AN: On the second day of christmas, Scrimshaw gave to me… emotional trauma, mutant madness, and what might be the weirdest crossover ever made with Worm~

AtW: Eh. Probably not. Still, hope it's good, hope you like it, and cheers.

Wyvern: Now then, as always, we'd like to thank Xavier Rall for his continued patronage. And encourage our readers to leave a like and a review if it so pleases them. Our engines basically run off of the stuff.

Mutant Bay - Chapter 3

Taylor

Throwing caution to the wind, Taylor sent out a simple command through her powers.

'Attack.'

There was a tremor of fear that ran through her when her own body tried to carry out that very same order, a flash of being trapped in a locker made of her own… skin. A second command to "not worry" actually worked enough that the panic welling up inside of her immediately died down, sparking a much deeper, much more concerning train of thought about who and what she was now.

Obviously, the critters around her didn't know any of this and threw themselves towards the capes.

They didn't care that they were dying by the dozens, the hundreds, as everything from mutant roaches to swarms of houseflies to army ants the size of her hand rushed over themselves to begin dragging down the monster mutilating Bitch's dogs.

She didn't stop running herself, couldn't stop.

If she did, nothing would distract her from the voice which told her to turn back. To turn back and give herself to the command. To rip and tear and kill until her prey was gone or she was splattered across the pavement like the rest. It felt like hooks had dug deep into her skin, tearing into muscle and bone as something pulled at the invisible strings.

Yet all of that was immaterial. Her body rolled in a way that was unnatural, chitin and joints clicking and flexing, claws digging into pavement and concrete whenever she pushed down too hard while at a run, and all of it was easier than moving had ever been before.

It was more of a small hop to rapidly scale the side of a building, brick serving as an excellent handhold as she bodily hauled herself up and across the Autozone in question. Now on the roof, she leapt to the building next to it - easily clearing another ten feet as she did so. This served as another launchpad, then another, with a final building, a squat, flat five story parking deck for a mall that never opened, letting her gain the height she wanted. After all, she had a target she was aiming for and being accurate with what she did next could well be the difference between life or death.

There were three targets she needed to deal with, or at least threats to address, and that meant she needed more firepower than she had at the moment.

From her vantage point, she could make out the weird lizard-monster thing fighting Bitch's pups, the giant bug monster - that was her prey, and the light based cape aiding the cops.

It was hard to tell who it might be.

Photon Lady?

No, she hadn't blasted the critters yet.

Maybe Shielder? Even when the giant bug, which was strangely present in her awareness but not quite under her control, smashed the angelic light creacher with chunks of debris nothing much changed. The same burning void simply kept attempting to pelt the once-human with the mind twisting energy blasts without causing any collateral damage… or at least making any of the already existing damage too much worse.

But standing there, looking down, seeing her world melt… something clicked.

Inhuman, alien, cold.

A switch in her brain was twisted up and let go and set off and born again.

Chitin cracked, ropey muscle twisted, the bones inside of her shell vibrated with the coiled tension of Taylor's new body. And she soared.

No wings, no powers, nothing but pure force and gravity. Coming down at an angle, she was clipped by one of the angel-capes blasts, for a moment light itself gaining a hundred new colors, but managed to stick her landing. Claws biting as deeply into mutant chitin as it did stone, the Cape turned Critter pushed with her power. Driving it like a railroad spike into red and yellow banded armor, she hammered away with her mind, body, and until her mount complied.

Shuddering, shaking, snorting with enough force to blow back her hair, the monster settled down. Both the police officers and the hero politely stopped shooting at her new pet and that meant Skitter could get to work.

Firstly, she moved her monster up and to the side, climbing that parking deck with all the ease of a swarm of army ants ravaging a nest.

Then, from on high, she gathered her swarm. A buzzing, chittering, screeching mass of twisted, abominable life. Everything new, everything old, everything alien and familiar and so, so much

"Down!" She spoke, the Swarm speaking as one with her.

The sound was like a thousand nails digging into chalkboards, like clacking, snapping mandibles forcing out a noise that might have once been human… but it worked.

Even in their frenzied state, the pups were too well trained. Someone they really, really should listen to had given them a command and Rachel had prepared them well. Moving with a battle frenzied hesitance the dogs obeyed, running away from their assailant, dragging their wounded with them. Chirping and chittering in victory, the monster commanded her pet kaiju to 'Jump!'

Once again, gravity took effect as soon as the momentum wore off, the sheer weight of her new prize coming down like a hammer blow as it performed a whale sized belly flop right on top of this particular trouble maker. There was a rumbling and the ground was cracked and shattered, the lizard monster unable to dodge such an absurd attack.

There wasn't silence after.

Snuffling from the dogs, a low humming coming from the cape, heaving pants from the once-human officers of the law, and the sounds of distant violence still filled the air. But perhaps from the suddenness of the cessation of conflict, the world was pregnant and tense, like a single final note in a song that hadn't quite been played.

Still, after ten deep breaths the calm hadn't been broken - other than by some shifting from the pinned down monster - and Taylor, not Skitter, remembered what it was she was after.

It was strange, how sudden everything had ended, but as Bitch's hounds came back, snuffling at both the defeated - but not dead - monster and her the young woman was forcibly brought back into the moment. She still had a job to do and, after telling the giant centipede thing to keep the giant lizard thing in place, and not to eat anyone if it could help it, she hopped down. A quick wave to the police officers, which they thankfully, if somewhat awkwardly, returned and she was off.

"Take me to Bitch! Go."

A single command and they were off. Thankfully, running was easy, the dogs serving as a guide around or over any major obstacles, and it let the bug girl fall into a rhythm of movement and thought that freed her mind to turn inwards - instead of on the now alien city around her.

Claw, claw, claw, jump, climb, climb, jump, claw, claw, climb, climb, climb, jump.

Movement in this body was nearly mechanical. Thankfully she'd also found that so long as Taylor let her mind drift, not pushing her power to really do anything, she could remain more or less unaffected by it. But still, now that she was looking for it, she realized that she herself was very much a valid target for… whatever it was that her ability let her do.

Obviously it was more than just insect control, arachnids blew that out of the water, but if she could control herself, and that giant monster back there, then clearly it meant she had a wider range than just creepy crawlies.

'And if I can control myself, who else, what else can I control too?'

As she moved, her arms would curl up under her chest, torso leaning forward and legs a bit behind. There was some weight, she wasn't sure what, inside of her torso that seemed to shift in response to her momentum and position that meant she stayed balanced. Taylor would have suspected it was haemolymph if she wasn't distantly aware that oxygen saturation would be non-feasible at her size and weight, not unless the oxygen content in the atmosphere had massively spiked, and so trusted that her rough understanding of biology wasn't totally invalidated.

Though, going by how there was currently an orange and purple sky above them, having faded from the earlier red, that wasn't a sure thing.

"If the chemical composition of the atmosphere has changed… what if there are survivors?"

Her father was out there. And even if her teammate was a priority right now, after all Bitch would have only sent her dogs out if it was important, she still wanted… needed to find him. He was the only part of her left, after all.

That meant somethi-

"Ping!"

Head jerking, she was knocked sideways, Taylor letting out a grunt as a bullet slammed into her jaw.

Part of her mouth and jaw was cracked, a mix of blue-red fluids pouring out, and the sniper firing at her put another three subsonic rounds into her torso before she ducked into cover.

In pain, Skitter couldn't help but let her jaw flutter a bit, a chirp-squeak coming out as her body reacted in a mixture of pain and confusion.

Tapping into her swarm, she found her assailant - though only by its breath. In an overgrowth of tall grasses, nestled behind a copse of trees, lay what looked like a grasshopper. However, it was a grasshopper as made by a mad child, one who had the imagination of the bully from the first Toy Story movie.

Two pairs of large, spiky legs were attached to a cigar shaped torso. Instead of a human's head was a bulbous, four eyed thing with six small tube-like structures around a central vertebral stalk. Instead of turning its head, these small tubes would contract and expand, turning the whole of the structure while the four massive, compound eyes jittered all over the place. In its hands, another two limbs that actually ended in eight insanely articulated digits, was a massive rifle with an equally as large silencer on the end and about a hundred boxes of rifle rounds sitting around it.

This was ultimately all academic as, when a part of her swarm crept a little too close, several thousand blades of grass around the mutant and, as she could make out in the last moments before her critters were destroyed, growing out of it hardened into steel like blades and mulched everything nearby.

Swallowing, Skitter held her hand up to her injured jaw, glad to find that the wound had sealed itself and a tough, ropey material had blocked off the hole, and decided that discretion was the better part of valor.

Skittering about the place, as a bug girl does, she began looking past the tendril like red and green vines that were spilling out of the windows of what used to be an apartment building.

Ducking through them, and ignoring how they grew taught and tried to grab at her, splitting open to reveal a mouth like slit that ran the whole of the length of the jaw, she used her swarm to bring Bitch's pups around to her, where she'd be able to lead them away from the crazed sniper.

Taylor, at the very least, had zero desire to engage an unknown mutant cape with powers that were more than a little horrifying.

Choosing to maintain her discretion, as always the better part of valor, she ducked down into a large gutter behind the apartment, a kind of flood area for when it rained particularly heavily, and did her best to ignore how the area had basically been turned into a tropical forest dominated by… coconut trees of all things. And, of course, spiders with twelve legs, even more eyes, that also just happened to be the size of said coconuts.

These insects at least obeyed, unlike her attacker, raising only more questions about her power.

Questions which would have to wait until the end of her journey, because something told the villainess that her friend was in deep, deep trouble.

Tattletale

Lisa wasn't scared.

She was deeply, teeth gratingly frustrated.

Even now as their little group snuck through the backdoor of an abandoned store, it was all she could do to try and keep from screaming her head off in a combination of cackling insanity and distilled rage against the heavens for the latest trick Murphy decided to play on Brockton Bay.

As if they really needed the metaphysical kick in the nuts, just as soon as their team had caught a break.

Without a doubt, the villainess certainly could have done without the makeover.

'Focus, woman! You have a job to do.' Her recrimination was swift and pointed - distraction could be fatal. Plus she had stepped into a pile of sticky, sickly sweet goop that had seemingly evolved from a burst open can of beans.

Though, if she were being honest, it wasn't so much a job as it was a self imposed mission, none of them were getting paid for this, but without any way to talk with Coil they didn't have any official orders. And while Lisa would have paid big time money to see the smug bastard's reaction to Bakuda's little temper tantrum, she wasn't about to stick around and wait for the man to send someone to check up on them.

Frankly, she really hoped he got turned into something nasty.

Maybe a snake? That would warn people off from trusting the guy.

"Man, they really fried everything. I had to reinstall all the apps I had on that phone I took off Leet."

Lisa was also trying not to be visibly annoyed because that would only encourage her erstwhile teammate. Brian, however, was less willing to tolerate Alec's whining - the chrome skulled metal man picking the Master up by the scruff of his neck.

"Woah, woah big guy, I didn't want to know how the weather was up here!"

Leaving the two boys to squabble, she began nosing about the place, taking in what she could and putting pieces together as best as possible without her power doing more than returning vaguely fuzzy suggestions. Plus, you know, grappling with a fundamental aggravation that she thought was the providence of toddlers and coma patients.

Because she was having to relearn how to hold everything she'd ever taken for granted. Walking, talking, holding things, and in particular picking up a jar of Prego was actually a bit of a challenge when her over long nails scraped at the glass. Looking around, she felt a strange sense of… alienness. Half the store was intact, more or less, but stripped bare. Linoleum tiles scuffed up, empty metal shelves, rot marked tiles along the roof. The other half was… not.

Large, stalked growths had formed out of what might have been coolers at some point, heavy beans hanging from them. Mildly fragrant, she carefully stepped around patches of large, purple lichens to find a mostly corroded metal rod. Picking it up, she poked at the nearest bean and watched as it split open, revealing an inside that looked like it was filled with grapes.

The seed pods, or whatever they were, rolled across the floor as a sweet smell filled the air.

It wasn't in her wheelhouse to try her luck, though, and the villainess returned to her group.

Secretly, Lisa was a little happy and a little worried that they'd yet to see other people.

Because somehow, half of her team was Scion knows where, probably fighting for their lives while dealing with the same issues she was. Well, probably not the exact same issues, but Lisa was pretty confident that Taylor was probably neck deep in trouble by now. Given how her track record panned out.

She was also annoyed because the one person not affected by this whole ordeal spent the last half hour whining about how his game got somehow erased by the bomb which had quite literally blown up on their faces.

Lisa would have shot him if she could hold a gun.

Or herself, really.

Her powers were starting to get used to… whatever it was that transformed her into a fox woman and had started their usual routine of force feeding her details about everything around her.

They were largely fuzzy, giving her what was more like vague supposition in a lot of cases. But the normal things she'd always dealt with? Well, she did not need to know where the suspicious stains on the alleyways had come from.

Nor did she need to know how likely the possibility was that someone could have survived a fall from the fifth store building when she had the footprints to prove that whoever it was had walked off the fall like it had been a stumble.

Brockton Bay had already been weird before.

But now? Lisa would be lucky if she ever got a peaceful night of sleep ever again.

And that sucked.

"Anything back there?" The metallic skull rasped out. Like, literally rasped out. The only reason Lisa understood was because her power was letting her translate based on a mixture of body language, forced jaw articulation, and crude gestures. Brian did look strangely out of place on his emergency change of clothes. Like something out of a heavy metal album cover.

"We're clear, Ghost Rider."

And of course, Alec had seen fit to try and give them new codenames throughout the entire trek through the city. Like the sugar fueled brat that he was, nothing they did could distract him from it.

She had already gone from Vixen to Foxtrot before he defaulted to copyright infringement.

Lisa was the wrong shade of fur and lacked the second tail.

They also didn't have the blue hedgehog.

Out of habit Lisa reached for her, at the moment, useless cellphone. Taylor didn't have one. Even if she did, she doubted the girl would keep it on her. Not that it would even help. There was no signal. No satellite or connection of any kind. Like the bomb had blanked out the whole city's electronics. Which, honestly, would be the least weird thing about today if the bomb had left the world queit.

Brian fiddled with his own phone, skeletal fingers carefully tracing buttons as he tried calling again, having awkwardly fished it out of baggy pants that hung from his rather fleshless pelvic bone.

Sighing, Lisa didn't need her powers to know he was worried.

That was the issue with having family in a place like Brockton Bay. Most days, you left hoping nothing too bad would happen. That whoever you left behind wouldn't have to deal with the craziness of the city. And that when you came back after the day was over, they would still be safe.

Neither Alec nor Lisa had concerns like that, though she suspected Taylor tried to convince herself she didn't need to worry. Too afraid to really care about someone else.

Brian was different.

Brian had someone he cared about. Someone who depended on him. Someone he cared about enough that he'd throw caution to the wind and brave a city filled with paranoia-crazed mutants scared out of their minds just on the off chance that his sister was one of them. Alone and defenseless.

"We have another group."

Lisa piped up, power whispering in her ear as the group came to sudden halt at the front of the store. Taking cover behind a massive garbage can. Lisa's ears twitched, her nose scrunching up in focus as her abilities parsed through the newly sharpened senses. The result being a wave of nausea accompanying the usual migraine.

There were three of them.

She couldn't tell what they were. One of them smelled similar to her, so maybe another animal-hybrid human. It was hard to tell. Brian and Alec didn't smell human anymore so she didn't have anything to compare it to.

Lisa did recognize the smell of blood.

As well as the sound of something metallic being dragged across the pavement.

'Another armed group.'

She relayed the information.

Brian's poker face was flawless. Alec was still as easy to get a read on as always. Eagerly rubbing his hands as he took his taser-staff out. Eager to start shocking more people into twitching piles of agony. If anything, he seemed even more eager to get into a fight than usual.

'You can't tell me he's still mad about the game!'

What kind of petty asshole beat people over a lost save file?!

After that, things got… weird.

"Hey boys, over here!"

Looking up out of cover, the fox girl saw something that made her pause. A fourth person had now appeared, this one a nude and… almost hilariously well endowed woman of indeterminate age, ethnicity, and with an accent not even her power could place. It was as if someone had taken a thousand people and perfectly averaged them out. Frowning, she motioned for her teammates to start pulling away - doubly so as the other trio, consisting of something like wolf or dog man, a rail thIn teenager that looked like he was made out of copper scales, and what was, without a doubt, an ant man.

All three of them looked at each other, then at the woman, then turned and immediately started sprinting flat out.

Shlorping back into what Lisa had thought was a pile up of cars, the "young woman" turned out to be the tongue of a six eyed, six limbed, toad like monstrosity that wore automobiles on its back like a snail wore its shell.

Leaping down the street at the retreating trio, it croaked with so much force the whole world shook.

That was when she stopped watching and joined her friends, the three running with just as much desperation as the others. However, when they were down at an intersection, with a clear run to a line of abandoned houses, Lisa did something stupid.

Cursing herself, she grabbed her weapon from, cranked her power up to max, and then fired at the monster way behind them. Not that the fox-girl's claws made for good tools, but she was able to squeeze the trigger at just the right angle that her power compensated for the rest - painfully losing part of a nail-claw as the recoil snapped the gun back.

Her round, however, was true, burrowing its way into thick tongue muscle just as the frog's lure wrapped around the waist of the copper scaled teenager.

Croaking in pain, the frog dropped the man just long enough for his friends to pull him away and into a line of heavy, squat brick buildings back the way the Undersiders had come. Thankfully, aside from some rude comments from Alec, her erstwhile comrades fared much better. When the monster mutant came hopping back over, it found only a sprawling cloud of darkness. Admittedly, it still fired it's wounded tongue into said cloud, but quickly found itself brutally shocked.

"That's for my shiny level ninety nine Sylveon, you bastard."

Having had enough, the attacker decided to run from the hostile, sharp, bristly, smokey prey creatures and find something far less well protected for lunch.

Ultimately, it was less terrifying than staring down Lung and, after taking a moment to breathe deep, gather themselves, and keep moving. Lisa made it a point to hand her pistol back over to Alec and he made it a point to take a jab at her.

"Break a nail beauty queen?"

Lisa simply huffed and sucked on the injured digit.

"If the worst thing that happens to us today is a broken nail, I'll count us all lucky."

"Hey!" The Master protested. "I lost at least three years of hard work!"

"Yeah." The Thinker agreed. "Leet's hard work you stole."

"Of course. He's a bad guy! What else was I supposed to do? Not steal his stuff?" And with that, Alec seemed to consider the conversation over.

Not particularly happy, but also aware that Brian was eager to get moving again - at least judging by how the skeleton was grinding his teeth - she decided to mutter a final snarky comment and get out of taser range before her coworker could retaliate.

"Says the guy wearing frills and carrying a magic wand."

Said magic wand came at her, but she dodged out of the way, Lisa's fluffy tail even co-operating long enough to bat Regent in the face when he came in for a swipe.

Lighter, happier, a little less swimming in horror at the fact their home had been twisted into an alien Hellscape, the duo moved a little more swiftly and a little more fluidly. Brian, though, had gotten frustrated and ripped off the jeans he'd been trying to wear, tossing them aside and instead cloaking his body in his black mist that, even now, constantly leaked from his mouth. This left the young man as a metal skull glinting in the strange, late afternoon sun as he was surrounded by an ever shifting darkness.

Lisa really, really hoped they didn't get shot at.

For the rest of their journey the trio remained as quiet as they could be, Grue's power leaving him functionally silent, as they stuck to back alleys. Sure, it was a risk that they'd be blocked in or might run into something likely to try to eat them, but the things growing out of dumpsters tended to be food based - they'd even seen a literal pizza tree that Alec had pulled a slice off of, claiming that it was the greatest slice he'd ever had - but that just meant that the dog sized rats were more interested in eating things other than them. However, it wasn't until they came into private neighborhoods that they actually ran into people again.

Inside of each house families, or so the Thinker's power surmised, had largely clustered together. Many were sobbing, some were fighting, others were quiet and praying.

Some houses were just plain silent, either because they had become overgrown by various plants or because they were empty or, in one sad case, because the residents had committed suicide. It made their whole situation all the more jarring when she glanced in a window and saw a group of grey-alien esque humanoids in bed together, the father having shot his child, then his wife, then himself.

How could she be in a world where pizza grew on trees, giant frogs with woman tongues roamed the street, and whole families committed collective suicide?

It was insane, it was jarring.

But it did give her a good deal of information, simply because she was seeing a clear trend as they travelled further through the city.

The initial blast had come from the south-west, out towards the old power plant if Lisa's memory served her well. And while they hadn't explored out that way, she had gotten a pretty good look of what the various… mutants had become in that part of the Bay. None of it had been pretty, a few had even been fatal.

However, her own team was proof that, more or less, normal results occurred if you were far enough away. Now, though, they were seeing more and more people that just looked like reworked humans. Greys, some animal-human hybrids like her, though more on the human end, and even one guy who peaked out of his curtains that looked eerily similar to Newter. More tellingly, though, was that families had all shared similar patterns of mutation when she could see them and they hadn't run into anything overtly hostile in a while now.

'And thank God we haven't run into any more giant monsters either. One super frog was more than enough.'

Chewing on those thoughts gave her enough to focus on without needing to overemphasize the horror of her present situation… without growing distracted enough to risk being caught unawares. Just because it seemed safe didn't mean it was.

Brian was, luckily, still good enough at finding his way to his father's house that, even with the odd street being turned into an alpine forest or a freaking green Hell, finding their goal was more of a matter of time and doing by this point. Located on the northern edge of town, a little bit to the west, about halfway between E88 and ABB territory, it was one of the small, somewhat, though not quite crushingly, poor sections of residential space latched onto the city.

"I think these poor SOBs finally caught a break." Lisa pointed over at a mostly normal group of people. "They're having a barbeque."

Indeed, about two dozen individuals, a veritable riot of colors, were all simply hanging around and cooking. All of the food even looked almost normal, except for things with high levels of preservatives, those were totally fine. The funniest thing was that hotdogs apparently resisted the wave of mutation too.

When Brian raised a hand, trying to call out in recognition, all of the male adults in the group very quickly presented weapons.

Lisa simply grabbed her teammate's shoulder and pulled him away.

"Just because they're acting like things are normal doesn't mean they're friendly." The look the silver man gave her told her everything she needed to know. "Yeah. It's a mixed sign. So let's hurry up and find your sister."

Choosing to forgo stealth, the Undersiders made even better time than before, simply rushing down the more or less intact, if badly in need of repair, street.

Unfortunately, their good time only brought them to an unpleasant conclusion even sooner. As,when they to where Brian's father lived, and where his sister should be, they found the front door kicked, two bodies slumped over in the living room, and a mutant with red and black swirls all over its skin dead in a hallway - shot multiple times and had lived just long enough to crawl away.

From how the skeleton reacted, it was clear that Grue recognized something of his father in the corpse.

Somewhat unsure of what to do, and with Alec politely playing on his freshly restarted tinkertech phone, the Thinker placed a single hand on her leader's cold, fleshless shoulder.

"B-Brian, is that you?"

And before Lisa could speak, those words had suddenly taken over the Shaker's whole world.