Weak to Bonesaw's Pathogen

"There you are Slime Princess! Jack said you were coming!"

Even though she presumably couldn't move her body she seemed awfully confident in herself. She coughed, and a moment later I felt my skin burning. The burning got worse and worse, and it wasn't confined just to my body. All my bodies started burning in the same way, even the one back in bed in the safe zone.

"Mr. Jack said that I should make something nasty for you," she said. Her hand was already twitching as whatever augmentations she had in her body repaired the damage to her neck. "Something that would make having all those bodies a disadvantage instead of an advantage. I think we're going to have a lot of fun together."

I was having seizures suddenly, seizures everywhere as the feedback from my first body was reflected in all of them. I tried to drop the bodies, but somehow I couldn't. It was like the mechanism for that was stuck and I couldn't pull away.

Portals were opening and closing around me, although they wouldn't have been obvious to the others.

***

"You left bodies all over the building when Shatterbird did her thing," Bonesaw said. She sounded smug, even though she was speaking in a high pitched, cutesy voice that I suspected was an affectation. "That was probably a mistake. It gave me a lot to work with. I'm sure that you've made changes since then, but the baseline is still the same."

She'd recovered movement in her right arm, and small mechanical spiders slipped out of her clothing, much smaller than the ones I'd seen before, and they began to work on her body.

"I mean, I'd already gotten a look at the woman with all the clones, so with enough bodies to study, I could see where you incorporated that into your own physiology. It's rather fascinating; you're a kind of biotinker who works on their own body. Crawler does something similar, but he doesn't have any control over it. I've been working on understanding the mechanics of it, and that sort of helped, but really, the challenge was taking what I'd learned from the woman with the clones and applying it to you."

The pain was overwhelming.

***

"I'm really glad you asked!" she said. Her face lit up. "So few of my patients have any sense of the artistry in what I do. They spend all their time begging and pleading. Jack likes that sort of thing, but I think it's rude and disrespectful! I had to create a smart bacteria, one designed especially to feed into your nervous system and create a feedback loop…"

***

Nasty-Better