When Über finally stopped laughing enough to be able to speak, which took a while, he looked at Tattletale with respect, then turned to Leet who had nearly gone blue in the face trying to keep breathing through his hilarity. "What do you think?" he asked, giggling inanely. "It's got nothing to do with video games but it's fucking hysterical."
"We have to do it," his friend gasped from the floor, waving a hand with his thumb up. "I don't care about the video games this time. I just want to see Piggot's face."
"You're certain about her reaction?" Über asked, turning back to Tattletale and Saurial.
The blonde nodded. "That's what my power told me, and I did some digging around in her records. I found an incident when she was in basic training that became legendary with her peers. They were playing practical jokes on her because of it for years. She should react… amusingly."
"And the DWU will provide people? We'll need quite a lot of extras," he asked, looking at Saurial.
The lizard-girl smirked. "A lot of them have issues with the PRT for various reasons and would love to mildly embarrass them if they could get away with it. With our contacts, we can get a public performance license from the city which makes it completely legal. They can't touch us or the DWU as long as we don't break any other laws."
He stared, then broke down laughing again. "Legal. That makes it much better. We're in."
"Great. I'll make the costumes and we can practice in the BBFO office, there's lots of room there. We need it to look good for the best effect."
"This is going to be fucking epic!" Leet chortled, sitting up. "The only way it would be better is if we could get Kaiju involved."
"She's a little big for the city," Saurial laughed. "But she's fully behind the idea." She and Tattletale exchanged a look with the two minor villains, all four of them collapsing with laughter.
Emily came out of the coffee shop with her normal order of a double espresso and a chocolate brownie. Or at least, normal since Panacea had fixed her. Jon would be annoyed if he knew, but what he didn't know she damn well wasn't going to tell him.
After the events of the last couple of months, she was glad to have a chance to relax a little. It was a fine morning, still chilly but crisp and dry, with a cloudless sky and the early morning sun beaming down on an almost unprecedentedly peaceful Brockton Bay. All the normal suspects were keeping their heads well down right now. After what had happened to Coil, no one wanted to attract attention from the Family.
She shuddered a little.
No, no one wanted that to happen again.
Wandering along fairly slowly in a, for her, very good mood, she bit into the brownie, then washed it down with a swig of strong coffee. Life was, at least for the moment, fairly good. About as good as it was likely to get around here.
Heading down the street that led to the main Boardwalk, she looked around. Tourist levels were up considerably, now that the city was becoming known to be somewhat safer than historically it had been, and the recent spate of good weather had improved on that as well. The evidence was all around her, a lot of people wandering around even now, only just after eight. Most of the shops were open, everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves, and there were even street performers starting up their acts and apparently doing quite well.
She paused to watch one young man who was playing a whole series of different movie themes on a violin, remarkably well, and looked to be making quite a lot of money in the process. The case of his instrument which was open on the ground in front of him was at least a quarter full of coins and low denomination notes already. Putting her brownie in her mouth, she stuck her hand in her pocket after a couple of minutes and pulled out a couple of crumpled dollar bills which she tossed in, appreciating the artistry displayed. He nodded slightly to her with a smile and switched to the next theme, which was the main intro to Jaws.
Smiling a little, she moved on, watching the people around her. Another performer was juggling a dozen brightly colored balls with significant skill, one was doing some basic but effective conjuring trick, and so on. There were quite a lot of them.
As she looked around, she frowned slightly. There really were quite a lot of them. Unusually so. After a moment she shrugged. It was a nice day and why not?
A couple of hundred yards later she stopped, staring, then frowning.
A mime.
He was in a box. One that wasn't there. She glared.
Fucking mimes.
The white-painted face turned her way, the expression becoming one of delirious joy, as his box disappeared. Unfortunately, a high wind prevented him coming closer, although he tried valiantly, slipping on the road surface as he battled towards her. She glared harder, turning away and walking off.
Idiotic performers. They should be locked up.
Her good mood somewhat disrupted she finished her brownie and half her coffee, moving slightly more rapidly now. Glancing at her watch she saw she had about twenty minutes to make it to the PRT building and yet another day of trying to keep a lid on the insanity of the city, unappreciated and underpaid considering the shit the job put her through. She rounded a gentle corner in the road and stopped, sighing.
Another fucking mime. This one was female, solidly built under the completely black clothing, her makeup the same as the previous one, her face expressionless. She was feeling her way around an invisible wall, to reach a small child who was watching her with wide eyes. He laughed as she handed him an invisible ball, which he took carefully, his face a mask of concentration, then he and his parents watched as she juggled several more, the charade so convincing Emily half-expected to actually see the balls.
Growling, she made a wide circle around the performer, finishing her coffee and tossing the cup in a garbage receptacle.
A hundred feet further on she stopped dead, sighing with irritation. Yet another mime, this one made up in silver paint, was doing a robot man act to a group of teenagers, who were laughing wildly. He leaned back at an implausible angle, his elbow resting on something that wasn't there, looking calmly at her.
"Oh, for god's sake," she growled under her breath. "Why do these bastards always turn up on a nice day? Learn the damn words, you idiot." Muttering to herself, her good mood ruined, she turned around to try a different route and yelped despite herself. Standing only feet away was still another of the damn parasites, done up in the French version of the affliction, looking sadly at her. He offered her a non-existent flower and smiled tremulously.
"Fuck off, you prick," she snapped, hurrying past him. When she looked over her shoulder, unable to stop herself, he was cuddling the flower that wasn't there while wiping an invisible tear from his eye.
"Jesus, it's like a plague," she grumbled, taking a short cut down a side street then rejoining the main thoroughfare past the mime-infested bottleneck.
She'd only gone a further fifty feet before she found another one.
"Christ!" she said rather more loudly that she intended as the young woman opened an immaterial door and stepped through, bowing to a small crowd. Her white-painted face was serenely calm.
Emily stared, then sighed heavily, turning down another side street. This was getting ridiculous.
Even there she wasn't safe. Another three of the swine passed her, one drinking from an invisible bottle, slumped in a doorway in some weird sort of performance art, and a pair of them carrying a non-existent ladder or something, walking in perfect sync. She stared, swore violently, and dashed down the nearest alley that spilled her out onto the Boardwalk.
Looking over her shoulder in vast irritation, she shook her head.
"I wish I could shoot the bastards, but the last time I did… that… I..."
Her voice trailed off into a whisper as she turned around to resume her trip to the PRT building.
Emily stared in horror.
Turning on the spot she looked all around her, wildly seeking an end to the madness.
They were everywhere.
Dozens of the bastards.
Hundreds!
White faces everywhere she looked, the entire Boardwalk full of them, black clothes, striped black and white shirts with stupid little berets on their heads, robot people, every version she'd ever heard of.
Mimes.
Everywhere.
And in the middle of them, one of them was over six feet tall, her slender body trapped inside a small invisible cylinder as she coiled her tail around herself, feeling the prison she found herself in, her scaly visage white-painted with a black tear under one eye.
Saurial.
Horror-struck, Emily looked around again, her heart pounding. She began moving swiftly away from the alley when she saw the ladder-carrying ones coming down it towards her.
Breathing heavily, wanting to pull her gun but knowing she only had fifteen rounds and there were far more of the enemy, she broke into a jog.
Then a run.
Eventually making it to the end of the Boardwalk, past all the horror spread across it, which the tourists were taking fucking photos of as if they didn't see the danger, she breathed a huge sigh of relief, wondering wildly how to deal with it.
Looking back as she hurried away, wanting to get reinforcements and clean the infestation before it spread, she noticed a sign on a stand at the entrance to the Boardwalk.
Reading it, she went purple, then stomped off, wondering if she could check out a flamethrower. "Fucking Tuesday. It's always Tuesday this sort of shit happens on. I hate Tuesdays," she snarled venomously. "And MIMES!"
Behind her, the performance continued, people looking at the sign as they passed and grinning, the stylized white face with rakishly tilted beret on a bright red background and sandwiched between two words, one above and one below, before carrying on, laughing and pulling out their cameras.
Danger
Mimefield