"Next load coming in!" a PRT agent shouts, holding open the back flap of the tent as EMTs carry stretchers towards the pool. "Two critical, three paralyzed."
"Place them near me and pull these guys out," Isidis yells back, spread-eagled and rubbing her limbs over four nearly-insensate naked people like she's trying to make some sort of snow-angel in the soup of blood, bone and flesh. "Internals and bones are done, last things left are scrapes and bruises." A little bit of the slurry slips down her throat and she starts coughing. "Bleh! A little less chunky, please!"
"I'll try," I hiss between my teeth. "Also, why don't you make multiple garbage disposals of murderation next time?" I like Isidis. Really. But I can't be held responsible for what happens to her if she tells me to adjust these fucking pain machines one more time!
The EMTs carefully step over the edge of the pool, glancing towards me nervously and staying well out of my reach. I hazard a glance at my armor. Hey, frilled spines again. Down. I pull the bone back in, but by then the EMT's have already picked up the mostly-healed people and Isidis is back to doing her gore-angel thing. I don't blame them. None of the normal people seem to want to stay in here for long, and the few lucid capes that end up in the pool aren't any different, hauling themselves out as soon as they're sure they won't fall apart.
Maybe it's the hash of body parts they find themselves nearly-submerged in. Maybe it's the naked teenager. Maybe it's the pair of macabre bone devices beside me constantly spewing forth waves of meat and blood as it tears into a pair of regenerators.
Or maybe it's the fucking singing!
"Germany was having trouble, what a sad, sad story," Alabaster sings out, punctuating the end of the stanza by shoving his arm into the blender. Not quite an orchestral accompaniment, but since he doesn't regenerate constantly it doesn't affect his speed much.
"Needed a new leader to restore its former glory!" Dorian manages. I'm not sure how he's capable of forming coherent words when I'm trying to turn his lungs into a fine mist, but apparently this is one of the only songs the both of them know. He's the one who started this actually, and I let him because it was better than the screaming.
Now I'm being forced to reconsider the wisdom of that decision.
"Where oh where was he?" Alabaster calls, a note of despair that is one hundred percent genuine in his voice. "Where could that man be?" Maybe he knows it's supposed to be satire. Maybe he doesn't. Either way, his musical palette is limited primarily to German composers, songs about Germany, and Death Metal, so the rest of us have to work around that.
"We looked around," Dorian groans, barely audible over the sound of his tearing flesh, but I think I can make out a glimmer of amusement in his voice, "And then we found . . ."
"The man for you and me," the two sing together as I mentally brace myself for the chorus.
"AND NOW IT'S SPRINGTIME, FOR HITLER, IN GERMANY!" Isidis belts out, shockingly tunelessly. "DEUTSCHLAND IS HAPPY. . . AND GAY!" How a lesbian, a Nazi, and a nearly-new cape reached this song as a compromise I'll never know, but apparently Isidis likes The Producers? I also have to assume that she's intentionally butchering the melody because how else could she be so out of tune? "WE'RE MARCHING TO A FASTER PACE! LOOK OUT, HERE COMES THE MASTER RACE!" Hell, she's even missing notes entirely. Dad sings in the shower with more precision.
I count patiently to ten, timing it to coincide with my breathing. Two patterns, twice the relaxation. When that doesn't work I almost shatter a rib. Almost, because when I suddenly stilled during the first rendition of 'Guys and Dolls' Isidis figured out why and started glaring at me in a way that expressed disappointment, sorrow, and pleading, all at the same time and made something sick well up in my throat. Then the first few patients started arriving and I decided that their treatment took precedence over me blowing off steam.
That, and I found another outlet.
Alabaster slaps his woodchipper twice. I'm on deck. I form a cylinder over the pit, festooned with teeth. A bar runs parallel to it, with long, flexible strips of bone almost touching the cylinder itself. A music box, of sorts. Amazing how versatile bone can be.
"COME ON GERMANS! GO INTO . . . YOUR DANCE!" Isidis finishes with all the theatrical pomp of an eight year old at their first school play, and I start spinning the tube.
There is literally no way for any of us to tap dance in this scenario. Even if we had the shoes, solid ground to step on, and the time in between patients to do so, none of us know how. So instead I improvised and made this during an argument about whether to do a Phantom song next or literally anything else. Once I assured Isidis that flexing bones doesn't hurt nearly as much as breaking them (and that by "hurt" I meant "tickled aggressively"), she stopped worrying and began heckling my song choices. Since this was immediately after her murder of Sandy's lines in You're The One That I Want, I decided to listen to Dorian's appraisals of my performances instead.
The end result is a semi-continuous rhythmic clattering that kinda-sorta sounds like the original tap dancing. Honestly I think it's terrible, but this gets me out of singing and I somehow doubt that anyone's going to be critiquing the flat nature of the notes. No one involved in this particular production seems to care, at any rate. I mean, we're down three different voices for this as it is.
"The Fuhrer is coming!" Dorian calls out. Oh boy.
"The Fuhrer is coming!" he says again, unaware of what disaster he's about to unleash. We never did figure out who precisely was going to be the number one most hated man in history. I assume Alabaster is going to want that role.
"The Fuhrer is coming!" I send a quick glance to Isidis, who's also dragging in a breath. The people around her are more or less healed, so she can afford to fuck around like this.
And just as both the pale man and the healer are about break out into song and shred this fragile truce of ours...
"Heil my-self." The voice sounds like it belongs to a chronic smoker six weeks dead from miner's lung. Its owner doesn't look much better. "Heil to me." An old man, withered and grey and looking less like a person and more like a sack of bones wrapped in elephant skin slowly stands up in the pit, eyes covered by a now-bloodstained white blindfold. "I'm the kraut who's out to change our history." He rolls his shoulders, kicks his leg all the way to vertical, and clears his throat before spitting, the black phlegm flying clear across the tent. "Heil myself, raise your hand." He cartwheels out of the pool, one long arm reaching down to the ground and the rest of him spinning out in a light spray of blood. "There's no greater dictator in the land!" His voice grows deeper and healthier as he walks towards the entrance, muscle filling out his frame as I watch. "Everything I do, I do for yooooooooou!" he finishes, no longer old, no longer withered, holding the note until the tent flap closes behind him.
For a few brief moments, the only thing that can be heard is the slap of Isidis's limbs as she applies dead meat to weakly moaning bodies and the wet churning of Dorian's insides.
"Well, I don't think I'm capable of topping that," Alabaster interrupts, generating another meaty splat to emphasize his point. "Do you two know something other than show tunes?"
We graduate to Top 40 songs (which Alabaster takes no part in), and when an unusually blase PRT agent comes in with a small laptop and a foldable table we set up a playlist of karaoke videos, relieving me of the pressure to provide musical accompaniment. If it wasn't for the constant stream of gravely injured naked people and the occasional solemn silence as an EMT pulls an unmoving corpse out of the pool, I could almost enjoy it. That, and Dorian's bitching about the lack of sufficiently obscure artists, Albasters dark comments about 'jungle music', Isidis's insistence of being the lead in every other goddamn song-
We're all feeling the pressure. It's just manifesting differently for each of us.
When a Ward died, Dorian started missing lyrics. It wasn't much, not compared to the near-complete lack of skill Isidis has, but it was noticeable. He also began to sound less in pain and more...
Lost.
Alabaster's the next easiest to read, actually. He doesn't seem to care much for basically anything, but seeing one of the Valkyrie capes come back with her stomach torn open shook him. A lot. Dorian tried to talk to him, and in return he got a stream of verbal abuse. Since then his arm has been in and out on a steady beat, once every four seconds, precise enough to set a watch by.
I think Isidis is coping the best. At the very least, she's around the same as she was at the beginning of the fight. She's still singing poorly, still scooping guts into people and sending them back out onto the killing field. Part of that must be experience, hard-won from attending more Endbringer fights than most people can name. During one of her bathroom breaks I ask a PRT agent if she knew how many Isidis had gone to.
"I've been on-duty three times when the sirens sounded," the agent says, helmet off and a cigarette in her hand. Leviathan's still fighting but the number of capes arriving to help has dropped substantially. Hell, some have gone back home. Tinkers with wrecked gear and people who just signed up for something out of their depth. "The Protectorate shows up every time, even when their powers aren't going to do shit versus what they're fighting. That girl over there," — the agent points across the open field to Isidis, who's stepping into a food tent clothed in a hospital gown — "is the only independent cape I saw all three of those times."
I thank the agent with a rose and went back into the tent, staring at the congealing blood in the pool and inhaling the sticky smell of fresh meat. I see the indents in the mud where my wood chippers were anchored, the trampled area where Alabaster was standing, and the path the EMTs stomped into the ground as they went in and out, the boot prints deep from the extra weight of the patients.
I put myself in the EMT's shoes, imagining the scene unfolding. Rain pouring down, breath coming in pants as they attempt to move quickly but smoothly, trying to strike the balance between getting the wounded to healing as fast as possible and not aggravating injuries any further. Then they push back the tent flap and see four people, two of them kids and the other two freaks, singing show tunes as blood and gore pour over one of their number. Wounds that are supposed to never heal completely vanish in seconds under the ministrations of a naked teenage girl, the worst singer of the bunch, and over the sickening sound of blades slicing through bodies a ragged harmony can be heard.
It sounds like something out of a bad horror movie.
"Donut?" Amy asks, startling me out of my trance. She's standing at my side, a pink cake donut with sprinkles extended towards me. Dorian is polishing off a maple bar while Alabaster reclines in a lawn chair flipping through a thin volume with a title in German. I look from the pastry to her, and take it. She has some odd metal caps on her fingers, pointed and dull. I wonder what they're for?
"How long until we're needed back?" I ask in between bites, not bothering to try and control my mask. If it looks creepy, it looks creepy. Not like that's going to actually stand out here. Amy shakes her head.
"They need us back as soon as we're ready, which means 'don't do something stupid like burn yourself out'. I'm ready here," she adds, turning towards the other two. "You guys?" Dorian swallows the last of his treat and nods.
"Soon as White Rose sets us up again," he says, stripping down. This time he doesn't bother waiting for anyone to shield their eyes. He looks nice enough, I guess. Muscled but not obscenely so, with more definition than Dad's dockworker friends. I hear the snap of paper on paper and turn in time to see Alabaster folding his coat around the book.
"Once more into the breach," he says, rolling up his sleeve and sliding the tourniquet to the midpoint of his bicep. "Though I don't suppose it'd be too much to ask for a little bit more control over the musical selection?"
"It is too much to ask," Isidis says, peeling off the hospital gown and sitting with her legs crossed in the center of the pool. She motions towards me. "Paste them, please." I shake my head and step forward, pushing out bone and mentally bracing myself even as Isidis uses her currently-clean hands to queue up another set of songs.
The blades start whirling, meat starts mashing, and a new song comes on. One that's a little more somber than the near-carnie levels of cavalier the previous ones were.
I don't think any of us mind.
"Woke up in London yesterday, found myself in a city near Piccadilly, Don't really know how I got there."
We give a lot of repeat performances. Capes with powers that make them difficult, but not impossible to hurt, who are in a strange grey area between Alexandria and Alabaster in terms of durability make up most of them. I choose to believe that the ones we don't see a second time have learned to avoid getting injured.
Others are short-range Blasters who shoot from far enough away that Leviathan's water whips don't cut them in half but close enough that he can still reliably hit them. Ballistic stays stoically silent while his pulped leg gets rebuilt and Crys- Laserdream shows up gasping for breath with most of her chest caved in. I don't think the man who died in that particular group of patients would've survived anyway, but Isidis...
She got more tense after that.
The rarest group of capes are the famous ones. I don't think any one of the main eight capes that appear on the Protectorate recruitment posters ever show up in the pool, even the ones without Brute ratings. I don't know whether that's due to being important enough to be seen by better healers, the efforts of their fellow capes trying to keep the leaders alive, or raw experience and survivability standing the test of time.
It's an encouraging thought, so I focus on that while the others sing, focus on the idea that there are capes out there who don't die to Leviathan or the other Endbringers. Capes who can face the most dangerous monsters on the planet and come out unharmed.
It's an encouraging thought until it's not.
During a rush, when the pool is nearly full, a cape in what looks like a modified blue and black limo-driver outfit appears in the middle of the room accompanied by a thunderclap. Off his shoulder hangs a limp and terrifyingly familiar form clad in blue and white.
Legend. The leader of the Protectorate. Maybe one of the top ten most dangerous capes in the world, with more charisma in his left toe than almost any other parahuman I've ever met, including Kaiser.
And he's barely breathing.
"He needs healing!" the cape says, striding over to the pool and gently sliding Legend into the meat. The cognizant patients who are capable of moving shuffle away from his still form. The hero's limbs are askew, tilted at angles that I recognize as more than broken, with a floppiness to his chest that brings bile to my mouth.
What happened to him?
"I need his costume off!" Isidis says, one of the only people not stunned, still slathering meat onto other patients. "Until that's gone I can't do anything!" I break a rib. No time to be shocked. No time to be awed.
Move.
I leap over the side, a knife already growing out of my arm. I hear a squawk of alarm from some of the other people there, but Isidis also speaks up, something indistinct and high-pitched. I'm not paying attention. A wafer-thin blade slips under the collar of his costume, then grows as I push mass into it. I can't afford to try again. No broken slivers, no second chances. I drag my arm down, slicing open his costume from neck to groin. Isidis is beside me almost immediately, one hand going to his chest and one to his neck, a handful of hash in both. I keep cutting, peeling the man out of his suit as Isidis tries to put him back together.
Then I take a closer look at her hands.
Her fingers are jabbed inside him, yanking open the hero's chest as she shoves meat into it. When I look up his neck is no better. I blink, almost messing up my cut along his pant leg as I see her peel back some of Legend's neck, a slush of blood coming out before she fills it in with flesh.
Oh. That's what the metal caps are for.
I toss the remnants of Legend's costume out of the pool, shakily reemerging and turning the new piece of information over in my head. I mean, it makes sense. To get to the deep-tissue injuries, she'd need to get access to them. Touch access. In the hospital, she probably has a team of surgeons for that. Here, the volume is so high she can't afford to. That, or they get prepared for it ahead of time when they come in as part of the stripping-down process. It makes sense, but now I know that she's had to stab at least half of the people she's healed here, and she hasn't so much as batted an eye at it.
"Fixed. Go to the nurses station and have them rouse him," Isidis says, lifting Legend and pushing his unconscious form back into Strider's hands. "Now get." Another thunderclap and he's gone. I look the empty space where the two heroes used to be, the adrenaline finally catching up with me.
Is that it?
"Can you start the blades again?" Alabaster asks. "I think you left Dorian in something of a jam." A hissing wheeze escapes the massive tube and I turn towards it. There's a pale hand sticking out of the top, waving at me. Right. I have a job to do. I get back out of the pool, forming treads on my feet to counter the light coating of blood on them. I try starting the wood chippers again. No dice. I check my connections. They've snapped. I must have forgotten to extend them when I jumped into the pool. I groan.
"I'm going to need to pull them apart," I say, crumbling away the edges of the one surrounding Dorian. "Broke my connection, which means I can't manipulate them as freely." Inside, Dorian's stabbed full of heavy blades. I start pulling them out, and as soon as he can actually move his arms he helps. Alabaster snorts.
"Well, back to mincing myself, I suppose," he says and once again the knife comes out. "Now then, how is the battle going?" The question is addressed to one of the cogent patients, a young Asian woman who's standing up and crossing her arms to try and preserve her modesty.
"No idea, this is my first fight," she says nervously, flinching away from the spray of blood from Alabaster's wrist. Then she looks down at her now flat-as-a-board chest with something like shock in her eyes. "And, uh-"
"Listen, we've got man meat and not much else," Isidis says, slapping the breastless woman's thigh sympathetically as horror dawns on the older woman's face. "After the fight I'll give you back your tits, just like how I'll give some other women back their ovaries. Survive, alright?"
"O-okay," she says, stepping over the edge of the pool and looking around. "So, where can I get some clothes?" Dorian's finally pulled himself free and takes a moment to work the stiffness out of his system, then points to the side of the tent.
"Hospital gowns and domino masks there, then head out and to the right. Look for a group of capes arguing, and a PRT agent will get you a generic bodysuit-"
The rest is cut off as a spear of light the length of a car phases through the wall and pins Isidis to the ground.