Snuggles The Symbiote

An hour later, Ashley'd got up from her nap and we talked a bit. She took a look through the pamphlets, hummed, and said she wasn't interested. I didn't push it.

I'd asked her to elaborate on her comment about this being either the best or worst day of her life.

"Today's kind of been like a rollercoaster. I wake up to heads in my bed and get into a fight with a dangerous monster. A man... A man saw how badly I was getting beaten and tried to help and... I couldn't do anything to save him, and... the only reason I'm alive is becuase helped showed up just in the right moment, and then I wake up in the infirmary and meet Gabby and she's nice, but..." She paused for a second. "And then, then I get to meet Spider-Man and other famous heroes from my world, and I'm happy, and I get back things I thought I'd lost forever but I also find out that part of my family hates me for what I am and... And then we leave them and I feel bad for feeling happy when just a few hours ago someone died trying to help me..."

So, I hugged her. She was leaving something out, but I wasn't gonna push on that, either.

"I want to fight," she said. "I don't want to stay back while other people are trying to help people and getting hurt. I don't want to... I want to help."

I'd been afraid of this. "Okay," I said. I couldn't exactly tell her no, even though I wanted to. "We'll just tell them we want to help and ask how they can use us."

After a little bit, we went out into the common area. Apparently, the talk with Alexandria went quickly, becuase the second young blonde, maybe slightly older than Vista was supposed to be, in pigtails and a black and yellow jumpsuit with a starburst emblem on her chest, Energizer, was on the couch with Vista, who was in full costume.

"...And that's how we stopped my brother from turning into a horse," the black-and-yellow-clad heroine finished.

"...So, Ashley isn't making this stuff up. Your world really is crazy." Vista sounded amazed. "So, do you know how to stop someone from being two years younger than they're supposed to be and also a tomato?"

"...You're a Hulk, right? Red Hulk?" Energizer said with a grimace. "Uh, that... I'm not a science person."

"I got a chest full of green energy and then almost got cooked by cosmic rays," Vista explained, "almost died. Is that where Red Hulks come from?"

"...You should talk to Val about that." Energizer said. "That's uh... Look, she's the supergenius in every field and her family has a vested interest in that kind of thing."

"So," Vista asked, "where is this Val?"

"Still on that oil rig," Energizer said. Then she sighed. "She ran into that Armsy guy with the beard and your Iron Lad working on an 'anti-S-class' weapon, she asked how they fit so many gadgets in his ax thingy, and uh..." She facepalmed. "She refused to accept that he didn't know how his own tech works and is trying to figure it out."

Vista laughed. "Yeah, nobody knows how Tinker-Tech works, it just does."

And then Vista noticed Ashley and I. She nodded. "Hey. The guys who rescued Ashley are sticking around for a few days to help with the Nine. Energizer is just as awesome as Ashley said she is."

"Thanks!"

"Okay, well, Ashley wants to help so..." I gestured to the door. "We're going to go talk to..." I didn't know who to talk to, actually. "Uh, you know, try to figure out what we can do to help."

Snuggles The Symbiote

Turns out, what we could do to help was try to find Shadow Stalker. Or her body. Since Ashley had a superhuman sense of smell, they gave her a piece of Sophia's costume and told us to look for her in a section of town that Assault and Battery hadn't gotten too yet. Apparently, the idea had come from Laura and Gabby, who had the same power, but they were doing something else. I was supplementing Ashley's search with the local bugs and their senses.

And we werren't alone. Neither Ashley nor myself were that heavy a hitter, as far as brutes were concerned, and we weren't that experienced. Sending us out alone when the Nine was in town would have been stupid.

Armsmaster had turned up shortly after we were told to head out, commenting that the weapons he had been working on with Kid Win were up to standards and that he needed a break from the arrogant little girl who thought that memorizing pi out to a million digits made her qualified to say it should be posisble to figure out how tinker-tech works.

(He did, reluctantly, admit he was impressed that Brainstorm actually had memorized pi out to a million digits. I wasn't quite sure how she'd managed to prove it, but...)

So while Ashley and I took to the rooftops (more to avoid broken glass than anything else, Shaterbird had announced herself shortly after Ashley and I were attacked.), Armsmaster was patrolling the streets below us on his motorcycle, drawing attention to himself and the streets in case we ran into the Nine or if some opportunistic bastard was itching for a fight. He was also collecting samples of the strange, sweet-smelling fog that had rolled in. It didn't seem to be a biological agent, something people were worried about with Bonesaw in town, but he figured knowing what it was and where it came from was important and if he was out and about anyway... Officially he was in charge, but he was following us, tracking Ashley with a device he'd had Mister Snuggle store in the place where he kept Ashley's phone. And we were following Ashley's nose.

A fourth member of our squad, providing the muscle, was the visitor from Ashley's world, Ms. Marvel. I'd asked Ashley if she was strong, and Ashley replied that Ms. Marvel's powers were like Mister Fantastic and Giant-Man combined. I didn't know what that meant, but Ms. Marvel seemed flattered by the comparison.

"So, this has been on my mind for a long time," Ashley said as she leaped from one rooftop to another and took a big sniff. "Where did the second Spider-Man come from? The one on your team, Ms. Marvel. I think it makes the most sense that he's a clone since Spider-Man's been cloned a bazillion times already, but..."

"Oh," Ms. Marvel replied as she pulled herself across the gap with an extended arm. "It's really simple enough: Spider-Man's the second Spider-Man from an alternate universe where the original Spider-Man died. He met our Spider-Man in an interdimensional adventure, but then his home universe was destroyed and he and his friends and family came to ours. Reality was warped to make it so they were retroactively always here though, which has the side effect of making it so that Spider-Man doesn't always remember his true history." That was simple? "It comes and goes. A little while ago, he picked a fight with Venom becuase he confused our Venom for the Venom that killed someone he cared about."

"But that's what Slothbaby on Freakin' Awesome said," Ashley whined. "It's not fair, she can't be right. She ships Spider-Man with Captain Marvel." As I leaped across to the other building, I noticed that one of Ms. Marvel's eyes twitched.

"So... You're Cuddlebug from Freakin' Awesome?" Ms. Marvel said neutrally. "I read your story. The Champions Meet the Crystal Gems was adorable, but you got a lot of stuff wrong about us. Amadeus Cho doesn't have the original Hulk's self-sustenance powers and Cyclops wasn't the original Cyclops' illegitimate son from a teenage fling. Also, Spider-Man's not a clone, but we covered that already."

"I know. Lots of people said the Cyclops thing was dumb. I'm sorry. I had the flu when I wrote it, didn't think it through." Ashley sighed "...Was Cyclops a clone?" She asked suddenly.

"No, Beast went back in time to get himself and the other original X-Men to try and make a point to adult Cyclops, then couldn't get them back to their own time," Ms. Marvel said. "Champions Cyclops was the teenage version of normal Cyclops. He and the others went back to their own time not too long ago and after adult Cyclops came back to life, he could remember everything he did as a time-traveling teen." What the hell was wrong with that world?

"Cyclops is alive again!?"

"Yeah. Jean Grey, too."

"Are they back together!?"

"...I don't know," Ms. Marvel finished. "I haven't talked to him since the War of the Realms."

"The what now?" Ashley asked.

"The Dark Elves of Svartalfeim, the Frost Giants of Jotunheim, the Fire Demons of Muspelheim, assorted trolls, the War Angels of Heven, and so on invaded the Earth with the help of paramilitary forces contracted by Dario Ager and the Roxxon corporation," Ms. Marvel explained. "Big emergency, all hands on deck, lots of drag out knock down fights, a lot of fantastic adventures, Daredevil temporarily became the new Heimdal, Ares lead an army of minions from various supervillain organizations, a dozen ghost-cowboys, and hundreds of fugitive Skrulls against the forces of evil, and Thor got Mjolnir back and is now the All-Father of Asgard."

"Wow," was all Ashley could say.

"Unfortunately, all the Valkeryes died, which would have been a problem if another one hadn't shown up out of nowhere, there were thousands of civilian casualties, and Roxxon somehow got off scot-free for selling out the human race." Ms. Marvel didn't seem happy about that. "Turns out Ager's a minotaur."

"So... Wait!" Ashley had been about to say something when she froze. She sniffed the air a few times, like a dog, then bolted off in the distance.

I sprang after her, but she was faster than me. From the corner of my eyes and the occasional startled bug I could make out Ms. Marvel stretching and jumping behind me and could hear the roar of the engine of Armsmaster's motorcycle in the streets below.

We found her in the streets proper, standing before what, as far as I could make out, had once been a makeshift animal shelter. I say once been, becuase it was currently a bloody mess.

The air was saturated with the disgusting smell of day-old blood and bits of animal carcass and... Let's just say that I was glad that I hadn't eaten anything today.

Armsmaster came in just after us and took a look around. "Well," he said... "Either the Nine targetted Hellhound or this is where Hookwolf keeps his fighting dogs and they targetted him."

"It's Hellhound," Ashley said. "I can smell her. And the dogs that she had at the bank. She was here a lot, and... She was hurt. But she got away. I can smell six dogs but not those six dog's blood." She pointed down the street, where I could make of a short trail of blood that cut off abruptly. "She must have been bleeding, but she and those six dogs got away. I don't know where she went or if she's gonna be okay, but..."

"Those poor dogs," Ms. Marvel said with her hands over her mouth.

"I can smell Shadow Stalker, too," Ashley said. "She smells fresh like. She's still here or she was here very recently. But..."

There was a sound from inside and, careful not to step in a puddle of blood, Ashley moved in.

The inside was just as bad as the outside, stained with blood and viscera. This was an experience I hoped I wouldn't find myself dwelling on in the future.

A lot of bugs had been attracted by the blood, and it wasn't hard for me to use them to get a layout of the place. There was someone here. I didn't know if it was Sophia, but we were here, we had to check it out.

I drew my baton and started leading the others to where the person was, and—

I felt sort of a pulsing tickle in the back of my head, my Spider-Sense, and ducked just in time for something to whiz past my head.

"Oh, you."

I turned to see Sophia Hess standing, but not proudly or confidently. Her clothes, her civilian clothes, were ruffled, wrinkled, and torn and she had dark circles around bloodshot eyes. A very nasty wound on her arm looked like she'd taken a bad cut, stitched it together herself, then used a piece of her shirt as a bandage.

She looked positively manic, and she was holding a crossbow out menacingly.

"Sophia," Ashley said, stepping forward. "We're here to help you. You, you need to come back with us."

"No, no," Sophia said. "That red, gooey bastard's with the Nine, and he took Emma and Madison. Gotta find them, gotta find them before... The Nine were here. There might be a clue to where they're hiding."

Right now, I felt nothing but pity for the girl who ruined my life. "Sophia... It's too late. They're dead."

Sophia's head twisted to the side fast enough that I could hear the vertebrae crack. "What? How?"

"You don't need to know that, Sophia," I said. In the state she was in, finding out how they'd died would just set her off. "Not right now. Not like this."

She stepped forward and I noticed a sort of shadowy, misty after-image tracing her movements. "My best friend was murdered." I swallowed the urge to say that Emma had been my best friend before Sophia stole her... Where had that come from? "I need to know just how badly I need to make the person who did it suffer before I kill them."

Armsmaster stepped forward, holding something. A dart or bolt with a sharp blade at the tip. "Shadow Stalker, these bladed bolts are a violation of the terms of your probation. Considering the circumstances, I'm inclined to look the other way. However," he continued, "you need to come with us back to headquarters. You're tired. You're injured. I understand how you must feel. Someone you care about was taken from you, and you want to make the people who did it pay." I noticed from the corner of my eye that Ashley's eye-lenses had shrunk and turned downward. "But right now you're in no condition to be of any help to anyone."

"How did they die?" She asked again. "I'm not going anywhere until someone answers me."

Ashley looked over to me and to Armsmaster, then back to Sophia. "He uh... He cut their heads off. He snuck into our house and left the heads in my bed. Said he didn't even know we knew them, he just went for the first girls ha saw alone at night."

Sophia laughed. A twisted, mirthless, broken laugh. It happened so suddenly that it knocked me off guard. "Well, isn't that some huge fucking joke? You," she pointed at me, "the biggest fucking jumped up weakling in the whole fucking city, a little bitch that I only gave a mind to because Emma was obsessed, and you, Killer," she pointed to Ashley, "are even worse. You know how this all works. You're strong, I've seen it, and you still act like some goody-two-shoes girl scout and act like doing what needs to be done is wrong." She started laughing again and I noticed that her jaw seemed to open a little too wide on occasion and that something black and misty rolled out from behind her teeth whenever it did. "Emma was stronger than either of you put together. And she dies for what? To send you fuckers a message? I ought to kill the both of you for the insult of it all!"

Sophia stepped forward and as she did she shifted. Something had changed in her breaker state. Before, she became a gaslike wraith with visible bones, but now? Now she doubled in hight in an instant and reached forward with too-long arms of bone enshrouded in a mist that seemed to eat the very light around it. One arm reaching for me, one for Ashley, My Spider-Sense was going off like crazy. I raised my baton, braced myself, and then...

Then a bang. Something was thrown in front of Sophia, something I hadn't noticed, exploded and released some kind of gas that got sucked into Sophia's shifted body. Immediately she became human again and fell to the floor. Within seconds, Armsmaster was next to her, checking her vitals.

"I'm sorry," I said, "what just happened?"

"When Shadow Stalker first joined the Wards, she did so after putting a lot of effort into proving that she deserved a second chance after using bladed crossbow bolts to crucify a man," Armsmaster explained. "Her psych evaluation hinted at some of the warning signs of a psychopath. I was having a slow week, so I designed a grenade meant to disperse an aerosolized dose of my standard tranquilizer, just in case she went off the ranch." He sighed while checking her over. "When she got back from the boot camp she agreed to go to, she seemed inclined to follow the rules so I put them in storage and forgot about them till now." Part of me wanted to bring up everything Sophia had done to me, all the ways she hadn't been behaving... But another part of me didn't want to kick her while she was down.

"...So, why now?" Ashley asked.

"She was missing when the Slaughterhouse Nine were in town. Between Bonesaw's habit of making monsters out of dead heroes and Jack Slash's demonstrated charisma and skill with manipulating those who are... Prone to violence, as it were, I felt it prudent to have a way to neutralize Shadow Stalker, in case she was compromised. I wasn't expecting her to have Second Triggered though."

"For those of us who don't know as much about power mechanics as we should?" I asked.

"Or those of us who feel like fifth wheels in a particularly violent soap opera?" In all the excitement I'd sort of forgotten that Ms. Marvel was here.

"A parahuman's powers activate in response to stress and manifest in ways tailored to the stress. Master powers come from social isolation. Shaker powers from environmental threats. Tinkers from long-term problems without obvious solutions. Brutes from physical injury." Armsmaster lectured. "And the stress has to be extreme. For first-generation Parahumans, the kind of trauma that leaves permanent scars and issues that recur." Ashley walked over and gave me a hug when Armsmaster said that.

"A second trigger is when a Parahuman experiences the same kind of stress that triggered their powers in the first place, with clear parallels to the original Trigger events, but far more extreme. Someone who triggered from waking up in a tub of ice with their kidney missing would need to be awake but helpless while their other organs are being harvested one at a time to second trigger."

"That's an oddly specific example," Ms. Marvel pointed out.

"I didn't make it up. You'd have to ask her former compatriots in the Orlando Protectorate for the full details, but Kidney Woman was never the same after she tried to break up the Floridamen's organ trafficking ring." I wanted to ask if he was joking, but his grim expression said he wasn't. "Upon second triggering, a Parahuman's powers will grow and change, but it's almost never a straight increase in power. Drawbacks become more severe, mental influences from the power become stronger, some features might be lost to make room for new ones. Very rarely the power might change completely. And it almost always either becomes harder to control or else never completely turns off." Armsmaster looked at me. "You, Weaver, actually fit the criteria for what is called a double trigger, where the second trigger occurs shortly after the first." Ashley hugged me tighter. "However, that's mostly based on the length of time you were incapacitated and your statements about your master and thinker powers. I'm sure you'd rather not go into the details of your trigger event just to confirm my hunch."

"Yeah," I said awkwardly.

"In Shadow Stalker's case," he said, "it seems like her breaker state has shifted to something more suited for combat at the cost of always being partially shifted."

"...So, we found her," Ashley stated. "Now what?"

"We should head back," Armsmaster said as he lifted Sophia in a princess carry. "She'll be out for a few hours. I want her in a secure cell where she can be monitored when she wakes up. Her behavior could be explained by the stress of the Nine's attack, but she became more aggressive after her initial trigger and we can't rule out that her power had something to do with it. It's possible that the second trigger left her unhinged and until we can verify, it's too dangerous to leave her unattended."

He carried her out, and we all followed behind him.

To find her street full of metal boxes, about the size of toasters each on spider-legs tipped with various syringes and surgical tools. And just after that realization, I noticed that I'd lost track of every bug in the area and my Spider-Sense started going off again.

"Does anyone else smell formaldehyde?" I didn't want to know how Ashley knew what formaldehyde smelled like, but I didn't have time to dwell on it becuase a sweet, childlike voice said from up the street.

"Oh, how fun, Hatchet. We come down here becuase Siberian said there were lots of dead dogs we could harvest for grey matter, and we get here and the girl I want to play with the most is right there."