My head aches again. Not the ‘millions of little bugs crawling around in my head’-kind (though that kind is still distinctly there) but the ‘I just got kicked in the friggin head’-kind. Because that’s a thing that happened. Just now actually; I know because my vision went all wobbly even though I saw it happen from several different perspectives. 

Am I on my feet? I look at myself on the ground, underneath the digital fireball of Ian’s thrown car. I am not on my feet. Am I unconscious? I see the body shift like an invisible puppeteer was trying to move a marionette in a way it wasn’t meant to. Not unconscious, th-

Wait a se-

My vision suddenly snaps into a whirlwind of shifting perspective, a constant, nauseating back and forth. We see Swarm, we see Dragoon, we see blue, we see Network, we see people, we see Ian, we see light and white and host and hell and shadow and hunger. Then I regain my bearings, my own perception coming back into focus like a choppy camera.. 

Now I’m prone, my fingers and feet locked in the rubble, holding it like I might fall sideways. I’m making a strange gurgling noise, which I soon realize is me caughing out dust through my mouthpiece. And my body is shaking; I don’t need the bug’s eye view to realize that. Then I look up, and all I can think about is the Blue Man Group.


I fall forward again, silently laughing to myself as the thing speaks in a distortion of Dragoon’s voice, spouting lines from Dad’s old pulp comics. 

...Then I get back up because I need to start taking this more seriously. I put insectoid perception as a whole on the backburner. If this blue thing could take control of fake people, then fake bugs were a liability. I turn my head to look at Ian. I’d managed to sever the link with those insects caught in Ian’s shadows before too much went wrong, but that growing cloud doing who-knows-what was something to keep every bug away from. Don’t need another fit. Not now, of all times, with a dozen digital civilians converging on my position.

My mind’s eye expands outwards again, without the bugs this time, and I become [i]aware[/i]. The ebb and flow of the environment becomes clear to me;I spring forward, like a pouncing beast, upon one of the holocivilians, lashing out with peak human parameters. These weren’t real people, I remind myself as I aim brutally calculated incapacitative strikes. I turn my head to the rest of the horde. They’re still moving. They’re still coming for me. I’m still shaking. I’m still scared. But I see Net and Ian doing their best. I see flashes of light from the observation deck. I see my reflection in the rubble. 

I steel my nerves, calculating a path to victory in my mind's eye. No holding back.
[hr]
[b]Unleash Powers - Swarm Spidey Senses Her Way Through CQC:[/b] [url=http://www.roleplayerguild.com/rolls/1422]7[/url]
[b]Conditions:[/b][list][*]Afraid (-2 to Directly Engage the Threat)[/list]