly random spot. Small debris floated on the churning, flowing water, as if a pipe was being drained.

"I think I see you," she told Willy through the communications drone. "Stay where you are, all right?"

"Yes, Green," Willy said in the same cadence she always used.

Tammy turned, her limbs spearing down into the banks of the river hidden under the floodwater, which were slightly less polluted than the river itself. In front of her, large old trees stood, but between them were gaps where flimsy slums and only slightly less flimsy old wooden buildings had probably used to be. Only a single lone, tower-like house of three floors on a footprint of probably ten square meters stood, several of the small glass panes of its windows shattered.

Beyond was like something out of a news report.

What had once been a thickly populated, thriving area of people's homes and small businesses was just… gone. The ragged stubs marking what had once been walls made chillingly square outlines packed next to each other, interspersed with the skeletons of a houses that was only bare unpainted walls of cement blocks and mortar with holes where windows should be, the roofs all ripped off. There were a few cars on some of the squares, as if a child had dropped their toys on the soft foam squares of their playroom.

Tammy looked to the side. Beyond the water rushing towards the river, there was what seemed like a ruin-filled lake, corrugated metal roofs, random wooden debris and bodies wearing soaked clothing floating on the water, some slowly drifting down towards the unnatural wall of water around the cleared, devastated neighborhood…

"I think I see you," her cousin said. "I'm going towards you."

One leg speared down into the ground taking root in some mud to the side of the road, and Tammy began to grow a new body from it, abandoning the flowery knot. The rooted stem bulged, distending and ripping open to release Tammy's new body, smooth and shining like new growth as flower petals began to grow at her wrists and neck. She stopped them before they formed seeds and fruit as she looked around, trying to spot Willy.

When she saw the tall suggestion of movement, she didn't hesitate. She just ran, her wooden feet slapping hard and heavy on the ground, vibrations rippling through her bod with every footfall. She slipped, fell, and scrambled on all four limbs until she was able to push herself up again, not stopping. Tammy didn't let the cars and furniture and debris and dead get in her way as she splashed hurried towards her cousin.

The two slammed into each other with a bone-jarring impact, if they'd had bones. Chips of ice actually went flying from her cousin's body, but Willy didn't seem to care as Tammy wrapped wooden arms around her, the wood bending like clay so they could go all the way around her cousin, squeezing around the hard, icy torso as Willy placed cold, stiff hands on her back. It was so wrong and unnatural and didn't feel anything at all like hugging her tall, special cousin, but Tammy didn't care.

"Are you all right?" Tammy demanded, speaking from her own head so only her cousin could hear her. She knew her tone sounded angry, and tried to moderate it, but the worry that had been filling her since she had woken up and realized her cousin hadn't really been by her side all came rushing out. "Are you hurt? What happened?" Angry questions. Stupid questions. Of course Willy wasn't hurt, she had better control of her powers than Tammy did, and nothing could hurt water.

Against her, Willy vibrated, the ice rattling against wood. "I'm all right. I'm not hurt. You went to sleep and wouldn't wake up, so I had to do something."

All sorts of things wanted to come out of Tammy's mouth. Stupid things. 'Why did you go alone?'. 'Why didn't you bring someone with you?'. 'Why didn't you wait?'. She kept them inside her. If Tammy said those things, Willy would think what she had done was wrong, that she hadn't been supposed to, that she'd been a Bad Girl.

Despite herself, despite her knee-jerk protective response to Willy getting herself in trouble, Tammy forced herself to think before she spoke, instead of just telling Willy positive things. Her cousin needed her to tell them true things. "I'm glad you took the initiative to do something on your own," she said, pulling back slightly so she could look her cousin in the eye. Well… pseudo-eye blotches to the part of Willy's head that would have contained her eyes if it weren't for the fact her cousin saw with her entire body. "I'm glad you did something to help instead of just waiting for me to tell you what to do." Tammy reached up and stroke the top of Willy's head in a familiar gesture before hugging her again. "That must have been very hard for you, but you managed to do it. I'm proud of you for that. You realized something had to be done, and even though you probably didn't want to, you still did so on your own initiative. You're a good girl, Willy."

Don't give blanket approval. State exactly what actions of her you approve of and positively enforce it. In a complicated issue, separate the good actions from the bad actions and identify both to her, then explain why it's good and why it's bad. Consistent repetition is the key to conditioning. The familiar advise, both things that she'd read and things all the doctors she'd had talked to while trying to find ways to help her difficult, special cousin came to her mind as easily as breathing. She'd long taught herself to think in those terms when explaining things to her cousin. Equally insidious was the sneering whisper in her ear that is was all brainwashing, programming Willy, making her into someone normal—

Her cousin didn't move, still and hard as the ice statue resembled. "I don't know if I did the right thing, Tammy," her cousin said, vibrating so softly Tammy barely heard her. "I think… I think I… I did something bad, Tammy."

Tammy didn't have a heart to clench, so why did it feel like a fist was squeezing the inside of her chest? No… no, no, no, no…!

"We'll talk about it later," Tammy said. "When we… later. Right now, there's something we need to do."

Willy, bless her special, innocent heart, nodded immediately. "Yes, Tammy."

Tammy nodded, then winced. "Sorry. We're in costume right now. Remember, you should call me Green and I'll call you Blue, all right? Be sure to remind me if I forget."

"Yes, Green."

The words were said like a child's prayer, full of trust and sincerity and belief in a higher, perfect power that could do no wrong. An article of faith said so many times the words had lost meaning, because their meaning had gone beyond the words themselves. Even with her real name removed, it still sounded the same to Tammy's ears, the simple acceptance that anything she told her cousin would be believed and internalized without question.

Only in the last few years had that notion begun to terrify her. That she essentially had complete and utter control of her cousin's ethics, morals, thoughts…

She remembered crying in her mother's lap from the crushing weight of the responsibility of it, the night she'd finally confronted her parents with the revelation. How she'd been so, so glad they'd raised her well, so that she'd never considered telling her cousin anything her parent's hadn't taught her. Because if she'd thought for even one second to tell her cousin something, like the taller girl should always give Tammy all of her dessert, or do all her chores for her… Tammy suspected her cousin would have. Forever.

If her cousin thought she'd done something bad…

A part of her wanted to be proud that her cousin had been able to tell the difference on her own, even if she seemed doubtful.

The rest of her could only feel cold, creeping dread.

She might not have known what she was doing, Tammy reminded herself. If she didn't know, that's on you. It's not Willy's fault. She couldn't have known. It's your fault for not teaching her better.

No one—not her parents, not any of the doctors she'd spoken to, not her aunt and uncle—had ever spoken those words to her. The only one who'd ever said them had been the girl in the mirror.

Gently, Tammy disentangled herself from her cousin. "All right. We need to get to work. Do you think you can do something about the flooding? Not just here, but all across the city? If we can get rid of the flooding and clear the roads, that will open the way for emergency services and first responders to get around."

The only sign Willy was thinking was the slight tilt of her head. "I don't know how much of the water I can control," Willy said, "so I can't be sure I can be able to deal with the flooding across the whole city at once."

"Well… just here to start with, then," Tammy said, looking around. "How about if you turn all the water in range that's flooding the roads into water vapor? What will happen then?"

"If I turn all the floodwater into vapor, it will result in the water molecules leeching thermal energy from the surrounding area as they make the phase transition from liquid to gas," Tammy said succinctly.

Tammy took a moment to translate that. "All right, not that. It's already cold because of the all-day rain, anymore and we're going to get ice." She thought some more. "How about if you just pull all the water to the river and push it out into sea?"

"I could do that," Willy nodded. "But I'll need to see what I'm doing. The floodwater doesn't have very good visibility. "

And the light they had now probably didn't help. "Let's meet up with Magenta," Tammy said. "Maybe they have some ideas. In the meantime, pulling the floodwater into the river and keeping it there will probably still help people recover."

As Tammy began to contact Magenta, she wondered where Yellow was. She hoped the woman was all right.

In the distance, the sky flashed with lightning, and thunder cracked, reverberating across the sky like a roar.

…

That probably had nothing to do with Yellow at all! Totally just coincidence! Yup.

Yup.

Yup…

…

Tammy decided to stop thinking about it before she jinxed the woman even further.

Chapter 47: The Nightmares That Came To Manila, Part 3

Sanny woke up suddenly as pain lanced through him, coming from what felt like several gaping wounds all over his body, and from the back of his head there was an immediate explosive tangle of urges and emotions.

—determination consume devour surprise confusion rage frustration exasperation resignation—

That was a bit more than what he usually got from her when he woke up. Some of her confusion bled into his own as he tried to figure where he was, and…

Why wasn't he on anything solid?

His eyes had been open all this time, their sensory input a confused blur, and they all blinked—those that had eyelids, anyway—as he looked around, habit and instinct as a vision-reliant animal making him utilize the most familiar sense first as more frustration exasperation resignation came from the back of his head. The urges all bled together to give him an impression of strained patience as he tried to orient himself and make sense of what he was seeing. Tentacles, those were his… grayness... the ground…

Wait, why was the ground so far away?

Other senses finally became immediate. Cold and wet and more pain coming from holes and cuts and what felt like burns all over his body. The fact his body's configuration wasn't 'bilaterally symmetrical upright biped' wasn't a concern. He was used to not waking up like that nowadays. The taste of water and blood and ozone on his… skin? And antennae? He heard the sound of wind blowing around him though little hole-like ears and antenna vibrations, felt it pushing against the skin on his tentacles and… large flesh membranes? Wait, were those wings? Did he have wings?

Still disoriented from having woken so abruptly and painfully, Sanny hurriedly tried to identify the muscles that moved what on his current body configuration as the back of his head kept throbbing frustration exasperation resignation at him. Right, tentacle muscle groups were familiar, but he didn't need to move those, he needed the ones that moved the wings… The ground got closer and closer as those muscles helpfully twitched to more frustration exasperation resignation. He took hold of those muscles and spread his wings wide, catching the wind. The flesh stretched, and he felt pain as a wound on the wing membrane was pulled open.

He kept on falling towards the ground.

Frustration and panic screamed though Sanny as the frustration was momentarily replaced by amusement and just a little spite. He wasn't flying, why wasn't he flying? He'd been flying before, the fact he only started to fall once he woke up proved that, what was he missing? As if to answer him, more muscles convulsed in his body. Wait, where those… gas bladders? Why was his body full of gas bladders? What had she been doing while he'd been asleep?

There was a violent shift in the wind on his antennae, and she went from frustration exasperation resignation to rage prey consume devour. That was all the warning Sanny had before he saw a dark shape outlined in the clouds, wide wings and oh come on, how was that thing flying? That was so unfair! Stupid square-cube law!

Sanny tried to flap his wings in a panic, but they were utterly ineffectual, and then like a bad dream the huge bird was on him and—wait, was that thing an oversized sparrow? Despite the wings being far too small to reasonably support something of that size and weight, no matter how fast they seemed to be flapping, the disproportionately intense downdraft from its wingbeats robbed Sanny of what little illusion of control he had, sending him tumbling as he lashed out in a panic with tentacles and leathery wings. The tentacles met talons, and there was more pain and blood as the talons stabbed and tore at his flesh and ah, that's where the injuries all over him had come from. What had she been doing fighting a giant bird? While he'd been asleep, at that.

He tried to move himself away, flapping frantically even if the only way was down, but the sparrow's head darted forward, and there was another explosion of pain as the sparrow's beak clamped down on one of his wings. Pain stretched at across the whole wing as Sanny finally found himself dangling, all his weight concentrated on the flesh in the giant bird's mouth and the joint where the wing connected to the rest of his body. Flesh, muscle and bone strained, and Sanny couldn't help but scream, giving voice to a strange high-pitched roar as one of the bones popped out of its joint from having to support his entire body's weight, the sudden shock finally knocking the lingering haze of sleep from his mind.

And then flesh in the grip of the giant bird's beak tore, and Sanny found himself in freefall once more. In freefall, and finally properly awake as he hastily looked at his body again. It was the sort of bizarre mix of parts that she favored, though a bit more symmetrical than usual. The only bones were hollow ones in the wings and a lightweight, air-filled bone plate where the wing joint connected to the body. The rest of the body's rigidity was provided by gas bladders, like some kind of inflatable suit. There was a thick cluster of multiple tentacles at one end of the body covered in gash-like mouths and eyes. The head was one huge bladder covered in tentacle stalks tipped with more eyes. The mouth was a teeth-lined sphincter that led down an esophagus with sphincters all the way down that acted more as a means to fill all of the body's gas bladders with air. Most of the weight was in the tentacles, which had naturally been pulled down as they dangled.

Except for all the gas bladders and muscles, the insides were surprisingly sparse when it came to organs. There wasn't even a stomach or rudimentary digestive track, simply an extensive nervous system hooked up to several very sensitive sensory organs. The skin was performing triple duty as tactile, taste and olfactory sensor, and hearing duty was being shared by little hole-like ears studded all over the body, and the bristle-like antennae covering the skin and backs of the tentacles. It was all linked to a small, almost rudimentary brain shielded under the bone plate next to—

Ah, that's where his man-bits were. He made a point of letting her feel his relief and thankfulness as he twitched familiar muscles to check that the bits were still healthy. More frustration exasperation resignation came from the back of his head in seeming reply, transitioning to rage prey consume devour as several eyestalks drifted to point towards the giant sparrow.

Sanny tried to say something, but none of the mouths were configured with vocal chords, only teeth. So instead, he relaxed slightly, pulling back from the instinctive absolute control he'd grabbed when he'd woken up abruptly. It was like riding a bike but only touching the handlebars with your thumb and forefinger, a too-light, half-hearted touch that was just waiting for disaster.

There was a final burst of frustration exasperation before he felt it, the sensation of nerves and muscles moving just a little bit out of his control, of someone else adding their own soft grip to the metaphorical handlebars. It was like trying not to think about breathing, letting his body seemingly do it by itself instead of being so conscious of his lungs they stopped moving entirely. The gas bladders filled, shaping the body, making it rigid in some places, curved in others, pliant in still more. The wings moved, catching the air in just the same way he could have sworn he'd shaped them to, but this time causing them to stabilize and start gliding as the tentacles flattened, going from being fat, grasping limbs to thin and wide stabilizers that all shaped themselves individually to catch the air and add lift and direction to their flight. The hair-like strands of antennae on the tentacles lay flat, curving to add their own lift and aerodynamics.

He fought to stay relaxed, to let her handle the esoteric body's flight while he divided his attention between using the eyes to watch the sparrow and seeing where they were going. The giant bird had flown off in a blast of air that felt greatly disproportional to its size, its wings flapping so fast they seemed to disappear as it turned around to fly towards them again.

Rage consume devour!

Sanny felt his body begin to turn to meet the bird head-on, and he arrested the impulse, trying to keep them flying straight. Frustration came from the back of his head, but he was in no mood to get in a fight in the air like this. Even if he could fly, the bird had too many advantages, like having talons made for poking into flesh! He altered a bunch of eyes on the front, optimizing them for low-light vision, and the dark and indistinct landscape below him brightened into a more recognizable cityscape, what few lights shining illuminating the area around them to his eyes.

It allowed him to get a vague idea of where he was, somewhere in the skies above San Juan. At least, he thought so. There was a large plot of clear space of there with too-straight rows of tree around long stretches of clear grass, so it was probably a golf course, meaning that was Wack-Wack, and over there was a river that wasn't the Marikina or Pasig with an overpass over it, and he was between the two…

He wished he'd left a drone at home that he could have check on his laptop, but since today was supposed to have been a casual, social, team-building thing, he hadn't thought to. Now he was regretting it, since something had obviously happened while he'd been asleep. A giant sparrow hadn't been on his list of monsters this morning!

But that was a problem for later. He steered them into a vertical dive, and she responded, even as she made more of her frustration known. He tried to reassure her, but that was a bit too complex a concept to be conveyed between them. Tentacles spread out, still flattened, acting to steer them as the sparrow pursued. She seemed to realize his plan as the sparrow kept overshooting them and circling back, only to be evaded at the last second, even as its disproportionally intense wake tried to knock them aside as the ground grew closer and closer, as Sanny saw the water flowing through the streets, with what looked like bodies—

He was saved from having to consider it too long as he pulled up and simultaneously surrendered a little more control to her. Thin, skin membrane wings opened wide, catching the air as tentacles spreading like the tail of some kind of hellish peacock. Wounds tore open wider, but aside from the pain that wasn't an issue as they slowed down, casting a shadow on the houses and trees below. The area was densely packed with houses and trees, though some of the former were showing signs of age and his eyes glimpsed indications some had been converted into small business. He could feel the people in those houses, many of them tired, stressed, or asleep…

Over a clear stretch of road, he dove lower, letting their wings catch on the trees before folding them. They slammed into the water, then slammed again into the road underneath, their skin ripping open even as the impact caused many of their gas bladders and eyes to burst as they tumbled and rolled. Antennae bent and snapped, and a few tentacles were sheared off before he skidded to a stop. Blood began to spread through the flowing rain water.

Sanny, for his part, was in agony only long enough for him to deactivate every single pain receptor and nerve connected to them, at which point blessed numbness filled him. In the back of his head, annoyance resignation exasperation oozed.

Then began to cannibalize the body's organ and tissues for parts he could use…

When the bird circled around again, landing on the street despite the trees, he was already gone, a small eel-like thing swimming through the water as the bird splashed down in a massive explosion of wind. The sudden surge actually let him swim further as he rode the displaced water, and from under some sunken bushes he was able to watch as the bird began to peck at his discarded body, ripping out chunks of flesh that he belated wished he'd filled with some sort of deadly neurotoxin.

…

Well, it wasn't too late. He filled the flesh and blood of the body, its cells still alive enough for him to control, with deadly flesh-eating bacteria of all sorts. Probably wouldn't do much good, but fuck that bird. From the annoyance rage frustration consume devour coming from the back, she was probably feeling similarly annoyed.

They lay there, watching as the bird pecked at the body they had so recently been occupying, Sanny altering any bacteria that fell off the body into the water into something harmless. He didn’t want the things to spread, after all.

When the bird started screaming and thrashing about as his bacteria began to consume the cells in its mouth, he felt spite come the back of his head. The urges and feelings coming from her were growing increasingly more complex… relatively, anyway. Even children understood spite. Some children were practically made of the stuff, from what he remembered of his childhood, which wasn't much since he was pretty sure he'd actively tried to forget most of it.

The bird took to the air, each wingbeat sending out a prolonged, too-strong blast of wind that made trees shake, windows rattle, and the floodwaters surge in all directions as the bird rose into the sky, the clouds above it actually roiling in its wake. Only when it was gone did Sanny let himself start growing a new body. Bilateral, symmetrical, upright, bipedal, hands, opposable thumbs, endoskeleton, exoskeleton, all that good stuff.

He left the tentacles growing in out of the way, weird places here they were, especially since she was stuffing them with sensory organs beyond just sight. He was willing to admit that the only senses he really thought to build were sight and hearing, with touch being taken for granted. Taste and smell? Not important. She however, thought otherwise, which was why he had random tentacles with highly sensitive olfactory senses and barometric senses, and vibrational senses, and thermal senses, and electrical senses…

And they both agreed that having shark teeth grow in a line on the outside of his forearm was cool, though probably for different reasons.

Growing also allowed him time to think. Now that he was no longer plummeting to his death or about to be eaten by a giant bird… why was he here? The last thing he remembered was walking down the sidewalk, trying to decide whether he should buy snacks from the supermarket or the bakery when it had started to rain and he'd started feeling sleepy…

He looked up at the dark clouds above, but while they threatened rain, they weren't actually raining anymore—

Wait, did that mean he'd left his clothes behind somewhere? Ugh, damn it, he'd had five hundred pesos in those pants! Maybe he could still trace his steps back to where he'd been and get his money back…?

No, no, focus!

But… the money…! That was, like, a month's worth of drinks…!

No, focus!  

He had to find out what was going on. That meant either getting some internet access—tricky, since he didn't have any gadgets on him, and nowadays people didn't just leave their computers on and unattended—finding someone conveniently watching the news, or finding a way to contact the others.

Given the options, he opted for the second one as 'Plan A'. After all, he was in a residential neighborhood, and even though a lot of the houses were of the 'empty mansion because the owners were living somewhere else' variety, he could feel that there were some places around him were occupied. He just had to find someone watching the news, the probability of which was actually pretty high.

It probably wouldn’t be all that useful, since it was Filipino news, and the networks all were pathologically obsessed with plugging their own shows and calling it 'entertainment news', but maybe he'd get lucky and there'd actually be something relevant to him. Still, given how he was essentially naked in the middle of a neighborhood that wasn't his, bereft of his usual resources and pretty far away from everyone he knew, he supposed it was the best plan he had short of heading home to find out there.

Settling in, Sanny began the painstaking process of sifting through the visual sensory inputs of all the people he could feel around him, hoping he found someone watching the news he needed before he found someone looking at porn or worse…

Chapter 48: The Nightmares That Came To Manila, Part 4

It was really tempting to go rifling through these rich people's semi-abandoned houses for spare change, but Sanny grudgingly reminded himself that even though it was more accurate to call him a violent vigilante, he should probably at least be trying to act like a superhero in the Sentaiger vein. Even the actual pirates didn't just loot people's spare change left lying around. Don't be the guy who stole the thing that was going to be auctioned off to charity!

…on the other hand, it wasn't like he was on TV and kids were watching…

No, no! Bad Sanny! God is watching!

It didn't take long to find someone watching TV. He could hear a generator running, so there were probably power problems somewhere, but the house had electricity, and an old man was sitting in the living room, watching a big screen TV. It was one of the older kinds, a huge enough to be its own cabinet that looked like it had been built in the early 90s. The colors were slightly off, either from the settings being messed with or something being broken on the tube, but the images were clear enough. He thought at first there was something wrong with the audio, until he realized the man he was listening through was simply hard of hearing and going deaf.

The man was almost dozing, barely mindful of the TV in front of him, and Sanny was able to subtly take control of the man's muscles to fix his posture and focus on the TV more clearly. Really, the man would have gotten an aching neck sleeping like that. Then again, maybe it was simply the lack of muscle mass to keep his head upright.

Carefully not to jar the man fully awake and terrify him from the fact an outside force had taken control of his body and he was temporarily trapped in his own flesh with no control, Sanny tried to watch the news. When it became clear the man's hearing was just really bad, he fixed that.

Once he could hear the TV, the news wasn't good, although there really wasn't much actual information, since the news was simply repeating what was happening. That implied either things weren't as bad as they said, and the news was merely sensationalizing… or communications were down and they were cut off from developments, meaning things were probably far worse than they said. The news they were repeating was already bad enough. There was terrible flooding everywhere, far worse than the usual terrible flooding everywhere that Manila usually got including places that didn’t usually get flooded, monsters had suddenly appeared with the rain that hadn't been active before, Pasig had been devastated by violent water… somehow… and apparently in addition to the over-sized bird, there was a giant shark shooting lightning flying around. Well, that explained the burns all over him, at least. They also kept talking about people finally waking up, for some reason.

In between each repetition of the same details 'for those just tuning in', which Sanny was grudgingly thankful for, they were also listing an increasing death toll, which was already in the hundreds of thousands. Because it wouldn't be Filipino 'human suffering for the ratings' journalism otherwise.

Once he was sure there was nothing more to be garnered from the news, Sanny turned off the TV and let the man sleep. He… might have gone a bit overboard when he'd been fixing up the man as he'd watched the news, but he couldn't just leave him with that prostate cancer. And really, what was the harm in getting rid of his partial cataract and fixing his vision? And his hearing? And restoring his sense of taste, that was just mercy, why live on bland food? And giving him a little bit more muscle mass? And fixing up his digestive system? And getting rid of some festering bacteria that his old immune system couldn't sufficiently deal with? And beefing up that immune system slightly back to spec? And doing something about the thinning hair? And tightening and thickening the skin a little…

…

Uh, it was probably fine.

So, priorities! He needed to get into contact with the others, find out if they knew anything that the news didn't, then see how many he could talk into helping him hunt down that stupid bird. Hopefully Jas would be amenable. A super-hot plasma beam was pretty much an 'I win' button for most things. He also needed to get a part of himself home and hope he still had power and internet so he could do his own research on what had been happening. He needed maps, he needed monster locations, he needed… well, whatever he needed, it would be easier to find if he was at home.

If he didn't have internet at home, then he needed a different way of getting information. That meant scouting drones. Lots and lots of scouting drones. There was a very good chance they'd been eaten by monsters or attacked by scared people, but that just meant he had to make a lot of them. The quality of quantity and all that.

Sanny started to make drones as he jogged in the general direction of the golf course he had seen, splashing through the rain water in a rather undignified fashion before giving up and falling on all fours. His arms lengthened into forelegs, feet extending and narrowing to be in line with his limbs, and he started leaping the way he'd seen deer do on videos on the internet, his now narrow, pointed limbs slipping into the flowing water at every leap and kicking him out and forward. It was an energy intensive form of locomotion, used for relatively short sprints by relatively successful prey animals but not intended for long marathons. The limbs and joints could only absorb so much shock, and the fast-twitch muscles would soon grow painful with lactic acid and need to stop. His eldritch biology laughed in the face of such limitations as he leapt over the water recklessly, not caring about what obstructions might be hidden in the dark-shrouded, murky flood waters.

There was a particular way he had to not do this if he didn't want to end up feeling like a single mother giving virgin birth to monstrous, inhuman abominations not of this world. He was fairly certain the way he avoided doing it exasperated her, but there was some things his self-image wasn't willing to compromise on for the sake of the heady rush of physical and eldritch power, and one of the lines he drew was on anything that vaguely implied mpreg. No. Just… no. Even if it probably was simpler and more efficient to just generate a lot of eggs and have them quickly grow into the drones he needed... no.

It wasn't pregnancy if none of the things were ever eggs to begin with!

The flesh on his back and shoulders began to roil, bulging cancerously as he altered the tissue there, forming small bodies as his intentions somehow filtered through her, and from her affecting his body, because damn if he knew how it actually happened. It was one thing to know his cells needed to change from this to that, but it was another to actually do it. Brains, wings, muscles, feathers… he knew what he wanted, a small, fast animal with no reproductive parts, no digestive parts, only enough respiration and circulatory systems to keep the muscles functioning, an incomplete creature that wouldn't survive in nature, optimized for sight, flight and speed.

She was the one who added the ears and organs for balance, the little electromagnetic field-sensing so it would know which way was north, the different kinds of feathers needed, the exact positioning and field of view of the eyes, pointed the feathers in the right direction, shaped it all to become a functioning animal rather than just a tumorous mass of flesh. It was disturbingly obvious how little actual fine control he actually exercised most of the time, when he considered it. While changes happened only under his explicit direction when he was awake and he could control anything down to the cellular level, he seldom actually thought to unless he was consciously experimenting with some new aspect of biology he'd read about. His body moved and changed as he imagined it, but the actual mechanisms that caused those changes were done by her.

If he didn't have clear proof that his decisions and notions about how the body was supposed to go overrode hers, he'd be terrified. As it was, he'd been creeped out, scared, nervous, and then finally began to take her existence for granted, just another thing he had to get used to about his new life, like knowing every detail of the bodies of the people around him, or the fact she liked to add tentacles to everything, despite the clear superiority of the 'fingers and thumb' arrangement.

His drones ripped themselves out of his back, slightly moist from minute amounts of plasma, cellular fluid, and water getting splashed as they opened their wings. He could feel each one, control each one, as easily as he moved his fingers. Their sensory input was added to his own, widening his field of view as if he'd just grown more eyes… which technically he had.

Also, these were not virgin births and he was not a single mother, and neither was this mpreg! He'd just cut off parts of himself and those parts had spontaneou-magically become not-independent, sorta-living mobile beings! He hadn't given birth, he was just in more than one place at once!

His drones rose into the darkened skies, and he used them to confirm where he was going, which was a few blocks too far to the left to be pointed towards the golf course. A few drones stayed with him to give him an aerial view of his surroundings and to keep a look out for that stupid bird—and he should probably keep an eye out for the flying shark too—while he sent the rest across the city and outside it to look for other monsters and make contact with the others. One went to fly straight towards where he lived, while another headed for Kim's house, in case they were still there. Kim would have probably left a means for his family to contact him if he was out in this, though there was an equally good chance he was just at home. The guy was a normie after all.

His drones also saw a giant house-sized snail on the golf course green that definitely hadn't been there when he'd been panic diving for the ground. What?

There was a burst of attentiveness from the back of his head, and he felt her interest and an urge to consume. He wanted roll his eyes, but manfully resisted the urge and instead turned to intercept. "Fine, we'll try to eat it," he said in a low voice like he was just muttering to himself. The volume wasn't important, but the thoughts, concepts and feelings he put into what he was saying was. "But if it's too much for us, we're backing off and coming back with the others all right?"

There was muted frustration, punctuated by consume devour.

"Yes, I know you're hungry. You're always hungry. I'm still not seeing any sign you actually do need to eat, though."

Focus consume devour.

"I already said yes, stop nagging."

Trying to ask what she'd been doing while he'd been asleep had been as frustrating as could be expected when the responses came in the form of someone else's feelings bleeding into his brain. He was also starting to suspect that what he was getting were simply the strongest feelings she was having, meaning subtlety was probably lost. Heck, he wasn't actually sure how much of what he sent got received. Things were a little clearer between them in dreams but also more intense, and somehow more confusing. The subtleties all bled together, and it was hard to sort through which was his and which was hers. How that squared with how she could understand any bodily changes he wanted and why, he had no idea.

Despite all that, they'd slowly learned to stop trying to fight each other and start working together. They made allowances for each other's obvious design preferences, and things became… not exactly smoother, but less contentious. Where she'd once given the impression of being a resentful assistant trying to take his job—and why wouldn't she, when he'd in hindsight foisting a lot of work on her without really listening to her opinions—now they felt like actual coworkers. Opinionated coworkers who thought their way was the best way, but who could talk it out now… even if only he was the only one who could actually talk.

It wasn't long before he could see a dark, curving shape rising up above the trees and houses. It was barely outlined against the sky by very, very distant light reflecting off the clouds, giving him something to contrast it against. Even with the light-gathering eyeballs he'd reluctantly switched his compound eyes for—one had to be practical, after all—he couldn't see much in the way of any details. Out of habit, he tried to get an idea of its physiology, but it was as if there was nothing there. The only things he could feel were surface bacteria and small parasites living on the shell and skin of the thing. Just like the Plague Dog, the Blood Bug, the Bounty Bee and the Gagambuhala had been. Well, he already knew it was a monster…

Even with the thing in sight, he was still a fair distance away. The thing was as tall as a decent-sized building, the large shell moving with slow, ponderous weight. What he could see of the skin seemed to be rippling as it breathed, and he couldn't see its head or any of its eyes. Was it eating? Snails were voracious omnivores and at that size… well, the golf course would probably need to replace trees. And grass. And probably dirt too.

There were houses between him and the golf course, no doubt expensive ones, and he could see townhouse buildings off to either side, but the rain and the presence of the huge monster seemed to be keeping people indoors. He found a house that was empty—no cellular life inside but the bugs, rats and bacteria—and cut through its lot, a leap and some scrambling at the back wall—curving, hook-like claws erupted from his limbs to give him purchase, and he sent a burst of thankfulness to the back of his head—let him go over it to splash lightly onto the flooded dirt and undergrowth beyond, his limbs sinking slightly into the mud.

Beyond some trees in front of him was a dark field of inundated grass—one of the golf course's fairways, he presumed—and then a line of trees separating one hole from another, the tops of the trees looking distinctly nibbled on. The old phrases flitted though his mind, as always bringing with it memories of familiar childhood resentment. Honestly, why golf lessons? Golf was one of the stupidest sports on the planet, and all sports were stupid! It had been another wasted summer where he'd been rigorously scheduled and made to learn a sport to 'get into shape' before being thrown back into the torturous drudgery of school. 'Learn', not 'have fun'.

Sanny felt the claws on his limbs grow and thicken, and he wanted to lash out, to strike something… and with long practice bottled it all in. That kind of lack of self-control was childish and stupid. He was finally living his own life. Save the anger for something he could take it out on.

Like the giant monster in front of him.

Still on all fours, he crept through the marshy ground, staying low and moving cautiously. The joints on his limbs shifted and reversed, letting him get even lower as his locomotion became crab-like. The water lapped at his legs as Sanny headed towards the end his drones could see was the tail. Or at least, the end opposite the head. The head was down and seemed to be eating something on the ground, and with the bulk of the body between the head and himself, it wouldn't be able to see him. Given how big the thing was, as long as he stayed this size he'd be ignored as a minor itch.

He was almost to the opposite tree line when the world suddenly lit up, bright light casting sharp, stark shadows. He didn't freeze where he was, instead running like hell towards the trees as one eye turned around to look at the source of light. After that eye was blinded, its cones and rods oversaturated, Sanny grew more, this time not having them look directly. In the sky, a small pinpoint of light was growing obscenely bright. It hung under the clouds, illuminating their contours.

Hopefully that was Jaselle and not some new monster or something.

The sudden light caused movement in his prey though. Sanny felt a rumble through the water as the snail's head rose up, the rippling across its skin increasing in frequency. It—

The world broke.

That was the best Sanny could describe it. The world broke like glass shot by a bullet. Lines rippled outward in all directions, parting and folding and he got a sense of down and vastness and emptiness and creatures, enormous creatures too big to exist, feeding on anything they could get, stalking across an endless vo—

And the snail was just gone, water rushing in to fill the long oval scar on the ground where it looked like grass and dirt had just been ripped off. The water quickly settled, leaving only a shallow and muddy pond. Sanny stared at the empty space. "Huh," he said as disappointment came from the back of his head. "That will be a bitch to hunt down."

Shaking his head, he turned towards where he knew Ortigas Avenue ran past the golf course, limbs shifting again as he changed back to the faster configuration, running parallel to the scar on the ground that the snail had left behind. He slowed for a moment, his eyes changing to give him a better look at the spot where the snail's head had been.

Was he a terrible person for only being able to nod and say, "Yup, that looks about right" as he saw the golf cart with its roof and seats ripped out, the bottom half of an old fashioned, heavy golf bag, and the bits of dead people? After all, he didn't know who they were. Why should he care and pretend it was somehow tragic, just because some strangers with the bad taste to play golf were dead?

It was part of why he'd always correct Tammy, the other being it was a joke he liked to keep running. He wasn't a hero or superhero, simply just a violent vigilante. He didn't actually care about whether people he didn't know lived or died. He'd try to save them of course, try to help those he could because it wouldn't cost him anything but time and concentration, because his parents had gotten that part of his upbringing right, but…

Well, ultimately it was about power. He finally had the power to do what he wanted, and the freedom to choose what he wanted to do. There was just enough decency in a heart full of petty childish grudges and railing against the unfairness of life that his choice was to try and do what, at a casual glance, might have been the 'right' thing.

But he'd know, deep down, that it didn't make him a better person.

Shrugging, Sanny continued running for the road. Already the drone he'd sent there was close to home, and the other one was getting close to Kim's house. They'd land soon, he'd make contact, and then he'd know where he needed to go.

Hopefully there'd be somewhere that he'd actually be relevant. Otherwise… well, that stupid bird was still out there. And the shark. He wasn't sure how he could take down a flying shark made of lightning, but… well, he'll think of something. And if he didn't, maybe she would.

Through the flickering shadows, Sanny ran.

Chapter 49: The Nightmares That Came To Manila, Part 5

"Hey, Tammy!"

Tammy managed not to start as she realized that someone was talking to her, nudging her little drone. "Huh?" she said eruditely, trying to juggle controlling her main body, which was in the middle of building a pair of massive, solid wood floodwalls that were rooted into the banks of the river, and listening to the input of the drone. She stopped growing the walls on opposite banks of the river for a moment, focusing on the drone's pseudo-eyes, and concentrated so she could see. Vision didn't come normally to plants, so she needed to…

Her eyes focused on a smear of paleness that slowly gained color from black and white as her eye splotches moved past detecting presence and absence of light to the different frequencies of it… "Ate Sanny!" she said, just barely managing to remember to keep her voice to her drone. There were people watching her, many with their phones out—how had those things not gotten wet from the superfloods that had happened?—who were already nervous of the presence of her and Tammy, she didn't need to disturb them more by starting to talk to herself.

"Yup, I'm here," the older woman said through her own drone. It looked like it used to be some kind of weird insect-bird hybrid, but was in the middle of turning into a round flesh blob being covered in fur. It was mostly mouth and a pair of eyes, and looked like some kind of low-level trash mob monster from a particularly cutesy Japanese RPG. "I managed to watch a news report, so I've got some idea of how the city is, but I don't know any more than that. What happened?"

"Sleep-causing no-save one-hit-debuff monster," Tammy said succinctly as she fused with the wall she was building and flipped over to the river side of the wall. Here, the only people who'd see here were on the opposite bank just past the wall she was building there, and they didn't have a very good view. "It was spread by the rain, and seemed to affect people who were already asleep normally, because Kim grandmother wouldn't wake up while it was raining."

"…shit. That's OP, please nerf in the next patch," Sanny said and ah, it was nice to talk to someone who got her! Willy could listen, bless her, but she didn't really like to talk much, and Tammy didn't want to force her.

"Willy took care of it," Tammy said as she began directing the walls to continue growing. Roots firsts, buried deep in the mud well below the water line, the walls on either side each forming a single massive plant structure. She wasn't sure how long they would manage to live on their own after she stopped growing them. The water being drawn from the river was polluted, but there were minerals, and she was letting them grow branches, leaves and even fruit, though the latter was mostly to give people something to eat to keep them from descending to violence and looting the stores. The fruits were hard to see, since they were literally in the shadow of the wall, but she could feel them being plucked off as soon as they stopped growing…

Sanny's drone, which was emotive, puckered its lips and it took Tammy a moment to realize she was trying to whistle… and failing badly. Finally she just rolled her eyes and said, "Good for her. What was it? None of what I was tracking seemed to be a rain monster or a sleep monster."

"Maybe it just wasn't obvious?" Tammy said, trying to sound casual. "In any case, we need you. Except for Red, we're all in Pasig clearing roads because it was the hardest hit. Oh, and yeah, we're going by hero names now, so you should start calling me Green and I'll call you Yellow. Same for the others on the team."

"Yes, boss," Yellow said. "What do you need me to do?"

"Talk to Loretta, compile all the information you can about the situation, and prioritize identifying situations we're best suited for dealing with quickly," Tammy said. "Not just monsters. Anything. You're creative, if you find a situation where any of our powers would help specifically, get word to us."

"Already found some and acting on it," Yellow said. "I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Where are you?"

"Along the Marikina River, almost where it joins the Pasig River, and probably halfway to Laguna Lake. I'm building a floodwall to prevent more flooding while Willy deals with the flooding that's already there." Which basically involved making the water shoot over the side of her wall and into the River.

"Got it. I'll talk to you once I either have more info or get there."

Tammy had no eyes that could blink. "Get here?" she said.

"I'm sending drones to all heavily flooded areas," Yellow said. "I should be able to stop any waterborne diseases. Any diseases, really. Things are bad enough as they are, if we can prevent people from getting sick on top of it…"

"You can do that?" Tammy blurted out.

"Cells," Yellow said smugly. "I can affect bacterial life. With all the flooding, the sewers must be overloaded, and all that literal shit is now in the flood water. That's not counting all the stuff that's in the water normally. If I can spread out enough drones, I can do something about it."

"Do it," Tammy said in what she felt was a properly decisive, leaderly voice. "Uh, can you still do that and what I asked you?"

"Oh, sure," Yellow said as if it was the easiest thing in the world. "I might be the literally squishiest person in the team, but my multitasking skill is maxed out! By the way, with the floods, the pumping stations for the water mains are likely down, so as soon as you can, see if Blue can provide clean drinking water. Hers is essentially chemically pure and distilled, right? People are going to need water soon, for drinking and eating, and eventually for washing. There's a limit to what stopping bacteria from working can do. "

Ah! Finally! Concrete plans! Big plans! Superhero-tier plans! "As soon as we deal with the flooding here," Tammy said, carefully watching her wall grow slowly. "I'm already handing out food as I can."

"Fruits and veggies?" Yellow's drone made a cutely disgusted face. If it wasn't a dangerous security risk, the woman would have been a wonderful on social media.

"They're good for you, and as superheroes we should encourage people to eat healthy," she said in her best post-cartoon PSA voice. "Gotta hang up, I have a wall to build."

"Yellow over and out," Yellow said, turning and growing legs to waddle towards Loretta. "Loretta, what do you—?"

Tammy let her awareness of the drone fade slightly, bringing her back into the moment. She glanced at both walls and made her way back to the top of the wall she was on, her feet fusing with the bare branches sprouting out from the top as she resumed building the wall. Branches exploded from the incomplete edges of the walls arcing down to make new roots to hold it in place, weaving together and growing thicker, fusing together to create a seamless wall to keep the water in the river contained

She was, uh, already kinda regretting doing this. This was going to be a mess to do something about when this emergency was over. If the walls were still alive then she might be able to suck it up later, unless they did die like she thought they would, in which case… uh, maybe she can get Yellow to throw termites at them or something. Right now though, they needed the walls to control the flooding where Pasig had been hardest hit.

Tammy glanced towards where Wi—Blue was, making sure she was nearby. She was, throwing the floodwater over the wall as Tammy had directed her.

She should probably check on Magenta. He'd said he was widening roads so that the dead cars wouldn't be in the way, and he'd directed people towards the fruits she'd been growing on her wall, but it had been a while, so she should probably call him like a responsible leader should…

 

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They needed more space.

"Is there something you can do?" the awkward-looking barangay official who'd come up to him said. Everyone was still wary of him, which was probably perfectly understandable when you had a slightly glowing, stone man walking around making the roads wider so that stalled cars could be moved out of the way.

Kim nodded. "Sure, I'll take care of it," he vibrated from his head. It wasn't until he'd started talking to other people that he'd realize how unnerving they found it that his voice wasn't coming from where his mouth would be. The fact that he didn't seem to have a mouth didn't matter. "Just let me finish moving these last two cars out of the way."

The man nodded, still looking awkward but also relieved. "Thank you," he said, before hurriedly turning away and speaking into a black radio. Kim hadn't been able to get his name yet, what with everything that needed to be done and almost getting shot at and calming people down when Green had started building her wall to divert the flooding and assuring everyone that the fruit growing from it was safe to eat and that they could all get as much as they liked… Well, he'd been a bit too busy for names.

That had been typical of their exchanges. Short, stilted, and with an undercurrent of uncertainty, though once he had demonstrated the ability to expand space by widening the roads so emergency vehicles could pass through the narrow streets, there had been a sort of cautious welcome. Suspicious and monstrous-seeming he might seem to them, but he'd saved them hours of trying to move and navigate around cars, trucks, tricycle pedicabs and jeepneys stalled on the road because of flooded engines, and that had earned him some goodwill.

People had managed to get moving then. Local associations, neighborhood groups, and local government units mobilized now that they could actually move faster than a constricted shuffle between cars. Kim and others had helped push the stalled vehicles into the middle of the expanded roads, ironically the best place to put them since he'd made the once narrow roads the equivalent of six-lane highways. He'd even done what he could to try and reinforce the road bed so that they wouldn’t crack from having things putting pressure on it while having a sixth of the overall weight distribution.

Emergency generators and lights had been delivered by trucks, and a central command tent had been set up. Once the barangay official in charge of the local area had been able to wrap his mind around what Kim could do, the requests had started coming. The local basketball court was expanded so that it could house far more people, letting it act as an emergency evacuation center once it had been drained of water by Blue and kept from further flooding by Green's floodwall. Rosario Church had also opened its doors to people for the night, and Kim had been hesitantly asked to expand the space of their parking lot, where an outdoor kitchen had been set up to start providing people with hot food.

He'd been mildly amused at how the parish priest—dressed not in the ecclesiastical robes Kim was used to for Mass but some cut off denim shorts, flip-flops and a white undershirt—had gently but firmly insisted on blessing him with Holy Water when he'd entered the church's grounds to start laying out the shards of himself he'd be using to anchor the volume effect. When he hadn't burst into flames or started screaming in agony, the priest had nodded in a matter-of-fact way and offered him some coffee to warm up. He'd politely declined to get to work.

Now he was once more expanding the bare stretch of parking lot in front of one of the nearby banks.

It was what they were using as a morgue.

The soaked, cold and stiff bodies of those who had fallen unconscious and either drowned or died of exposure were laid out in not all that neat and not all that orderly rows to get them out of the way. The little stretch of slightly cracked concrete was now about the size of a soccer field, filled with the bodies of the dead that were being recovered and removed just from the immediate area, given what dignity could be given, set aside to be identified, if they could be. Groups of people were scouring the tight, wet confines between the houses and alleys, using flashlights to see in the dark where Red's light didn't reach. They were trying to gather as many as soon as possible, before the light of day and the heat started causing them to decay…

All through this Kim worked tirelessly. Literally tirelessly. A body of stone didn't get muscle aches, didn't need to breathe, didn't need to drink, didn't need to rest. He just willed his body to keep moving and it did. He picked up debris too heavy for any one man to lift and moved them off the road to where they were being gathered. Roofs that had been ripped from houses, couches and beds and wardrobes, unclaimed furniture carried on the floodwaters, picking them up and dumping them into the slowly growing pile being gathered. Pieces of homes rendered into detritus by uncaring forces.

He moved concrete barriers to make traffic lanes, because despite all this cars and trucks still needed to move along Ortigas Avenue Extension, bringing supplies or just letting people get home after being trapped by cursed rains all day. Working vehicles cast the glow of their headlights on the roads, illuminating the people crowding the streets because they survived but had nowhere else to go. Kim ignored the cars that slowed down to stare as they passed him carrying a round wooden table over his shoulder by its central leg like it was a golf umbrella, ignored the phones raised up to take pictures.

The only other option was to stop moving and just break inside.

There were children on that parking lot. The elderly. People dressed for a casual day at home. People dressed for a day's work. People dressed in old, worn clothes that weren't quite rags. They all looked like they were asleep, save for the staring eyes and still, unmoving chests.

So many… there were so many…

He remembered the people who'd died at his University. People, fellow students with holes stabbed though their chests to get at their hearts, blood sucked up. But it had only been a handful there. Here…

So many… so many…

Could… could they have done something? Could they have done more? A monster had done this, a monster they hadn't found, or worse, a monster they had left alone until it was too late. Could they have found it sooner? Dealt with it before it could do… this?

All around him, he could hear them as vibrations on his surface. The tense, tired voices. The crying, the wailing for dead loved ones, for neighbors and lost friends. For homes and cherished possessions, irreplaceable and ruined. Small businesses damaged, the hard-earned work and investment in them gone.

Kim couldn't help but feel… helpless. Pointless. That nothing he did could bring back what they had lost…

For the first time, standing there in his body made of pink rock, he felt silly and inappropriate. A clown thoughtlessly playing the fool in a place of pain and tragedy. Turn to sand? Warp space? Super toughness and strength? It all felt like silly parlor tricks, worthless toys in the face of this grief and loss…

Someone nudged him. "Mags? Hey Mags, you awake?"

It took Kim a while to realize he was hearing through his drone. Yellow's plushdoll-like drone was poking with a tentacle. The tentacle was soft and furry and actually pretty cute, even with all the little eyes and mouths on it. "I'm here," he finally managed to say.

Yellow peered at him, but seemed to quickly realized she wasn’t going to really discern anything from a cube of rock. Yellow slithered back—Yup, those were furry tentacles pushing her around—then turned to the others. "All right, everyone here?"

"Listening," Green confirmed. "Blue, are you there?"

"Yes, Green."

"I'm here," Red said, her own black cube vibrating and flashing with plasma.

"All right," Yellow said. "In case you're not watching the clock, it's past midnight." It was? "Loretta's gone to sleep, so Ryan's taking her place right now."

Off to the side, Kim saw his brother sitting there with his laptop and tablet. "Hey!" Ryan said. "My turn to help. I'm been asleep all day, so I'm pretty well-rested."

"Are you sure? You don't have a cold or anything, do you?" Kim asked, concerned.

"He did," Yellow said, "but I fixed that."

"Healer is OP, please do not nerf," Ryan said, which probably meant something. The only bit Kim understood was 'healer' and 'please'.

"All right, let's not get sidetracked," Green said. "Yellow, what do you have?"

"There's still flooding in Marikina, but they're a bit better prepared for that than other places," she said. "Though I don't think your solution will work there, since it's loamy floodplain. However, of specific interest to us, Laking Kamay reportedly climbed out of Manila Bay this morning after the rains began and has been rampaging through the barangays in the area. People have mostly been safe, since the rain forced them to stay indoors, but it's reportedly been eating the corpses on the streets. At last report, the military have engaged and opened fire with rifles, but it's had predictable effect. No reports on casualties, and the streets are too congested for them to get in anything bigger than man-portable weaponry."

Kim's heart clenched, even though he didn't have one at the moment. More dead, fallen on distant streets… being eaten by this monster that… that…

"I'm heading there myself to finally deal with it," Yellow continued, "though I'd like some backup just in case."

"I'll meet you there," Green said. "I'm done with the wall all the way down to Laguna Lake, and Blue managed to at least get the water level down to something reasonable."

"I'll send drones to pick you up."

"Why did we wait until now to deal with Laking Kamay?" Kim said, and if his voice was accusing… well, it was.

"Because despite the fact that its preferred ambush territory is known, it wasn't so stupid as to conveniently stay there," Yellow said calmly. "It swims into the deep water of the bay after each ambush, and Manila Bay is deep and polluted enough that playing sub hunt with an aquatic monster is a risky prospect, even for me. Add to that, the military started heavily occupying the area, which was a complication I wanted us to avoid. That's not taking into account the fact the American Embassy is literally close enough to see from most of the length of the Baywalk that Laking Kamay liked to grab people and cars from. They've used those tanks they have stationed in front to shoot at it at least twice, and I don't know about you, but I still don't want to find out what a tank shell feels like. "

"We weren't ready," Green said quietly. "I didn't think we were ready yet for something so dangerous. Not yet."

"But we are now?" Kim said, just barely managing not to snap.

"Laking Kamay's on land now," Yellow said, and there was something in her tone… "On land and confined by the roads and buildings. It can't just run into the water now. And while I'm not sure about my chances fighting it in the water, I know I can kill and eat it on land." Furry yellow lips peeled back, revealing sharp, triangular teeth.

Narrow streets. Confining buildings…

"You can't just fight it where there are people!" Kim said. "If something the size of a monsters hits a building, people inside might get hurt!"

"Yes," Yellow said bluntly. "Which is why we need you there. You can use your powers to keep it from ever touching the buildings. The roads are probably a goner, but who cares about the roads?"

"What about me?" Red asked quietly. "What can I do?"

"You're our emergency button," Yellow said. "If you can leave a light on, that would be great, but we need you over the fight. We'll need light and if things start going poorly, someone to start bombing Laking Kamay with lava. And if your urges are acting up, you'll have a target you can shoot at. Just remember I'm not fireproof, please?"

"And me," Green said. "You're not fighting it, Yellow. I am."

Despite still looking like a bright yellow fuzzball, the way Yellow's drone snapped around to face Green was distinctly snakelike. "Excuse me?" she said in pointed tones.

"I need you to evacuate people from the area. And by evacuate, I mean hijack their bodies and make them run like hell. I don't want any people rubbernecking. You'll get them all out, and then we'll take that thing down together."

That seemed to mollify Yellow. At least, she stopped giving off the impression of a spherical snake and was back to being a plushy ball. "I… suppose you're right," she said reluctantly. "Then Blue, Mags, back her up. Green is tough and hits hard but she's slow and kinda sucks at serious fighting."

"Hey…!" Green whined. "All true, but you didn't have to say it out loud!"

"We'll see about giving you a training arc. Maybe you can learn archery. Traditionally most of the relevant parts are sourced from trees," Yellow said.

"Ooh, let's! I've always wanted to learn archery!"

"You can shoot arrows that grow into poisonous yew trees inside people," Ryan suggested, and if Kim had a face he'd have given his little brother an aghast look.

"It's a reference," Yellow said, looking at Kim as she said it. "There's a Robin Hood story with poisonous yew trees."

"Oh," Kim said. "That's… almost understandable."

"All right everyone, I have drones headed for your locations, so wrap up whatever you're doing. I've been tracking you on social media. Red, I'll try to get a drone up to your altitude so you can follow it, but for now, try heading in the direction of Manila Bay but don't go over the water."

"Understood," Red said.

"Blue and I are ready to go," Green said.

"I… better tell the barangay officials I'm leaving," Kim said hesitantly.

Yellow's very expressive drone gave him a strange look. "You know they can't actually stop you, right?"

"It'll be rude to just disappear, and I don't them to waste their time trying to look for me if they realize they need more space," Kim said.

"Okay… well, you do you. I'll be there soon."

Yellow turned away, bouncing up to Ryan, who picked up the drone and put it in front of the laptop as Ryan pulled out his tablet, and the two began talking about more monster sightings, government response in what areas…

Back in his body, Kim shook his head, letting his awareness of his drone fade back a little, the conversation it heard becoming a distant murmur. In front of him, the bodies of the dead lay still. Saying a small prayer for their peaceful repose, he turned and went to look for the barangay official.

Chapter 50: The Nightmares That Came To Manila, Part 6

Controlling multiple drones at once, and through the drones doing several things at once, came easily to Sanny. It was one of the few distinct advantages he had over the others even if, as with many things about what he did, he wasn't quite sure how exactly it really worked. The short answer was that having multiple bodies gave him multiple brains and let him pursue multiple distinct trains of thought at the same time. That was the answer the others knew and accepted.

He knew it couldn't be as easy as that. When he was using his power, when he wasn't strictly base human, he didn't actually need his brain to think and plan and perceive. Having a brain let him interpret sensory input better, assembling them into something he could understand, but he didn't actually need it to perceive the input. It helped with keeping his body's functions… well, functioning, but it was a convenience, not a necessity. Like a functioning digestive system, it was nice to have, but for him it wasn't strictly required.

Sometimes, he wondered darkly what would happen if his head was pulped like a tomato when he was normal and his powers were ostensibly 'off'. Would he die? Would he find that he was still alive, but could only feel from the neck down and everything above his shoulders was in familiar searing agony? For obvious reasons, it wasn't exactly the sort of experiment who'd care to run, even if he did already know what having his head suffer massive trauma felt like.

Stupid bees.

It was one of several questions he'd long since learned not to ponder when he was trying to sleep, lest he stay up all night staring at the ceiling, suffering from existential dread and the Lovecraftian horror of realizing how utterly insignificant he was in the face of a truly infinite universe. She seemed to share his opinion on such thoughts, because whenever he slipped into it, distress discomfort would start coming from the back of his head, and that would be his cue to knock himself out by doing questionable things to his body chemistry.

He'd usually wake up in the morning with a lot body mass, covered in fur, and curled up on himself and a lot of tentacles.

When he didn't let himself dwell on why he was so good at controlling multiple drones at once, it was awesome.

He moved through the city faster than a car—although if you picked the right time of day in Manila, that wasn't exactly hard—as he alternately ran and flew, following the roads he knew so he wouldn't get lost. Sadly for the aesthetic, Manila wasn't a city of soaring skyscrapers and glass towers. Most of the city was composed of building between four and ten stories, with the buildings beyond that either being stupidly expensive condos—something of an oxymoron—soul-crushing corporate offices, or calls centers that were somehow even more soul crushing. Four limbs, properly configured, ate up the distance when there was clear straight ground in front of him to build up speed, and where there wasn't, wings took over. And as he traveled, his drones did as well.

Some of them were perched and still, disguised as birds or rats or, for the ones she was idly messing around with, at least reasonably hidden from sight so that no one would see and become alarmed at the writhing unnatural mass of… well, whatever it was. Most, however, were still traveling, flying through the darkened skies to reach further parts of Metro Manila. There were more than a hundred of them under his control, his connection to them not diminished by range. Just as he watched his surroundings and the city below him so he knew where he was, so did his drones, each one looking around and noting their surroundings, each one him, if distantly.

It was like trying to look at two computer screens at once and controlling what happened in each with different controls. But instead of only being able to properly focus on one screen and one set of controls at a time, he could do both. And if he had a third screen and a third set of control, they would be just as easy. And it would be just as easy with a fourth screen.

Or hundreds.

All he had to do, he'd learned, was simply to pay attention to each screen and each set of controls.

And he could. It was just that easy.

But sitting behind him the whole time as he watched all his metaphorical screens was her. And even if he could pay attention to all those metaphorical screens and operate all those metaphorical controls at once, some of them he paid attention to a bit more than others. After all, nothing was happening there, but he was busy here, and while he was watching that thing he didn't really need to touch the control, and this one was so routine he could do it with his eyes closed…

And that was when the light touch she usually had becomes much more forceful.

It wasn't like he completely lost control, or that she pushed him away and did her own thing. He could take control back instantly. All he had to do was pay attention to what she was doing. But that meant looking away from something else…

Nowadays, it wasn't a problem. Instead of looking at all the separate screens and operating all the separate controls alone, it was like she was standing behind him and looking over his shoulder. Sometimes the controls were nudged just a little bit as a small adjustment was made, or some setting was changed, or one screen was boring so the controls were all mashed in boredom to see what happened. Little things that made a living body run which he'd overlooked were fixed, adjusted, optimized, and there were a lot of such little things.

Or maybe it was just as simple as having multiple brains to think with simultaneously. No need to get too complicated about it.

Sanny controlled dozens and dozens of drones at once, and trusted.

Through the drones and their myriad eyes—and other senses that she had put on that he'd just shrugged and not bothered to argue with—he perceived the city below him. One of him waited, perched near Mags, skin rippling impatiently as the younger man talked to some rando like he was asking permission from a teacher to leave a school event. One of him was picking up Green and Blue, looking at the wall made from trees fused together, holding back the waters of a raging river as the two cousins collapsed their bodies  down to something he could carry. One of him used Ryan's laptop, tapping on the touchpad with an overly long and prehensile tail with a bald tip as he switched between looking at the online map to orient himself and talking to Kim's younger brother.

Through his drones, he felt every animal in the city.

Bacteria, on every surface, in the air, in the water, in pipes underground and in foods, inside other organisms. Insects and other invertebrate life, hidden everywhere just out of sight. Rats. Frogs. Worms. Birds. Dogs. Cats. Lizards. Snakes.

And of course, people.

He could feel them around and across the city through his drones. Men, women, children, young, old, sick, injured, ill, unwell, afflicted with everything from arthritis, drug withdrawal, alcohol inebriation, psoriasis, diarrhea, diabetes, and cancer. He could feel them all, every individual cell, every biological process, every reaction of internal chemistry, the spark from every nerve. They all almost, almost blended together, almost too much to take in at once.

Almost.

Just like the drones, it was a matter of directing his attention and trusting her with the details.

It was one of the things he'd noticed that was different between him and the others. Jas, Willy and Kim all needed to make contact with their… well, 'element', for lack of a better word… to be able to affect it with their power if it didn't come from their body. Willy could stare at a glass of water for hours and nothing would happen to it until she or a little water she produced actually came into contact with the water in the glass to claim it before she could violate thermodynamics and conservation of mass with it. Kim needed to touch the ground to be able to manipulate it. Jas had no effect on flames and plasma she didn't make herself. He and Tammy though… if it was the right kind of cellular life, they could be aware of it, control it, manipulate it, change it, grow it. Did that mean anything? Probably, but damn if he knew what.

What he did know was that he could kill every animal in the city by making their heart stop beating.

Or turn them all into piles of undifferentiated stems cells.

Or… anything, really.

It was just that simple. So, so simple…

…

But that would be wrong. Though he made a point of staying away from people who might piss him off so he wouldn't be tempted to do something… unnatural to them.

Even if he hadn't been talking to his parents before, he definitely wasn't now.

Through his drones, he was doing as he had told Tammy he would. Every bacterial cell living in the waters of the city turned on each other, as did all of their like that had latched on and were reproducing in warm, nutrient-rich bodies. Bodies already being ravaged by illness as bacteria altered the delicate balance of the body's bio-chemical processes and settings were gently reset as damage was repaired, blood chemistry was returned to normal, and energy was added to cells.

In the water, he felt people being swept away. Their bodies were growing cold, and he could feel water in lungs, felt limbs heavy with tiredness despite the adrenaline in their system. Many were too weak, too young or too old to resist. He felt could feel the mix of neurotransmitters and impulses sparking in their brains, and though his awareness of a body has limits, he could guess at their fear, and in some cases their resignation. Bodies moved, becoming drones under his command. Lungs heaved, pushing air out of lungs as new strength pulled them above the water, their limbs swimming them to shore…

He could do it, so he did. It cost him nothing.

Sanny couldn't do anything about those lying cold and still, cells metabolizing their last, choking on a lack of oxygen. Well, he probably could. But the brains had been damaged long ago, and while he might not need his brain to remember and think (don't think about it, don't think about it, don't think about it…) other people did. There was no saving them. Keeping them hooked up to machines in a hospital would just be a pointless waste of money for some family.

Ahead of him, the drones that had already been in the area scouted for his prey. He heard cries screaming from a throat that had no right to be something walking on land, heard gunfire in a wide array of eardrum-blasting rhythms that forced his drones to listen through vibrating antennae, felt the way the earth shook as heavy footfalls slammed down on roads. Through his drones, he felt all the people around, soldiers with hearts beating furiously, arms shaking from recoil, feet splashing on the wet ground as they somehow felt hot, wet and cold all at the same time…

The blocks and neighborhoods fronting the Manila Baywalk area where Laking Kamay had made his haunt were some of the oldest in Manila. Not that many of the buildings were old, since the area had been bombed flat during World War II, but the locations had been in use for a long, long time. In the way of old cities, the place was a clashing mess of residences and business that didn't seemed to follow any sort of zoning laws. Most buildings only went up to two or three stories on average, five at the most if they were multi-level shop arcades or cheap, cramped hotels, with the towering condos, more expensive hotels and glittering skyscrapers being the glaring exceptions. Small restaurants, shops, banks, convenience stores, massage parlors, and more old professions that catered to tourists were mixed in among old and big residences as well as small, shabby and poor residences. Powerlines were strung up on poles, and most of the roads were only two lanes going in opposite directions at best. The streets were flooded with the drains overflowing, and even though the rain had stopped, the water remained. As was the case everywhere else, the roadways had been clogged with stalled vehicles, toppled bikes and motorcycles, and the bodies of those who'd fallen to the sleep and would no longer get up.

At night, in the wet, during a crisis, it was a nightmare even without the giant monster.

Unlike other places though, the area still had electricity and with it, streetlights. Despite this, nearly every building and storefront and home Sanny could see was dark, those with curtains closed. Scattered seemingly at random were places that looked like they'd been hit by a speeding truck, walls and windows, cement and glass all crushed inward, the interiors seemingly ransacked. The damage wasn't limited to the ground floor, with whole upper floors crumbled in as if something had punched through them from above.

"I see Laking Kamay," he had the drones carrying the others say to them directly. They were all together now, Magenta using warping to compress the space ahead of the drones carrying them, letting them cover more distance. "It's about six blocks away from the Baywalk, in the neighborhoods on the other side of the highway, and it looks like he's been here all day. It's too dark to make out any more details on the ground, and the water is covering them up, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ate people." It wouldn't have been the only thing that had. Just one of the biggest ones.

"Don't engage until you clear out the people around it! " Tammy—Green—ordered. "We're doing this right! Minimize casualties, and no throwing monsters through occupied buildings!"

"I suppose we don't want to take the title of being the leading cause of death in an office environment away from Space Moses," Sanny agreed, making Green giggle. It was an affected sound the drone deliberately made, but he was glad she found it funny.

Laking Kamay was practically crawling through the streets, just barely able to fit between the buildings on either side. Its limbs were long and thin, making it seem emaciated, with too-big hands and feet, topped with an oversized head. Its appendages were tipped with short, slightly curved claws that seemed better suited for puncturing than ripping and tearing. Its body was covered by a patchwork mix of dark fur, scales and smooth, rubbery skin, with dark and unblinking eyes, and its nose was more of a suggestion of a curving line. In the middle of its smoothly rubbery face was a hole that expanded and contracted shut, seemingly sealed from the inside by a fleshly flap, like a dolphin's blowhole. Even with its body crouched down low, back hunched over and head down, it was as huge as the snail earlier. If it weren’t for the fact it was moving slowly and heavily, Sanny would have been bitching about the square-cube law all over again.

No one had ever gotten a decent good look at the monster before now. It was so named because all that anyone had ever seen clearly were its big hands and the arms they'd been attached to as they had darted out of the water, grabbed some unsuspecting pedestrian walking past on the Manila Baywalk, and pulled them into the water. After people had finally learned to stop walking there, it had progressed to grabbing whole cars and occasionally jeepneys and pulling them down into the deep. The cars were eventually found washed ashore. The people, not so much.

Even Sanny had never really gotten a good view of the thing. All his flying drones had seen was a dark shape in the water, its coloration letting it blend in with the water, waves and sunlight when seen from above. Drones actually in the water with the biggest and best eyes he could grow almost never survived, snagged by a giant, scaly hand and torn apart by sharp, needle-like teeth before more it could see past the elbow.

He'd even actually sent drones to walk back and forth along the Baywalk, trying to get caught so he could get some sort of look at it, but some official busybodies in uniform 'politely' talked to him over a megaphone and told him to leave the area. He'd gotten the impression they thought he'd been trying to commit some elaborate suicide… which, to be fair…

Now, on relatively dry land, Laking Kamay had none of the blurring, fast movements that had made it such a deadly and successful ambush predator. Instead, like a landed alligator, it was heavy and clumsy, a wallowing brute as opposed to the monstrous terror of the bay as it casually crushed in the front of the buildings on either side of it while it tried to get away from the gunfire soldiers directed at it from one end of the street. It scrambled over a two-story row of commercial spaces, the weight of its limbs easily caving the roofs in, and Sanny barely managed to get control of the people cowering on the second floor of those buildings and have them throw themselves under tables and other sold pieces of furniture as the ceiling came down, followed by the mass of the roof. One of the people he'd controlled was impaled in the calf by the shattered tip of an old half-rotted wooden beam. Bacteria died as Sanny had them rip the metal from her leg, keeping her eyes averted from the gushing wound as the gash rippled like lips before sealing shut and fusing whole as immune cells devours fungal cells he couldn't directly affect.

"I'm starting the evacuation!" Sanny told the others. "Have to focus so, uh, if your drone starts growing mouths, just remember, it’s a drone and can't actually devour you, okay?"

The next building in Laking Kamay's path of escape wasn't so lucky. It scrambled over a five-story cheap overnight hotel like it was a pile of sand, and it started to come apart like it to as Sanny reached over and took control of those in the building, used their senses to try and predict how the building might crumble as he had them all head for the emergency exits, getting them out of the building and into the cold and wet of the dark. It wasn't enough. Some people were crushed by debris, too pinned down to keep moving. Others were trapped with nowhere to go as hallways were destroyed, and he made them settle down as best as he could, finding them a secure place to stand. A few he was able to get down, using other people he had under his control to catch and support them, not waiting on the supposed existence of altruism for people to do so themselves.

Even as he tried to save the people in the aftermath of Laking Kamay's path, it kept on moving, putting more people in danger. He wasn't there yet, but he had drones, and he used those to spread his influence and control. He took over more and more people's bodies, trapping them behind their own eyes, unable to move their own fingers as he stimulated that nerves in their ears, sending phantom signals to hear imaginary sounds.

Everyone he'd taken over heard the same words: "It's not safe here. Run."

Then he made them run, getting them out of the area while he still could, not giving them the choice of trying to hunker down in their darkened homes and hope Laking Kamay didn't see them. People splashed though the wet streets, and he could feel the neurotransmitters in their brains as fear and panic slowly mounted, as they realized they had no control. Children and the elderly too slow to move were picked up by other people in his control, carried over the water as everyone moved perpendicularly away from Laking Kamay and its path of destruction, the people in areas ahead of it streaming out of their homes.

Cold didn't matter. Tiredness didn’t matter. His power filled them with the warmth and energy they needed as he made them run. Soon the streets were crowded by more than just cars and corpses, and he did his best to run through it as he tried to get the ever-increasing number of people under his control to safety. Sanny gently loosed his hold on those far enough away, trusting the situation and the crowd would keep them running. To his relief, they did. To his further relief, they didn't start screaming or, as he almost expected, whip out their phones to do something even more stupid…

Thankfully, she didn't start slapping tentacles, mouths, extra eyes or triangular, shark-like teeth on people as Sanny had to divide his attention between evacuating people out of the area, controlling bacteria and disease in other parts of the city, and getting himself and the others to the site. Instead, she was changing his main body, making faster and faster, trying to get the part of them that could actually consume this prey there as fast as possible. He was almost there, just blocks away. Already he was running into the leading elements of his evacuees, and they parted before him as he ran flat out, he and she eager for the fight.

The soldiers were still out there, moving to new firing positions, and Sanny let them even as he saw through their eyes and other felt through their other senses to get more eyes on his prey. He didn't have the faintest idea how to actually use theirs guns beyond 'pull the trigger', but they did. He doubted if the bullets actually did meaningful harm, but they hurt and they were loud and if you could see the muzzle flash, bright. All you needed to scare most predators away, by making it clear you were unpleasant to deal with—

Laking Kamay let out a deep, warbling cry as its feet trampled over the wall around a big property with an old house, pushing part of the wall down and pulling the rest of the wall down with it. It looked like someone had stomped down on a cardboard box as Laking Kamay picked up a nearby car and threw it clumsily in the direction of the soldiers still shooting. The car fell short, smashing into the ground and rolling once as Sanny took control of the people in the house, giving them the strength to climb and vault over the walls on either side of the property, making them run the shortest path away from Laking Kamay.

Still on the way to the fighting, already distracted by taking control of the hundreds of people close enough to be in danger and possibility in the path of that danger, Sanny frowned internally as the drones he had over the scene saw Laking Kamay trying to get around the group of soldiers as more and more groups peppered it with gunfire from the upper floors of office buildings, hotels and condos. Despite having a clear path behind it, Laking seemed to be trying to move deeper inland as it tried to circle around the solders blocking its way.

Why? Was there another monster there or something that it was trying to reach so it could devour them, driven by the same predatory impulses as her? But if that was the case, why hadn't it moved towards Baseco, with the giant mushroom forest full of zombies barely quarantined by military patrols with flamethrowers—

Oh no.

"Green, I just realized," he screamed out as he sent the drone nearest to that location into the air, while at the same time diverting away the people he'd been evacuating as best he could. Baseco. He hadn't thought to check Baseco! Why would he, when it was a charnel ground for the dead and dying? "Baseco, Green! All the measures to contain it need to be actively manned, or else the zombies in there could just climb over the walls!"

"Sh—" Green began, only to very obviously strangle what she'd been about to say into senseless growling sounds, which was pretty impressive for the limitations of her drone. Really, Green? Who are you censoring for? Oh, right, probably Blue. "Can you deal with it?"

"I'm not sure I could," Sanny said grimly. "There's a reason I've avoided it. The monster there seems fungus-based, and while I can get my immune system to aggressively consume spores and mycelial cells, my drones are vulnerable to being zombified by the mushrooms. Assuming the mushroom growths are a type of drone, if the main monsters can get the rest of me is as well…"

"I'll go!" Magenta said. "I'm made of rock. Let's see mushrooms make a dent in that."

"They probably can, but I agree, you're probably less vulnerable," Green said. "Yellow, take Magenta to Baseco. Do what you can to contain the situation if they've gotten out."

"There's been nothing about it on the news so far, not even talking heads, but that could just be because people have forgotten about it," Sanny said as he diverted the path of Magenta's drone. Including him. After all, it was a known, relatively contained factor that stayed in one place.

For a moment, Green was silent. Then her drone in Kim's house said, "Red? Are you moving?"

It took a moment for Red to reply. "I'm here!" her black cube vibrated and flashed. "Heading towards Manila Bay! Sorry, but it's hard to see, and I've been trying to leave drones to leave light."

Ah. That was why it had been getting incremental bright for some of his drones. He hadn't checked, too focused on what he'd been doing through them.

"We might need you to burn something," Green said.

Sanny's drone finally reached the little artificial slip of land that jutted out slightly into the bay that was Baseco. The semi-permanent military encampment that guarded the destroyed bridge and waterways around the former slum area was utterly wet and dark. However, Sanny's drone had good eyes, and there was light from the streetlights next to the highway that had been closed off to keep people from being infected with fungal spores. From above, he watched as emaciated, partially desiccated corpses covered in mushrooms, some still barely alive and in immense pain, climbed out of the water, using each other as stepping stones as they clumsily climbed over the barriers the military had set.

On the other side, soldiers who had no doubt fallen asleep from the rain were covered in mushrooms growing on their skin and through their clothes. Even though they were still alive, their bodies still functioning, they had no control as unnatural, eldritch mycelia burrowed into their nerves, clumsily controlling them. All they could do was feel the agony of the unnatural infection as they screamed for help, screamed for others to stay away, screamed and begged for the sweet release of death as they climbed over each other, over the barbed wired-topped walls of the encampment and out into the city beyond.

"I think it might be a little too late for that," Sanny said. "We have a zombie outbreak on our hands, and there are plenty of bodies dead and alive for it to spread."

"Red, forget the drones, get to Manila Bay now!" Green cried. "Yellow, can you evacuate people and fight Laking Kamay at the same time?"

"I can try," Sanny said grimly. He supposed now was as a good time as any to push the limits of his multitasking.

"Magenta, I need you to build a wall. Not a physical wall, a freaky looping space wall! It's not just the zombies that are a danger, if I remember right the mushrooms on them carry infectious spores for making new zombies! I need you to warp space to keep all those zombies and their spores contained in one place, and trap them all so Red can burn them!"

"Got it! I think we're almost there!"

"Blue," Green said, then hesitated. "I need you to pinpoint who among the zombified are still alive and get them into the bay, away from Red's line of fire! The salt water might affect the growths on them, and with Laking Kamay on land, there's nothing to worry about something eating them. Maybe Yellow can boost their immune systems to fight off the fungus or something. We're saving everyone we can!"

"Yes, Green."

Sanny broke through the running crowds, onto streets empty of life. The gunfire was growing louder and louder, the water was vibrating with monstrous footsteps as he changed form. Mass. Height. Weight. Muscle. Claws. He needed to match Laking Kamay in size. Unless God was literally on your side, literal David and Goliath fights were not going to go well for David.

There was a moment of reluctance, a twinge of suspicion. Then he forcibly buried it and relaxed. Not let go, never let go, but relaxed as he formed the image of what he wanted his body to be, and let her do the rest. Trust.

From the back of his head he felt it come back. Trust.

Bone, muscle, skin, exoskeleton and all the rest swelled.

Fuck the square-cube law.

Chapter 51: The Nightmares That Came To Manila, Part 7

Tammy heard a new roar echo through the night below her as the drones carrying her and Blue, as well as the drone Yellow had left in Magenta's house started cackling in a mildly disturbing manner. "Uh, Yellow?"

"Busy," was the terse reply. "Get ready, you're almost there."

Tammy was mildly concerned, but she'd seen Yellow like this before, when they'd going after the bees together in Tagaytay: aggressive and disturbingly berserker-like as she tore at every monster drone in her way. They'd worked well together then as Yellow tanked and drew agro from the increasingly larger bees, while she'd stealthed towards the main hive, burrowing underground from root to root until she'd been in a position to try and get at the queen. It had turned out well in the end, and Yellow had forgiven her for nearly eating them when she'd suggested they try to share the bee…

She forced herself to focus on what was to come, wishing she could shake her head. She didn't like this. Their plans had needed to be abandoned before they could even be implemented, and she got the feeling that was going to be a pattern.

The American Embassy passed by below them, the latter guarded by Marines and tanks, and then Rizal Park and Intramuros, before finally flying over the Port Area. Tammy felt a sickening squirming in the heart she currently didn't have as she saw car-size growths of mushrooms just sprouting from the roads, walls, roofs, and random piles of garbage and debris. Around them, people were milling about at random, moving stiffly and jerkily as they cried out in pain and fear. Despite moving like badly controlled puppets, they moved as one, shuffling outward in a wave from Baseco and through the port area.

Tammy remembered the news reports from months ago, of people in a part of Metro Manila she'd never heard of waking up with strange mushrooms growing on their bodies, filling up the local clinics and eventually the nearby hospitals. She'd listened to it on the news in the morning before she and her cousin had left home to do some groceries, since Manang Zenny was taking her vacation to visit her family. By evening, increasingly sensational reports about more and more people with mushrooms growing on them was being passed around in text messages, on social media, even on the radio. She'd actually turned on the TV again to find out what the fuss was about, and watched talking heads being interviewed about fungal infections, about how they were still trying to identify what sort of mushroom it was since there were thousands of species of mushroom in the world, of how it might be an invasive species from South America or Japan.

Two days later, the news were reporting about people had been infected into living dead mushroom zombies, of the fact corpses were moving and seemingly animated by the mushrooms growing on them, of how studying the fungus was difficult because it grew so virulently, of how the research team from UP have already had people get infected even through their protective gear. No one actually, officially used the word 'zombies', even if that was how people referred to them online and over the radio. They were 'fungal hosts' or 'fungal carriers'. At worst, the news referred to 'infected' or 'afflicted', as if the people still alive and in ceaseless agony from having parasites dominating them simply needed some antibiotics or a topical cream.

Further days had been like something out of a movie as Tammy and Willie stayed at home, watching the news and fielding calls from their parents about what was happening and whether they were all right. There were semi-disjointed warnings to pack emergency bags in case they needed to run, to be ready to get out of the city in case this somehow spread.

Tammy remembered they had been filled with fear, of how she'd barely kept it together for the sake of her cousin, of how she'd passed on information she knew to everyone on her contacts, even the information that had been, in hindsight, completely false. Ah, those had been innocent days, when no one had yet realized what more there was to come.

Nowadays, it was just the new normal. Everyone went to school and work and lived their lives, while passing around notices of monster sightings and senators tried to convince themselves that the military bio-hazard cordon around Baseco could be stepped down because it was an unnecessary expense and that the situation was stable and would no longer be a problem…

Grimly, Tammy separated another drone so that she could have an aerial view, tentacles taking the drone as it grew and turned black, covered in photoreceptive faux eyes.  "Blue, you ready?" she called down to her cousin.

"Yes, Green."

"Magenta, where are you?"

"Already on the ground! I'm at the Bridge near Baseco!" he replied through the drone at his house. "I'm blocking the way so they can't get to the other side!"

"Shh, not so loud, kuya" Ryan shushed. "Everyone's already asleep."

"Oh, sorry," Magenta said.

"Yellow, can you do anything?"

"Busy," Yellow said tersely. "Keeping people away, preventing victims." A roar echoed from the distance. How the hell could she still hear that? "Could kill them, put them out of their misery, but corpses would still be controlled."

"Don't," Green said sharply.

"Could maybe get the mushrooms out of them, but need time, too busy. Not now. Can't do everything."

Tammy winced at the reminder. "Sorry. All right, we'll deal with this while you deal with that."

"Concentrate on saving uninfected. Prevention easier than cure. Ready to drop?"

"Ready—" was all Tammy managed to say before she was in freefall, the ground suddenly coming closer and closer towards her. She had a moment of instinctive panic before the lack of feeling of movement because she hadn't made her balance organs yet reminded her that she wasn't falling as a soft, squishy meat bag, she was falling as a hard ball of wood. She'd just reminded herself to calm down before she slammed into the ground, bouncing up ten feet before she hit the ground again and started to roll. About thirty feet away, she saw Blue slam into the ground and shatter into pieces, had to remind herself her cousin was fine, that she'd get back up from that…

Tammy began growing her body, the round, coconut-like form she had elongating, then narrowing to create a distinct head and torso as limbs grew out from her like stalks of bamboo. It was familiar now as she grew arms, legs, feet, hands and fingers. Lace-like petals grew at her wrists and neck. When she had enough of a body formed, Tammy pushed herself up to her feet as she looked around. Blue had already reformed, her body tall and glass-like. They were on a wide road, the now-familiar sight of abandoned jeepneys, pedicabs, and fallen bikes and motorcycles littering the ground and crashed into walls. There were also large cargo trucks, some overturned with their large steel cargo containers fallen on the street, others with their doors open as if the drivers had simply stepped out. Street lights burned brightly, save for where a truck had crashed into one, and she dimly recognized the area from a field trip when she'd been in elementary school.

There were bodies here too. Fallen bodies, skin no longer wet, clothes only damp instead of soaked.

There was no one else in her immediate line of sight, though she could distantly hear screams of pain and agony, of people screaming to God, begging for help or simply asking for the pain to stop. She could see the bridge spanning over a later stretch of the Pasig River as it met the sea, saw the roil of movements of those infected. While many crowded over the bridge, some here heading towards them

 "We're on the ground," Tammy said through her drone. "I don't see anyone, but I can hear them coming closer." She felt for the plants in the area. There were always plants around, either weeds that people were just too lazy to uproot, blades of grass too stubborn to die wedged between cracks in cement. Here she was lucky. There was a golf course on the other side of the wall, and the sidewalks as well as the island in the middle of the street had trees growing at intervals, with less planned plants taking advantage of the unoccupied areas of soil. "Blue, remember the plan. Find the living ones, and get them into the water—" no, the water was too far away, wasn't it? —"or at least isolate them to keep them safe. The rest, we keep contained."'

"Yes, Green," Blue said.

Tammy fell into the familiar rhythm, giving her cousin detailed instructions that she made up on the spot. Willy needed to know exactly what she had to do, because sometimes she wouldn't do anything else. "Don't hurt them. Be gentle, like I showed you. If you do get them into water, make sure to keep their head above water. Oh, and make sure they're warm so that they don't get hypothermia. Warm, but not boiling hot. It has to be like a hot shower. I'll help you with it after I get done making sure the dead ones can't keep moving. Remember, get all the living ones. You can feel it if they're alive, right?"

"Yes, Green."

"And the ones who are alive are…?"

"The ones with feelings coming from them."

Tammy nodded. "Also, if they're talking or screaming, breathing or bleeding, they're probably alive. Don't attack them, they can't really hurt you. If you're not sure, talk to them, and if you get some kind of response, then they're probably alive, so keep them safe—"

Movement ahead of her, shapes moving out of shadows under the trees into the streetlights…

"Sorry, what was that?" Magenta said. "You said something strange…"

Ah, right. She'd never explained that, had she? "Later!"

They came silently, from her perspective. Their bodies moved stiffly, as if they were babies that didn't know how to balance, or puppets with tangled, knotted strings. Pale mushrooms with dark blotches grew on their exposed skin, semi-circular, horizontal growths like she'd seen in some trees, making her shiver as she imagined them growing on her both ways. In the shadows, between the lights and under the trees, the mushrooms seemed to glow slightly, a toy-like, glow-in-the-dark green that could almost have been a trick of the light. The mushrooms grew from people's eyes, nostrils, ears and even their mouth, pushing out from between their lips. There were even some that seemed to be growing from people's armpits. Some were dressed in military fatigues, others in loose shirts and shorts, in business casual wear, in what looked like the uniforms of security guards. Some were children.

Thin white filaments like spider webs grew over the rest of their skin, on their clothes, in their hair, strands of it waving loose in the wind, giving them a strangely hazy—Tammy refused to think 'ghostly'—outline. They didn't walk with arms outstretched or mouths gaping open, though some had red stains of dried blood around where the mushrooms grew. Some of the blood trickled around the growing mushrooms, dripping down with every jerky movement. The blood…

There were people among them still alive. She'd known that. Seeing them with her own eyes instead of simply hearing about them from the news was a different matter. They bled, muscles shivering and shaking from either cold or pain. Some were dangerously emaciated, and she could see strange bulges and clumps outlined under their skin. Their mouths moved, and though she could hear their screams, their cries…

The horde stumbled forward, and when they encountered a dead body in their path, parts of the horde would cluster over them, legs collapsing like dropped puppets in a lazy parody of kneeling as the mushrooms on their body pulsed. Tammy saw white filaments begin to spread from spots on the fallen bodies, saw them start to twitch…

Twitching all the way, the previously unmoving corpse clumsily tried to move as the ones around it that had given it this parody of life clumsily rose and continued on. The walls on either side of the wide road was channeling the horde towards where Tammy and Willy were standing, but it wouldn't last. Behind the two of them was a rotunda intersection, one path leading further down to the Baywalk, one leading down to the port area, and the third leading deeper into the rest of Manila…

More and more of them appeared, moving like badly articulated toys a child was making walk, and Tammy involuntarily took a step back as they approached. No, no, don't be afraid! They couldn't hurt her. She was there to help them, to… to save the city from them. She forced herself to stand tall, and almost opened a slit on her face so she could talk before she remembered the mycelia growing over her. She wanted to reassure them, to tell them that it would all be all right, that they were there to help…

Behind her, her dear, sweet, special cousin, unburdened by such sentimentality, simply flooded the ground with water, liquid exploding violently from her icy skin and onto the ground, and sent a wave towards the zombies heading towards them without hesitation. The water parted around Tammy, sweeping forward and pushing fallen bikes aside as the water rushed forward, drowning the road again as it slammed into the legs of the horde. It barely seemed to hinder them even momentarily as they continued to stumble through the water running over the road.

Then the water froze.

The horde stumbled as their feet were either encased in ice or lost traction as said feet came down, the stiff puppet-like movements of their limbs no letting them recover their footing as legs were split open by the inexorable demands of gravity. Only some of the living managed to maintain their balance, the ones who looked like they had only freshly been tainted, only to fall as whatever eldritch force possessed their bodies forced them to continue moving to step forward.

Right. Do something now, be crippled by the moral ambiguity of her violent actions later.

Some plants were naturally fast growing. Kudzu was infamous for it. All around her, she felt the plants, the trees in the parking lots over the wall, in the islands between the roads, in the golf course and historical tourist trap to their right. They were full of water after the day's rain, but that didn't matter. She reached out to them, into them, claimed them as part of her. She could feel carbohydrates slowly being metabolized, felt leaves taking in precious, life-giving carbon dioxide and expelling waste oxygen…

She made them grow.

The trees shuddered for a moment, like the breath before the dive… and then slender, vine-like branches burst from their trunks, exploding and unfurling as the branches slammed into the hordes. Tammy wasn't Yellow. She wasn't some horrendously unfair super-multitasker. All she could do was control what was in front of her, barely able to spare a sliver of her attention on her drone in case the others talked to it to let her know something.

The branches reached out, far more supple than they should be, and began entangling around anything they touched that wasn't another branch. They wrapped around heads, limbs, cracked windshields, posts, and other trees like vines seeking support, as she vastly accelerated their growth, her power letting them generate mass ex nihilo. Entwined branches hardened, thickened, and sprouted more branches, holding the struggling bodies in their grip. Those she had caught struggled against her bonds, stiff arms clumsily grappling at her encircling branches as the mushrooms growing on them pulsed and rippled.

Tammy felt her branches coming under attack, something boring through the outer layer of protective bark, forcing its way down to the softer underlying structure where xylem and phloem circulated nutrients, felt those nutrients being stolen as growths of pulsing, plate-like mushrooms began to grown on the branches she controlled. She fought back the way she knew how, growing her branches from the inside, creating more mass to push out the damaged parts, branches growing thicker as a result as she fought the infection that tried to weaken her structure even as she tried to keep from growing inward, tried to keep her growing branches from strangling the very people she was trying to save as the branches grew thicker.

In front of those she'd entangled, more branches grew. They found the cracks along the ground and grew roots, digging downward to anchor themselves as they spread in a long across the road. Those branches began to thicken, weaving a wall in the across the road to block the way of the horde as the trees and grass growing on either side of the rode grew explosively. To her right, over the wall and high fence netting separating it from the rode, the grasses growing on the grounds of the Intramuros golf course change, their slim, decorative blades thickening into wide, hollow stalks, pressing together in a mass that increased the height of the wall, keeping the horde from scaling those walls to escape containment.

Compared to the floodwall she'd already made that night, this was nothing as she created a new barrier to keep the horde in.

It wouldn't last. She knew it wouldn't. No walls held back a zombie horde forever. Already the horde was pushing into the ones she had entangled in front of the wall, pressing them against the barrier. Some were being covered in protective barriers of ice, Blue following her orders and isolating those still alive from those only moving. She did the same, wrapping them in protective loops of branches that were less likely to break from applied pressure or give them hypothermia. When she did that, Blue let the ice melt away, marking other members of the horde as alive even as they began to slowly amass against her barrier.

She thickened the barrier, the branches growing from within, fusing to each other, roots digging deeper as they anchored the whole structure. A second layer began to grow to reinforce the wall as she increased its height, making the barrier curve over the horde to try and make scaling it by climbing over each other harder. Already she felt more and more points of attack on her wall, the strange fungus animating the horde digging into her wood, trying to consume it from the inside, to weaken her wall, or possibly just spreading from instinct.  

Tammy grew more eye splotches on the trunks, on the leaves, and on the branches so she could see what she was doing, so she could direct more slim branches to entangle around over the of the heard, keeping them immobile, yet as she did more and more pressed against those she had trapped.

Was it unleaderly to wish that Sanny killed and ate Laking Kamay quickly so she'd be here to help take care of this? Because she really wished the other woman was here to help them with this. Hopefully she was having better luck with Laking Kamay, because Tammy got the feeling that things were going to get worse. She had no idea what more to do beyond keeping the horde trapped and trying to separate out the ones still alive for Yellow to try and heal later!

Above her, the sky brightened.

Chapter 52: The Nightmares That Came To Manila, Part 8

Sanny had been running as something slim and quadrupedal (and any resemblance to a mythological virgin detector was sheer coincidence), with the front limbs doubling as wings when he had room to leap and glide. The body had been all fast-twitch muscles that laughed in the face of fatigue and let him keep on accelerating when normal biology would have long stopped moving in agony. He didn't stop running even as he felt the muscles growing, bones lengthening and thickening, and his body's overall mass increasing. His limbs grew thicker to support the weight, the formerly narrow hooves on the end of his limbs hardened and spread, bones reconfiguring, growing and changing to form structures able to distribute the increasing weight of his body, going from deer-like to elephant-like, changing his gait by necessity.

Still, he charged, maintaining speed as well as he could as he increased in mass. Motorcycles, bikes and corpses were stepped on, poking painfully on his hooves until they started crushing under his weight, which both flattened them and started producing folded edges that dug into his soles like caltrops. He ignored the pain as the injuries knit shut, flesh fusing back together as he shouldered aside stalled cars, then kicked them aside, then just stepped on them with a satisfying crushing feeling. He moved like a charging ape, with long forelimbs and a short, barrel-like torso, head small and sunk in between the shoulders, little more than a bump with a bony plate for a face to protect the eyes and soft tissues. Well, protect it from things that weren't bullets, anyway.

However, there is no stealthy way to grow fifty feet long. At least, no stealthy way to do it when you were also running flat out, anyway. Traditionally, the way to grow fifty feet long with no one noticing was to do it in a large body of moderately deep water.

The flooding in Manila wasn't that bad… yet.

So the soldiers shooting at Laking Kamay definitely heard and saw Sanny coming, which was probably why he was greeted with several dozen rounds of assault rifle fire to his limbs, torso and face. Holes were blasted into his compound eyes, and bullets lodged into his thickening, leathery skin and the shell on his back covered in triangular, teeth-like spines. He ignored the little stings as he kept running, head low, neck muscles tensed and ready. So what if they'd shot a few of his eyes? He had dozens more, and they were repairing themselves as he grew, with more growing in other places on his body, giving him omnidirectional vision.

Laking Kamay definitely heard him as his feet pounded cracks into the already damaged pavement of the street. The beast turned towards the sound, and Sanny fought his reflexive urge to swerve aside, to not hit or get hurt, or somehow worse, hurt someone else.

Fuck that. The whole point of this exercise was hurting someone else.

The multiple eyes let him aim the triangular, tooth-like horn protruding from the center of his bone mask.

His feet pounded cracks into the already much-abused pavement as he closed the distance between him and Laking Kamay, bullets now spraying his rear and ow that was undignified. If he had a working digestive system, he'd have worried about something going up it as he tried to keep the horn pointed at Laking Kamay's center of mass. The monster roared, spreading its arms wide and rearing up to its full standing height, towering over many of the storefronts as it rose up to six stories in a threat display. It looked like a cartoon ghost, standing there with its arms raised over its head, but Sanny wasn't some easily scared stoner who ate dogfood.

Sanny kept charging, crushing everything in his path, flattening bodies and vehicles under his weight, the buildings on either side of him blurring past. He never deviated, head and shoulders low to aim the horn into Laking Kamay's torso and spine. At the last moment, the kaiju wavered, stumbling back a step and turning partway as if hoping to scramble over one of the buildings to either side. The hesitation cost it, as Sanny slammed right into its belly, boneplate and shoulders striking with a sound like a truck getting into a traffic accident.

He felt the shock of impact vibrate thought his head, neck, shoulders and spine, felt bones break and knit themselves back together in moments as he pushed Laking Kamay back, the monster crumpling and folding over Sanny's back as it roared in pain. The shell on his back managed to support the weight, and he felt the kaiju clawing at his back, but it did what thick, heavy shells were supposed to do, which was protecting the soft, squishy bits. The teeth-like spines also did what teeth-like spines were supposed to do, which was tear and bleed Laking Kamay when it slammed into them, ripping open the palms of its huge hands as it clawed. Sanny turned his head, twisting the horn and tearing open the wound. He felt thick, hot blood and more disgusting viscera spewing from the wound, and he instinctively closed the eyes behind his bone mask.

He had to close his nose too, because at this range the stench coming from Laking Kamay was awful, and that didn't include the added indignity of waste that was probably coming from ruptured intestines. Gritting his teeth—at least, the teeth of his drone, since his main body had no mouth or teeth right now—Sanny ripped his head downward, tearing open Laking Kamay from stomach to thigh, sending more blood, ropes of entrails, and viscera raining down Sanny'd head, chest, forelimbs and finally the road.

For most animals, this would be a debilitating and definitely fatal wound, so the Laking Kamay screaming bloody murder and agony was completely expected. Unfortunately, the monster didn't just roll over and die. The wound began to knit shut, muscles convulsing to press the ragged edges of the torn flesh back together, even as Laking Kamay's legs wobbled, some of the muscles in one thigh too torn to support it properly. Sanny stumbled back as most of Laking Kamay's weight fell on him, still ignoring the bullets peppering his hind legs and—ow, that went in dead center! There was no main street for it to go up, but the path was the same, and some of the air-filled bladders giving his torso size and rigidity popped.

Most of his torso was gas bladders, which doubled as having lots and lots of lungs for him to respire with, and pseudo-muscles when contracted in sequence. Without a digestive system, reproductive system, most of an endocrine system, and excretory system, he was able to cut out a lot of mass and weight from the torso. Most of the weight in it was muscle along the spine and rib cage. Despite how she could, if not completely fuck the square-cube law, at least lewdly hold hands with it, mass and weight were still factors that needed to be taken into account, and being part-balloon had been the solution. It also meant that he was very much a lightweight, which was why he hadn't pushed Laking Kamay onto its ass with his charge.

His limbs, however, were muscle wrapped around a core of dense bone, so even if he didn't have a lot of mass, he did have strong limbs and, now that Laking Kamay had collapsed on him, the leverage to use it. Bracing his legs under him, Sanny pushed against the ground to drive his horn back into Laking Kamay's torso, and he felt more hot, fluid start to drip down on his face. It pooled in the eye holes of his bone mask, and Sanny felt it burn over the softer, more delicate tissues there. Judging from where he'd been able to impale, it was probably stomach acid. Sanny twisted his head again to open the wound out further, and more blood, stomach acid, and a few partial-digested corpses fell out.

Laking Kamay roared again, deafening to the ear holes on his head and annoyingly loud to the ones around his rear forelimb's knees. It was a scream of pain, high-pitched and full-throated, and Sanny wondered if this counted as 'sociopath torturing small animals'. Or was it psychopath? No, wait, they didn't use those terms anymore, not enough confusing multi-syllables and obtuse meanings for today's medical establishment—

And that was when Laking Kamay tried to gouge out his eyes.

It wasn't a raking attacking, curling their fingers and trying to tear across the organs. There was no bending down and using teeth. Laking Kamay raised its right hand from where it had been trying to claw a Sanny's shell, and jabbed down straight for Sanny's left eyehole with fingers fully extended. His eyes there burst like rotten tomatoes, and the fingers kept going, digging until it reached brain. Sanny felt the long fingers curl, the claws—growing, lengthening claws!—tearing chunks out of his brain, and causing several of his senses to go numb as the parts of the organ in charge of their sensory data was turned to meat mush, heard the vibration as claw hit the back of his skull. The finger hooked, tearing open his other eye from behind, and wow, despite the bits of brain directly behind it already being pulped, loosing his other eye somehow still hurt.

The pain didn't last long, the nerves deadened and disconnected as irrelevant. Already a new brain was growing in the middle of his torso, near his heart and his man-bits and the gas bladders he was using to regulate the pressure in all the other gas bladders in there. That was fine. He could function in a body without a brain for a while. It would just take more active attention on his part, as he took direct control of the muscles and the sensory input of the eyes positioned on his shoulders, but Sanny managed to twist his head and catch Laking Kamay's arm on the edge of his horn, cutting through the tendons and veins there like he was helping someone die in a bathtub.

Blood flowed, getting into the normally absolutely sterile part of his body where he kept his brain, but since that brain had been trashed it didn't really matter and…wait, what was… ah. Lack of sensory handling mean no input from his various inner ears, so of course he was losing his balance. His skin was only numb in patches, so he felt it when slammed against the side of the building. Laking Kamay stumbled back, thankfully pulling its finger out of Sanny's now-abused brain pan as Sanny fell, the walls of the building beside him cracking, then buckling, than partially collapsing as he tried to get it to support his weight so that—

Ah, there went one of his leg bones… and just in time to feel the full agony as the second brain came into being and started accepting all the sensory input again and argh! Sanny immediately cut off the sensory input from the head, focusing on the eyes he still had. He could still move, what had broken was a forelimb, and it was already knitting back together, the bone warping and distending and shortening to be properly aligned.

Unfortunately, so could Laking Kamay. The soft tissue damage, while agonizing, was much easier to heal from than a broken bone than hadn't been properly aligned before it had been healed. Its wounds had already stopped bleeding as the monster dropped down into a crouched stance again, partially using Sanny's body as cover as soldiers moved to other firing positions. It moved sluggishly from what Sanny recognized as blood loss, but if it was anything like him it was already producing replacement blood.

It was completely focused on Sanny now, and why not? With him collapsed like this, he was probably looking like easy prey and if that had been the plan it would have been great! Since it had not been the plan, this sucked. It bared its teeth at him, and Sanny noticed how the tip of its tongue glowed. Was it some kind on anglerfish thing? That explained the teeth and some of the fin-like growths, though wasn't the lure supposed to come from the forehead?

The light wasn't strangely hypnotic though. It was just a light, and it was in Sanny's face as Laking Kamay lunged, mouth wide open. Sanny could actually see the lower jaw detaching as he tried to move his head to bring the horn into play, tried to move at all, but Laking Kamay was out of range as a circle of needle-like fish teeth bit into Sanny's bicep. The one on the uninjured limb, which wasn't uninjured anymore. The teeth went straight in like candles into a cake, plunging down their full length. Then, with a ninety-degree rotation of the monster's neck, a circle of meat was ripped out of Sanny like a knife coring out an apple.

Sanny saw Laking Kamay's throat bulge hideously as the entire circular chunk of his arm meat was swallowed whole, the bulge traveling down the throat and down to the gored stomach, where it actually tore open the wounds to bulge out hideously. The edges of the meat were still dripping blood as it poked out from the injury.

It gave a wonderfully cathartic target as Sanny's other, now-uninjured forelimb, the bone restored, jabbed straight in for a sucker punch, the rudimentary and still-growing spike jutting out of the forearm ripping the stomach open again. The stomach ruptured once more, though with less gore and stomach acid this time. The chunk of meat from Sanny stayed in place however, because it had grown spiked tentacles and eyes and small tearing mouths that were mostly just circles of muscle with teeth, and had managed to anchor itself around one rib, the mass of flesh warping and mutating as it tore at everything within reach as it tried to fight its way up to the heart.

Wonderful things, drones.

Laking Kamay fell onto its back from the dual attack, tearing at its own chest as Sanny pushed himself up to his feet. The wound on his bicep was healing, teeth growing around its ragged edges as the raw, torn flesh smoothed, forming a new, gaping mouth that opened and closed hungrily for a moment before the teeth knit together, the injury sealing shut. The muscle mass had been reduced, but it was growing back, and the teeth were fusing into a line of spikes meant to deter that happening again. One forelimb reached out, the fingers on the end finally opening up to grab at Laking Kamay's ankle as claws finally began growing from the fingertips. He wasn't letting this one get away!

So, of course, Laking Kamay kicked him. It's wide, webbed feet were broad and backed up by leg muscles meant to propel a large aquatic creature through water at stupid fast speeds, so it hit like an absolute bitch.  Gas bladders squashed and distended, popping along deliberate failure points and violently expelling air. At these scales, biological balloons weren't very good for harmful transfer of kinetic energy, especially if they were meant to break before they could. Sanny's torso caved in at the point of impact as air violently exhaled from his mouth, because all that air had to go somewhere and it also had to be replaced somehow too.

Laking Kamay kicked again and again, deflating more gas bladders, the sort-of-ablative armor wearing down to protect the actual bones and organs that mattered, before Sanny's other forelimb—arm—slashed out with claw-tipped fingers, raking at the attacking limb. The flesh was thick and felt like hard rubber, his claws not getting enough purchase to tear it open, when it wasn't skittering over scales and deceptively thick fur. Still, it was enough to ward off the attack as Sanny got his other limbs under him, still holding on to Laking Kamay's ankle. He wanted to roar, but he didn't have the organs as he hammer slammed his other fist into the knee of the leg he was holding. He dislocated every finger in that hand in an explosion of agony, several of the phalanges breaking, but was rewarded with a dull crack and another scream of agony from Laking Kamay as one knee started bending the wrong way.

Ah, he'd always wanted to do that. Pity it wasn't to one of his highschool classmates, especially that annoying class president he'd had his senior year, but he'd take vindictive, spiteful pleasure in what he could get.

Further attempts to hammer were thwarted as Laking Kamay raked at him with its own claws from both its elongated hands and its other, remaining foot. Its chest was a bleeding mess—Sanny could see its heart and one lung, while the other lung lay punctured—while the mass of flesh that had come from Sanny's shoulder lay torn to shreds on the road, still twitching but the muscles cut in too many places. He gave it up as a lost cause, and it fell silent, now just slowly dying meat. There were no more fingers on Laking Kamay's big hands, just long, wicked, curving claws that grew out of what had once been a palm, connected at the base by vestigial webs of flesh. They tore at his forearms, their curving, hooked tips ripping at his flesh even as ridges of spikes began to grow to deflect them. On its back, Laking Kamay fought like a wild animal, claws raking and stabbing at every opportunity, uncaring of how its wild, flailing movement tore at the buildings around it, elbows slamming into walls as Sanny defended himself with his free arm, jabbing back with the growing spike on the forearm and not letting go of his prey's leg—

Something exploded between them. It literally exploded, a burst of heat, light, sound, concussive kinetic energy and, he later realized, shrapnel. Many of his eyes and ears at his front burst, rendering him deaf and blind in the front half of his body. The gas bladders on his torso had burst too, and he actually found himself fallen on his side, covered in blood.

Tears ripped open on his flesh as he started growing new eyes and ears, looking for Laking Kamay even as Sanny reached out with his power and looked for people. There, in a building two blocks away, in front of a shattered glass window, were a group of soldiers with some kind of shoulder mounted rocket thing. He looked through their eyes, where they had a good view of both him and Laking Kamay, and had obviously taken the free shot from the two of them staying relatively still when it had presented itself.

"You're assholes, you know that," he said, saying it with a drone and transmitting the nerve signals the drone heard of to their ears so they'd hear the phantom sound of his feminine voice talking to them. "Just assholes. This hurts. I'm on your side."

Their confusion at the sudden voice lasted long enough for him to take stock of their situation as Sanny berated himself for loosing track of what else had been happening around him. He'd been ignoring the bullets, because they were all too small to actually harm him, but that had led to him ignoring the soldiers too… and the people he'd been evacuating, now that he realized. At least he no longer felt such people around him. Just him, the soldiers, and random animals not of Hominidae.

He hoped she hadn't gotten bored and given the people he'd evacuated something unnatural while he'd been occupied. His body was healing, wounds sealing and gas bladders inflating as a layer of metallic scales began to grow slowly. Across the road from him, Laking Kamay was screaming, its own black eyes popped and bleeding, its hands broken and limp, even as muscles on it convulsed, the bones inside distending back into shape. Sanny forced his body to stand, getting his weight under him even as he had to heal from the injuries produced by… whatever it was the military had shot him with, he didn't know, he wasn't that kind of nerd. That caused the gunfire to redouble, and a few fired what in hindsight were probably underslung grenade launchers.

Unfortunately for them, he wasn't ignoring them anymore, and it was trivial to take control of their muscles to alter their aim, sending the grenades somewhere else. The group of soldiers with the shoulder rocket… thing-y had finished reloading, but Sanny just assumed direct control of the one actually holding the weapon and had him shoot out into the bay. As fun as it would probably be to fire military ordinance by proxy, he didn't want to risk getting caught in the AOE of one of those things right now. Meat getting shredded like that hurt.

"Really? You're shooting me again? If I had an umbrella, I'd throw it at you."

Reinforce the image. It won't matter now, but they had to give a report about this, didn't they?

Across from him, Laking Kamay opened its mouth wide and chomped at the road, the pavement tearing as its teeth stabbed and scraped across it swallowed a dead body in a single gulp, then bit down again at another and another. It was shaking, though since Sanny couldn't tap into its physiology he couldn't tell if it was from pain or hunger.

…

He should probably stop it from eating people, shouldn't he? Even dead people. It might be some kind of power up, and just letting monsters do something without knowing how it affects them is how it can recover stranger than before and beats the crap out of the whole team…

Sanny managed to get his feet under him, then reluctantly put his arm on the building beside him. Between Laking Kamay and the exploding ordinance, it was thoroughly trashed, so it wasn't like he actually made it any worse when he used it for support. He rose upright, gingerly balancing on hind legs that were completely unlike what he was used to, without the long sole to distribute and balance weight, instead using a strange circular tripod arrangement. It made him have to keep his feet apart and knees slightly bent so he could be ready for any sudden changes in balance. He had to lean back as he raised his arms in front of him, claws growing out of one as the other collapsing into one long, sharp bone spike, both he and she deciding that trying to rebuild that hand on that limb was futile at the moment.

Laking Kamay had fallen on all fours, claws scraping on the ground, limbs spread wide to other side. Its leg had healed, the same way his arm had. Beating each other into physical trauma was so temporary, since all monsters had some degree of physical regeneration, but usually it took longer to recover from broken bones than mutilated flesh, giving him time to inflict more damage so it would stand still long enough for him to be able to devour it safely. This one, however, had recovered from it as fast as he would have. He might have to break its bones while exsanguinating it to get it to—

...

The claws. It had changed its claws. Actively changed them. Like he could.

…

Oh, shit…

…

Well, it was fine. This thing was obviously just a mindless animal. Well, not exactly mindless, but it didn't have the human level intelligence and creativity needed to get full advantage of a power like his. It got big and gave itself claws, that was it…

From the general area of Laking Kamay's ass, something long and supple was growing and beginning to wag back and worth. A tail, obviously, and it was getting longer and longer, whipping back and forth and starting to slam into buildings behind it. Windows would have broken if they weren't broken already, and—

Laking Kamay leapt at Sanny like a frog, the formerly heavy, wallowing creature suddenly uncoiling with explosive force. The ground where its limbs had rested shattered, one of the craters breaking into the sewers below as the skinny monster leapt at Sanny's face, mouth open wide, trying to go for another bite. It was unfortunately not stupid enough to go for the bone mask where his face nominally was, going for Sanny's other shoulder, but he raised up his spike hand, muscles straining to lift tones of meat and bone burning with pain that was ignored and powered through. The spike went for Laking Kamay's face, only for it to twist its neck like it was boneless, moving out of the way. Claws struck, one raking at his bone mask as if trying to claw at his eyes, the other jabbing straight into Sanny's torso. The former left bleeding marks but mostly rebounded off the bone, while the latter goes straight in and stabbed through two gas bladders.

He immediately flexed the muscles around the bladders, trying to entrap the claws, but they're too sharp and straight, and get pulled back out cleanly. Sanny felt the wound burn and recognizes necrotic venom and nerve toxins. His other hand, the one with functioning claws and fingers, was snapping forward, grabbing the whip-like tail in the air, spiny barbs jabbing towards him from below and at an angle, a sucker punch if it hadn't been completely obvious and—

Laking Kamay's tongue snapped out, once more frog-like, and the glowing lure in the tip was gone, replaced by a needle barb.

Sanny imagined more than saw some clear fluid dripping from the injector as it pierced his chest, and squirted an obscene amount of venom into his flesh, his blood starting to coagulate immediately.

His chest felt like it was on fire as Laking Kamay's feet hit the ground, which was all the time Sanny needed to stab down with his bone spike. He felt the spike just skittering off some ribs and away from the spine, but the spike punched clean through the rest of the flesh before stabbing into the much-abused road below. Sanny felt the tip snap off as it struck the ground, but that was fine. The hooked barbs all along the rest of the spike anchored it in the thick, rubbery flesh as Laking Kamy lets out a roar of pain.

The venom in his chest continued to burn as Sanny ripped his forearm, spike and all, off at the elbow. Laking Kamay's tail slipped through his grasp, so he reached up and ripped the envenomed areas off his chest, revealing raw, wet flesh that ballooned outward, seemingly filling in the gaps as he threw the punctured and infected gas bladders at Laking Kamay's face. It struck full on, and there was a slapping sound as loud as a firework going off. The flesh writhed, still alive and metabolizing even if it was venom compromised, clenching and wrapping around the monster's face, blocking its eyes as Sanny stumbled away, getting space as he grew back his arm, muscles peeling off from his bicep and wrapping in skin before braiding together and fusing into a tentacle, a triangular and serrated spike starting to grow from the end of it.

The muscles peeled off the bone of the forearm embedded in Laking Kamay's back, skin wrapping around them as well as they grew spines and barbs and suckers and teeth and began ripping at its flesh.

Chapter 53: The Nightmares That Came To Manila, Part 9

When the sky above them had lit up, Tammy had been relieved. Red had finally arrived!

But no, it turned out it was a giant flying shark made of lightning.

Silly her. Of course the other monsters around the city wouldn't just conveniently make themselves scarce while they were having a crisis.

With their arrival, the weather changed for the worse, the cool, constant breeze growing stronger, more violent.

The Lightning Shark was, of course, huge, and much sleeker and longer than she thought it would be. It was hard to judge how high up it was, much less how long it was. It was blazingly bright as constant streams of lightning defined its shape, moving in sinuous motions through the air as if swimming, little streamers of lightning darting ahead of it as it moved.

It was extremely distracting, especially since Tammy wasn't sure what it was going to do. Was it simply just swimming and found itself here? Was it looking for food? Had it simply been drawn to the water? She didn't know, and neither did anyone else she asked, though Yellow had become terse, apparently too busy concentrating on the fight she was in. That was fair, she was fighting alone and probably didn't appreciate being bothered about animal trivia.

"It's circling back around," Magenta said, the voice coming from his cube sounding wary but no longer panicky.

Willy turned her head until some of the black spots dotting it saw the Lightning Shark. "I see it," she said, her feet fused to the branches of a tree so that she wouldn't fall of. She needed height. She needed to see. "Keep at it."

So far, it had been almost beneficial. The light it was giving out from the constant lighting outlining its shape was even useful, since it was so bright it was like having a spotlight in the sky. It also hadn't attacked them yet. It hadn't even attack the Marines down the road in front of the American Embassy when they'd fired at it with their tank, which had scared the sap out of Tammy when it had gone off, ha ha. The Lightning Shark had reacted, but it seemed to have been more from the sudden sound than from actually being hurt as it had suddenly flickered off in a crack of thunder like… well, like a nervous fish that had just had something drop into the water next to it.

Still, it had moved lower as a result, buzzing the trees and the metal poles holding the safety netting for the nearby golf course. Tammy could have sworn she saw lighting flick from the lightning Shark to the poles, and she'd ever felt the tips of the branches of trees suddenly being charred. So close, it was like being near a blazing bright neon whale as it 'swam' circles in the air, like a cat trying to find a place to settle down to sleep. She hoped it stayed that way. Even if they could afford to divide their forces to deal with this, who among them could meaningfully deal with a flying shark made of lightning?

It was a terrifying distraction from the death and misery in front of her.

The situation had already reached the point where she'd had to get aggressive, impaling the ones in the horde that were definitely dead. The ones with no more eyes, their skin desiccated, withered and pulled tight like overcooked fried chicken… her branches stabbed through those, then lifting them up and throwing them towards a previously mostly-empty parking lot that had been surrounded by a wall and closed gate. It made for a convenient pen to throw zombies into, though it had quickly begun to fill, and the zombies started trying to climb up until she began raising the walls with growth.

So far, she managed to keep ahead of the horde, pulling out those still alive. The people were clearly in pain, screaming and crying and thrashing with what limited independent mobility they had as the rest of their limbs moved without their control. Tammy tried to be gentle and have Blue be the same, but she didn't know how successful she was. Those who were still alive—when she noticed them and when Blue could point them out, presumably from the pain and utter terror they felt— were gently extricated from the horde, wrapped up in a pitcher plant-like pod that she grew around them to both protect them and keep their still-possessed limbs from taking them anywhere, before hanging them up from the trees like Christmas lights.

Tammy had no illusions that she'd been able to pull them out completely unharmed. Her sense of touch was fertilizer when she was like this, and the trees she used for extracting and isolating them were even worse. It was probably utterly terrifying for the people involved, but it was the best they could do. The horde being blocked off by her containment barrier looked like the sort of solid mass of humanity she'd only seen in pictures of the EDSA revolution or meme images about overpopulation in India, the kind of density you needed CGI to make nowadays because extras cost too much money. She was literally needing to physically push them back to keep them too packed for anyone to climb over the ones in front, probably terribly crushing people she hadn't manage to extract yet.

Time was ticking on, and with every passing moment the horde in front of her grew and grew, the Lightning Shark hovering over them ominously. They all kept an eye out for it, lest it suddenly dive down for an unexpected attack. Also because it was a flying shark, and therefore utterly terrifying. The waves of shuffling, moving corpses and not-quite-corpses-yet seemed never ending, and Tammy could only wonder how Magenta was doing at his end of the highway, protecting the bridge and the smaller branching roads that led around the Spanish-era relic that was Intramuros.

She didn't dare try to move to join him, however. It was all she could do to keep her end of the road contained. Time. They just had to buy time for Yellow to finish her fight so she could once more multitask enough to work her magic, even if it was just helping Blue identify the ones still alive so they could get them all out before they could finally have Red literally go scorched earth on all the giant mushrooms and the corpses being controlled by them.

Tammy peered down from the drone that was still being carried by Yellow's drone, looking for more places that the horde might break out through. With the view from above, she'd been able to stay ahead of them, taking control of plants in their path and growing them from weeds and grass to thick, solid trees that could obstruct the way, as long as she kept the branches of her trees heaving and pushing so that the horde couldn't simply climb over each other. Despite what she saw in front of her, the rest of the area was free of the afflicted and moving corpses.

That didn't mean it was completely empty. On the ground, growing where there was soil or wood or anything but bare metal and concrete, more and more mushrooms were growing. The previously car-sized ones were rising upward, looking like fairy houses, their stems and undersides filled with a soft glow-in-the-dark plastic toy green illumination. The biggest were close to Baseco and along the road from there, but more and more were sprouting, ready to fill the air with spores.

"Red, where are you?" she called.

"I'm almost there! I can see the shark, I'm heading towards you." Her black cube glowed with either plasma or lava inside it, and her words came out slightly distorted. The cube had been vibrating the whole time, as if Red had some sort of elevator music playing through it.

"Be careful. We don't want to fight it, we have enough to deal with right now," Tammy cautioned.

"I understand. I'll circle around to avoid it…"

"Can you see Yellow?"

There was a pause, the obsidian cube only vibrating to a barely discernable tune. "I… think I see her? At least, there are two giant monsters fighting, though I can't say for sure which one she is."

"The one with the horn," Yellow said tersely. "Don't mind me, I'm fine."

"You sure?"

"I'm sure. Go, gotta kill this thing."

In the sky, she saw the glowing, burning bright ball of light that was Red. She was far, far brighter than the Lightning Shark, literally leaving a glowing trail behind her, and Tammy could feel the plants around her rousing slightly as if at the sunrise, felt their metabolism start to wake up as their branches swayed in the wind. She could feel the chlorophyll that made up her bright green coloring doing the same, and had to stop leaves from budding randomly all over her. If she allowed that sort of behavior to go unchecked, she'd find that her feet had dug roots into the ground and she was starting to be top-heavy from spreading branches.

Just a little longer. They only had to hold out a little—

Wait.

Why was it getting so windy?

The tree she was fused to was swaying, moving almost back and forth as leaves and smaller branches whipped about almost violent. The people she'd rescued began to swing back and forth from where they hung in their fibrous cocoons, eliciting a new note to their screams as they were tossed about in the rising wind. And the wind continued to rise, and suddenly her barriers were swaying as they caught the wind like sails, waving back and forth as they were pushed, only to recoil and repeat the movement over and over again.

What was this? What was causing—? Her brain, wooden as it was, popped out a recollection and a name.

"Guys, keep an eye out, I think this is the Gale Bird!" Tammy said.

Above them, the Lightning Shark suddenly flickered with a brief burst of thunder, moving like a frightened fish even as its mouth opened and shut. Tammy found herself feeling slightly faint as she saw that it did, indeed, have huge, triangular teeth, except they also seemed to be made of lightning, and lighting was coming from them and arcing to other teeth made of lightning, and suddenly her mind was filled with childish terrors of sharks, like that time she hadn't taken a bath for two weeks after watching Jaws when she was seven, and then suddenly it was gone, thunder echoing in its wake.

From the darkness over the bay, the roar of the wind suddenly increased, and the tree Tammy was fused to suddenly started to bow, and she could feel her legs bending where they connected with the branch beneath her as her body found itself bending in the same direction, caught by the sudden gale that carried with it sprays of seawater. She saw Blue loose her footing, falling and being carried along by the wind, her frictionless body sliding on the ground beneath her until she hit a wall, where she was finally able to anchor herself.

The roof of one of the two-story buildings built along the side of the road, a generic looking building with the kind of blocky architecture and rough pebble wash facade that seemed prevalent with all buildings built before the nineties, suddenly crumbled, and Tammy heard concrete crushing as it became a perch. The monster on it was a dark outline in the night, but the wind coming from it was a good hint. With a hop, the Gale Bird jumped down and landed on the road. Then its head darted down, its beak opening wide and pecking down to grab one of the horde, swallowing it whole.

…

Tammy wanted to sigh, but she had no lungs. This thing was going to get around to trying to snack on the people she'd been rescuing, wasn't it?

"Blue, Magenta, change of plans!" she called, resisting the urge to add 'again'. "Get all those we've rescued and get them secured." She considered the people she'd extracted, who were handing from her various trees like berried to be plucked. "More secured! Don't attack, just discourage it from coming closer!" They couldn't afford to get into a kaiju fight here! Not with people so close to it!

She took control of the trees again, bending the lowermost branches, pushing them to the ground to make roots to support the rest of the tree even as she tried to pulled the people she'd rescued as deep among the trees of the trees as possible, the branches growing and weaving together to try and make a protective cage to keep the Gale Bird away. For the moment, the Gale Bird continued to keep pecking at the moving corpses of the horde like a chicken pecking at fallen grain. The wind continued to roar around it, making Tammy's job more difficult as she had to bend the branches in her control against the wind, even as they flexed and bent and seemed to go everywhere.

All right, they could do this. Just keep the Gale Bird away from the people who were still alive. Tammy had already gotten all the still-living around here, so they could probably safely let the Gale Bird eat the ones left, right? It's a shame for their families—if they still had any left alive—but the priority was saving the living, not the dead.

Light flashed, and suddenly the Gale Bird was gone, only for thunder to crack in the air as a blast of air so harsh it had Tammy whipping back and forth on her branch and she heard crashes as more than a few more precariously rooted trees didn't make it, falling to the ground as they were uprooted—

UPROOTED!

Tammy ignored her body as she frantically tried to recover, but it was too late. From where trees had fallen, leaving gaps in her containment wall, the afflicted corpses of the horde broke through into the road beyond.

"Blue!" she cried. "Containment! Containment! Stop them!"

"Yes, Green."

For a moment, she was tempted to turn, to join her cousin and help her stop the afflicted, and Tammy had to physically stop herself. No, no, Willy could do this without her. Tammy had to concentrate on closing the breach! She took control of the fallen trees, fattening the roots, using them to seal the break, even as more and more of the horde pushed and stiffly stumbled through the opening, the still-fine roots unable to stop them. "Magenta, are there any breaks at your end?"

"Rounding them up! That explosion managed to push a few against each other so hard they went over my barrier. Not gonna happen twice, but I have to get them all back before they cross the bridge!"

"Got it, good luck!" she said as thunder cracked and wind roared again and again. The trees around her continued to whip back and forth in the typhoon-like gales, and even as she finally managed to patch up the holes, she felt another tree shudder and start to tip over, the wind too much for its roots to anchor against. Above, in the sky, the Lightning Shark and the Gale Bird fought, wind and lightning lashing out yet both just going through the other. Still the two monsters continued attacking each other futilely, either from urges or animal instincts and hunger, throwing themselves against the other again and again as Tammy finished sealing the breaks in her containment wall.

Tammy didn't scream in shock as lightning stabbed down from the sky, slamming into a streetlight and killing it in a shower of sparks, but only because she didn't have a mouth or lungs. Another bolt slamming into the branches of a tree and causing the point of impact to explode as the heat made water molecules turn into steam instantly, even as the rising gale whipped branches so hard leaves were stripping off. A third bolt hit slammed into the midst of the horde, and suddenly the sky was filled with bolts of lightning flickering out from the Lightning Shark above like it was the center of a plasma ball exhibit as it spun and tried to bite the Gale Bird even as the latter tried to claw and peck it right back, both of their immaterial forms just passing through each other.

There was a ripping sound as the corrugated metal roof of a nearby building was ripped off by the wind, deceptively waving like paper before the final rivets holding it in place tore, and it went flying in to the night. Nearby, there was an explosive snap as a branch suddenly ripped off and tumbled to the ground, clipping some of the bundles with people on its way.

No, no, no, no, no! Tammy tried to protect them, weaving branches into a more solid protection even as she tried to keep trees from falling in the impromptu thunder storm the two monsters were creating, bending the trunks so that branches could rest their weight on the ground, trying to minimize the possibility of wind causing branches to snap. She spared a look toward Willy, and saw she was containing the afflicted corpses in her own way, blasting them with water that would freeze and engulf them to keep them from moving. Good girl!

So occupied was she, Tammy didn't notice how the ground started to shake.

Chapter 54: The Nightmares That Came To Manila, Part 10

Inconsiderately, getting impaled near the spine by a spike that suddenly sprouts tentacles to start ripping apart flesh wasn't enough to kill Laking Kamay. It was still a spike through its back which had tentacles ripping at its flesh, however, and therefore very distracting. Being impaled through the back, it was also nearly impossible to reach and remove since limbs rarely had the flexibility to reach that far.

Sanny would have liked to say he planned it that way, but it had simply been a lucky hit.

Laking Kamay was screaming as blood flowed from its back, the flesh tearing even as it tried to heal. Thrashing about in pain, it slammed into the buildings on either side, repeated impacts wearing them down to rubble. There was a crack and another scream as it accidentally broke one of its own bones in its frantic struggling with pain.

The urge prey consume devour filled Sanny as he stepped back to be out of tantrum range, but he gently pushed it back. Yes, he agreed they were going to eat this one, but there was no reason to get in close and put himself in danger when it was already hurting itself. A new bone and hand were growing to replace the one he'd removed to make the drone, which he was using to dig through the ribcage from the back to try and get at the heart again. It was the tougher approach, since there were more bones and the spine in the way, but it was working as Laking Kamay frantically tried and failed to rip it out, completely ignoring Sanny as a result. Taking out the heart would also be temporary, but the effect it would have on bloodflow should slow Laking Kamay even further.

Laking Kamay's attack forced Sanny to upwardly revise his assessment of how fast the monster could move out of the water, even if it was in bursts. He should have figured, many aquatic predators were burst ambushers at the edge of the water. The attack had been quick, sudden, and had been meant to be overwhelming and final, and so when his arm had finally grown back, a new spike jutting out from the bones of his forearm, he decided to return the favor.

The monster's thrashing had leveled the buildings around him, its pained kicks throwing debris into farther buildings and roads. Try as it might to bend its arm up and over, it still couldn't reach the drone on its back, and the few times it was able to brush at the drone sideways, the barbed and clawed tentacles managed to ward it off. Laking Kamay completely ignored Sanny, completely focused on the drone on its back.

It afforded a wonderful distraction as Sanny threw his entire body on top of the monster. He felt bones on both of their bodes break at the impact, felt three of his rib crack, but considered that a fair deal as the spine under him broke and Laking Kamay's legs abruptly stopped moving. The drone lay sandwiched between them, the spike digging deeper in as Sanny pressed down harder, gas bags inflating to try and spread his weigh as evenly over the monster's body as he used his limbs—arms and legs, because he was a bipedal upright hominid and thought like it—using them to weight down Laking Kamay's limbs. Tentacles erupted from the ends of his feet, tangling around Laking Kamay's long, bony legs. Sanny felt perversely like a rapist, using his body weight to force his victim and do unnatural and unwanted things to them…

Prey consume devour!

Laking Kamay roared, trying to buck him off, but the monster's slender build and lack of leverage allowed Sanny to press the advantage of his position. His drone fused with him, adding to the perversely rapist-esque position as the tentacles grew and lengthened, wrapping around Laking Kamay's torso, mouths on the tentacles opening to attach leech-like to patchwork flesh and fur, teeth full of spiked barbs anchoring even further. He could feel the beginnings of spines starting to grow on Laking Kamay's flesh, but not quickly enough. They were already meeting the scales he'd clad his gas bags and limbs in. The protection wouldn't last long, but they'd give him time.

His head extended, turtle-like—or at least, cartoon turtle-like—out from between his shoulders, his spine elongating out from under the spiny shell on his back. The triangular, tooth-like horn on the bone mask at the end of the limb moved like as sword as Sanny carefully lined it up and stabbed his nominal face downwards at Laking Kamay's head. The monster's head twisted back and forth with a nearly unnatural range of motion—but then, who was he to talk about 'unnatural'? Its wide, black eyes seemed to see the horn poised above it, and the thrashing grew more violent, but Sanny waited patiently, even as he took control and diverted the military geniuses who kept trying to aim their shoulder-mounted rocket things at his head.

The temptation to just point the things at their own feet and blow them up was strong, but he wasn't some murder hobo. Besides, power wasn't killing them, power was having completely control of them and treating them like annoying insects barely worth his attention!

…

Anyway, back to the matter at hand, because that was a bit too borderline supervillain even by his standards…

Sanny waited for the right opportunity as his scales warded off spines and Laking Kamay finally started growing other vestigial limbs before his head stabbed down, the bone horn stabbing into the base of the skull, severing the spine. The rest of Laking Kamay twitched and went limp even as the spines and limbs continued to grow. If it was anything like him—and it was starting to look more and more likely—Sanny had less than a minute before the damaged was sufficiently repaired for the monster to be mobile again.

This was his best chance.

Making the military shoot off any of their rocket loads away from him, since he'd have to stop paying attention to them and foiling their aim, Sanny's bone mask split open vertically, peeling outward on either side of the long triangular horn. The empty space that had once contained pulped brain and eyes unfurled with tentacles to hunger, all lined with round mouths that seemed to go too deep, to open into depths. He felt once more a phantom sensation, like she was taking a deep breath. Anticipation filled him, and Sanny knew it wasn't entirely his own as the tentacles began to wrap around Laking Kamay's head, the mouths biting, teeth digging in.

As the weakly struggling head tried to fight back, jaw snapping open and close as the tongue, stinger tip dripping with venom, tried to flop at him, Sanny felt it. The shift inside, as if a mouth as opening wide, and licking teeth, lunging…

…and was met head on.

For the second time, Sanny felt someone trying to devour him while he was trying to devour them, and he just barely managed to evade the possibility of a far too intimate deadlock. The only reason he knew such a deadlock was possible because he'd indulged Tammy's idea of trying to share the same prey, and he'd barely managed to pull her back from simply following instinct and metaphorically swallowing whole. He felt the surprise and annoyance at his interference, like he'd held in a relieving biological action while it was still unfinished and was causing the pressure to build when it could be given release.

However, for the first time he found himself on the receiving end on an attempt to consume him, a genuine, intent one that wouldn't end in a frantic burst of teenaged self-control and apologies. Instead, Sanny was pressed—

It was huge. Something, endless, boundless, almost beyond comprehension, almost understandable—

And then suddenly he and she were pressing back, and he was a spark, bright and burning, while she was around him, part of him, inside him, a vast, terrible and great thing that pressed against the other, so like themselves, too like themselves, but not them, nothing like them. Sanny could feel her, calling not just to consume but filling him with such basic, raw hunger and the call to satisfy it. He felt it when she and the force that could only be Laking Kamay trying to devour them right back clashed, no longer deadlocking like two hands accidentally entwining fingers when they were trying to shove against each other. Instead, two fists shoved back and forth, hard, closed, wrathful, except the fists were also mouths, lined with teeth to shred and tear bite-sized bits and bleed and chew and bite and swallow.

There were no images, no convenient visual metaphors of slightly curved, needle-like teeth meeting triangular, serrated, saw-like teeth, only two forces pressing against each other, and Sanny was just there, hanging like a spark…

And on the other side, hanging from Laking Kamay, was another spark. Small. Weak. Flickering, almost snuffed out…

Laking Kamay and she clashed once more, like open mouths trying to bite each other, teeth rebounding on teeth, trying to find something, anything, any advantage, a deadlock in its own way…

This wasn't the Blood Bug. It wasn't beaten, broken and overwhelmed. Laking Kamay was still full of vim and vigor, and what the hell was vim exactly, so that even when held down, it still fought, still didn't surrender, driven by animal need and appetite that couldn't be matched….

Or rather, could be matched, and that was a problem, because she was only matching it, becoming locked in a bloody battle of attrition, even as—

Sanny felt, in a strange way that felt both distant and immediate, rockets slamming into his back, his shell, the thick bone and titanium organic composite breaking and buckling at the pressures, felt ruptured cells and internal bleeding, felt her rock as the injuries registered, and she was almost pushed back, almost eaten, before Laking Kamay got hit with a glancing impact with another rocket. Laking Kamay immediately stopped fighting, drawing back almost all the way, and Sanny heard it roar in pain, once more losing sight of its priorities…

Sanny struck. They couldn't risk more rockets, not with them on top of Laking Kamay and likely to take more of the hits. He threw himself somehow at the reeling, distracted monster, and she came with him, because she was within him, around him, part of him.

He threw his small, almost insignificantly little spark, burning bright with all he was, at the monster as it was drawing back and in pain. So was she, but he pressed them both forward, made her open wide, and while Laking Kamay was ignoring them in favor of itself—

—Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Not Like. Pain. Anger. Not Like. Not Like! Pain. Surprise. Prey. Consume. Devour. Prey. Prey. Consume. Devour. Prey. Consume. Devour. Prey. Consume. Devour. What? No. It Not Prey. It Not Prey. Other Prey! Consume! Devour. It Not Prey! Other Prey! No! No! No! N—

—make it stop. Make it stop. Mommy! Daddy! Make it stop! Don't want to eat! Save me mommy, daddy! The monster is making me eat! I don't want! I want to wake up! I want to go home! I'll be a good boy! I'll stay home! I'll go to school! I'll work for money for food! I'll be good! Please mommy, daddy, save me! Make it stop! I want to wake up! I want to go home! I don't want to go swimming anymore! I thought I was awake, so I tried to go back home, but now I'm asleep again! I'm dreaming I'm a monster! Mommy, daddy, please… Kuya? Kuya, can you see me? You can see me! Kuya, please save me, I want to go home! I don't know how to go back home! Kuya, kuya, please, please kuya, take my hand, save me, please, the monster is about to eat me, please Kuya! Kuya! No, no, no! Kuya, please! I want to wake up, please kuya, don't eat me, don't eat me kuya, I'll do anything, I know where you can find cheap girls, almost free, just please save me kuya, please, please, I want to wake up, I want to wake up, please kuya DON'T EAT ME! NO! NO! No! no! no. no… n…—

Sanny tried. At the last moment, he tried. He tried to pull back, even if a part of him knew it was too late for the small, weak, faded, smothered spark that SAW HIM! He tried. He wanted to say he tried…

For a heartbeat that lasted forever, Santiago Dalag saw the… the…

His mouth, her mouth, their mouth, snapped shut, and there was no going back as he felt the little spark of s… as he felt the thing that had once been human, the little spark that… that for the grace of God could have been him—

When he opened his many, many, many eyes to find his mouth-lined tentacles feeding on meat of the lifeless, empty corpse of the monster that had been Laking Kamay… Sanny knew he was a murderer, of the worst, most terrible sort.

He expected to wretch, even if he didn't have the organs for it. Expected shock, disgust, loathing. Expected himself to think 'what have I done' as he forced himself to let go of the gnawed-upon head, pulling his neck back into his damaged shell, the bone plate face still open, tentacles drooping down, bracketed on either side by paleness and dark eyeholes.

He expected guilt. Shame. Horror. Denial.

Instead, there was only the cold, detached thought of 'Ah. Now it makes sense' as urges of prey consume devour coming from the back of his head, replaced by the most wonderful feeling of satisfaction, of contentment, of being pleasantly full after a large, wonderful meal, of a belly full but not bursting, of new possibility, of power…

The little spark was already gone.

Sanny knew he should feel wretched. Shocked. Disgusted. Loathsome. Ashamed. Horrified. Guilty. He even expected to feel numb and empty.

Instead, all he felt was a perverse expectation as he waited for feelings that didn't come, followed by impatience when they didn't.

…

He was a truly twisted piece of shit, wasn't he?

…

Well, enough trying to see if he had some kind of normal, stereotypically 'healthy' emotional response. There were more monsters out there and a team who needed him.

Sanny let go of the giant, already cooling corpse of a most unfortunate soul. It was still warm, cells still metabolizing, but it was only dead meat now, empty of anything to make it special. He loosened the grip of his tentacles and gently, gingerly rose up and up and up and up, the impaling spike slowly being absorbed back into his chest. At their feet, it looked like a picture from World War 2, crushed buildings and everything completely flattened, with something poking out here and there to give an almost comedic bit of contrast. There was a tree that looked completely unharmed, swaying in the night breeze that was stronger now without so many building to get in the way. A car, standing as if perfectly parked, if a little dusty.

She was already at work, changing their body, replacing gas bladders with muscle, actual muscle as he began to walk with a bow-legged gait through the path of destruction the… the poor child just trying to go home after months trapped in a waking nightmare had made. With each step, each pendulous swing of arms longer than busses, he felt strangely… not light. More… able, somehow.

Hesitantly, he relaxed, letting go to her and she stepped forward, eager happy seeping the back of his head, and all he could think of was a puppy with a toy, running around and playing with it without a care in the world.

The cynical part of him pointed out that puppies grew up to be dogs, which were nothing but loud, bite-happy poop machines of no redeeming values.

He didn't feel like he grew lighter, or stronger. Yet as the layers of muscles grew and grew, as he walked away ignoring the unrelenting gunfire that was all being directed at him now that he was the only monster left in the sight of all the soldiers around him, Sanny felt… more comfortable. As if his own skin had been refit to sit better on his frame. Not perfectly. But better.

Experimentally, he increased his pace from a slow walk to what he imagine was a predatory stalk, leaning forward a bit. The movements felt natural, as if all the weight of the bone and muscle and shell of his body had been wonderfully balanced and not just slapped together because fuck it. He felt the ground shake with every determine step, felt the pavement collapsing under his feet as sewers collapsed under the road. Wind roared, barely chilling the wide expanse of his skin, and when lightning flashed and was followed by the inevitable thunder, the wince caused a rippling, full-body involuntary muscular contraction that lasted a good five minutes…

Wait.

Sanny swore inside his own head as he actually looked through his senses and noticed the world around him rather than enjoying the feeling of, if not exactly fucking the square-cube law, then at least copping feels in intimate places and getting under its clothes. The wind roared liked there was a typhoon, and lightning flashed like a strobe, to deafening thunder. The clouds above were being blown this way and that, not in any orderly direction or in a rotating cyclone, but in haphazard streaks and lines. In the sky, something bright and sinuous as flickering, serpentine around something with great wings that seemed to flicker in and out of view.

From the back of his head, a familiar urge came.

What a glutton.

"Guys, I'm done," he said calmly through his drone in Kim's house. "Heading your way."

"Yellow? Oh, thank God! We need help, I think we're losing some of the people here! We need you to keep them alive!" Green's drone exclaimed. "The Lightning Shark and Gale Bird are fighting too close! And there are giant mushroom monsters all of a sudden! I don’t' know where they came from!"

"I'll do what I can, but they'll still have fungal infections," Sanny said, already reaching out. "Not my area of expertise. I'm better with bacteria." Still, he wasn't entirely helpless. Fungus was protein. He could have cells eat protein…

"Do what you can! Red's almost here, she can burn the stuff away!" Magenta said. "Red, where are you?"

A thin line of light bright as the sun wrote itself across the sky. It passed between the Gale Bird and Lightning Shark, and for a moment, Sanny felt a burning, fiery heat, hotter than any summer, and the two flying monsters darted back from each other with alacrity. The clouds above roil strangely, like the surface of a boiling kettle, as the line of light disappeared.

"I'm here!" Red's cube of obsidian vibrated. "I'm in range!"

"New plan!" Green said immediately. "Keep shooting those two, and try to drive them away from here and over the water! You can burn Baseco later, we need to get the people still alive out of here! These mushroom things are toughed then the zombies, but I'm holding them off for now! Yellow, can you send drones to help?"

"I'll try!" Red said, and another line of light drew itself across the sky, aimed at the Lightning Shark, which dodged aside with a crack of thunder. "I'm not sure how effective it is, but plasma to plasma contact seems to be happening"

"I won't be able to get close to those things, not without my drones getting infected," Sanny said as he waded through the bay, water splashing up to his knees now, feet sinking into the cold, ground that was alternately soft and hard, depending on if he was stepping on mud, rock or debris. He walked past the American Embassy, keeping the buildings between him and the tanks of the marines, ignoring the little rubber boats with more of them in the water. "Made of meat, remember?"

"Holy shit, I see you, you're huge! That's still vulnerable?"

"I'd rather not test it," Sanny said. "Let's not have the 'mind-controlled teammate' fight tonight, all right?" He could see things moving, pale and glowing a little green, pressing clumsily against what looked like a wall made from trees. Huh. He sort of expected some humanoid-shaped thing, but no, it was just a tangle of fungal reproductive parts that seemed to have gone mobile

"Do what you can, then! Red, as soon as you think those two are far enough, burn Baseco and get rid of those mushrooms that are spreading spores!"

"Those are all just symptoms," Sanny pointed out. "Unless we find and devour whatever central monster is actually responsible for the growths, they'll just keep growing and spreading."

"But it has to be somewhere in Baseco, right?" Magenta said. "One of the mushrooms? It's not like there's anything else it could be. The infection hasn't spread beyond there."

"We don't know that," Sanny said. "The growths coincide with the fungal infections on people, but the actual source could be anything living there. It… it might even be one of the still-living infected."

Tammy sounded confused. "But why would they do that?"

"I currently have strong reason to believe that the five of us were very, very lucky. Jas had shown that the urges can be so overwhelming we lose control to the power. Take that to the most horrific extreme."

There was silence.

It was Ryan who said, "Ate Sanny… Laking Kamay…"

"Not now," Sanny said curtly. "Not the time."

The look in Ryan's eyes… "Oh, Ate… "

"Not the time!" he snapped.

He didn't need their pity or compassion. After all, he'd felt nothing for what he'd done. He didn't care.

"Well… if it's on the island, it'll still burn," Green said with shaky finality. "So it works either way. Red, continue with driving those two off, then fire when ready!"

Chapter 55: The Baseco Horror, Part 1

Another line of light carved itself along the sky. It reflected off the clouds above, staining them white as it seemed to make night into day for a moment. A wave of heat came a moment later, hot as an open flame from far too close as the beam of plasma shot between the two monsters flying in the air. Both darted back from the beam, one moving in a sinuous, serpentine motion, the other just seeming to fade out of sight save for swirling mist pulled down from the clouds that evaporated away in moments from the heat.

The beam itself ceased to be as it crossed over the waters of Manila Bay, a measure of darkness falling once more. Yet even this darkness was not the black of a true overcast night, as the burning ball of plasma floating between the city below and the clouds above shone with a sun-like radiance. Skyscrapers of the city cast long shadows through the light. It lit the flattened and debris-strewn blocks of the city where a surprisingly brief battle between towering beasts had occurred.

In the midst of this, a fallen corpse more than fifty meters in height lay sprawled and still as blood and viscera gushed from the hole stabbed through its chest, dripped from wounds. Already it smelled worse than sewage as the bodily fluids pooled on the ground and flowed, dripping down to the shattered road and into the sewers beneath. In the harsh light of the burning orb, the corpse's rubbery skin was a dolphin grey, its fur dark brown, its scales a silvery green.

The light from the burning orb shone down on crowds of hundreds, thousands of people in various states of dress. Wet, cold and tired, they milled about in confusion and fear, their bodies free once more, yet all too aware of being trapped in their own flesh as they had run—as they had been made to run—from their homes and hotels and businesses by the distorted, feminine voice they had all heard. They had run for kilometers, over broken roads, over cars, over the bodies of the dead, as behind them two monsters like something out of movies had clashed and one had reigned victorious over the other.

In the water of the bay, that victor stood, its cracked shell already whole, limbs thick and strong as it rose upright in the water, staring down at the tangled juncture of roads between the port area that had been turned into a military camp to contain the infected corpses of the artificial island of Baseco, the old fort of Intramuros, and the highway that passed between them. Walls formed from trees had grown, containing the spreading horde of the infected of the slums of Baseco. From the trees hung the bodies of the living, their nerves burning with pain as eldritch, unnatural mycelial hyphae spread through them, stealing their bodies even as it fed upon them slowly, and leaving the poor souls—many brave soldiers who had stood watch against this evil for months—in agony as they begged for mercy, for surcease, for God…

 

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Tammy had honestly thought things would finally get easier when Yellow and Red finally reached their location and be able to assist. Why had she thought that?-!

"I've managed to shut down the most painful of the nerves, but they'll still be in a little pain," Yellow reported through her drone. "If I shut it down completely I won't have any warning for if any more issues come up as the infection keeps spreading through their nerves or they go into shock. More into shock. The ones with hypothermia I've warmed up, though they'll have lost a little weight. Eh, no one ever minds having a smaller gut. They'll live, and if we can get them out of this situation I should be able to get the fungus out of them. The damned things are growing into their optic nerves. Some of them have it in their brains. Green, I think you've managed to get everyone still alive at your end… and you've got a few that are dead but you probably couldn't te—Red, shoot! Shoot!"

Tammy felt the heat and radiance as another line of plasma tore through the sky and there was a crack of thunder as the Lightning Shark was presumably diverted away from moving in Yellow's general direction again. Tammy couldn't actually see this, occupied as she was by the mushroom monsters and mushroom-armored infected trying to batter down the barrier of trees she'd built. She'd only seen them forming too late, growing out of the ground covered in fungal mycelia. She'd thought they'd just be normal giant mushrooms at first, and had been in the middle of sighing about how it was now 'normal' for giant mushrooms to be a thing, until they'd ripped themselves out of the ground and started moving on their own power towards her wall. The mushrooms has been surprisingly tough, certainly tougher than the canned stuff from the supermarket that went with the pasta she liked to cook, but that hadn't been much of an impediment to them trying to climb over the barrier she had made.

They hadn't been vaguely human shaped, like the popular depiction of mushroom monsters, with the cap acting like a head and inexplicable limbs sprouting from the rest. Instead, they had grown in clumps that looked less phallic and more like some kind of weird architecture, growths of different sizes and lengths seemingly fused together in a common base. Each growth seemed to move independently, bending along the stalk, each of them acting like limbs as they propelled themselves along the ground, and Tammy had been reminded of the form she had taken when trying to fight the Gagambuhala. The clusters of mobile mushrooms had no visible—or at least identifiable— eyes, but they somehow knew where to go because they went straight for the barrier's she'd raised.

Tammy had needed to grow her walls higher, more and more roots growing and spreading underground to anchor it in place as branches grew, trying to push and pull and cast down the mushroom drones trying to climb over the barrier. Despite the fact they had no fingers or even any structures like hands, they seemed to bond with the white web of mycelia already growing on the trees, sticking to them like glue to pull themselves up. Their size made it difficult to just pick them up and grab them, and when her branches made contact, more strands of mycelia dug into her bark and wood, burrowing inside and breaking down her cells, forcing her to grow to repair the damage and repel the infection.

She'd had to detach her main body from the tree she was on to prevent the infection from spreading into her, making her perch precarious, but she hung on with fingers and arms that were harder and stiffer than mere flesh and bone as she directed branches to batter the clusters of moving mushrooms, to bend and fold under their weight and drop them, to impale them and grow inside them to hold them in place.

Her mind was so occupied she couldn't come up with a catchy name for them!

Blue helped as she could, blasting back the infected now that Tammy's attention was torn, encasing more and more in ice, and reshaping that ice to try to pull them away from the walls and push back those behind them. It made Tammy burn with pride when she saw that. Her cousin was improvising, being creative, yet still using minimal force instead of just blasting away and ripping limbs apart…

More of the things had also appeared at the bridge Magenta was defending, but from the sound of it he didn't seem to be having any problems dealing with them. Others had grown even larger and fallen into the waters of the bay where she hadn't raised barriers because of the water, their large bodies awkward but buoyant, as they tried to propel themselves around the blockade that had been raised. They were enthusiastically sunk and eaten by Sanny. In the salt water, her drones didn't have to worry about being infected by fungal spores, letting them tear apart the mobile mushroom clumps—no, Fungal Clusters!—with relative impunity.

…all right, maybe things were a bit easier, but it certainly didn’t feel like it for her!

"Where did these things even come from?-!" Tammy cried as another line of glowing plasma tore across the sky, scaring away the Gale Bird.

"Well, the mushrooms were growing," Magenta said.

"But they were just mushrooms! And they were growing slowly! Well, slow, anyway. And none of the mushrooms in Baseco were walking around!" Yes, as the leader she knew she shouldn't complain, but it was a legitimate question!

"Maybe it was the proximity to the Lightning Shark?" Yellow said, sounding surprisingly calm and thoughtful for someone literally controlling hundreds of thousands of things at once. "Studies have shown mushroom growth can be stimulated by electrical arcs, and there's even old superstitions of mushrooms growing from lightning strikes."

Her face had absolutely no expressions at all, but it was the thought that counted as Tammy sent the dirtiest look she could at the Lightning Shark flying above. "Red, try to see if you can get direct hits on the Lightning Shark, maybe you'll actually be able to convince it to stay away."

Petty? No, she wasn't petty, she was the leader of a superhero team! That sort of pettiness was unbecoming of her, this was a genuine tactical decision!

"Uh, Yellow?"

"Yes, Magenta?"

"I have to ask… your fight with Laking Kamay is done, right?"

"Correct. I won."

"And... you're not actually doing anything, right? I mean, physically."

"Nope. I mean, I'm controlling a bunch of kinda-sharks to eat the giant mushrooms in the water trying to get around the defenses you, Green and Blue have put up, while at the same time keeping all the infected people still alive from dying or being in too much pain, while also keeping an ear on this drone for communications purposes, and connecting to hundreds of other drones around the city who are keeping hundreds of thousands of people from getting sick or dying, but no, I myself am physically not doing anything besides standing around since I can't get close to the fungal spores."

Tammy winced as while branches hammered at the Fungal Clusters. Put like that… the other woman was still dealing with a lot of stuff even after beating Laking Kamay, wasn't she? "I'm sorry for asking you to do so much!"

"It's fine, I'm a gainfully employed adult. I'm used to being treated like disposable garbage good only for making money by negligent bosses who undervalue my experience and abilities, and see me as a replaceable cog in their cash machine."

"I'm VERY SORRY for asking you to do so much!"

"Really, it's fine…"

"Uh, so… if your fight is done… why are you a hundred foot tall giant…? I don't even know what."

"Because until now everyone and everything has been able to get huge and fuck the square-cube law but me, and now that I have, I am not going to stop unless I have to."

"But… wouldn't it be safer for you to get smaller so that the Lightning Shark can't see you?"

"Hell no! Being smaller than a shark is a good way to get eaten! Small things made of meat are prey! At least they're actually naturally wary if you're bigger than they—RED, SHOOT IT, SHOOT IT!"

Tammy's view brightened, and she felt the trees around her opening their leaves, despite the fungus growing on them, soaking in the energy in the light as Red fired another beam of plasma. Once more, the Lightning Shark diverted its path to avoid being hit.

"Thank you…" Yellow said in a shaky voice.

"It doesn't seem to be working," Magenta said flatly.

"I'm still be bigger than it can swallow in one bite."

"Fair enough, I su—oh, shit."

Tammy blinked. That other exclamation had been… unexpected. "Magenta?"

"The mushroom things are getting over the bridge!" the previously composed college student reported. "Damn it, they grew this white stuff under the bridge to get around the curve I made to contain them! Mushrooms are growing all over the bridge!"

Tammy made a snap decision. "Red, destroy that bridge NOW!" she ordered. "If they infect the people on the other side, they'll be able to spread across the entire city!"

For a moment, there was silence as Red hesitated. In that moment, Tammy knew what was going to happen. Red… Jaselle was going to ask if they had to do it, if there was some other way, and they'd lose precious time explaining—

A beam of light slammed into the bridge, and there was an explosion as concrete and steel were superheated in an instant. At the point of impact, an incandescent, glowing cloud surrounded by an ineffectual veil of cement dust rose, plasma no longer pressurized and directed but a loose, expanding cloud that glowed with light and should have burned with such heat as to set the atmosphere on fire. Then the glowing cloud seemed to ripple, and then it was a bright orange, glowing wave of lava falling out of the air that caused the swollen and rushing river beneath the bridge to bubble with clouds of steam.

Eventually, Red's cube vibrated. "Was that enough?" she asked hesitantly.

"Uh… let me check…" Magenta replied.

Tammy waited as she had Blue go back to flooding the ground and creating layers of ice to keep this trick from being repeated at her end of the blockade. If they could grow mushroom behind her lines…

"I think you got them," Magenta reported. "The white fiber stuff they were growing from is burned on the other side of the bridge, and doesn't seem to be spreading anymore. It'll leave a little sand to warn me, just in case, but I think you stopped it…

"Magenta, with the bridge down, you don't need to defend it anymore," Tammy said. "Check the other places you've blocked in case they've spread there too."

"Shit, you're right. On my way as soon as I secure the people I've managed to extract."

"Be careful," Yellow said. "There are still a few live ones in the horde on your end."

"I know, but trying to pull them out is a bit to chancy for me. Don't blow them up?"

"Just trap everyone near them and sort it out later," Tammy said. More mushrooms were growing on the streets in front of her, rising up into more Fungal Clusters to replace the ones impaled on her branches. "We need to finish this so we can deal with those two flying—"

There was a crack of thunder.

There was a reverberating, echoing roar that shook her trees and made the roots she used to balance herself vibrate. It was a monstrous cry that would have been deafening had she had ears made of meat, the sort of thing special effects sound engineers have been trying to make for decades to bring creations of the silver screen to life.

It sounded absolutely terrified.

Tammy turned her head to get one the many spots on her head that she could see through pointed at where Sanny was, only to see a gigantic shark clamed on to her enormous arm. Unlike before, it wasn't bright and glowing and flying. Instead, it looked… well, it didn’t even look like the sharks she saw on TV. Instead, it looked more like something from her dentist's aquarium, almost like a catfish, except it was as big as a ship and was fastened on to Yellow's bus-thick wrist, which she'd seemed to raise to protect her face. The shark wiggled and jerked back and forth as if trying to tear a huge chunk off, while Yellow was…

…was…

Tammy paused and double checked, just to be sure.

…

There was no denying or mistaking it. Yellow was flailing around in batshit panic, screaming at the top of what must have been considerable lungs. There was none of the composed, intelligent, widely read and occasionally frighteningly ruthless woman that Tammy had come to rely on, the kind who treated bodies like disposable clothes and viewed pain as something to get rid of by shutting down nerves.

It would have been funny if Tammy couldn't perfectly understand why she was freaking out.

After all, she had a shark biting on her arm.

There was a flare of light, and suddenly the shark was flesh and blood no more, but instead glowing electric plasma, and Yellow was screaming louder and louder. The windows of nearby cars and buildings didn't break, but the sound was in the range where it felt like they should, even for her. Arcs of lightning played across Yellow's body, causing it to shudder and spasm all over before the shark was once more solid and thrashing back and forth, doubtlessly drawing blood as the shark's teeth dug in. Yellow was slumping, her limbs shaking and weak as she slumped forward and walked unsteadily.

Even with her size, the fact she was still shaking from electrocution—some parts of her were actually steaming—the steps where clearly panicked as she walked towards the closest land. The giant shark's weight was making her list, and for a moment it looked almost like she was going to collapse into the water.

With a shudder that Tammy felt from where she was standing on a tree, Yellow collapsed onto the grounds of the port area, and there were nauseating cracking sounds like bone breaking. She actually saw the shell on Yellow's back seem to crack in half as one side started lifting up. There were flopping sounds like a beached whale as the Lightning Shark continued trying to rip a large chunk from Yellow's wrist by thrashing its head so that its teeth would saw through the meat and bone…

Tammy shook herself. "Yellow! Are you okay? Yellow!" she yelled at the drone next to her drone, trying to get Ate Sanny's attention. "Yellow, snap out of it!"

Finally, drone shuddered, its eyes—which had disturbingly started to roll independently of each other, focusing on Tammy. "Boss…"

"Yellow! Good, you're okay! Get up Yellow, you're going to get eaten."

"Boss…" Yellow's drone quavered. "I think I've found the monster controlling the mushrooms."

Tammy wanted to blink. "What?"

Yellow's huge kaiju body started roaring even louder as the Lightning Shark, in a burst of light, turned back to arcs of electric plasma and shot into the air as steamers of electricity from it scrapped along the ground and Yellow's fallen form.

Chapter 56: The Baseco Horror, Part 2

As burning agony began to spread over his body like his nerves being set on fire, Sanny reflected that he should have realized sooner. When people talk about fungus, mushrooms are what come to mind. Those tall, usually phallic-shaped growths that weren't trees or plants, as everyone who's had to endure elementary school science classes knows… except that was horribly, horribly wrong. Mushroom's weren't really the fungus at all. There were just fruits, growths that acted as reproductive organs—yes, the irony inherent in that was obvious—of the real fungus.

The real body of a fungal growth wasn't immediately obvious. It tended to be hidden, buried under the surface of what it was feeding on. It was in the network of the strands of mycelia, grown from the spores released, growing under the surface of the ground, inside living trees, inside rotting wood… and inside animal flesh.

Sanny's flesh.

He cut off the pain receptors but that only dimmed the pain for a moment as the mycelia, growing and boring into his flesh far too fast to be natural, reached the underlying nerves themselves, which was when the 'being set on fire' feeling started. He thrashed, even as it made him slam on ground riddled with more mycelia, which immediately anchored themselves to his flesh and were ripped out of the ground, only to start growing on him immediately.

Sannyf fought back, of course. Bodies are not without immune responses, even to fungi. His flesh writhed as he tried to manually eject the growths out from under his skin, but it was a losing battle. They grew fast, digging into his flesh, injecting themselves into more and more nerves. Only his bulk and the design of his current body slowed it down, as the mycelia had precious feet of flesh to dig through to reach the nerves—

And then it tried to eat him.

He also died then and there. The burning agony of his nerves served as enough distraction that he almost didn't notice the burning net wrapping around them, ready to break them down, if it hadn't tried to eat her first.

It was like being bitten in the back of the neck when you weren't expecting it, or stabbed between the shoulder blades. A sudden attack where you were vulnerable and weak, a place that should have been fatal. All the warning Sanny was a sudden burst of surprise pain and eventually THREAT before he could feel her being pulled back, and he was being dragged along, and his awareness of what was all around him began to fade, replaced with the sensation of being in the grip of something—

…move…

The urge was his own as he threw himself forward, towards the force devouring them even as she was unable to respond, still taken by surprise. There were no images of teeth biting down, no imaginary claws or visions of tentacles or roots holding them in place, but Sanny knew that they were in the mouth of the beast, being sucked in and all it had to do was chew and swallow….

He pushed back desperately, trying to raise resistance, trying to at least deadlock it, to buy time for her to start pushing back. For a moment, he thought he'd failed, thought he'd only managed to succeed in killing them both faster—

Sanny nearly sighed with relief as he felt his little spark press against something, something much, much bigger than he was, but it pressed back instead of swallowing him. He wasn't sure how this worked, but he remembered all their prey before them being devoured when they didn't, couldn't push back against her, had been swallowed by her without resistance. If he could resist…

…resist…

And then he felt it. He felt her, and suddenly he wasn't alone in pushing. She was there too, the familiar urges at the back of his head filling him with not prey not consume not devour prey consume devour, and for the second time that night, he found himself almost a spectator as two forces greater than himself fought.

Almost.

The two clashed, and Sanny helped as he could, pushing forward even though he felt like an ant helping a tractor. But even as he did, he suddenly became aware of the burning, fiery agony, of the bastardized, brute force signals being inflicted through his nerves, felt the mycelia continuing to grow and grow through his body, burrowing deeper and deeper into his flesh. He could feel the mycelia digging, following the paths of the nerves. It was only a matter of time before it reached the brain…

And next to his brain…

Panic filled Sanny, panic and desperation. No, no, no, they could not allow the infection to get this deep!

He could feel her still fighting to not be devoured, and could also feel the effort slowly flagging. The pain of the nerves, the damage the mycelia was were slowly causing their main body was accumulating, becoming a dangerous distraction. So far, they'd deactivated nerves when pain had become too great to ignore, but that didn't seem to be an option in this instance. There were too many nerves, and cutting the brain off from all of them was…

…

Sanny cut off their brain from all of the body's nerves desperately to buy time, to cut off distraction. He willed the brain to physically disconnect from the spinal cord, to isolate it from all sensory input and nerve transmissions. For a brief moment, nothing seemed to happen, and with a sinking feeling, he feared that she might be too distracted to understand what he—

He felt the spinal cord disconnect from the brain, and he was trapped in the dark of his own thoughts, without sound or sight or smell or physical sensation. He couldn't feel himself breathing, couldn't feel the distant vibrations of their heart pumping…

…and she felt no pain anymore.

He felt her effort redouble, felt the clash against the one trying to devour them press with greater fervor. But he could also feel the strain, the way her efforts still seemed held back, not as energetic or fervent as it had been so recently when they'd been trying to devour Laking Kamay and its unfortunate host. Was she… tired? Sanny realized that they'd never actually devoured in such quick succession before…

Were they… full?

To his horror, the more he watched, the more that actually seemed to be the case.

Well, shit.

If they couldn't win the fight… then they had to do the other thing.

Sanny didn't have to close his eyes, since he was already seeing the darkness inside his own mind, but he wanted to anyway as he began willing a new body around the most important bit of his anatomy. He felt the cells around the brain, as well as the brain itself, start to divide, changing functions into muscle and bone and skin. He could feel how slow the process was moving and tried to will it faster. Maybe it helped, maybe it didn't as he felt her slowly losing ground against what was devouring them, as he felt the threads of mycelia, the actual body of the monster they faced, digging deeper and deeper into their body.

Bones… muscles… heart… blood vessels… their blood was still clear, since the mycelia didn't seem to be releasing spores internally, but Sanny cut off blood vessels to the internal cavity anyway as he filled the body he was growing… lungs, esophagus, windpipe… ditch the digestive system, too much weight…sensory organs: eyes, ears, olfactory receptors, touch, no digestion so no need for a mouth or taste… brain…

It would have to be enough.

The most important part of him ensconced in the torso, Sanny moved into the body. He felt surprise from the back of his head as he ripped her away from the force trying to devour them. He hoped it was equally unexpected for the other guy as he detached the remaining tissues connecting the new body to the kaiju body that was being infected, isolating them from contiguous contact with the mycelia, and hopefully from being devoured.

Inside a brain once more, he felt warmth, pressure…lungs full of blood extracted air as he stretched limbs and felt confusion at the back of his head.

Even infected, the body they were in was still alive and made of animal cells, still technically under their control. Sanny willed the chest cavity to open, the flesh to split down the middle, the bones to part…

The kaiju body responded with the alacrity he was used to, the bones flexing open as flesh parted, a vertical, lengthwise tear opening. Blood rushed out and Sanny scrambled to move, even as his body was changing, muscles and bones optimizing, nerves coming together properly, senses becoming sharper as she fixed his probably amateurish construction. Clawed fingers and toes found purchase in warm flesh as he dug his way out of the infected body, even as he felt it moving, nerves firing to move limbs inexpertly, muscles flexing in response. The outermost meter of flesh wasn't parting properly, held together by mycelia. Sanny swung his arm, a triangular, tooth-like blade extending from his forearm and tearing through the fibers baring his way as tentacles with sharp, claw-like tips writhed from what had once been their flesh, tearing at the mycelia from the outside to meet them.

The flesh parted and he felt the night air, smelled salt and blood and ozone as he scrambled out of the hole like a perverse birth and threw himself into the air.

Gossamer wings unfurled from his back as blood filled their veins, and they caught the air as all four wings began to beat with an audible buzz. It wasn't enough to give them true flight—the wings were still too wet—but it was just enough lift to give them the range to dive into the water at their recently abandoned body's knees. They slammed into the bay, utterly ruining their wings, the sea water wrapping around them in cold relief.

In the water, two of the shark-like, bright yellow and exoskeleton-covered drones swam toward them, and Sanny grabbed onto where he could before the flesh and exoskeleton of his fingers fused into their. Conjoined, the three bodies began to haul ass from the still-rising kaiju as he felt the fungal infection spread into the body through the hole he'd come out off, attaching to the detached end of the spinal cord…

"Green, I'm out!" he said through his drone as he realized she'd been trying to talk to him all this time.

"Yellow? What happened? You stopped talking!"

"The monster is the mycelia!" he said, then realized she might not know what that was. "It's the white stuff that's spreading all over the ground that the mushrooms are growing from! That's the real monster that's causing all this!"

 

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Through her drone, Tammy stared at Yellow's drone.

Then she stared down, down at the white fibrous stuff covering the ground, her trees, the infected whether living or dead, even herself as it tried to bore into her and she didn't let it…

"Blue!" she cried. "The ground! Devour it, now!"

"No, don't—" Yellow's drone cried.

Tammy threw her will at the ground through her feet, imagining roots that dug into the white filaments, digging into it and trying to spread, as if trying to pull in nutrients, even as she kept actual roots from growing…

It was there. She felt it, even as she felt the still but powerful weight of the power she held, its roots sunk deep into her such that she didn't know where she started and the power began, didn't know if it was growing from her or she was just a fruit hanging from it…

She felt her roots boring into something, trying to pull it in even as it tried to bore roots into her in turn, the roots twinning together, consuming and being consumed…

Tammy felt it when her cousin tried to devour the monster, as something endless and dark and deep and lightless washed over her and her nutrients both. However, the moment it touched her, the bottomless sea seemed to recoil, before turning its attention on the nutrients she was trying to draw in, almost not seeming to care as Tammy began to grow roots towards it as well…

She wanted to say it was a force of will, but Tammy didn't really know what she did as she tried to pull back from infinite depths that she knew was her cousin and focus only on the prey between the two of them. Already she could feel it weakening as it tried to defend against both of them at once and was utterly inadequate to the task. Tammy braced herself to pull back at the last minute so she didn't deadlock the way she had with Yellow the last—

And suddenly there was nothing to eat.

Da fuq?

"The heck?" Tammy said, self-censoring from long habit as she snapped back into her own body, her metaphorical roots no longer finding anything to dig into in the mycelia around her. "Blue, was that you? Did you devour it?"

"No, Green," Blue said, her ice cube and the ice on the ground both vibrating in answer. "I did what you said, but I didn't devour it."

"Where is it then?" Green wondered.

The ground began to shake.

"Oh, come on!" Tammy cried. "Not again!"

"It's all right," Magenta said. "It's just Yellow getting back up."

"That's not me! It's infected!"

Tammy took a moment to understand that and wanted to sigh. "Of course it is," she said. "Can you stop it?"

"I've been trying! I've killed the cells, opened the arteries to drain blood, hell I've even tried fusing the joints together! The mycelia are eating the connections I grew in the bones in the joints to give them back mobility— aaand the bones are dead, so I can't even do that anymore."

"Can you fight it?"

"Not without risking infection again. I can chance it if it comes into the water, but…"

Tammy looked at the kaiju that had been Yellow. Already, mushrooms were growing in lines over its skin where the Lightning Shark's bolts had struck, and it moved with the rough, jerky movements of the infected as it began to walk among the stacked rows of cargo containers, towards… Baseco?

"Red, burn it!" she said.

There was a pause.

Then a beam of light slammed into and punched through the infected kaiju before hitting the waters of the bay behind it. Steam exploded from the flesh as the water promptly erupted into a geyser, more steam spreading out as the water of the bay was violently launched upwards. Tammy could see the hole through the kaiju's torso, the edges of the surprisingly small, car-sized hole actually glowing all the way through. There was no roar of pain, no reaction at all as it continued to walk, its feet slamming through the branches that formed the upper parts of the barrier in its way.

"Red, again!" Tammy said.

"I don't think I can, Tam—Green," Red said. "The angle's changing. If I shoot it again, the beam won't hit the bay anymore once it goes through it. I'd need to get lower and closer to be sure I don't damage anything."

"Just shoot it now while it's still in the port," Yellow said dismissively. "All you'll hit is cement and cargo containers."

"But there'll be damage!" Red cried.

"So?"

"That's vandalism!"

"So? You already blew up a bridge!"

"Yellow, please stop talking," Tammy said as she stared at the looming figure that dwarfed all the buildings around her, a shape out of a monster movie walking away. "Red, find a better position to shoot from. Magenta, it's heading towards you, do you think you can contain it? Do your space warping thing?

"Not unless it stops moving long enough for me to warp the air over its head," Magenta said. "I need to get all of it, or else it won't work. I can still try, though?"

Damn it! Yellow was, apparently, completely useless for it, Red didn't have a shot, Magenta didn't have the range… "Blue, any suggestions for stopping this thing? Can you cover it in ice and trap it?"

It took a while before the ice cube vibrated. "I'll need to completely submerge it in enough water to cover it instantly," Blue said. "Otherwise it has enough mass to break ice. I could make it go to sleep?"

"Can you make it go to sleep without putting all of us to sleep too?" Yellow said.

Another pause.

"Answer her, Blue," Tammy said with familiar rote weariness.

"I don't know. I've never tried it before."

"Don't, then," Yellow said. "Red, get to the ground so you can shoot up at it. You shouldn't hit anything but sky— are those mushrooms on it?"

"Uh, yeah? You said mushrooms grow because of lightning, and—"

"STOP IT NOW! Those mushrooms are high enough off the ground that any spores they release will be able to go over the river, especially in this wind, and there are still people over there!"

Chapter 57: Omake: Nightmærangers - Beach Episode!

Notes:

Summer in the Philippines! (March to May)

"It's the sea!" Tammy cried, wearing a modest one-piece swimsuit and a pair of cut-off shorts. Next to her, Willy wore a sky-blue one-piece, a baseball cap keeping her hair in place.

"Wooh!" Ryan and Katherine agreed excitedly. The former was wearing orange swim-trunks, while the latter was wearing a pink two-piece.

"Wooh," Ryan's twin deadpanned.

"This is an anime thing, right?" Kim said, wearing red swim trunks as he set up the beach umbrella. 

"Yup!" Tammy chirped. 

From the changing room, Jaselle stepped out. Unlike the other girls, she was wearing a red and black surf shirt and black swim trunks over what Tammy knew was a plain one-piece. It was very modest and yet the college girl from the provinces still seemed extremely nervous. "Um, do I look decent?"

"You look fully clothed, Ate," Tammy said. "Is Ate Sanny behind you?"

Jas blinked. "I thought she was already done? She's not with you?" 

"Eh? No!"

"I think I see her," Ryan said, pointing.

They all turned to look.

At the bar of the nearby beach shack, Sanny sat at a table, a pair of headphones on her head and a controller in hand as she faced her laptop, which was connected to a high-capacity battery Kim had made. Wearing knee-length cargo shorts, a bright yellow T-shirt, sneakers and socks, she clearly had no intention of going anywhere near the water. Already, a small pile of soda cans was piling up next to her.

Tammy sighed. "Somehow, I'm not surprised. This explains so much…"

Notes:

We're back for another round of 'What If...', where we find out what powers our heroines and heroes would have gotten if they'd been the one to devour certain monsters instead of the one who'd managed it in the story.

Geyser Rat

• If Sanny or Tammy had gotten it, they'd would have gotten nothing, as it was incompatible with theirs power as they currently were.
• If Jas or Kim had gotten it, they'd have been able to a little water to their powers. Kim would have been able to detect underground aquifer water (but ONLY underground aquifer water), while Jas would be able to make volcanic hot springs and produce superheated steam the way she could lava and plasma.

Rainmaker

• Again, Sanny and Tammy get nothing, as it's incompatible with them. However, if they were the versions that managed to get the Thorn Thicket, they'd have both been able use their singing to put people who hear them to sleep.
• Kim is completely incompatible with this power, and it would have remained inert inside him. however, if he'd also gotten the Geyser Rat, the two powers would have combined allowing him to cause rain, put people to sleep, and make sky tsunami drop to the ground, as well as control aquifer water and rainwater that he generated.
• Jas would also be able to make it rain and control her rainwater, but NOT put people to sleep. However, like Kim, if she'd be able to use sleep if she'd also gotten the Geyser Rat,

Laking Kamay

• While it would be marginally incompatible with Tammy's power, she'd eventually notice she's able to make MUCH bigger trees, and have more leeway with the square-cube law.
• Completely incompatible with Willy, Jas and Kim's powers. However, if Willy or Jas had gotten the Blood Bug AND Laking Kamay, they'd find they would be able to become sea/aquatic creatures, but would lack Sanny's multi-tasking and body-controlling abilities.

 

Chapter 58: Omake : What If... Nightmærangers Was A Magical Girl Series?

"Bwahahahaha!" the weirdo with pastel-colored skin—pastel purple, if you were wondering—and vaguely military outfit complete with a peaked cap laughed villainously as the people who had found themselves trapped in the call center cubicle maze screamed, pounding on the doors and windows. Well, those close to the wacko, anyway. The rest stayed at their stations, nervously continuing their soulless, insincere customer service scripts despite the potential danger to their lives, because otherwise... their performance would be evaluated! "Scream all you want, foolish mortals! Scream and offer your dreams to the to Phantasm Empire! Dreamlings! Take their dreams while they're too busy doing their jobs to care about anything else. "

The Dreamlings, vaguely humanoid forms there were the black with flickering white static you see behind your eyelids, moved with creepy, unnatural smoothness. People recoiled away from them as they approached, raising their arms defensively as the Dreamlings raised their hands. However, rather than being grabbed, people began to hear voices in their ear.

"You can't become an astronaut son, our country doesn't have a space program."

"A firefighter? Why? The don't make any money. You'll never be able to support yourself that way. "

"Son, be realistic, there's no money in being a writer. How are you going to make a living?"

"Look, you need to be realistic.... instead of being an archaeologist, why don't you become an accountant?"

"How are you going to become president? You need to be already rich to become president. And given how the last two women presidents turned out, no one is going to vote for you..."

Slowly, people lowered their arms, and only then did the dreamlings touch them. gently, almost tenderly, the Dreamlings led them to their office chairs, giving them back their headsets, which call center workers put on listlessly. The workers began accepting calls, the fake smiles as empty as usual as they went through their meaningless scripts. Behind them, the Dreamlings began to change. One became big and bulky, a white spacesuit appearing on them. Another became clad in the stereotypical garb of a firefighter, an axe in one hand, a firehose that seemed to trail on the ground and fade away in another. Another began to look like a younger Harrison Ford wearing a white shirt and hat, a whip hanging from their belt, and a fourth became garbed in a smart woman's suit, pockets full to bulging with money, a smug smile on their face...

Suddenly, one of the doors that had been locked was kicked open, the glass unable to resist the foot of someone who didn't care about property damage, and in rushed our five heroes. "Hold it right there, Major Setback!" Tammy declared, pointing dramatically at their evil foe.

"Actually, I have been promoted," he declared triumphantly. "You gaze upon Lieutenant Colonel Setback now!"

"Oh, congratulations!" Tammy declared, giving him a thumb up.

“Thank you! My fiancee was so happy when she heard. We're planning to get married the next time I go on leave," Lieutenant Colonel Setback said happily. "Dreamlings! Attack!"

The Dreamlings all turned and charged, whips, a distressing number of guns—for some reason a lot of people's dreams involved guns—axes, swords, and in one case a chainsaw and machete dualwield combo were raised. The fact the Dreamling wielding the chainsaw and machete was wearing a striped sweater and an old-style hockey mask was probably cause for concern for someone else.

"Nightmærangers, transform!" Tammy cried, holding up a broach-like thing that looked like a flower. "By the power of plants!" Vines, leaves, and bamboo rose up around her to protect her modesty as her clothes seemed to vanish into leaves!

Willy, her expression absolutely deadpan, raised her own broach, one which was a stylized depiction of a water molecule made of a sapphire and two pink rubies. "By the power of water," she said in a monotone voice, her clothes dissolving away into water that rose up to wrap around her. Strangely, while the water was absolutely clear, her body was an indistinguishable dark outline.

Jas nervously raised up her broach, which depicted a volcano with lava oozing down its sides, a smiley-faced sun at the volcano's peak. "Um, by the power of fire!" she said, and fire exploded from her, immediately setting off the fire alarm. "Ugh, not again!"

Kim glanced at the girls and raised his medallion-definitely-not-a-broach, which depicted a stylized tesseract. "By the power of space?" he said, still hesitant, and yelped as his all his clothes dissolved into definitely-magenta-and-not-pink dust that rose up into a shifting geometric shape to encapsulate him. "I'm still not sure this is right!"

Sanny grinned, holding up a broach with a design depicting the double helix of DNA. "By the power of life!" he cried, and his clothes exploded into blood before turning into a mess of tentacles, teeth, eyeballs, scales, fur, feathers and shells.

Lieutenant Colonel Setback sighed, accepting a cup of coffee from a Dreamling wearing an apron that read 'World's best housewife' as he waited for the protective shells to come down. Really, couldn’t they do this before they came in so they wouldn't be wasting anyone's time?

Finally, the barriers dropped, revealing the five of them once more. Their hair had changed into bright primary colors, clad in boots, leotards with short figure skater-type skirts, puffy sleeves and long gloves. There was a short cape streaming down their back, and a slightly longer waist cape trailed down below that. The two men were most definitely wearing kilts and not skirts, even if the rest of their outfits were broadly the same.  Nightmare Green's looked like her clothes was made of leaves and bamboo, while Nightmare Blue looked like she'd stolen it from the wardrobe of a princess who wasn't bothered by the cold, and Nightmare Red was clothed in flowing magma with flames rising from her shoulder. Nightmare Magenta's clothes looked like armor plates of stone, while Nightmare Yellow appeared to be wearing a living thing with too many eyes, mouths all over, and tentacles along his arms and legs.

At that moment, the fire sprinklers came on.

"Fire!" the firefighter Dreamling cried. "Everyone, on the ground to get under the smoke. No one panic, let's all go through the fire exit in an orderly gurgle!"

The gurgle was because the firefighter had just gotten his head bitten off by one of Nightmare Yellow's tentacles with a mouth on the end.

"Wait, don't you people usually give a speech and pose first?-!" Lieutenant Colonel Setback exclaimed.

"It's the middle of the day. I have my own dream-sucking office job to get back to," Nightmare Yellow said. "But if you insist... For forcing me to combine my horrible work life with the only thing in my life that makes my existence bearable, prepare to be devoured!"

With a roar, Nightmare Yellow's clothes split open, more and more tentacles coming out of his sleeves, his kilt, his capes.

The call center agents continued their soulless work as the Dreamlings around them began to be ripped apart, leaving Lieutenant Colonel Setback to face against the four other Nightmærangers.

"So... you just got promoted," Nightmare Green said, a thorn-like spike a meter long growing from her forearms as Nightmare Blue formed her icicle spear. Nightmare Red readied her lava whip as Nightmare Magenta made a stone hammer. "And you're planning to go home to get married. What a coincidence! We just happened to be practicing a new combined final attack..."

Notes:

Join us on discord! https://discord.gg/aw3Kf4zV

Chapter 59: Sidestory: Nightmærangers Play A TTRPG!

Summary:

The team tries to play a TTRPG.

Notes:

And now, a little special chapter.

When Tammy had floated the idea of another teambuilding party, asking for ideas of what they could do, Sanny given her suggestion half-expecting the middle-schooler would say no. Instead, the Nightmæranger’s leader had happily taken the suggestion. Tammy had of course heard of the game, sometimes seen it depicted on TV or in movies, but she’d never gotten the chance to play it before. She figured now was as good a time as any, and Ate Sanny seemingly decided to just roll with it.

Hence why the team was spending a Saturday morning at Kuya Kim’s again, this time sitting around the dining table instead of the coffee table in the living room. His family actually had two dining tables: one was right next to the kitchen and was a plain wood table that the family ate their usual meals at; the other was a bigger, fancier table for when they had visitors or for special events. The latter was often unused for its intended purpose, so that was where Kuya Kim, Ryan and Lori did their homework, or in this instance entertained guests.

“So… how do we play this game?” Kim asked as they sat, while Sanny handed out the sheets of paper as well as the printouts of the relevant rules. Tammy had been surprised to learn that most of the rules of the game were available in the public domain, enough that they could use it to play. “I mean, I’ve heard of this sort of game before, but I don’t really know how it’s supposed to be played.”

“Oh, it’s easy,” Ate Sanny said, the tall woman—although Tammy was beginning to suspect that she hadn’t originally been that tall before she got her powers—sitting at the head of the table. There was a bunch of dice in front of her, and while some were the familiar six-sided cubes, there were others that looking strange, like a triangular four-sided one that looked like a bare feet hazard and another that was practically a ball. “Depending on how we do it, it can be a story-telling game, a combat simulation, or an argument generator,” she said, a shit-eating grin on her face.

Wait, what? “Argument generator?” Tammy said, confused.

Ate Sanny nodded cheerfully. “Arguing over the rules is a traditional part of the experience. Basically, you all make up characters, while I put them through an adventure.”

“And all this is for…?” Jas said, gesturing at the printouts.

“Rules for making up the characters we’re playing as,” was the prompt reply.

Kim frowned. “…why are there rules for making up characters?”

“Well, it wouldn’t be a grown-ups game if there weren’t any,” Sanny said. “So, first, let’s go over how to make a character.” She picked up one of the printouts and flipped it open while her other hand picked up cubic dice. “Now, everyone take these dice and we’ll start rolling up your characters. What classes do you want to play?”

“…what’s a class?” Kim asked immediately.

Tammy could almost literally see Sanny’s train of thought slamming into the pile of debris on the track. “All right, let’s go back a little. The game has twelve character classes that you can play as….”

“…now what do you all want to play as?” Sanny asked again an explanation later.

“So, what’s the difference between a wizard and a sorcerer?” Kim asked as he flipped through the printouts. “They’re the same thing, right?”

“Not in the game,” Sanny said. “Basically, a wizard can know a lot of spells but needs to prepare them before he can use them, while a sorcerer only has a few spells, but can use them at any time, provided he has enough spell slots.”

“Spells slots?”

“How many times you can use spells in a day,” Sanny clarified.

“Wait, why? Aren’t wizards supposed to be able to use magic all the time?”

“Not in this game.”

Kim stared at the printouts. “I think I’ll be a fighter, then.” he said with a sigh. “Being a wizard doesn’t sound fun. From what you said, a fighter doesn’t have anything to keep track of, so I can just play the game. I’m still not sure as to how that actually goes…?”

“I’ll be a cleric,” Jas said. “That’s the one that heals everyone using the power of God, right?”

“… sure,” Sanny said, before quickly turning towards Tammy. “How about you, boss? What are you going to play as?”

“I’ll be a paladin,” Tammy said. “That’s the knight with the magic powers, right?”

“… technically they’re holy warriors of the forces of good, but… yes. What about you, Willy?”

Willy just stared at the printout for a moment, then turned towards Tammy. “Which should I choose, Tammy?”

“You can pick whichever one you want.”

Willy considered that. “I’ll choose whichever it was Tammy chose.”

“So you’ll be a paladin too? All right, then. Now we can finally start rolling up characters. We’ll start with you, boss.” She handed her four dice. “Roll these, disregard the lowest number, and write down the total.”

“What if two of them are the same low number?”

“Then you just disregard one of them.” Sanny looked like she was getting a bit impatient. Her cheek was rippling, and a gash-like mouth opened for a moment, exposing her teeth and tongue before closing again.

“Got it! Now what?”

“Now, do it five more times so you end up with six numbers between six and eighteen…”

Tammy had known playing this game would involve math. She’d heard of it in passing and watched a few videos online of people playing, but she’d underestimated exactly how many numbers were involved. First there was choosing which of their numbers would go to which stats—which had required another sidebar as Sanny explained what stats were—depending on what character they were playing.

Sanny had to make her own character—a sorcerer—to demonstrate how it was done, with everyone following step by step. With a lot of help, they eventually managed make their characters, which were all humans because that way she didn’t have to explain the alternate rules for non-humans. And then there’d been buying their equipment…

“All right,” Ate Sanny said tiredly after two hours of them all making characters. “Now, we can really get started.”

“Question,” Kim said. “Why is everything in feet?”

“The game was made by Americans in the sixties,” Ate Sanny said. "It's normally not a problem."

Kim sighed. "It's things like this that hold the metric system back."

“Hey, no argument from me. So, let’s get started! You are a group of heroic adventurers who have just arrived at the small village of Starter—”

“Starter? Really?” Tammy said.

“The names will get better once I’ve had time to mentally recuperate,” Sanny said. “Anyway, you’ve just arrived in town with nothing but the clothes on your back and the items in your bags. You’re there because the town is having a small problem they can’t solve and sent for you from the nearby town of Tutorial so you would come and fix it.”

“Tutorial,” Tammy said flatly.

“I’ve decided to lean into it,” Sanny said.

“Well, that was a fast recovery. All right, so we came to this time because they have a problem… which is?”

“The note didn’t say. You’ll need to talk to the person who sent for you, which is the mayor.”

“All right, so we talk to the mayor,” Tammy said.

“You don’t know who they are, what they look like, or where they live,” Sanny said promptly.

Tammy frowned in thought, glancing at the others. All three were looking at her, waiting for her to say something. “Uh… what do we do now then?”

“Well… how would you go about looking for someone in a small village you just arrived in?”

“Facebook?”

Sanny sat back against her chair, staring up at the ceiling. Finally, she sighed. “All right, give me your character sheets, I’ll show you how the game is supposed to be played…”

The tall woman’s fingers popping off was still as disturbing as it always was, even if there was no blood. Tammy knows she was being a hypocrite, since people weren’t supposed to grow branches and flowers either, but at least she usually did that when she kind of looked like a plant. Sanny didn’t change her hand in any way, and the fingers just fell off, revealing bare bone and raw muscles before more fingers grew to replace the digits. The detached fingers writhed, the skin breaking open before tentacles burst out, then compressed as the fingers became…

Well, little people. As in little, finger-sized naked people, although they were so small there really wasn’t a lot of detail. Each other them ran with surprising speed across the table to stand in front of each of them, standing on top of the ‘character sheets’ that they’d spent time making.

The little… fairy, Tammy supposed, turned toward Sanny and said, in a surprisingly loud approximation of Tammy’s voice. “I look around. Is there anyone I can ask for suggestions?”

“There are some passersby, but they’re all hurrying away from you, so it doesn’t look like they want to stop and talk,” Sanny said. “However, you see that there’s a nearby public house that seems to be open for business.”

“We go there and ask where the mayor is!” the little Tammy fair declared.

“You enter the public house and find it contains three people. One is a man drinking, another is a woman taking a jug of some sort, and the third is the owner of the public house.”

“I walk up to her, put on a pleasant smile, and ask where the mayor is.”

“All right, I think we get it,” Tammy said, a slightly exasperated look on her face.

“You sure?” Sanny said, a small smile on her face. “I can keep going.”

“Aren’t you essentially playing with yourself?”

“You’ve just described the state of modern gaming,” Sanny said blandly.

Tammy looked around at everyone. “It is clear to everyone how we play?”

“Yeah, but… I don’t see why we needed to make the character sheets for that,” Kim said.

“It’s for when combat, and physical or mental challenges happen in the game,” Sanny said. “Like if you get into an arm-wrestling competition.”

“…I’ll take your word for it,” Kim said, still sounding skeptical.

Despite the inauspicious beginning, things started going smoothly after that as Jas and Kim tentatively began to contribute. Willy had to be prompted, and her contributions, after “What do you want me to do, Tammy?” consisted of “I follow Tammy’s character.” Tammy really should have realized sooner, in hindsight. They went through this every time she taught her cousin how to play a new game, and had to outright tell her to try to win whenever the two of them played. Actually, this might be even harder, because there’s no obvious win condition…

They found the mayor and talked to him, finding out that they’d been called because a family of bears had broken into and moved into the village’s grain stores, making themselves at home. The villagers had been trying to lure them out to no avail, and so had sent for help, and now here they were.

“The bear has made the grain store into its den, and as a result the village has been limited to the grain they have stored in their own homes,” Sanny said. “They ask you to deal with the bear, and in exchange they’re willing to offer you a substantial reward. However, they assert the priority is keeping the grain stores intact, because if anything happens to it, they will be going hungry when winter comes. The mayor asserts repeatedly that there is to be no property damage to the grain stores and the food it contains.”

“Does that even need to be said?” Jas said, an uncharacteristic frown on the normal timid young woman’s face. Coming from a family of rice farmers, that sort of thing was probably second nature to her. “That’s probably the town’s livelihood. It’s probably the only wealth they really have. They’re probably planning to pay us in rice, or whatever grain it is they have. My grandmother told me stories about things like this, where they needed something done and all they had to pay with was rice…”

Well, it was nice to know that Jas seemed to be getting into the game.

“You all arrive at the grain store, staying well away from it so you don’t draw the attention of the bear, which is awake but seems to be resting. The front door of the grain store is broken, meaning that the villagers can’t just close the door to keep it out when it leaves. A villager with a rusty spear who doesn’t seem to know how to use it is nearby, and whose job seems to be to watch the bear rather than trying to keep people away from it. What do you do?”

“We attack the bear?” Kim said.

“Is that a question for everyone or are you telling me what you’re doing?” Sanny said.

“Ate Sanny, how strong is a bear compared to our characters?” Tammy asked.

“That’s a Knowledge check, specifically ‘nature’. Since you don’t have that one, roll the D20 dice—the one that looks like a ball—to check how much general knowledge your character has one the subject.”

“Uh… 8.”

“And your intelligence modifier?”

“10. No, wait, it’s the other number, right? Uh, zero.”

“Well, the number you were trying to beat was 14, so try as you might, you don’t recall enough about bears to be able to specifically compare how strong it is compared to you, besides the fact that it is clearly bigger and stronger. So, nothing you didn’t already know.”

“Ugh… can I roll again?”

Sanny shook her head. “Nope, not today. The others can, though.”

“All right, everyone roll! Let’s see if anyone would know anything about bears!”

The others dutifully rolled. Jas also fell short, and while Kim did manage to roll a 14, he had a low intelligence stat of 8, meaning he also didn’t make it.

Willy got a 20.

For a moment, Sanny looked at the dice suspiciously, then glanced at Kim for some reason. Then she shrugged. “Willy’s character tells you all that the bear is way stronger than the four of you all can handle, and you’d all probably die trying, especially since you don’t have a wizard to conveniently set them on fire with eldritch forces.” She grinned toothily at them, and although her teeth were normal and human, serrated shark teeth were implied.

“Does this mean she knows how to get the bear to come out of the grain storage?” Tammy said hopefully.

“Nope! Try something else,” was the cheerful reply.

Hesitantly, they all looked at each other, and then down at their character sheets.

Sanny sighed. “Do you guys need me to use the help fairies again?”

“That’s what you’re calling them?” Tammy said.

“Please,” Kim said immediately, leaning back on his chair.

The little drone who had just been lying down on the table in from of Kim sat up. “Why don’t we set the grain storehouse on fire and kill the bear that way!” the drone declared in an approximation of Kim’s voice.

Jas frowned. “The mayor just said we shouldn’t damage the grain stores.”

The little drone folded its arms. “Well, do you have a better idea?”

“Well… we could… uh…”

“Right. Let’s set the building on fire!”

“Okay, no setting on fire,” Kim said. “Not while you’re playing for me, anyway. Um… How about we lure the bear out with some food and… uh, block the grain storage entrance somehow to keep the bear from coming back in?”

“Wouldn’t the villagers have tried that already?” Jas said.

“Did they?” Tammy asked Sanny.

Sanny grinned again and shrugged. “Why don’t you ask one of the townsfolk?” she said.

“…but… wouldn’t you be the one telling us anyway?”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Sanny said.

“You said you don’t have principles.”

“Standards, then.”

Tammy rolled her eyes. “Fine. We asked the nearby townsfolk with the spear if they’ve tried luring the bear out with food.”

“He just barely manages to stay polite as he says that of course that’s the first thing they tried. It didn’t work, since the bear wouldn’t move too far away from the building towards any food they left out, and the villagers thought it was too dangerous to put the food too near.”

“Is there any poison in the town?” Jas said.

Everyone stared at her, even Sanny.

“What?” she said. “Everyone knows if something is going to break into the grain stores once, it can do so again. You shouldn’t leave something like that alive.”

“You can ask the townsfolk,” Sanny said, looking mildly impressed—or amused, it was hard to tell with her.

It turned out the townsfolk did, in fact, have a poison they could use. It was usually meant for rats trying to get into the grain, but the person they got it from was sure it would probably work on bears as well, provided they used a lot.

Tammy had volunteered to bring the bait food to the bear, a piece of venison, since she was wearing the heaviest armor. The meat had been injected with poison and the puncture wound covered in beeswax to hold in the scent, then washed to remove any suspicious smells.

“I walk towards where the bear is hiding, the poisoned meat ready to throw,” Tammy said. “I keep moving as close as possible to get the best chance to get the meat to the bear.”

“You see the bear moving around inside the grain store from fifty feet away. It’s looking at you, but that’s it so far. However, when you reach forty feet, the bear starts to growl at you.”

“I get closer anyway.”

“Once you’re thirty feet away from the bear it gets up and starts moving out of the grain storage. However, it stops just outside of the entrance, and rears up on its hind legs to threaten you.”

“You said thirty feet. Am I close enough to throw the meat at the bear?”

Sanny hummed. “Yes, although you need to make an attack roll to see if the meat lands where you intended to throw it. Where are you throwing it?”

“I throw it straight at the bear, then turn around and run. My roll is… 13. Is that good or bad?”

“Hmm… the meat lands just short of the bear, not actually hitting it. The bear lets out a roar, but doesn’t run after you. Instead, it goes down on all fours, picks up the meat in its teeth and goes back into the grain stores.”

“Does it eat the meat?” Tammy asked.

Sanny hummed, then picked up the d20 dice and rolled them, looking at the result. “The bear eats the meat. At first, nothing seems to happen, but after about an hour you hear the bear roaring loudly. It sounds like it’s in pain. Soon, a horrible smell fills the air as the bear continues to roar. After another hour, however, the roaring stops.”

“Is the bear dead, then?” Jas asked.

“Perhaps you should investigate?” Sanny said brightly. “You know, for the full game experience.”

“Uh… I walk close enough to see if the bear is still moving. Do I see it moving?” Tammy said.

“You see the bear has collapsed on the ground, surrounded by a runny, dark substance, and that in its pained throes the bear spread it everywhere. The bear itself is still alive, and is writhing on the ground. As you watch, it throws up bile, partially-digested meat and blood mixing with the dark substance. The smell is even worse up close, and you see the substance has been spread on the sacks of grain, many of which the bear had clawed open.”

Jas looked horrified. “What—?! The grain!”

“Um, this means we failed, right?” Kim said, looking uncertain. “Because we were trying to keep the grain safe?”

“The villager with the spear starts yelling at your for ruining the grain, waving his weapon angrily,” Sanny said cheerfully. “What do you do now?”

Tammy considered the situation. “How about we call this the tutorial and start a real game now?” she said. “I don’t think we’re getting out of this one.”

The blonde sighed, looking disappointed, then shrugged. “All right. So, that’s a glimpse of what a Tabletop RPG session looks like. I kept it simple because this is your first time, but now that you know what it’s like, what do you think.”

“it’s… pretty boring, isn’t it?” Kim said.

“Well, of course you’d think that, you played the least,” she pointed out. “This isn’t Monopoly where you just sit around waiting your turn, roll dice, and then just move your token. The more you participate, the more fun you have. For example, your character could have suggested something else, like digging a pit and luring the bear towards it, or climbing the grain store building and cutting through the roof so you could get above the bear and take it by surprise that way.” She sighed. “Part of that is my fault. I should have prompted all of you more.”

“So, how would you have handled that situation?” Kim asked.

“Well, first I’d have rolled a wizard and used spells,” Sanny said. “But for you… well, you could have looked for a bow and arrow and put the poison on that. The attack would have drawn the bear out, so when it died you at least it wouldn’t have been in near the grain.”

“Bow and arrow!” Tammy said. “Ugh, I should have thought of that!”

Sanny shrugged. “I’m surprised you didn’t buy any, you had plenty of money left.”

“All right, new game!” Sanny declared. “Something we’ll all like!”

“Fine, fine…” Sanny titled her head for a moment, then nodded and took a deep breath. “The four of you have been asked by the local mayor to check on the wizard Bob, who lives deep in the woods outside of town. He’d been commissioned to make magic floating candles for a local town event and has yet to deliver. As he is usually quite prompt in his deliveries, the mayor is worried and asks you to check on him.”

“Why us?” Tammy said.

“Because everyone is get things ready for the town event, a local summer festival,” Sanny said. “The four of you have just arrived, as this if Kim’s hometown and he’s invited you all to stay for the festival.”

“I did?” Kim said, looking surprised at being put on the spot.

“Yup, you did,” Sanny said. “So tell us, Kim. What’s your town like and what is this festival about?”

“Uh… I don’t know…”

“Then make something up, something fun.”

“Uh, the festival is… ah, the local paper airplane race,” Kim fumbled. “Everyone is competing to see who’s paper airplane design can fly furthest. The winner… ah, gets a special victory cake.” His vice was sounding a bit more confident at the end.

Sanny gave him a thumbs up. “Yup. Jas, you saw the sign coming in, what’s the town called?”

“The town is called of ‘NoBears’, all one word,” Jas said immediately. “Because no bears live nearby.”

Everyone chuckled at that.

So of course, they ran into wolves on the way to the wizard’s house, because Sanny was nasty.

Notes:

Yup, this story is still remembered, and hopefully will rise again in 2025... hopefully.