Bakuda spatial bomb

“Let’s see how smart you two are after I give tall, dark and mysterious his treat,” Bakuda threatened, “Let’s see… here.  Here’s a real gem.  Two-twenty-seven.  Now sit still.  If you even think about using your power, I’ll just shove it down the bug brat’s throat instead, set it off.  Not like you’re in a position to stop me from getting the job done, even if I’m deaf and blind.”

She removed her pink gloves and threw them aside.  Then she withdrew a set of what looked like long, narrow scissors from her sleeve.  Except they were blunt, not sharp.  Like pliers, almost.  They clicked as she closed them on the tip of what looked like an inch-long metal pill.

“No need for surgery, since this isn’t going to be long term.  What I’m going to do is slide this up your nostril and into your nasal cavity.”  She reached into the darkness that was leaking from all around him and fumbled around his face. “Just need to get your mask… helmet… off.  There.”

If Grue’s mask was off, it was hard to tell.  His head was just a roughly human-shaped blur of shadow.

She reached into that layer of darkness with one hand and pushed the capsule into the center of it all with the other.  “And in it goes… slowly, don’t want to activate it prematurely, and the effects will only be really cool if it’s deep.  See, my two-twenty-seven was something of a happy accident.  I’d taken readings of little Vista’s powers, thought maybe I could make a space distortion grenade.  Purely by accident, I cracked the Manton effect.  Or at least, whatever I’d done when I put the grenade together, it bypassed the Manton effect.  You idiots know what that is?”

She stopped and cracked her knuckles, leaving the scissor-like tool sticking straight out of Grue’s face.  “It’s that little rule that keeps pyrokinetics from boiling your blood, that limits most powers from affecting people’s bodies.  Or, depending on what theory you’re going by, it’s the rule that says your power either works only on organic, living things, or it works on everything else.

“So think about it.  A spatial distortion effect that only works on living material.  I set this thing off, and all living matter within three feet of the capsule is reshaped, warped, shrunk, blown up, stretched, bent.  It doesn’t actually kill you.  That’s the second most amazing thing about it, besides the Manton bypass.  Everything still connects to everything else.  Totally nonlethal, but it’ll make you wish you were dead every second of the rest of your miserable fucking existence.”

Don’t just lie there and watch, I thought.  Do something!

“Just click, whoosh, you’re ugly enough to put the elephant man to shame.  Wind up with a head four times the normal size, bumps like tumors all over, every feature and part the wrong shape, wrong size.  Reshapes the brain, too, but that’s usually just some mild to moderate brain damage, since I’ve got it calibrated to focus on the external features.”  She laughed.  It was that dry, repetitive, inhuman sound.  When she spoke again, she enunciated each word separately.  “Irreversible.  And.  Fucking.  Hilarious.”

- Shell 4.10