Stepping on Worm
Chapter Fifteen

by Skysaber
aka Perfect Lionheart

OoOoO

Brockton Bay was delirious in celebration.

The whole world was, really. The first Endbringer death? In a cosmic game of Us vs Them, finally They have suffered their first casualty? If you aren't capable of celebrating that, you aren't human.

Which made it the perfect time to go on dates.

Jared was downstairs, waiting for the girls to get ready, when his hearing, based upon a phenomenal Listen skill, returned to him that there were an awful lot more people in the apartments upstairs than he'd left there when he'd gone, leaving the girls to their privacy.

And, in fact, there were an awful large number of young ladies leaving the apartment complex wearing outfits he'd have sworn he could recognize, made in masterwork styles but in the drab colors of natural dyes.

Going back inside, he moved against the current of traffic, finding the source of the flow in Amy's bedroom just as the last of the crowds left. He looked around, noting how stripped and bare the apartment was now, no sign of any of the clothes or soaps he'd given the young lady. Even the bed was stripped bare.

There was literally no cloth left in the room that wasn't part of the furnishings. Even Amy was standing there, embarrassed, wearing nothing but a couple of supermarket paper bags with arm and neck holes punched out.

She fidgeted, unable to look at him, as she explained, "Well, you see, we had so much... and they had nothing... and you made it all so easily..."

Figuring out that she'd given all she'd owned away to people she knew who'd had less, Jared could not help the fond expression spreading over his face. Hearing the rustling of paper behind him, he turned himself around to see the door to Amy's room now filled with the other girls, even Serena's *Mom!* all of them dressed in nothing but paper bags just like she was.

With a gesture, he created enough clones so there was one of him for each girl. Taking them all in hugs around their waists to the accompaniment of rustling paper, he asked fondly, "Oh, what am I going to do with you girls?"

"Love us?" Serena asked confidently, wiggling around in his arms until she faced him, her liquid eyes beaming confidently.

Meeting her gaze, he could not help but smile. Trust Serena to have the unique blend of gifts to not only have the insight to know what he was feeling, but the ability to accept and trust that despite not understanding how it came on so suddenly from their perspective, as well as the boldness to throw her own heart out there so readily in return. He sighed happily and hugged her more. "Well, there is that, I suppose."

Then he got a wicked thought and leaned back to fake a lascivious wiggle of his eyebrows. "Weeell, now that I've got my presents, I wonder if I should unwrap them?" He gave a finger flex to crinkle and emphasize the paper they were wearing.

"You can if you want to," replied several young voices, shocking him.

He kissed them lightly on their noses. "Wedding rings first, and I'm just an old-fashioned fuddy duddy who wants the brides to be wearing actual clothes for their weddings. Plus a few dates beforehand so we don't set a terrible example for our own children about being too hasty."

Mina captured his gaze in eyes that were both deliriously happy and incredibly calculating as she judged his response, measuring it for truthfulness. "Does that count as a proposal?"

There was only a slight wall of doubt holding back an incredible tide of happiness within her that wished to burst forth.

He hugged her to him more closely, speaking into her hair. "When you tell your daughters how I proposed, I think you'll want to tell them something more romantic than you wearing paper bags in a barren and stripped apartment. I think you want to tell them about how lovely everything was, and about how you still remember the dress you were wearing - which needs to be a bit more spectacular than brown paper with 'Safeway' printed on it."

He then released her into a more loose hug so he could match her warm and loving gaze with his own. "But I think you could definitely accept my statement as a promissory note that a proposal is coming."

She leaped up in glee to catch his lips with hers, heedlessly tearing the brown paper in her excitement as she did so.

A very red-faced elf left the apartment seconds later, leaving them all with a brand new pile of magically created clothes and things to go over.

He shivered and tried to suppress the knowledge that he was almost certain that Serena's mom had deliberately tried to flash him.

Wasn't she married?

OoOoO

Generously deciding that it was going to take the assembled females half an hour at least to get ready for their dates, more likely an hour, with two not being unlikely depending on how fancy they wanted to get prettied up, the young elf perceived that he had best do something to keep himself busy in the meanwhile.

Leaving a clone of himself on guard outside of their shared apartments, he walked casually to the stairs, noting in passing that many of the other residents of this building were the ones Amy and the others had given their clothes to, as he passed by other young ladies now dressed in them.

Every apartment door was open, and music was playing loudly from every door, mostly stuff he recognized from the 80's... which made sense, as that decade was the last period of real prosperity around here before the varied parahuman troubles hit and people stopped having so much disposable income for luxuries like buying music CDs.

There was also drunkenness, singing in off-key Hebrew, and wild parties going on at every level, but he could hardly dispute people's relief from the stress on a night such as this.

Even if he did, they were in good company, as one of the news stations on a television visible through an open door as he passed by showed a newsroom where the camera had to all appearances just been left on and abandoned while the staff had a party.

In the split second glimpse he had while passing by, Jared saw on that screen a media room where jackets and ties had been discarded, one lady even had her shirt off (though her bra was still on and her back to the camera), bottles were being passed around, and the oh-so-important media talking heads could not even be identified among the revelers.

An atmosphere of revelry matched quite well by the apartment block he was swiftly departing from.

He got kissed and hugged by three total strangers just on his way out of the building! It was enough to give him cause to wonder if anyone had seen through his costumed disguises and knew he had the endbringer kill to his credit; but no, his ranks of Sense Motive assured him they were doing that to everybody.

They were just that happy.

Outside, the scene was, if anything, even more celebratory. Less crowded, but more fireworks, literally in this case. It was only a few dollars worth, a fountain or two and some sparklers probably left over from some 4th of July then saved ever since for some special occasion. That they were being used now spoke volumes.

Around the apartment complex hung balloons and party streamers, paper decorations and the like. Paper production was still something that North America had plenty of, despite what had happened. Canada and the United States had both been among the top ten paper producing countries in the world before this. The formulas used had probably changed a lot to adapt for the lack of inexpensive chemicals, yet the end product was flexible in that it could be made a lot of ways. So that, at least, was something the shortages of everything else had not struck too badly.

People were dancing everywhere, some with trained skill, most without. Also there were several barbecues going on, the tantalizing smells of roasting meat drifted merrily through the milling crowds and their festive atmosphere.

Someone handed Jared an empty plate to fill up, and as he thanked them his eyes narrowed, taking in the homeless and people from other apartment complexes nearby (nobody really caring who crashed their celebration) and doing a quick tally of numbers, then comparing that to the meager supplies of food and drink he saw.

A lot of precious stockpiles and carefully hoarded supplies had to have been drawn out of storage to make this party, but it was still going to be very limited volume contrasted to the amount of guests already here, and more kept pouring in.

The food and drink were going to run out very quickly, he feared.

Jared considered a moment, as someone tried to press a wine glass on him and he turned it down with a 'thank you', then he set his empty paper plate aside and slipped out into the darkness, past some couples that were making out in the privacy of the areas on the borders in between the light and dark.

Finding privacy in the crevasse of a partially collapsed building a few hundred yards away, far enough away from prying eyes which were nearly all turned to the lighted areas by this point, the boy made mystic gestures and whispered a single phrase:

"High Albatross."

An obscure spell, but for all that one of the most effective spells for scouting that he knew.

Instantly around his hand mist gathered into the shape of a large bird the size of one of the largest eagles, though it was white and shaped like an albatross. He threw it skyward and in six seconds it was two miles above the ground.

More importantly, he could see from its perspective, looking down on his own position. This gave him a top-down perspective, able to make out his surroundings for miles in every direction. Every six seconds and the bird of mist was another two miles higher, until Jared could easily see clearly within a ten mile radius of himself on the ground, and less clearly for another ten miles beyond that.

You try getting lost in the wilderness when you're accompanied by a wizard who could do that. It was also something that he liked to cast before setting up camp at night, as there was a certain value in knowing via bird's eye view what monsters were around that might attack.

Due to game optimization, the value Jared got out of his ranks in the Spot skill were extreme. He could see detail at a mile away that most people would see ten feet away. Frankly, he'd needed that to support his archery, as he could hit targets a little over twenty miles away with his specially enchanted bow and arrows. Of course, at those distances that pesky little 'Curvature of the Earth' thing interfered, but when it didn't, like when you were flying at sufficient altitudes, you had to be able to see your targets to hit them.

The ironic thing, of course, being that while he could do extreme things with a bow and arrow, the more modern a ranged weapon the less good he got at it. He could make shots with a flintlock that would make any physicist weep tears over the sheer impossibility of it all, but only about half as impressive as he was with a bow. And his skill with modern firearms sucked. Why, he could barely shoot the wings off a mosquito at fifty paces!

So when he looked down as if from ten miles up via his High Albatross spell, he learned detail nearly as well as if he'd been at street level all across the area viewed. As a result, Jared now knew the territory and layout of the city of Brockton Bay fairly well, almost as well as though he'd walked every street and ally in town himself.

He also knew where every person standing outdoors in the city was at that moment, including nearly every homeless bum and beggar.

And the situation was not good.

There were a lot of 'parties' that were just a group of homeless standing in the dark around a fire built inside of a metal barrel. Sometimes they had a bottle or some food to pass around, but even when they did it wasn't much.

There were smiles, there was backslapping and laughter, even feelings of triumph, but the seeds of something darker were there as well.

On the other end, basically every police and security guard he could find was just as happy as can be, and the vast majority of them were, like everyone else, drunk with the victory over the endbringer, so, like that television news crew, having fun at parties instead of attending to their duties.

Squadcars sat parked while cops got out and danced or drunk, and just generally let their guards down.

And, well, that was going to cause problems, because for certain people who had nothing, their idea of a happy celebration included breaking through windows and stealing stuff. Or rape, or a bunch of other 'take what you want' habits most people called 'crimes'.

It had not gone so far yet, it might not happen today or even the next two days, but the wizard could easily read the situation, and unless someone did something the happy parties and dancing were probably going to get disturbed by an awful lot of rape and looting.

So he resolved to do something about it.

Short term, they needed guards who wouldn't get drunk and wouldn't be partying when the troubles started. It was no shame to the natives they did so, people got giddy when they saw victory. People had partied at the endings of both world wars, too.

Well, it just so happened Jared had a source of good guards.

Dipping into Uber's power for the first time consciously, Jared called up, and instantly mastered, strategy skills related to the games he had just been playing with Uber and Leet inside of their little pocket world.

Soon he had plans forming, but just as an afterthought he reflexively did what D&D players are liable to do when about to make an important skill check, and layered on the bonuses, casting a full half dozen spells throwing potent additions.

With the spells boosting Uber's power the plans he had been forming now looked childish, even a little infantile by comparison.

The map he'd been using as the 'playing field' on which this strategy was forming was the map of Brockton Bay he'd just seen via his High Albatross spell. And now he knew precisely how much of what to build, and where, in order to achieve the best effect for his purposes.

The north side of the city was the struggling side, and therefore the one where homeless and squatters were found in the greatest numbers, and therefore the side to contain so that trouble did not spread elsewhere.

Fine. He could do that. He could do that very well now.

Flying over to a long abandoned junkyard right in the middle of the conflict area, he cast a spell and soon had sixty giant bulldozers, each as big as a house, computerized and fully autonomous, accepting instructions from him.

He downloaded into each of them copies of his new master plan and they went to work, sometimes accidentally running over wrecked cars or clipping the sides of old buildings and bringing those down, but truthfully for giant construction machinery of this size that was a mere 'oopsie', and he felt confident they would faithfully carry out his new plans.

A different junkyard seconds later (the first was completely emptied by that first spell) and he had thousands of Star Wars droids waking up and taking in their surroundings for the first time. R2 units by the hundreds whistling and beeping and rolling around, more droids of strange and unfamiliar shapes trundling about, some on legs, some on wheels, some just floating in mid-air, all with beeps and whistling of their own as they tried to figure out where they were and what they were supposed to be doing.

Jared stopped that with some high-volume whistling of his own.

Thousands of robotic heads turned towards him.

Truly, the Tongues spell, granting the ability to speak and be heard in the native language of whoever was listening, had to be one of the best social spells ever intended, as Jared did not have a mainframe hooking up to Star Wars style communications systems, which was how most of these droid styles were accustomed to receiving their orders.

But he could arrange for that, too.

It required burning up one of his precious Tinker slots from Leet's power, but for the amount of time and effort saved, it was well worth it. So Jared cast Fabricate again and had a stock of the Star Wars central control computers arranged about him, already uploaded with his plans, along with new programming.

The new programming was Jared's private addition. In real-time strategy games, the key to victory was choosing what to spend your time micromanaging, as shaving off a fraction of a second here, or optimizing gatherer efficiency there made up the difference between a merely adequate player, and an excellent one.

Jared had recently been made quite aware that he was, at best, merely an adequate player of these real-time strategy games. On the other hand, the games used different codes for running player units than they did computer ones. Player troops and towers were deliberately made dumber and less efficient, to force the person playing to micromanage them, whereas the computer controlled teams had far more efficient and effective programming, just to give the humans playing the game a better challenge.

So, now that his base plans had been completed, Jared took the most advanced, highest difficulty bot-team programming for his units, and enhanced it, switching Uber's power over to that, along with the usual raft of D&D buff spells to throw his skill bonus even higher.

He may still only be an adequate player, but now his units had behaviors so well programmed he'd almost never have to micromanage them!

Unfortunately, the droids who were to have constructed everything according to this grand plan were simply standing there staring at him.

Tapping into the computer net to learn the reasons why, he saw the first was simply a vast amount of parts requests logged. Long lists of everything one could imagine from bolts and wiring to microelectronics and fusion generators, all nicely logged under parts numbers that would have filled an average phone book ten times over.

So apparently the average Star Wars droid could not build sophisticated technology out of flint knives and bearskins. Who'd have thought?

The other reason was almost as telling. An R2 unit was for precision engineering tasks. They do work with delicate electronics just fine, but lifting ten ton girders into the air for heavy construction? Not hardly. Star Wars droids were accustomed to working in groups assisted by literally hundreds of other types and styles of droids, and for each one specialized in precision engineering you needed at least two in other fields working in harmony to support it. More would have been better.

The RTS games had the builders just roll to a spot, then stick their welder out and make sparks for a few dozen seconds before a building magically appeared. During their World of Warcraft binge Leet had had Jared, as their Mod, input commands they could trigger with macros to summon barracks, farms or other structures once their droids had marked out where they wanted a new building to be.

But apparently real life operated under a few more restraints.

Not a problem, as Jared already knew the answer. Frankly, it was a bit of Star Wars trivia he was honestly surprised more people didn't know about, as they were insanely useful. But the I2F-5 and I2F-73 Industrial Droids were one of his favorite bits of the Star Wars universe. Normally used as part of the Corps HQ of the Imperial Military, Jared had never scrupled to steal as many as he could in roleplaying games featuring the setting because they were so insanely useful. To quote page 96 of the Imperial Sourcebook by West End Games, "These droids serve as a mobile processing and manufacturing plant... Such a complex can manufacture everything from glow rods to blaster packs to repulsorlift engines upon demand, using the crudest and most impure raw materials. If the corps can keep the complex producing, it can operate without Imperial resupply indefinitely."

Yep! Molecule furnaces. Or, to put it in terms perhaps more familiar to more today, they were essentially identical in purpose and results to Star Trek replicators. And, due to the publishing dates being so close together, it was actually a toss-up which franchise had come up with the idea first.

So, yeah. The redhead grinned as he flew to yet another junk field and cast his massive Fabricate, deploying thousands of those machines, and watching the 'parts request' queue in the central control computers drop a significant fraction as the mobile industrial droids began to accept parts orders, marking them as 'under construction', while lifting up on their repulsorlifts to consume local rubble for the molecules needed to convert into Star Wars super-high technology.

Included in their production queues were, not surprisingly, entire classes of droids the games had left out. But honestly, something had to hold that ten ton girder in the air for an R2 to weld it.

Just like that, most of the construction problems were solved. It would take a little while to start up, but once rolling this would produce enough guards so that the people would not be unprotected, and could party as much as they pleased.

Thinking it was not only Brockton Bay that would be having this problem, Jared created enough clones of himself to duplicate what he'd just done outside every major city in North America, feeling that strain him enough so he did not even try to extend that further, as apparently his ability to self-clone did have limits after all.

He was just about to pop back to check in on his girls when he saw that a significant portion of his original worker droids remained standing immobile and unresponsive.

Weird.

He checked the parts build queue once again, but saw nothing that would have caused a good third of his work force to be unmoving. To his surprise there were a few odd requests for items that could not be produced by the industrial droids, but it was all stuff he had gained patterns for out of the 'Leet's Greatest Hits' jukebox in Warcraft. The droids had even ordered a half dozen of those "Barely dressed woman frozen in carbonite" blocks Leet had programmed patterns for.

Perhaps they needed them for wall art in the fortresses-to-be? Who cared? He built them. Anything to get construction moving. But even clearing out the 'Industrial droids can't make this' list with a few more Fabricates did not get those droids moving.

The Star Wars RTS game they had been playing during their video game binge inside of the World of Warcraft simulator had eight races, but only six of those used droids as their generic peasant-equivalent unit. So they'd only been able to play those six races. Now the wizard had manufactured hundreds of each of those peasant-droids, but all of the ones representing the Galactic Empire and Trade Federation refused to move.

He could think of several possible reasons why, but none of them good.

On the other hand, he still had several hundred droids that were shortly going to build several hundred farms, and with Star Wars advanced technology applying even to their food harvesting, he ought to be able to get a crop or two in before people in the city began to run out. So, both primary as well as secondary goals achieved!

Alerted by his clones back at the apartment complex that his newly-dressed girls were now emerging, and this project only having been a side-interest anyway, Jared left his crews to their build work and hurried back to his dates.

He did throw up a truly massive illusion to conceal all of the activity in the build area before leaving, though.

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

In August of 2018 Enoch Ornstead died. He was the last of my younger brothers. We had been close our whole lives. Often bullied as children, it was to family each of us had turned to fulfill our social needs, and it was often remarked upon by strangers how close we'd been. We'd never in our lives been separated for more than a year or two, attending the same schools and colleges. Even married we'd always lived close by the other. Every holiday was spent with the other, and we'd had times in our adults lives where we'd gone for years having him over four times per week, although two was the usual standard. There was no taste or hobby I had that Enoch did not share, no movie quote he did not know. We read the same books, and played the same games.

As another brother, Adam, himself blind from a brain tumor, struggled to rise to give the eulogy, I was naturally feeling strongly affected. Being the most mobile among us, though not well by a long shot, it was I who had been tasked with pushing our mother's wheelchair from room to room, first to the viewing chamber, then to the chapel.

This was not my first time burying a brother, and I knew from experience that I was going to need a lot of emotional support to get through it.

That was then I realized: This was it. These frail people, none of them far from death, were the bulk of my social circle. That despite spending considerable years laboring to make people laugh, posting stories for which I have never asked for any reward, done as a gift and a labor of love to the world; that due to the tireless efforts of my bullies, I dared not show my face anywhere online. No site was safe for me. That not even having been silent for years had done ought to diminish the feverish intensity with which they hunted me. And though I'd once had online friends, due to the single largest, coordinated cyberbullying campaign I personally have ever heard of, anyone who had once been my friend online had been either driven out or intimidated to silence.

That was the first time I every really felt true anger over my bullies. How dare they? How DARE they?!

And my crime? Oh, yeah. I have some opinions that some of these people disagree with. Yeah, that's it. Obviously death sentence material, right there.

The sad thing is, I am not kidding about the death sentence thing. Cyberbullying is a brand new thing. Congratulations to this generation, as they have managed to invent a new way to abuse each other, something not even Pol Pot or Hitler had managed to pull off. So now we have a brand new entry into the sad and lamentable catalog of human crimes - and there are already deaths recorded as the results of it. Some of those merely the case of the sad victims of this new form of abuse committing suicide, others from their fanatic foes driving eleven hours to kill some poor person whose opinion they disagreed with.

Since I was abused as a child, I hate abuse, and I point out abusers as being wrong. It's how I grew to be hated. Most of my current crop of abusers were not even alive back when I started fanfiction. Many of them will not even have heard of the series Ranma 1/2. It's an amazing series marred only by the fact that the obvious author-insert character is verbally, emotionally, and physically abusive to her fiance.

Again, I was abused as a child. My father beat up, hit us, humiliated us, and at one point lost his temper and broke one of my brother's backs by hitting him with a full-body swing from a garden rake.

I. Don't. Think. Watching. Abuse. Is. Funny!

But pointing out that abuse was wrong earned the instant and complete ire of those who admired the abuser, and Akane Tendo was a very popular character. Naturally, through the years, there have been different series, and different abusers. Harry Potter is an abused kid, full stop. Severus Snape, whatever Rowling started smoking to imagine him as a good guy, was an abusive character, and not just to Harry. But point out that his abuse was wrong and even more of his fans hate you - and that wretched creature had a lot of fans. Naruto was abused by practically his entire village, with an abusive teacher and teammates.

And my reward for pointing out that abuse is wrong, is to be abused by the fans of those abusers. It would be hilarious if it were not so sick and wrong and outright evil.

But I'd venture a guess most of my current crop of cyberbully abusers don't even know *why* they hate me. It's just the in thing to do, y'know? Everybody does it. If you want to be part of the popular crowd, you've got to go along, y'know?

Which is another thing that would be darkly hilarious if it were not so stupid, sick and evil, as that's exactly the excuse list used by another series that's popular right now - Worm. The Bitch Queens of Winslow High, who heap unwarranted abuse on that main character? That's the list of excuses used for that crowd.

So my current crowd of bullies, almost all of whom are fans of Worm, every one of whom has freely condemned those same bitches as horrible, awful, and wrong; and *boy*, they declare, *they* would sure put *those* bitches in their place if *they* were there!

It's hilarious, in a stupid and evil way, as those same cyberbullies are worse than the bitch queens they so freely condemn.

Why? Well, Taylor Herbert, the lead character of the Worm serial was bullied by those bitches for a little over one and a half years. I, only the other hand, have been bullied since I started fanfiction, roughly back in 1997, so more than twenty years of abuse - my bullies are worse than those fictional bullies by more than an order of magnitude on that account.

What other things have those bitch queens done to Taylor? Well, email accounts closed because their inboxes got filled with hate mail? Been there, done that. Assignments lost or destroyed? Yeah, I've had web pages taken down or destroyed by hacking or other methods. Everyone who *might* have befriended Taylor bullied and intimidated, to create social isolation so she can more easily be destroyed? Mine practically do nothing else.

And Taylor Herbert escaped from her bullies by just going elsewhere. I don't have that option, as these guys cover the entire internet with abuse towards me.

So yes, I can reasonably say my cyberbullies are worse in every way than Taylor's, save only they have lacked the physical access to destroy me.

Not that that has been a terribly limiting factor for them. My brother, Enoch, died to what is essentially a prolonged bullying campaign, where he got mocked and ridiculed until he lost the will to live.

And the next day, the very next day after the funeral, at 5:30 AM, I checked Adam into the hospital for brain surgery. It was, and remains, a difficult period, filled with trials and sickness for all of us. Adam, thankfully, survives, though as a lifelong voracious reader his blindness is particularly difficult for him. We try to fill in, but there is only so much we can do.

That these online CRETINS, these bullies, think they are so hot, so special, many of them even think they are HEROIC for bullying a bunch of cripples like us. Suddenly it was something I could no longer bear. And there will be a reckoning.

As one who has no power of myself, no friends to call upon, I call upon my God for vengeance!

Hear my words: In the name of Jesus Christ, and by the power of the Holy Melchizedek Priesthood, which I hold, I curse those who have bullied us, both past, present and future. I curse you that your lives shall be destroyed, and your causes utterly vanquished. I curse you to lose all of your powers, that they shall never be regained, your popularity shall be forgotten, and what fame you had will turn to horror over your deeds. I curse you that none of you shall wield a creative spark ever again. I curse you to be alone, and that no one, living or dead, shall call you friend; No, not even each other. I curse you to suffer bodily torment and emotional anguish even unto death, and for the whole earth to breathe a sigh of relief once you are gone. Amen.