A teenager with a red streak dyed into her dark hair strode down the street in rubber boots. Three hours past curfew, alone.
She drew a smartphone from the pocket of her jacket, then set to untangling the earbuds. How did the damned things always get so knotted together? They were like Christmas lights. Not that she’d ever untangled Christmas lights, but she’d heard how Christmas lights got tangled.
Popping the foam-covered buds into her ears, she began thumbing through the music as she walked.
J’adore-
Sweet Honey-
Love me, love me, you know you wanna love me…
Love me, love me, you know you wanna love me…
Her head nodded in time with the beat, and she slipped the phone into her pocket.
She supposed she could have bought something to coil up the cord of the earbuds, or replaced the music playlist instead of deleting everything that didn’t appeal. It wasn’t like she didn’t have money. It was an option. What stopped her was the fact that she had a pattern going. Everything she owned and everything she used day-to-day was stolen. The shirt on her back, her shoes, the music, her laptop. She kind of wanted to see how far she could get before she caved and actually bought something.
Love me, you?
Love me, true?
Her boots splashed as she danced a little circle, murmuring the words. The light drizzle had wet her hair, and she pushed it back out of her face, stretched her arms out and let the raindrops fall against her closed eyelids.
It wasn’t as though she was in a rush.
She’d walked long enough for six songs to start and finish before someone stopped her.
“Miss. Miss!” He was barely audible over her music.
She turned and saw a man in military gear, forty-something, his face heavily lined. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, he had a short buzz cut, a bit of scruff on his cheeks and chin, and his face was beaded with droplets of water. She pulled out her earbuds.
Crazed, kooky, cracked, crazy,
Nutty, barmy, mad for me…
The crooning sounded artificial coming from the earbuds that dangled from her hand, nasal.
“What’s up?”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m excellent.”
“There’s a curfew during the state of emergency. I don’t want to scare you too badly, miss, but there’re rape gangs, murderers and human traffickers on the street. All people who would prey on a pretty young woman.”
“You think I’m pretty?” She smiled, stepping closer.
“I have a daughter about your age,” he replied, smiling tightly.
“That doesn’t answer my question. Do you think I’m pretty?” She stepped even closer, ran her finger down his chest.
“Yes, but-” he paused, gripping both sides of her jacket. He pulled the jacket together, then did up her zipper all the way to the top, around the heavy box that dangled around her neck. “That’s all the more reason for you to be careful, understand? Do you have a home or a shelter you’re staying at?”
She didn’t reply. Her brows knit together and she undid her jacket and stepped away from him.
He went on, “I can give you directions to the nearest shelter if you want. It’s new, just a little ways up Lord street here. There may be space.”
“I’m staying with some people.”
“Do you need directions?”
She didn’t reply. She studied him instead.
“If you’re willing to wait, I can give you a ride when I’m done here. I’ll get relieved in five or ten minutes, but we could talk in the meantime. You can sit in my jeep, and you’ll be dry.”
She hesitated. “Fine.”
The man led her back to his jeep. She sat in the passenger seat while he stood outside, his eyes on the surroundings, occasionally exchanging words with the person or people on the other end of his walkie-talkie.
After a few minutes, he climbed into the driver’s seat. “The men who were supposed to take over the watch are late. Something about fires downtown.”
She nodded.
Crazed, kooky, cracked, crazy,
Mental, dotty, whacked, loopy…
“Do you mind turning off your music?”
“I like it,” she said. “I hate silence.”
“Well, I’m not about to deny someone their coping mechanisms. Where do you live, or where did you live, before the attack?”
“Out of town.”
He raised one eyebrow, but he kept looking out the windows for possible trouble. He put the key in the ignition and started the car so he could use the windshield wipers. “Sounds like there’s a story there. People don’t just come into town at a time like this, and if you were just visiting, you would have evacuated already.”
“Oh, we’re visiting because it’s a time like this,” she smiled.
“Thrill seeking?” his voice hardened. “That’s not only stupid, it’s disrespectful.”
“The people I’m staying with? They’re the Slaughterhouse Nine. I’m one of them.”
“That’s not funny.” His voice went hard, any gentleness gone.
“It’s really not,” she agreed with a smile.
He went for his gun, but he didn’t get that far. She closed her eyes for a moment, listened for the music that came from his mind and body. The jangling, dissonant noise of alarm, the throbbing percussion of mortal fear, every part of his body shifting into fight or flight mode. The underlying notes spoke to his personality. His love of his family, his fear that he was about to leave them behind, anger towards her, a momentary anxiety that he was overreacting. She grasped this in the fraction of a second.
Reaching for that mortal fear, she wrenched it. When that wasn’t quite enough, she pulled at it and twisted it until everything else was squeezed into the far edges.
He screamed, throwing himself as far away from her as he could get, his weapon falling between the seats.
Crazed, kooky, cracked, crazy,
Nutty, screwy, mentally diseased…
She twisted other parts of his emotional makeup until he was compliant, adrift in apathy, obedient. “Stay.”
He stopped retreating. He was still breathing hard from his momentary panic, but that would pass.
She leaned towards him and ran her hand along the top of his head. It was like rubbing a toothbrush, spraying minuscule bits of water onto the wheel and dashboard.
“Good.”
He stared at her. There was fear in the look, and she didn’t have the heart to erase all of it. A little was good.
“I want to drive. Switch seats with me.”
He nodded dumbly and climbed out of the jeep. She made her way over to the driver’s seat, then waited for him to climb in before she peeled out.
The jeep cut through the shallow water that covered the roads. Others had noticed her leaving, she knew, and were following in their own vehicle. She could sense them, each a fingerprint of emotions in deeply individual configurations. The mix of personal pride and confidence that she sensed in them suggested they were military. The soldiers that had been taking over for this guy?
Not much time to do it. She searched through the feelings of her passenger, found the networks of brotherly love, trust, camaraderie, and adjusted each until the music was one of tension, suspicion, paranoia. Then she set his fight or flight reflexes into high gear.
“Get the gun.”
He fished for it between the seats, picked it up.
Then he pointed the gun at her.
“No, stop,” she said. Too unspecific. Fuck. Still need to work on that. She hit him with as much doubt and indecision as she could manage to keep him from shooting her. Then she stalled all of the ‘music’ that flowed to and from that one point in the very front of his brain. She knew the music was her way of understanding and interpreting the biological processes that drove people’s emotions. By listening for it, she knew what they felt, knew what the emotions were tied to, vaguely.
There would only be one thing in his short-term memory that was that important right now. Her. With that link severed, he would now feel nothing towards her, couldn’t summon up any self-preservation, anger or hatred. Another tweak, redirecting the flow of emotion from his family to her, and he would feel an extreme aversion to the idea of shooting her, wouldn’t be able to shoot her any more than he could his own daughter.
He pulled the gun away, dropped it into his lap. He crumpled over, his hands to his head, then moaned, “No.”
She was close to her destination. She pulled the jeep to a stop and hopped out, the other jeep pulling up just a ten or so yards away. Two soldiers got out.
“Hey!” someone shouted at her.
She turned her back to them, slipping her ear buds in. The music had looped back to the first track. She got her phone out and skipped forward a few times, pausing to delete one song. She sang along, “Love me, love me, you know you wanna love me…”
“Hey!”
She could sense her passenger climbing out of the jeep, hear the garbled murmurs of warning, questions. There was a burst of fear from all three, then the sound of multiple guns firing. She smiled. The authorities would have a hell of a time figuring out what happened there.
She’d had her doubts about coming to Brockton Bay. It had been a turn off to know that areas lacked power, that still more areas lacked working plumbing. But Burnscar and Bonesaw had both been excited to come, and Jack Slash had bent to Bonesaw’s wishes, pushing for the group to come this way. Crawler, Mannequin and Siberian had seemed fairly indifferent. Not that Crawler or Mannequin showed much emotion. She’d thought she had an ally in Shatterbird, at least, but the woman hated her, and the uptight bitch had gone along with the plans to visit Brockton Bay just to ruin her day.
But it was interesting, she had to admit. The landscape of people here was so different. So many people here were so insecure, so worried. Most were on the brink of some kind of emotional breakdown, needing just one event, one piece of bad news before they broke down completely. Others had already been broken, or they’d turned vicious and started preying on their fellows, seeking out vengeance on those who had wronged them in a past life. In their pre-Endbringer life.
People here were so deliciously fucked up.
This kind of situation, ordinary citizens were doing things they’d never even have considered before. Stealing, hurting their neighbors, bartering things they once considered precious for clothing, food, toilet paper and other essentials. Emotions were raw, far closer to the surface, easier to manipulate.
Her music cut off. She checked the phone. An alert on the screen notified her that the battery was dying.
She swore. No more time to waste. She dialed a number, but didn’t hold the phone up to her ear. Good. Now she had fifteen minutes.
She reached out and started feeling for the outliers. The emotional fingerprints that stood out from the rest.
The other seven members of the Nine were out there. Not hard to find. One or two were interacting with some other outliers. The most fucked up people in this fucked up city. She’d studied each of these unknown outliers over the course of a week, watching their emotions shift as they went out about their lives, sometimes visiting the areas they tended to hang around, to get a sense of their environments. Slowly, she’d pieced them together, created profiles, discerned which ones had powers and described them to the other members of the Slaughterhouse Nine. Each had made their picks:
The buried girl. The arrogant geek. The dog lover. The daydreamer. The warlord. The scaredy cat. The broken assassin. The crusader.
And all she wanted was a few minutes to pay a visit to hers. She didn’t have to name that one. He was familiar enough. She smiled.
Two men sat on the steps outside the building. She knew immediately that they were soldiers, but they weren’t official. They wore black, and they wore body armor that she hadn’t seen before.
“No,” she stopped them from reaching from their guns with a mixture of doubt, apathy and anxiety. Complementing her words with a heavy surge of depression, guilt and self loathing, she ordered them, “Kill yourselves.”
It wasn’t immediate, but their willpower wasn’t enough to stave off some of the strongest and most agonizing emotions they would have felt in their lives. It was quick when their composure cracked, the guns flying to mouth and temple to fire.
She could sense the others inside the building, alarmed at the gunshots, moving toward the front. Four more soldiers and four others who stayed back. Not soldiers.
She didn’t wait for them to step outside. She did the same thing she’d done to the guards stationed outside, crushing them with despair, overwhelming them with loathing and paranoia. It was only slightly faster than it had been here. Here, there had been an enemy for the soldiers to focus their negative energies on, to distract them. It was surprising how important that could be.
Nearly a minute passed before the fourth gunshot sounded, marking the death of the last soldier here.
She tried the front door and stepped inside. The inside was nicer than the outside, watertight, heavily reinforced. A feminine looking teenaged boy with a mop of dark curls stood at the other side of the building. He had two men and a woman guarding him.
“Jean-paul. Ça va?”
“It’s Alec now. Regent in costume.”
“Alec,” she smiled. “Still sounds French. I approve, little brother.”
“Cherie,” he ran his fingers through his hair. “What the fuck?”
“If we’re changing our names, I’m going by Cherish. I wanted to make an entrance.”
“Man.”
“You’ll find others.”
“Fuck,” he sighed.
She reached for the three people who stood between her and her brother, manipulated their emotions towards Alec. Filled them with suspicion, paranoia, hate.
They didn’t budge.
“Cut it out, Cherie,” Alec said, “I’m controlling them.”
“If I remember right, you lose control if they’re hit by enough emotion,” she smiled. She turned up the intensity.
“If I’m farther away. Seriously, stop. It’s irritating.”
One of the men fell to his knees. His hands were clenched at his sides. Beads of sweat rolled down the faces of the other two, tears appearing in their eyes.
“While I’m doing this, you can’t tell them to attack me.”
“Unless I’ve gotten stronger over the past few years,” Alec answered. The man who was still standing reached for a knife and started walking towards Cherish.
She hit the knife wielder with fear and indecision, saw him stop.
For nearly a minute, they engaged in a tug of war over the three subjects.
“Seems we have a stalemate,” she said, finally.
“Did the dirty old man send you?” Alec asked.
She shook her head, “Daddy? I went my own way. After a bit.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Unfocused. For the longest time, I thought he was building up to something. Lots of kids, ensuring they had powers. Thought he’d try to topple the other gangs and become ruler of organized crime in Montreal.”
“But?”
“But it didn’t happen. Time passed, he never made a push for it. Guillaume got his power, you know. Ten or so of us kids, and three of us could control people one way or another. Four if we count you. We had what we needed to pull off something huge, and Daddy decided he wanted a celebrity among his girls. Took us on a road trip to a film set in Vancouver, kidnapped this star, took her back to Montreal. So petty.”
“Somehow I’m not surprised.”
“Heroes came after us, from both Vancouver and Montreal. Half of what we had built and earned as the Vasil family just kind of got trampled in the fighting that spilled out from that. All because Daddy wanted to bone someone famous. I got fed up, left.”
“So you’re on your own. And he didn’t send the others after you?” Alec moved one of his subject’s legs so she would fall to the ground rather than point her gun at the man standing next to her.
“He did. Guillaume and Nicholas. Guillaume just has to touch someone and he can sense everything they do for a good while. Nicholas just wallops you with pants-shitting waves of terror. Literally thousands of eyes and ears looking for me, can’t fight when they do get close to me.”
“Right,” he said.
“Anyways, it got old real fast, them constantly finding me, constantly making me pack up and run somewhere else. Besides, the freedom to do what I wanted and go where I wished kind of lost its appeal when the boredom set in. I would’ve done it even if my big brothers weren’t coming for me, but I joined the Nine.”
She looked at the multitude of small changes that crossed Alec’s expression and smiled.
“Well,” Alec said, after processing her statement, “That was dumb.”
“It’s exciting. I decided I needed to earn a place on the team, both to scare our brothers away and to add some spice to my routine. Took out Hatchet Face to do it.”
“I got the info on him a day or so ago, after I heard the Slaughterhouse Nine were in town. Isn’t he immune to powers? That’s pretty much what he does. Super strong, enhanced toughness, big… and your powers just stop working when he gets close. Or they go haywire.”
“He is immune to powers, but he didn’t get close. See, difference between me and Daddy is that I have range. I can use my power even if I can’t see the person I’m using it on. Through walls, from the building next door. Hatchet didn’t get close enough to me to turn off my power. He tried, but it works both ways. I was prepped to run any time my power stopped working, because it told me he’d found my trail or guessed where I was.”
“Ah. I sort of remember that bit about your power. The part that sticks in my head is that you don’t have long-term benefits. It wears off, and your targets build immunity pretty quickly.”
Cherie shrugged.
“I’m not the best when it comes to strategy, but I’m thinking… I’m going to win here. Eventually. You can’t run without me getting control over my people and sending them after you, you can’t use them to attack me, and if you stay, I can try doing this.”
Her arm jerked involuntarily.
“Remember me practicing my power on you when it was new?”
“I remember, little brother,” she frowned, looking at her arm. “Daddy had us all practice on each other.”
“Well, I still remember how to hijack your body, pretty much. Info that’s stored away in whatever corner of my brain makes my power work. I’m thinking I could get control over you pretty fast if I tried.”
“Fuck,” she said. “I think we’d both be happier if you didn’t.”
“Oh? You going to tell me the Nine will come after me if I don’t let you go?”
She shook her head, then used one hand to brush the hair away from her face. “No. This.”
She reached inside her jacket, and Alec made her hand seize up, the fingers striving to bend the opposite way.
“It’s cool,” she said. She winced with pain, then used her splayed hand to work a metal case the length of her forearm out into plain view. It dangled from a thick cord that stretched around her neck. “See this?”
“Yep.”
“It’s a bomb. Very simple. A block of explosives rigged to a timer. Any time I call the right number, the timer will reset. I did make the mistake of letting my phone battery die, but I figure I’ve still got a couple of minutes. If you keep me here for any longer than that, I go kablooie.”
“Is that a threat? Sounds like a win for me.”
“You’ll probably get blown up as well. Or maimed,” she smiled.
“I could walk away.”
“And lose control over your minions as you get further away? Please do. I can make the call when you’re gone.”
His emotions were so muted. Dim. How much of that was Jean-Paul or Alec’s personality, and how much was his natural immunity, built up over years of exposure to Daddy? She couldn’t get a sense of what he was feeling, which was disappointing.
However faint his feelings were, she could sense the slightest change. A chime of attention. He didn’t look at any of the puppets that he was struggling to control, but she could sense his attention flicker to the woman. A thrum of confidence.
They both dashed towards the woman at the same moment. In their hurry to get to her, they collided, falling to the ground as a trio.
The woman wasn’t in any shape to fight, but Alec did strike Cherie across the head, fairly ineffectually. She retaliated by kicking him, then grabbed his wrist as he tried to draw the weapon he had in his pocket. It was a gold-painted stick topped with a crown. She couldn’t see why he wanted it, but he did and so she wasn’t about to let him have it for just that reason.
He changed tactics, rolling over to drive one shoulder into Cherie. With his free hand he tried to reach for the gun holster worn by the woman. That had been what caught his attention, gave him that surge of confidence. Cherie fought with him, pulling him away, and then got one leg under him to roll him away. She pinned him, holding his wrists to the floor.
“Got you, little brother. You still suck at fighting.”
He stared up at her, panting for breath and looking half-bored at the same time. He used his power, and she let go of his left hand to strike him across the face. He stopped.
She smiled, “Thought you should know that things got pretty shitty at home after you left. Daddy got really overprotective, angry. It sucked. Sucked worse when we couldn’t find you.”
“Sorry,” he said, in what she judged as the least convincing tone he could manage.
“My payback? I’ve nominated you for the Nine.”
“Not interested.”
“Doesn’t matter. You get nominated, you’re tested no matter what you want… and a few of the Nine don’t want to have two Vasils on the same team. Shatterbird hates my guts, for some reason. Crawler doesn’t respect me. Jack thinks it would be boring. So what I’m thinking is that this test? The initiation? It’s going to be a little harder for you. They won’t be testing you to see if you’re mean enough, bloodthirsty enough, creative enough. They’re just going to try to kill you.”
“Fuck,” Alec said, his eyes widening.
“Have fun with that,” she smiled, standing. She had to leap back to avoid being stabbed with the gold-painted stick as she released his wrist. “Now we’re even.”
“Fuck you. That’s not even at all! I leave home, so you arrange to have me killed by some of the scariest fuckers on this side of Earth?”
“Yep,” she smiled, smug. It was good to see she could provoke him, get a response out of him. Was that because she’d done it well, or had he gotten more emotional as of late?
He ran his fingers through his hair. “Lunatic.”
“What I find really interesting is that you’ve got some connections. A girlfriend, maybe? No. Nothing romantic. You have friends? A team?”
He stayed silent.
“Come after me, I go after them. You may be immune, but they aren’t.”
“Fine.”
“And remember, I can always tell Daddy where you are. He’s pissed you left. Pissed I left, but he’s too scared to come after me. Not with the Nine having my back.”
“They don’t have your back, Cherie.”
She shrugged. “Close enough.”
“No. They’re going to kill you someday. Probably sooner than later, when you’re no longer useful and they want the thrill of the hunt again. You’ve probably seen what they can do. Fates worse than death. Just don’t ask for my help when you realize it’s happening.”
“Whatever.”
“You just screwed me over, Cherie. Don’t know why you did it, but I think you did a pretty fucking good job of it. You trying to be like Jack? Trying to act like them, pretend you have a place there? Rest assured, you screwed yourself ten times as bad as you screwed me.”
She scoffed at that.
“You’re way out of your depth. As good as you think you are, they’re better.”
She smiled and shook her head, “We’ll see. I’m gonna leave now. You’re going to let me. Cool?”
He sighed. “Can’t really stop you or you’ll fuck with my team, right?”
“Right. But first…” She bent down and searched the woman who was sweating, panting, and twitching with the combination of Cherie’s emotional assault and Alec’s physical control. She found the gun, and then found a cell phone. She dialed the number to reset the timer on the bomb she wore.
She felt a touch relieved as the call went through. That could have been a pretty lethal mistake on her part. She’d have to break her rule and buy a cell phone charger.
“Bye, baby brother.”
“Go die horribly, sis.”
She smirked and turned to leave, putting a touch of extra sway into her walk as she made her way out the door.
She had this. A few weeks, one or two months at the most, she could be one of the most dangerous people in the world, barring the obvious exceptions like the Endbringers.
What Alec didn’t know was that her power did have long-term effects. Subtle, but they were there. Emotions were like drugs. People formed dependencies and tendencies. If she hit someone with a minute amount of dopamine every time they saw her, it would condition them until she didn’t even need to use her power to do it.
Just a little while longer, she told herself, and I’ll have the Nine wrapped around my little finger.
Worm 
Wow, she is so screwed. How crazy do you have to be to believe that eight psycopaths becoming dependent on you would help you stay alive? Even if none of them ended up resistant to her powers, one of them would eventually kill her regardless of how much they like her.
“…one of them would eventually kill her regardless of how much they like her.”
No. Kill her because of how much they like her. When your most prized possession is the art you commit (gruesome murder) it’s not a stretch to show your love and devotion by turning someone you ‘love’ into what you love.
The question is maybe if Cherie understands the human brain as well as she thinks she does. She may dose Jack Slash up with endorphins every time he lays eyes on her, and her power tells her that it makes him happy, but he may not be able to perceive or understand or recognize or enjoy that sensation of happiness. She seems to have figured out those long term effects of her power all on her own, and I fancy I can see that pride in having had what seems to her like a really big, really good idea that makes it hard to examine and test it practically; it could be full of holes that she doesn’t want to acknowledge.
Especially when she chooses to do her first experiments on a group of people with highly atypical psychologies.
Are you kidding? She was trained by the same supervillain who trained Regent, so she’s sure to at least match his talents for planning and forethought. Combined with lessons Heartbreaker taught her about keeping a team of supervillains loyal and hahaha I can’t keep a straight face anymore.
But seriously. Cherish seems to be better at thinking ahead than her brother. We may not need to worry about her succeeding, but that doesn’t mean the first steps won’t go off without a hitch, and I suspect Brockton Bay will feel the scars of whatever wounds she inflicts for quite some time.
So Hatchetface is already dead. The Nine do seem to have quite a turnover. You would have to be crazy to join. Which I guess is the point.
I was interested in the list of potential recruits: The buried girl. The arrogant geek. The dog lover. The daydreamer. The warlord. The scaredy cat. The broken assassin. The crusader.
“The do girl” is Bitch, “the warlord” is Hookwolf, “the daydreamer” is Labyrinth and “the buried girl” is probably Noelle. Which leaves “the arrogant geek”, “the scradey cat”, “the broken assasin” and “the crusader”. Armsmaster could either be “the arrogant geek” or “the crusader”. Jack’s recruit could either be Oni-Lee as “the broken assassin” or Theo as “the scradey cat”. Her appellation for her brother is the hardest to pin down but I guess it could be “arrogant geek” or “scradey cat”. If “the broken assassin” was really Oni-Lee and she thinks of her brother as “the scradey cat” and Armsmaster is “the arrogant geek” that leaves one crusader for Bonesaw to recruit. I can’t think of anyone who that might be. Purity might have qualified due to ideology and zeal but her family already got their visit.
At least Skitter appears to be not on their list. Of course the fact that two of her teammates were targeted as well as her boss’ headquarters and some other people she knows means that she will likely still be heavily involved.
I think Oni-Lee has to be the broken assassin as a recruit, because Theo wasn’t someone he went deliberately went for. He was a target of opportunity, and Cherie wouldn’t necessarily have any knowledge of him.
I wouldn’t rule out Skitter as ‘the scaredy cat’.
Actually, if you double check, her brother wasn’t included on that list, she says that we didn’t need to name him, so we actually have 2 unknowns.
But that means there are too many candidates, doesn’t it? 8 nominators, 9 candidates. Unless Jack gets two.
Oni Lee is definitely the broken assasin, Armsmaster the arrogant geek. I think the next interlude reveals the identity of scaredy cat, but who is the crusader?
Also, apparently the Nine were only eight when Cherish killed Hatchet face, what happened to the previous ninth member? Killed by a hero?
The crusader is Purity I think. Jack deliberately sought her out, though not as a recruit, but rather to fuck with her. She has that whole city cleansing agenda going on, making the world a better place for Aster.
Heck, I wouldn’t rule out Skitter as the crusader either.
Now that you say that, it does feel like it could be.
She never said she killed him. She disabled him. After all, Siberian said he was still around.
And yes, making a bunch of people who would happily do anything up to and including genocide to get what they want want you is a bad strategy…
I do not believe Regent was on the list…but I can’t think of who else the crusader would be.
Just in case a future reader is curious – the complete list:
Siberian – Bitch – the dog lover
Crawler – Noelle – the buried girl
Mannequin – Armsmaster – the arrogant geek
Burnscar – Labyrinth – the daydreamer
Shatterbird – Hookwolf – the warlord
Jack Slash – Oni Lee – the broken assassin
Jack Slash – Purity – the crusader
Cherish – Regent – unnamed
Bonesaw – you’ll see – the scaredy cat
It’s worth noting Cherish was listing people who she was asked to find, rather than necessarily just the nominees for the Slaughterhouse 9, which is why Jack Slash appears twice.
Hey, thanks for the readable list.
The Nine just get worse all the time.
Hmm… she lists eight people, and says the ninth is who she’ s after, otherwise I’d be tempted to say Alec is the coward. I agree that the Oni lee guy is obviously the broken assassin. The burried girl is definitely Noelle, the arrogant geek is most probably Armsmaster, the Dog lover is obviously Bitch, the day dreamer Labyrinth for sure, the warlord most certainly Hookwolf, and that leaves the scaredy cat and crusader.
I’m tempted to think that Skitter will be the crusader, she’s the one trying to improve things by any means at her disposal, and she could have a reputation from before when she’d made a guys genitals disease and rot off and then cut out his eyes and let the cops get him.
Now I’m really wanting to draw Alec and Bitch and Tattletail when I get the chance..
Thanks so much for posting all these stories in such rapid succession, they’re absolutely delicious.
At this point I don’t think Taylor’s reputation matters at all. If they use Cherie’s powers to determine who would be appropriate choices then I really don’t think Taylor would show up on their radar.
Really? You don’t think Taylor is totally messed-up, emotionally? I think her fixation and need for atonement definitely puts her in the crusader category.
On a related note, I was thinking while reading these episodes that it’s too bad Bakuda is dead — she’d have been a great Ninth.
Hg
I don’t think it’s a matter of them being emotionally screwed up, necessarily. They don’t seem to mind at all that they’re picking a crowd that mostly doesn’t want to join them. I think part of the trials involve the 9 doing stuff to the person that helps to screw them up to the point of wanting to join them if they survive.
Well, the text calls them, “the most fucked up people in this fucked up city”, and refers to them as emotional outliers. So, clearly, Cherish thinks they are all messed up.
But yes, I agree that the trials are designed to push them further along the path of emotional fucked-up-ness, such that they may be more appropriate candidates for the team, and more inclined to want to join.
Hg
Bakuda is not dead,it was revealed in the last Dragon interlude she barely survived.That said,it is implied she was rendered useless anyway((by being dependent to some machine/other convict,and likely on a vegetative state,certainly in no fighting state),so moot point.
Actually the terms used, if memory served, were “revived,” and “not really alive,” so I’d guess it’s not so much that she was rescued but that she reanimated.
Presumably without a taste for brains. 🙂
They seem to do some background research to decide who to recruit.
It’s going to suck when we go back to the regular schedule.
And that whole dependency thing won’t work out for her. Due to something similar I was writing…and which once again makes me wonder how some similarities are cropping up in ideas (I know not in quality)… I was having a not so sane character deal with someone manipulating how he thinks. It wouldn’t turn out how it’s meant to.
I really have to wonder how this whole thing is going to work out. Facing the 9 as a group is going to require the same kind of numbers as against Leviathan, so I feel like the testing is going to be a way in which they play the 9 against each other. Heck, they could even get away with it as people want to make sure that more than one person will have a place in the group.
The buried girl (Noelle). The arrogant geek (Armsmaster). The dog lover (Bitch). The daydreamer (Labyrinth). The warlord (Hookwolf). The scaredy cat (Panacea). The broken assassin (Oni Lee). The crusader (Skitter).
I don’t think Scaredy Cat referred to Theo. That seemed pretty spur of the moment, at least at first. Also, Theo wasn’t really nominated. He just has a side deal going on with Jack Slash, so he’s not going to be tested in any of this. You have to remember that she mentions 8 names and there’s only 8 people in the Slaughterhouse 9 at the moment. Bonesaw still has to go and grab someone and my guess for the magic slot is Panacea due to them picking people they have a similarity to and Panacea’s fears about her real father and what she might turn into.
My other guess, since I just now noticed something is that Skitter COULD be the scaredy cat, if the crusader is…Crusader. There’s a character with that name out there.
I don’t actually trust that guess about it being Crusader, so it’s just up in the air if it turns out to not be Skitter in that spot.
If we’d known this was coming, we all could have done a bracket.
Ooooo I like the call for Panacea being the scaredy cat. The only problem with your list is that it doesn’t include Regent.
PG’s fairly close there. I made a small change to where the text in the story was misleading. Cherish is listing the people the others asked her to find.
And yeah, PG’s count is wrong (even if you ignore my clarification) – because there’s only eight members in the Slaughterhouse Nine, now, and once you added Regent, there’d be nine people. But then again, not all of the people the Nine asked them to find were candidates.
The reason my count is wrong is because she lists off 8 people, then says she’s going after a ninth herself. Regent wouldn’t be included in that list, at least according to the text I had to go by when I first wrote it.
Right.
But the problem with your list (not to criticize too harshly – you’re very close) is that you’re introducing two people to the list (Panacea and Skitter) but there’s only one left to be ‘interviewed’.
I was also going to clarify what I said about the numbers of the 9 (using 9 as a way of shortening Slaughterhouse 9), but I’m not sure I see where it makes a difference in what I wrote. Regardless of numbers, they’ve picked who they picked and it looks like Cherish picked someone she didn’t list in there.
7 interludes so far, unless things are blurring my math (completely possible though)
“The buried girl. The arrogant geek. The dog lover. The daydreamer. The warlord. The scaredy cat. The broken assassin. The crusader.
And all she wanted was a few minutes to pay a visit to hers. *** She didn’t have to name that one.***” Emphasis mine.
But, if it’s taken to mean that those 8 are all they’re after, as Wildbow suggests, then that does throw off things. Regent COULD be the arrogant geek in that regard. However, as much as she talked about him running away, consequences of that, and as fearful as he seemed about it, Regent could be the Scaredy Cat.
In that case, I don’t see why the Crusader would be Skitter due to Bonesaw’s picking. Might actually still be Panacea in that regard if you count how she’s got something to prove by helping people.
The 8 she named are the 8 she found for the others. Not all of those eight are nominees. One interlude dealt with a member of the Nine seeking a meeting with someone who wasn’t nominated, though it didn’t wind up happening, remember?
Alright, let’s give this another go then based on checking a few more things.
The buried girl (Noelle). The arrogant geek (Armsmaster). The dog lover (Bitch). The daydreamer (Skitter). The warlord (Hookwolf). The scaredy cat (Regent). The broken assassin (Oni Lee). The crusader (Panacea).
I can’t say I’m confident in this one. Technically Noelle didn’t get an offer either, but unless I missed something, always a possibility, then I don’t believe Labyrinth is actually nominated. That being said, it might be Skitter as crusader and someone we’re not thinking of as daydreamer. I’d feel more comfortable if Grue was also nominated, but unless he’s a closet transexual (The buried girl), then I don’t see it happening.
Loads and loads of characters to pick from indeed.
the crusader isn’t panacea. it’s purity.
I thought the “daydreamer” was Elle.
You are correct.
I figured Cherie was picking up the candidates at range with her weird empathy powers, not just going off foreknowledge.
So she *could* conceivably be aware of Theo.
I agree “The scaredy cat” doesn’t quite fit for Theo, though. Given his task he could actually be ‘the crusader’ except that the two year timeout suggests he isn’t actually counted amongst the current batch of candidates.
I wonder what would happen if Hatchet Face shut down Weld’s power… Would he simply lose the ability to shapeshift and absorb metal, or would he completely lose control of his body?
I think the same question would arise for all the people with monsterous appearance who like Weld came out of that gifting people with power project and then stealing their memory.
If he is still around his effect on Labyrinth or Bitch whose thinking was influenced by their powers should be something special.
In any case somebody should try to weaponize him and drop him on an endbringer just to see what happens
I suspect passive changes like that don’t matter. Otherwise, his power would nullify Siberian, right?
Then again, I’ve got a bad track record when it comes to guessing things about this story. I figured that Hookwolf was the Crusader and the dragon guy in the Birdcage was the Warlord.
It wouldn’t make any sense for the warlord to be Lung, he’s locked up in the Birdcage. In Canada, which is nowhere near BB.
Well, actually, I’m pretty sure someone like, say, Newter, would still be able to move around. Having a tail isn’t really an active superpower. The way it appeared wasn’t natural, but it’s still normal flesh and bone. Weld, though? He’s made of metal. Just how alive is he? There’s a chance he’s actually using his shapeshifting power to move and turning it off would basically turn him into an inanimate statue.
Also, I like Hatchet Face as the Wormverse take on the big, brutish slasher type. Like Victor Crowley from Hatchet (can’t help but think of him when your guy is Hatchet Face) or Jason Voorhees, there’s always some reason why you just can’t shoot him or finish him off with superpowers (save for the telekinetic that one time). Basically, you can’t just one-shot those guys. And even when they die, they still aren’t completely dead.
They probably kept just enough of Hatchet Face alive to be able to get his powers going.
Considering it was Cherish who took him out, I figured Hatchet Face is currently sitting in a corner somewhere, rocking back and forth in the foetal position.
I wonder if Jack Slash has figured out that feeling the emotions associated with a trigger event gives a power boost. If the Nine have Cherish on their team, they could prove exponentially more dangerous.
Hey if you check comments from this time, the link to the next chapter is broken.
Thanks. Fixed the bottommost link.
My guesses, as irrelevant as they are for others since I just stumbled upon this glorious story, are as follows~
The buried girl = Noelle. The arrogant geek = Armsmaster. The dog lover = Bitch. The daydreamer = Skitter. The warlord = Hookwolf. The scaredy cat = Panacea. The broken assassin= Oni-Lee. The crusader = Purity.
All good except the daydreamer. I think it’s pretty cut and dry that one is Labyrinth.
Okay with Alec it’s becoming increasingly difficult to morally justify Skitter on the team.
I mean Skitters trying to save a single person and here he is, torturing 3 random people in one of the worst ways I can imagine, 24/7. And it’s not going to stop. He’s had dozens of previous victims and he’ll find dozens more.
If you don’t count the slaughterhouse nine Alec is probably the biggest monster in town right now, and though I like him I also really want him to die.
So while I like what you’re doing with Alec as a character he just sort of makes the narrative fall apart.
I don’t think Alec was controlling those guys before she showed up. There would be no reason for him to do that and he doesn’t really seem like he’d care enough about people to torture them for no reason.
Seems more likely that he took control of them as soon as he realized it was her to avoid getting shot by his own bodyguards.
He had it set up beforehand. He has to work on it for a while, or at least he did with Shadow Stalker, and she knew what he was up to and resisted. Maybe he can be more subtle about it if he goes even more slowly. It’s not clear how he could force them to sit still for it, so either he tricked them, or Coil ordered them to let him?
But also, he can’t keep it up when they get far away from him, and he loses control of himself if he has to use all his concentration to control them. (More than one at a time?) So does this make it more plausible or less, more horrible or less? When did his victims realize what was going on, how will they react when he releases them, could he just keep them forever?
I’m not sure why god would say that this makes the narrative fall apart. Taylor clearly believes that Alec only used this technique on Shadow Stalker. The others knew about his ability, not clear how much they may know about how extensively he uses it. Could he have a handle on some of them, but not made use of it yet?
I think you’re right, it’s something he set up beforehand as a safety measure.
Clearly he took Coil’s help and a handful of mercenaries, but if he’s going to let them be near him it’s smart to make sure they don’t have a choice in being loyal to him. Better yet? He could have, and probably did, grab some former Merchants or any of the other horrible people cropping up all over BB. Taylor has already shown that to her it’s acceptable for him to use the full extent of his powers on people that are truly horrible, like ShadowStalker.
Also, Alec has already said he loses control in his sleep, so it’s never a 24/7 thing. Though I’m not using that as a justification to say it’s okay.
making the narrative fall apart? I beg to differ. I find him very intriguing and i think he makes the story much more interesting. And with the whole justifying skitter thing, for me anyways i find it more interesting to have the juxtaposition in the team.
>The buried girl. The arrogant geek. The dog lover. The daydreamer. The warlord. The scaredy cat. The broken assassin. The crusader.
The numbers don’t match up. This list excludes Cherish’s pick, so there should be 7, because there are currently 8 members of the nine. I think you’ve listed Hookwolf as both “the warlord” and “the crusader”.
I made a little list to match up who each person is and who they were nominated by:
Noelle The buried girl Crawler
Armsmaster The arrogant geek. Mannequin
Bitch The dog lover. Siberian
Elle The daydreamer. Burnscar
The warlord. ???
Amy The scaredy cat. Bonesaw
Oni Lee The broken assassin. Jack Slash
The crusader. ????
Alec- Cherish
No mistake. Think about it.
I believe the “warlord” is Hookwolf.
Hookwolf (The Warlord) – Shatterbird
Cherish reminded me of Chelsea from Luminosity.
Everyone must love me.
I dont’t know how much pf her personality is canon, though, I never read Twilight.
So. Cherish. The first of the Slaughterhouse Nine who we see through the eyes, ears, and weird-emotion-sense-power-organs of. Regent’s (probably half-)sister, and it shows. What siblingly love. But onto Cherish herself. Pride goeth before a fall, and Cherish not only intends to control the Nine but also tries to control everyone she comes across. (Wow, that sentence went through a lot of restructuring.) Anyways, this shows a level of arrogance that makes Arms “I’ll kill an Endbringer single-handedly!” Master look positively meek. You’d better believe she’s set up for a fall. Cherish is like a classical Greek hero, with one fatal flaw (arrogance, as it so often is), except for the fact that she is, you know, a murderous sociopath. She wants to join the Nine.
Which brings me to a point. Count the recruits who wanted to join. Bitch didn’t really care, Oni really wanted to (but died), Labyrinth didn’t really get invited but wouldn’t have accepted, Armsmaster was violently opposed to the notion, Hookwolf was angry about being asked, Noelle was never asked her opinion but probably wouldn’t agree, and Regent tried to simply refuse the offer. That leaves whoever Bonesaw recruits, who is about as eager to join the Nine as Armsmaster is. Interesting…
You’re getting better, but laying the foreshadowing on pretty thick.
I’m not laying on the foreshadowing, I’m just clarifying it. Crystallizing it.
I think the main thing to take away from this chapter is that Cherish is an idiot. Seriously. I mean, running away to join the circus? Probably unwise. Running away to join the Slaughterhouse 9, because you want your family to leave you alone? That’s…there are just no words for that level of stupidity. I don’t know whether it will end badly for her (I’m sure it will end badly for someone), but it’s a terrible idea. In fact, it may be the single worst plan we’ve seen so far in Worm, and that’s including Bakuda’s plan to just keep blowing stuff up and Armsmaster’s plan to take on Leviathan single-handedly.
On the other hand, she seems psycho enough to fit into the S9, so there’s that. It would be funny if the others decided they liked Regent better and killed her so they wouldn’t have both on the team at the same time.
Blondes. They’re never all that bright when they’re raised by amoral abusive sociopaths. Actually, that’s probably true of brunettes and redheads, too.
To be fair, her family is so messed up that joining the Slaughterhouse 9 to get away is a logical progression.
So while I still like Alec I am increasing uncomfortable about that fact. It seems pretty obvious that he genuinely cares about the rest of the Undersiders which is a big redeeming fact but he also has three slaves…At least he feels that his sister went way too far with the Nine and that they are batshit insane psychos which is a good point for him. He strikes me as the Token Evil Teammate though as tvtropes would put it.
Cherish is…pitiable I guess. She really hasn’t considered that the people she is trying to manipulate will likely have no more compulsions against killing their bffs or their mother than they would killing a hated rival or complete stranger.
Actually, something that came up in an earlier comment was that it might be less painful if he goes slower. If that’s true, I don’t see it as unreasonable for a villain to stipulate being able to take physical control as part of the mook contract, especially since we seem to have so many things capable of disabling people about.
Talk about overconfidence! I feel like things are not going to end well for Cherish if she really thinks she can manipulate the rest of the Nine without them becoming aware of it and retaliating.
That might be true for their normal personalities, but with enough careful manipulation I expect they might not figure it out. After all, who could think ill of such a wonderful person who is so nice to be around?
What I don’t get is why Regent didn’t just kill her then and there. I doubt anyone would miss a Slaughterer, so he should have just grabber her and had them run in opposite directions. By the time she popped, they would be far enough apart for Alec to live and Cherish to die. He still has to deal with the seven survivors, but not the one who would pose the most threat to him, and dealing with seven is inevitable anyway.
I’m interested in seeing how Cherie will do against the undersiders, what kind emotions will she inflict into each of them? Alec also seems like the only person that can personally stop her. I’m wondering if he can manage to 1v1 stop her, and then get the rest of the team to attack her. I must say though, their family tree is really messed up.
Now that I think about it, if Cherish took out Hatchet Face to become a member, who is that 9th member they’re missing?
He could override her and steer her out to an abandoned building or something to blow.
If The 9 want to kill him anyway…
I’m surprised no-one else has suggested Shadow Bully for the Broken Assassin: since with Oni Lee’s state there’s a chance he was one of the others (Scaredy Cat?), and Shadow Bully is definitely enough of a mess to show up on Cherish’s scans after what Regent did to her (assuming she’s still alive, of course).
Intriguing to see another example of hereditary powers, I find your way of giving relatives similar-yet-totally-different powers fascinating.
And those poor mooks during the Heartbreaker siblings’ psychic tug of war… I think that’s actually one of the most horrible things the story’s had so far. The fact that the two of them barely acknowledge the pain they’re causing certainly helps hammer in how uncaring the entire Heartbreaker clan end up because of their powers, too.
She is my least favorite character in the series so far. What’s with the unlikable female character line up? Shadow Stalker, bitch and her?
It happens when you have so many female characters, annd unlikeable male characters appear later, and two of them are worse than SS.
Also, I wouldn’t call Bitch unlikeable, she just… computes things differently and has been betrayed before. I can dislike one character regardless of his past, but a condition that makes him think differently in conjuction with her past kind of gets a passfor me, at least.
Hum…the french part is bad,not natural,not french like at all
No french people speak like that;)
I really hate this girl by the way…
I think “Info that’s stored away in whatever corner of my brain makes my power work.” should be “Info that’s stored away in whatever corner of my brain (that/which) makes my power work.”
Could Hookwolf be the Crusader