Snuggles The Symbiote
The next thing I knew, I was on my back, I felt like shit, was soaking wet, and I felt someone pressing hard on my chest. I snapped to full consciousness, sat up, and coughed up some foul-tasting water. Once I had my bearings I looked around to find myself... On the shore of a pond, in the middle of a tropical jungle full of exotic trees and a large boulder across the pond. Ashley's mother was kind of kneeling over me and... She was also soaking wet.
"Where are we and... What happened?"
"We got teleported, I think we got scattered," Ashley's mother said. "I woke up next to a cave, came out to look for anyone else, and found you face down in the pond. Are you okay?"
"I feel like crap but I'll be fine... I've got a really intensive and thorough healing factor ever since I got bitten by a fuzzy naked mutant spider-lady... I swear that I don't have brain damage," I said as I realized how that sounded.
"No, no, that sounds normal," the older woman reassured. She stood up and helped me up. "As for where we are..." she pointed to the other side of the pond. That boulder that I'd glanced at when I first looked around, on a second look, was not a boulder.
"Judging from the ankylosaurus sitting there just minding his or her own business, I'm going to assume that we're in the Savage Lands."
I blinked. "It hasn't noticed us, has it?"
"No, I think it's taking a nap," Ashley's mother responded. "Getting you out of the pond without making enough noise to wake it up was a chore."
"We should go..." I began just in time to hear something roar in the distance. You see movies where someone has cloned a dinosaur or go back in time or something and they have them roar, but... I don't know what that was, but nothing from a Hollywood movie has ever come close to the real thing.
The ankylosaurus began to stir and I scrambled to my feet. Ashley's mother was already backing up. "On three, follow me. There wasn't anything living in the cave I landed near, we can set up shelter there."
Big step back.
Big step back.
"Three!" Ashley's mother shouted without counting up to it, then she twisted around and took off running. I dashed after her, adrenaline starting to flow and making my body forget about the fact that I was drowning a few minutes ago.
Ten minutes later, I was huddled at the entrance of a small cave by a small fire in order to warm up and dry out my wet clothes and looking out into the dense jungle just outside the clearing. I kind of wish I'd been in costume, Kamala's Law be damned, because my costume was treated to be water-resistant.
"You have any wilderness survival experience?" Ashley's mother asked me.
"I went to summer camp a couple of times as a kid," I answered half-heartedly. "Got lost in the woods when I was eight and followed a wolf back to camp. In hindsight, really lucky the wolf wasn't hungry."
A thought occurred to me and I checked my pants pocket for my PRT-issued phone. They were meant to be carried around while on duty and... Yes, I didn't lose it in the pond and the water didn't seem to damage it.
Now, logically speaking I shouldn't get service in a different universe but that didn't stop Ashley from sending and receiving texts, so...
"And no service," I said almost disappointed. "There's a text from Deadpool69_X_69 telling me not to double up on shoutouts from over seventy chapters ago but no service... There's something seriously wrong with that guy."
"Okay so, the most important thing is to establish shelter and not wander too far and get lost. Figure out a way to contact help and wait for rescue..." Ashley's mother said allowed. "This cave should work decently well, but it's a bit open at the front... There are plenty of logs, fallen branches, vines, and large leaves around us though. We could probably build some rudimentary walls around the mouth of the cave. It won't be enough to physically stop anything big enough from breaking through, but it should stop anything from casually wandering in while we're asleep or distracted which is better than nothing. We'll also need to make pallets or hammocks to sleep on..."
After a while, I got the feeling that Ashley's mother was talking more to herself than to me, so I turned her out and focused on the feedback I was getting from the bugs in the area.
Pro-Tip, there were fuck of a lot of bugs in a tropical jungle. I thought Brockton Bay was lousy with vermin, but God Damn.
Seeing the jungle around us for several city blocks from billions of sets of eyes, smelling it, hearing it, feeling it...
The Savage Lands were beautiful. It would have been nice to come here of my own choice instead of being stranded here.
I expressed that sentiment and Ashley's mother replied "count your blessings, we could have ended up on Monster Island."
I almost laughed before I realized that she wasn't joking.
"Or God forbid we end up in Canada. We'd find civilization decently quick but we wouldn't be able to trust any food we didn't make from scratch with meat we killed and butchered ourselves and never let out of our eyesight even once." Ashley's mother then spent the next few moments mumbling about wendigos and how human flesh keeps ending up in the food supply up there. "What does the CFIA do if not make sure that there aren't any people in the food supply? In the part of the continent that's cursed so that even a small nibble of human flesh turns you into a feral monster that usually needs to be put down. You'd think after the Wendigo War that they'd have cracked down on that."
"This universe terrifies me," I deadpanned. "I mean, I knew about all of that but still."
I finished scouring the jungle around us with borrowed senses. "There's no sign of Miss Militia or Ashley anywhere near us. We should go looking for them."
"No," Yuri said. "It's not... If I hadn't found you near here I would have come back and set up camp. We've gotta be smart about this," she sounded as if she was forcing herself to be calm. "We set up camp here, and once we've done that we try to get our bearings, make note of the major landmarks, maybe try to figure to which direction is... Okay, I was going to say figure out which direction is North but we're right next to the South Pole so... sorry, brainfart."
"They might be in danger," I countered. "Or injured."
"I know," Ashley's mother said back, "but rushing into danger without a safe place to fall back on would be stupid, and if they're hurt we can't treat their injuries if we're running from predators. Ashley isn't helpless anymore, and she has her father's brains, her grandfather's morals, and my complete inability to give a fuck. She'll be fine on her own until we have a shelter set up and if I keep telling myself that I'll believe it eventually."
Okay, she was just as worried as I was, she was just going about it differently. But still... "What about Miss Militia?"
"...She has a gun?" Ashley's mother half-stated, half-asked. I got the feeling that she didn't care.
"We can't just leave her to die in a dinosaur-infested jungle," I said firmly.
"Well, you're a better person than I am," Ashley's mother said flatly. "Which, to be fair, is a good thing."
The woman began kneeling down next to me and started warming her hands on the fire.
"So, once we have a camp set up as a base of operation, which should only take a few hours tops since there's two of us... Well, we could either explore the jungle together for safety, or one of us could go out exploring, looking for the others while the other stays behind in case they stumble across us on their own."
"With my bug control, I can scout out a huge area in a pretty small amount of time," I explained. "About two city blocks, give or take, with bugs I find and more or less indefinitely with the spiders I make with my body. If we're okay with the risk of me forgetting to reclaim a few and fucking up the ecosystem, I could probably scout out the whole jungle in a couple of days."
"That's a thing to consider, yes," the woman said. "Okay, let's get the elephant out of the room: Things are awkward with us, they've been awkward since the warehouse. We could be stuck here for weeks, let's clear the air."
I looked away. "Don't worry about it, it's just... My own selfish baggage. I'll deal, I'll..."
"Taylor, was it?" The woman asked. I nodded. "I didn't dig for my sister's 'baggage' and she ended up being radicalized by anti-mutant terrorists under my nose. Forgive me if I'm skeptical."
I didn't answer. This prompted her to start literally poking me in the cheek. "Don't ignore me. I'm not so old as to have forgotten being young, I can and will annoy the truth out of you."
I did my best to ignore her.
"You have three pokes before I go nuclear."
I rolled my eyes.
Three pokes later, Ashley's mother stopped poking me and moved around to the other side of the fire so that she could look me in the eye. Then, with the graveness and gravity of a man declaring that the President of the United States had been murdered, slowly enunciated. "So... Let me tell you about... Homestuck."
I lasted ten minutes.
"Okay, fine! Just... stop describing the house full of paintings and statues of clowns."
"Harlequins," Yuri's mother insisted pedantically. "Also, I can't help by be amused that you lasted through the CAPTCHALOGUE modus explanation but lost it at the harlequins." I hated that I could somehow hear the capital letters.
"It's... Jealously. Or envy, or... Something," I admitted shamefully. "...I don't have much going for me. I don't have a... Purpose to keep going, and... I... Things went downhill when my mom died. Dad fell apart, I cried myself to sleep every night for... I had my best friend as a support network but then a few years ago I get back from summer camp and she's turned into a raging bitch out of nowhere, says she's outgrown me and makes my life a living hell for the next couple of years and I'm never gonna find out why because she and half of her possie got murdered and the only surviving member is in a psych ward indefinitely because the stress of being hunted by a serial killer seriously fucked up her already questionable sanity."
"Eventually, I get superpowers and start preparing to be a superhero... And throw all my plans for how I was gonna go about that out the window when I run into Ashley because 'hey, here's a kid who needs help' and then taking care of Ashley and figuring out how to take care of Ashley is my life for the next month or so... And then you come back to life just as I finally figure everything out and decide what to do," I said while avoiding eye contact. "Ashley doesn't need me anymore, so now what?"
Ashley's mother came up to me and pulled me into a hug. It was awkward. "Okay, first, I have no intent to deprive my little girl of the first and only flesh ad blood friends she's ever had... Even if they're all older than her. And, honestly, since my husband is still dead I'm probably gonna need help. She could be a handful back when she was bedridden. She..."
"Is fiercely independent, scarily intelligent, and has your complete inability to give a fuck?" I finished for her.
"Exactly," Yuri agreed. "So, that isn't something you need to worry about any time soon. Honestly, I get the feeling that Ashley adores you. And second... Living for a person or a purpose isn't good. If that's... I'm not a therapist, but if you need to talk I'm willing to listen. You sound like you've been through a lot and..."
"...Thank you, Ma'am" I replied awkwardly.
"Please, call me Yuri,"
"Okay, Yuri."
"So, what's this about Ashley having a pet serial killer?"
"That might as well be its own saga," I deadpanned. "It started in January 2005 with the murder of the Davis family by the Slaughterhouse Nine."
"Well that's a tryhard name," Yuri deadpanned. "It doesn't even alliterate."
"Anyway, as I understand it the only survivor of the attack was the youngest daughter who..." and I spent the next few minutes explaining, as clearly and concisely as I could the convoluted chain of events that led to Ashley essentially adopted one of the most prolific serial killers of the modern age as a pet.