The Butcher's Bill: 1.3.1

For a little while, I blanked out, or maybe it was that "I" ceased to exist as a concept that made sense - but somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, there was a place where I and my passenger met, and that went up against the fourteen shards that made up the Butcher. It wasn't really like a one-on-one argument at all, but in later times when I thought back to it, this is how I remembered it:

That wave of memories, that collection of power, was trying to tell me that I had no chance of using those powers without understanding them. Wanted me to abandon my consciousness, and to let the Butcher run the show.

I fought back.

The Teeth were born in Brockton Bay? I ran the Undersiders, and we owned it. The Teeth had fought the Slaughterhouse Nine and barely survived? We'd beaten them. Fourteen alien powers? Try fourteen colonies of bees. My power, my viewpoint, just happened to be bugs. What it really represented was unity. Coordination. Many small pieces becoming a whole. That was something that the Butcher needed, something that it had always suffered from.

The Butcher countered.

I was weak. A girl. Prone to fits of emotion. I had been ridiculed by Valefor. I had inappropriate sentiment for friends and family. The Butcher was purer in purpose, more willing to kill, to eliminate the chance that future opponents would be willing to strike back.

To "Me", that was itself a weakness. The world was going to end. What was the good of killing opponents unnecessarily when an Endbringer or something like Nilbog could come along and kill the whole world? Even if the Butcher did manage to survive through reincarnating, what good would ruling over an empty world be? "I" was already striking the right balance of ruthlessness and sympathy - I had the support of some of the strongest parahumans around, and was attracting more to "My" banner. If more capes like Valefor showed up to mock my feelings of sentiment, there were always more maggots that "I" could use to deal with them. In the meantime, that same sentiment that the Butcher derided was an irreplaceable part of the support that "I" enjoyed.

And, if "I" changed too much towards the Butcher, those same friends would throw me into Cherish's range and leave me trapped underwater to suffer an eternity of despair.

The response was... untranslatable, but it boiled down to this:

All right. We'll play it your way... for now.

When I woke up, it was to a bewildering array of enhanced senses. My eyes were sharper, my nose and ears more sensitive; but beyond that there was a welter of 'seventh senses' that did their best to twist themselves into methods that could be interpreted by the ones I already had. It was surprising how many powers actually routed themselves through something other than my eyes; while Butcher and Lancet saw the nerves and blood vessels that they targeted, Forearmed's danger sense manifested as a feeling of pressure on the skin, and Devil Child's ability to teleport almost felt like an inner-ear imbalance, a simultaneous shift of gravity in the directions that it would be safe for me to go. Other powers, like Quarrel's space-warping ability or Red Ronin's ability to amplify the sharpness of blades he wielded, seemed to be tamer powers, ones that would need to be evoked consciously.

Idly, I pressed down on the pebble between my fingers, and felt the fizz of Stonesmith's shaping abilities as it narrowed into a stone dart, then flattened out into a perfectly smooth, round disk. I stood, turned, and used five kinds of super-strength to flick it at the bay. Quarrel's powers insured that it struck at exactly the perfect angle. It would have been symbolic, or poetic, if it had skipped exactly fifteen times, but it only made it to about nine before it struck the rusting hulk of a wrecked ship and shattered with a clang.

I turned back towards the shore, and saw a small army of monstrous dogs, with powerful parahumans behind them, all staring at me and wondering if I was going to run forwards and kill them.

"Um." I said, looking out at everyone. "Okay, maybe I didn't think this next part through... how do I prove I'm still me? Uh... Butcher is dead, long live Skitter? Um... crap."