Well, it had to happen sooner or later.  He'd been hoping for later, but you can't have everything.

His neck and spine twist erratically, pinpointing the direction that the sirens are coming from, and he heaves his victims around so they'll be between him and the cops when they arrive.

He rotates his head fully one hundred and eighty degrees and barks at his daemon, "Bast, get ready - "  Sharp, businesslike, none of the extravagant languor he displayed bantering with Decima.  Bast nods.

Soon, the cops arrive, police cars skidding to a stop, men with guns piling out of them and taking aim.  He maneuvers his hostages to give himself cover.  He drops his first victim, the one wrapped up in his entire hand, and the man slumps, unconscious or dead.

He still has the sparrow daemon entangled in one finger.  He breaks its wing, and the man on the ground vomits.  He whips it toward one of the cops, and the man whines pathetically and crawls after it.

Bast watches intently, attention flickering between Slimebones and the cops.  As one of them takes aim, Bast focuses -

An enhanced bullet impacts his chest and punches a hole clear through it, but there's no blood.  It looks rather like someone dropped a bowling ball in a vat of flesh-toned mud.

He flashes a winning smile at the cop who hit him, drops his hostages, and lopes, elastically, liquidly, into a maze of back alleys.  Bast follows and races ahead, a black blur.

The cops are on his tail, the hero slowly making a few bullets selective - 

He gains distance, and Decima is leaning against a wall in an alley, still maskless, and she claps when she sees him.

"Quite entertaining indeed."

"Are we done yet?" asks another person, who looks drawn into reality, colors not quite keeping perfectly to the confines of zir skin. Decima inclines her head, and the person's butterfly daemon flits between the three, colors bleeding from its body to whirl around them.

They're elsewhere.

"Your sense of style sucks," Tyrannissa tells Slimebones. "But Decima thinks you're funny, so."

He chuckles.  "Can't please everyone, I suppose.  That's quite an impressive effect, by the way," he adds, gesturing toward zir.  "Is it an illusion?"

(Bast says nothing, just surveys her surroundings.)

"It's my reality. My power is art."

Their surroundings are still an alleyway, but the details are different. Weathered brick rather than concrete, most noticeably. The murmur of sound is relaxed, typical for a city, less of the screaming.

"Quite impressive," he says again, and turns to Decima.  "How did I do?"

"Entertaining. I do like your style, and you handled the police with neither cowardice nor stupidity."

"You flatter me.  Am I to meet the rest of the Guillotine, then?"

"Maystadt had wanted to meet you, at least."

"Is she around?  Where exactly are we?"

"A hop away. Tyrannissa, if you would?"

"Sure."

The world shifts around the butterfly again, until they're in a wooded area, in front of a house that looks like it's seen somewhat better days. The lights are on in the living room and kitchen. There's no neighbors visible or audible.

"Is this the place?"  He conceals his glee.

"Our current crashing ground, though we do usually stay pretty mobile."

"Looks nice."  And he strolls toward the door.

"Quite. Previous inhabitant certainly wasn't appreciating it enough."

The door opens into a short hallway adjacent to a sort of parlor, with a bay window overseeing the front yard. There's faint signs it's been redecorated - "Tyrannissa objecting to his interior design sense," Decima comments, "Had these horrible rooster decorations, it's much better now," (now being a fairly abstract theme, with knick-knacks that look like they'd be screaming if they had mouths, and paintings that look like very colorful blood splatters if you unfocus your eyes a bit) - and then the living room is where most of the people are, apparently, with an overstuffed couch and sinfully comfortable chairs, and pillows that look like more of Tyrannissa's design sense.

"It is," Slimebones says.  "Lovely place.  May I?"  He gestures to an empty chair in the living room.

"Go right ahead."

She sits down as well, Moira still draped over her shoulders, Tyrannissa perching one hip on the couch-arm next to Decima. Decima nods at some of the other people - one, a quiet man with little crystals braided into his hair, introduces himself in a soft voice as Kreus (his daemon is apparently hiding under the couch), and a woman who keeps tapping her fingers along her thigh, apparently unable to sit still, who half-snaps that she's Egni. She has a bird, evidently, a yellow canary that keeps hopping from her head to various perches nearby. There's no real indication to her power beyond maybe the name - she's in a plain purple tank-top and low-rise jeans, nothing thematic going on, not even a mask.

There are others.  A slender man in a black bodysuit and something like a hockey mask, holding a large steak knife with his bright yellow wasp daemon perched on the tip, says by way of introduction the word "Suture" without taking his eyes off his wasp.  A man whose skin looks to be made of mercury, with a fluffy housecat daemon, doesn't so much as spare him a glance -

 - he's too busy staring adoringly at the woman in the chair next to him, the woman who must be Maystadt, the leader of the Guillotine, sitting in her chair like a throne with what looks to be a well-worn expression of equanimous severity on her face.

She doesn't say anything to Slimebones when he enters, but confers under her breath for a moment with her strange, storklike daemon.

"And, of course, last but certainly not least, our most noble leader, Maystadt. Welcome to our humble abode," Decima concludes, gesturing broadly with a showman's grin. "We will, of course, want to test how well you play with the team before any sort of major operation. Full power disclosure is not required, but helps with the whole not dying shtick."

"I stretch," he says.  "In short, I can replace some or all of the mass of my body with a kind of - gel, I suppose, which I can deform but not meld.  I can't turn two fingers into a closed loop," he says, holding up one hand in an "ok" symbol, "but I can extend or withdraw them to almost any length."

"I can suppress powers. Temporarily, and if they sent every hero in the states after me I'd be overwhelmed. Moira here," her snake lifts his head, "Is venomous. With a few different applications - we usually use the paralysis or a deadly venom. Tyrannissa can strengthen powers, rather like if you'd taken one of the relevant drugs, though it makes you look rather artistic for the duration. Zir daemon, Dolores, can teleport people."

Egni introduces herself as "Pyrokinesis, though don't expect any light shows. I prefer boiling blood."

While Kreus is a soft, "Crystallization."

"Quicksilver," Maystadt says, gesturing to the man at her side, "is made of metal, with all that implies.  Suture is my healer.  I assume control of others' peripheral nervous systems, as I believe is public knowledge."