I watch and I wait. 

Nothing new on the radar, of course. Honestly, even with its necessity in the field, overwatch duty was boring stuff. No sign of reinforcements to be seen. No fun little easter eggs hidden in the graffiti. No nothing. Just simulated movements of simulated civilians, and not even interesting ones either! All she saw was plainly fake walking around routines, followed by artificial running and panicking once the fighting had started. Would it have killed one of the Guardians to throw real personality modules into these things? 

...Nevermind.

Now, back to the doldrums of watch duty. Pretty standard ‘sit back and watch the show’ procedure, except at some point the show’s projector decided to glitch out, proverbially and - if my metric crapton of eyes weren’t lying to me - literally. The simulation went from Danger Room to musical dress rehearsal in six seconds flat. I couldn’t believe my eyes: they’d programmed dancing - and [i]good[/i] dancing at that - into these things, and they didn’t even add a street performer NPC? Shame. 

I shrug. Then I start nodding my head side to side and, at the same time, move my arms in tune to what inaudible beat I could infer from the simulacrums. It was probably off, but I couldn’t help but get the feeling that the rhythm was familiar. Da-da-dadada-da-da. Da-da-dadada-da-da. In hindsight, I probably should’ve cared about this situation a bit more, but the NPCs weren’t real. Why should I care, especially now that this had become about 20x the farce it was earlier?

Then I hear Network - a flesh and blood teammate affected physically by the simulation, and thus firmly in the ‘people Swarm should care about’ category - shout for me to cover him. Leaving him to face this thing alone, especially if he was asking for it - help, not a butt-kicking - was something I couldn’t do, and  if there was anything I knew about, it was the importance of synergistic action and camaraderie within the [s]hivemind[/s] team. So to support him, I array my fastest bugs to shroud Network’s movements among their chaotic swarm, and to infiltrate Dragoon’s armor through whatever openings they could find, using the distraction of Ian’s car bomb to do so relatively (for a giant mass of bugs, anyway) stealthily.

[i]Or at least that’s what I [/i]would’ve[i] done if the good-for-nothing holobugs would’ve followed my orders![/i]

Instead they just vibrated. [i]’Well,’[/i] I think, [i]’This is certainly going to prove problematic.’[/i] I guess once whatever glitch had struck them, my power stopped considering them insects? Or maybe the vibrate function was overriding the move function. Whatever the case, I could still see through them, so they weren’t useless to me just yet. 

With as much celerity as my statistically modelled peak human body could muster, I spring out of cover and across the battlefield. At first, there was an unavoidable wave of nausea as my expanded senses and personal senses contended - a conflict of senses that I really, really needed to get used to before it messed me up when it counted - but I’d done this once before. Doing it again with help shouldn’t be so hard, yeah?

I use the diversion made by Network’s failed attack to take Dragoon by the flank - hopefully proving myself enough of a nuisance to let Network get his wits about him again in the process - with a strike aimed at the side of her knee. Divine armor or not, I was sure it should destabilize her enough if my presence wasn’t enough.
[hr]
[b]Unleash Powers Roll - Overcome Hacking:[/b] [url=http://www.roleplayerguild.com/rolls/1309]6[/url]
[b]Engage Enemy - RIP Net and Swarm:[/b] [url=http://www.roleplayerguild.com/rolls/1331]5[/url]