This post has the following content warnings:
There is a buzz around campus all morning.
The source of a buzz is a newspaper article. The newspaper article announces that the governmental bureau handling the Sentinels has used them to depose the rest of the government, who "have time and again refused to take seriously the mutant threat."
People say that about lots of stuff.
Like frog guts or where babies come from.
I'm not just saying you'd regret knowing, I'm saying I do. Bet you don't hear that about frog guts.
Sometimes people who've just had to dissect a frog wish they hadn't.
Dissecting frogs is fun. This wasn't. And I bet somebody's going to be mad if I traumatize you.
Okay.
And look at that, you're almost here!
The exit tunnel spits out its train of passengers into a spacious Clay-walled building in the middle of the forest. First Naomi is there, clean and fully dressed. Slime separates itself from the emerging passengers and flows back down the tunnel to redistribute itself throughout the network.
"Thank you," says one of the adults, a blue-skinned red-haired woman in a trenchcoat.
A little boy with blue fur and a tail teleports into her arms. She hugs him tightly.
Adorable.
"My tunnels don't go much farther than this and I haven't had much time to explore, so all I can tell you is we're in the middle of the woods somewhere north of the border and there's nobody around for a quarter mile," she says.
"That will do," she says. "We've mostly been avoiding civilization lately anyways, except when we're rescuing someone."
"Figures. If you need anything, uh, my unsettling slime is edible and that's about all I've got in the way of hospitality up here."
"I don't suppose your tunneling ability let you find any iron ore."
A girl--preteen or early teenage--raises her hand. A thick steel bangle on her wrist starts rotating around it.
"Because me."
"Oh, cool," she says. "I can't do 'mining for iron ore', but I can probably do 'raccoons digging through trash', if you want."
She nods. "That would help!"
She sets her network to producing another batch of thieving raccoons. "It'll take a while for everything to get here, though. I should really figure out how to make the tunnels go faster."
"Why aren't we slimy?" the girl standing next to her asks.
"Because I figured you didn't want to be. I can re-slime you if you like." A blob of goo peeks playfully out of the tunnel.
She peers suspiciously at it. "No thanks. So you just sucked the slime off us?"
"Huh. Neat. How's your power work?"
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
