Amaranthine

Cait followed B-Man’s tentacle as he traced it along the wall, leading her through the twisting tunnels. It was the compromise they’d landed on, given that she didn’t actually have any idea where they were going, but if they ran into any traps, they would definitely best be sprung on her.

“What’s the over-under that we’re walking into a big trap, you think?” she asked over her shoulder.

LIKE 100%

OBVIOUSLY

“You think?” she responded, scratching at her chin in thought. “Idk, my dude. I think they might be actually running. Think about it: the Ironhides and Silvers we jusy tore through would have absolutely shredded any team that wasn’t the Dawn Posse. Shit, without you getting soul-swole, even we would have had trouble, especially with me being effectively a sexy brick right now. They can’t have planned on the kind of losses they’ve already taken.”

She could almost feel his confusion, both at the good point and the fact Cait had made it. People were always surprised when she displayed critical thinking skills, which was the way she liked it.

YEAH….

YOU’RE RIGHT, BUT STILL, BETTER TO ASSUME IT’S A TRAP RIGHT? ESPECIALLY WITH YOUR INDESTRUCTIBLE ASS TO TRIP IT

Cait chuckled, brushing away the tentacle that swatted at the aforementioned ass.

“Yeah, fair point,” she admitted. “Thought experiment anyway. Not like we aren’t gonna follow this line.”

QI OKAY? Breastman asked, like he had a few times in the 15 minutes since they’d parted ways. Cait had to focus a bit to really get at the dragon’s status through Kennedy’s filter, but each time she had, Qi had actually seemed less stressed.

“Like I’ve said, I’m not exactly precision instrumentation, but yeah, seems like she’s doing just fine,” Cait answered. “I think I’d notice right away if anything really bad happens. Panic tends to cut through the fog these emotions come with better than basically anything else.”

GOTTA SPEND MORE TIME LINKED TO KENNEDY

I FIGURE SHE’D HAVE LINKED UP TO ME BY NOW IF IT WAS AN OPTION AT THIS RANGE

“Don’t beat yourself up bud,” Cait consoled, “that’s a Kennedy foible, not you. She’s really just getting around to experimenting with what her powers can really do. She didn’t even link much to Lira before our chaotic asses entered her life.”

She grinned lecherously over her shoulder.

“Plus, she’s spent plenty of time linked to you. You just were using a very different set of abilities most of the time.”

In the darkness of the tunnel, Cait couldn’t actually see B-man blush, but she figured he was probably almost all black at the thought of Kennedy riding along, helping him keep control as he lost his virginity to Gwyn.

WHAT DO YOU THINK THE WHY IS?

“Huh?” Cait had expected him to change the subject, but didn’t quite follow what he’d changed it to.

ALL THIS WITH THE IRONHIDES AND SILVERS

FUCKING WITH OUR COMMS

THE ATTACK

LIKE YOU SAID, ITS GOING PRETTY BAD FOR THEM OVERALL

“Oh, shit, I dunno,” Cait admitted, but he’d set the gears turning and she thought out loud. “I mean, yeah, I said its going bad, but I also said it would have been tough for them to predict how bad. They probably thought they’d have taken us out and be well on their way to taking the city by now, instead of having some real dangerous motherfuckers on their way to their secret lair. Wish I knew fuckin’ anything about Technocago’s politics, because I’d bet there’s some power struggle we aren’t privy to.”

WE DIDN’T START THIS FIGHT, BUT WERE GONNA END IT SITUATION?

“Heh, exactly brother.”

REMINDS ME OF WHEN IT WAS REALLY BAD WITH THE BOOKKEEPER, WITH THE SILVERS

ALTHOUGH ALSO KINDA THE ER ASSHOLES

“Yeah…. Seems like every dick and their balls have an army these days,” Cait said. She’d obviously been thinking of The Bookkeeper, especially with the sudden turn of a good portion of civilians. She hadn’t been thinking about Fait and his league of goons. The way Technocago was set up, with Altereds much more implicitly in control, it seemed like someone might see the city as ripe to make that fully explicit.

“Man I wish we’d killed that guy at HQ,” she groaned, slamming a fist into her palm, remembering Dawn’s arbor chasing the fleeing supremacist across the sky.

MAKE THAT TWO OF US

She felt B-man stiffen behind her, and went on alert herself.

JUST PICKED UP A NEW ALTERED SIGNATURE

CAN’T TELL IF IT’S A PERSON, RESIDUE, OR WHAT, BUT ITS PRETTY BIG

WE’LL HIT IT SOON, BE READY

“Always,” Cait said, setting her jaw and paying more attention to her footing. She was well aware of how easy it would be to neutralize her, without the extra options her tech usually gave her.

They moved another hundred yards, before they turned a corner and suddenly the tunnel had a soft, silver light at the end of it. As they approached, the light made wave patterns on the roof of the tunnel, like an underlit pool at night.

As on edge as she’d ever been, Cait stepped out of the tunnel into another large cistern, almost identical to the one they’d left save for an enormous pit in the center.

While the layout was nearly the same, this one showed clear signs of occupation. Laboratory and medical equipment dotted the stone floor, some of which was familiar to Cait and others that reeked of sci-fi Bullshit.

“Huh. Looks like I was right about them running,” she said, scanning the room for any motion. There was none, not even rats. “You getting anything?”

JUST THAT PIT

WHATEVER I SENSED IS IN THERE

“Well yeah, I could have told you that. That’s lair 101,” she said, earning another swat at her ass she ignored. “Is it moving?”

…

KIND OF?

TAKE THESE

Cait looked back at him to see him holding out his bandoliers of blastrings. With his new strength, it hadn’t really proved necessary to use them when just pounding on bitches seemed more effective. Cait took them, throwing them around her shoulders.

“That bad?” she asked, adjusting the straps for a non-spherical torso. These were definitely going to ruin the lines of her supersuit, but fuck it, Sharon Smart wasn’t watching and it’d be good to be able to do some damage again.

DON’T KNOW

BAD FEELING

“Welp, I’m as good a canary as there’s ever been. Lemme check it out.” Cait walked up to the edge of the pit, looking over some of the esoteric equipment she passed along the way. Lots of tubes, lots of metal, lots of extruders. Definitely nothing she’d used back at Pilgrim Ag, but honestly finding seed lab tech here would have been pretty surprising.

She reached the stone ledge, immediately suppressing the call of the void telling her to jump in. That was harder than ever these days, since she knew she could hop into the grand canyon and it would hurt the earth worse than it hurt her. She peered down into… goo? Silver goo. Swirling, sloshing, buzzing… and rising.

“Hey, when Gwyn says a ‘grey goo’ scenario, what does she mean?” Cait asked, shoving her hands into two rings.

SHE GETS TOO EXCITED TO EXPLAIN IT WELL, B-Man responded, also curiously looking over lab equipment, BUT I THINK ITS LIKE ‘OUT OF CONTROL NANOBOTS TURN EVERYTHING INTO NANOBOTS’

“Thought so!” Cait said as a massive tendril of the bot-lake whipped out at her. She snapped her arm forward and- fuck, I never asked how these work- and commanded the ring to shoot. Fortunately, that seemed to be all it took.

The ring exploded into light, beam surging forth to impact the tendril. For an instant, they stopped one another, frozen like a video game clash bar, before the blast won out, and the tendril burned away as the beam slammed into the mass of bots below.

She was already loosing the energy of the ring on her other arm when the next tendril came out, instantly followed by another. That next one was the last she was able to handle, because whatever conciousness was guiding the bots fully woke up after that blast.

The lake seemed to fracture, rivulets of the bots flowing up the sides of the pit and into the air, then zeroing in on the girl shooting lasers at them.

“Breastman!” Cait shouted, aware that her friend wasn’t doing much more than looking worried. “Get the fuck out of here! If Gwyn is right, I don’t want to gamble on these things not being able to eat you.”

To his credit, he hesitated for an instant, clearly not wanting to leave Cait alone to fight the formless foe before her. Also to his credit, he could see she was right. Even as she spoke, a tendril touched a cart of equipment, and in seconds it was turned to the same silver goo. He nodded, wrapped a tentacle around a few instruments, and whipped himself back into the tunnel they’d come through.

Okay, come at me you binary bitch.

Cait hadn’t stopped blasting, doing her best to keep the tendrils at bay. It honestly wasn’t that different from sparring with B-man so far, save for the fact there wasn’t any kind of end-game she could see. She couldn’t get in a lucky hit on his core, because as far as she understood, this thing didn’t have a core. It wasn’t even a thing, but a nearly infinite number of many things acting as one.

Sure, the blasts were burning away millions at a time, but in a bucket of billions, each one accounted for barely a drop. The fight had only lasted for a few moments when the first tendril reached her, and she cursed, expecting to be carbonited like B-Man had been.

Instead, when the tendril touched her, it sparked, fizzled, and fell away to ash. She boggled for an instant, before the pieces clicked into place. Her suit was gone in an area around the impact point, but already, purple fabric was materializing into place to patch it.

The fucking suit nanobots! They’re doing the same thing to these bots as the Ironhide’s did to Gwyn’s bots!

Cait grinned, the fight suddenly seeming like much less of a sure-fire loss.

Gotta be smart, she thought, again resisting the urge to just dive into the pit and see what happened. No idea how many ‘bots I have in me, but it can’t be this many.

Still, it meant she had a chance. She did her best to dodge and weave, burning her way through the striking tendrils back to the pit’s edge, reasoning her only real shot was to burn away enough of the enemy bots that her own could take care of the rest.

Without her tech though, she just wasn’t that agile. She avoided some tendrils, blasted others, but plenty still scored hits. It was the first time she really regretted picking such a skimpy uniform. The tendrils that hit exposed skin would do exactly as she feared, silvering her skin in a creeping cage, before burning away when they touched the edges of her outfit.

That outfit was getting smaller by the second, however, as the occasional brushes froze Cait’s limbs long enough she took more hits. Before the fight had lasted a minute, she was all but naked. In a last ditch, she pushed as many rings onto her arms as she could, and leveled them at the roiling lake of nanobots in the pit.

With a blinding flash, and the crash of super-heated air, twin beams of corruscating power burned into the pit. They pushed through, turning ‘bots to cinders, and for the first time, Cait saw the stone floor of the pit. Then it was gone too, burning away to the unworked rock below, even as Cait swept the beams away, trying to get as much of the mass as she could.

The beams petered out, and it wasn’t enough. Too many of the bots were already out of the pit, and even a few could eat away at the room to make more of themselves. Cait desperately kicked off the edge of the pit, knowing she’d be too slow to dodge the approaching tendril, and keenly aware of her nakedness.

She almost had time to feel sorry for herself, and that her team would have to rescue her again, when a soft gold glow shone beneath her. Instead of a desparate roll, her leg shot her across the pit, air clapping behind her and causing the tendril to fuzz out as it met displaced air instead of tanned flesh. Cait grinned, sending a burst of thanks and adulation Kennedy’s way.

“Oh baby, we are so fucking back!”