this is crazy

[from_scratch]

Cam is watching a new recording of Atriama, tail swishing in the gap in his couch, and doesn't stop to pause the show when he feels a summons go by.

Comments

[wormcan]

There'll be a bit of a wait while it descends.

Just before it reaches him, there's a crash. It's loud, but he can feel it more than he can hear it. The crash itself is more like an impact, like if someone dropped a grand piano that was also the size of the moon. The spaceship rocks in the air, and shattered glass falls down from it.

[from_scratch]

The fuck?

[wormcan]

The good news is, this wasn't targeted at Cam. The bad news is, this wasn't targeted at Cam.

In every direction windows have exploded, sirens are going off, and there are plumes of sand and glass rising into the air.

[from_scratch]

The fuck. Cam lets his shattered spaceship make an emergency landing and takes to the air on non-glass wings.

[wormcan]

This is a bad city to not be invulnerable in. Cam may have been lucky enough to be away from anything that exploded, but a lot of more fragile people weren't. The dust is settling, and even after the explosion the place is still loud.

[from_scratch]

Does anyone seem to know what happened?

[wormcan]

Yes. Almost everyone does, except Cam. If he lands and asks, the first response is going to be "Shatterbird."

[from_scratch]

Shatterbird being...?

[wormcan]

"...she's a cape," says the bystander, grimacing as she improvises a bandage. "This means the Slaughterhouse Nine are here."

[from_scratch]

Bystander gets a blood transfusion and proper bandaging for her trouble.

Does Cam have wifi?

[wormcan]

He does, thanks largely to the efforts of one Campbell Swan in getting this planet up to a civilized standard. His computer is probably the only one in who knows how far that's still in a state to connect to the satellite wifi, but it's there to be connected to.

The Slaughterhouse Nine are a group of parahumans who travel the country seeing the sights and killing people. They are very good at this. Ever since Shatterbird joined their method of announcing their presence has been to make every piece of glass in the city violently explode.

The Nine aren't the only capes ever to have a kill order placed allowing anyone who can manage it to legally kill them and collect a reward. But the longer-term members are among the very few to survive having such an order for any length of time. Reading the list of their powers, the fact that Shatterbird isn't the scariest may have something to do with this.

[from_scratch]

All right. Seems like it might be time to go kill some people.

Cam gets aloft again. Shatterbird can fly. Any chance she's doing it now?

[wormcan]

She probably is, somewhere, but she has a lot of range. No sign of her.

[from_scratch]

Cam overflies San Francisco. He can't do a whole lot about the damage on the scale it was dealt.

[wormcan]

Thousands of people flood the streets, there are screams and alarm bells ringing, and a few flying capes. And yes, there, one of the capes has decorative stained glass wings.

[from_scratch]

The decorative stained glass cape is now unconscious.

[wormcan]

The humanoid falls. The wings fall with her, slightly faster.

And then she slows and resumes flying. Her background reassembles, and she starts looking around for who might have done that. Glass shards speed toward Cam.

[from_scratch]

Well, they can't hurt him but they could trap him. How the heck did she -? Cam tries various methods of neutralizing shards to see if any of them work. Encased in plastic? Supercooled? Melted?

[wormcan]

Melted and plastic both work. There is a surplus of glass to replace anything he neutralizes, though. Pieces are moving fast and from every direction.

[from_scratch]

Melting's easy to do en masse. Melt, glass, melt. (He makes a chilly layer of air below him so anything that hits someone beneath will be room temperature.)

[wormcan]

If Cam keeps up enough heat to melt the projectiles in the fraction of a second they take to reach him, he can be splashed with molten glass instead of slashed with solid. If that's better.
Shatterbird considers it worse, at least. She amasses a larger volume of glass, several times the size of either combatant, and throws that at him.

[from_scratch]

Melt. (Colder cold layer of air.)

Shatterbird can melt. He can't avoid hitting pedestrians forever like this if anyone's got too much of a broken leg to scurry indoors and she could use killing.

[wormcan]

It takes a lot of heat to melt that much mass that quickly. But Shatterbird is too distracted to do much with what remains of her weapon.

The armor supporting her melts, as does she. And she is unpleasantly on fire. This time she hits the ground.

[from_scratch]

Does she stay there?

[wormcan]

She's not moving.