Tangle 6.5

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Still time to think of a reason to back out.


Last chance, Taylor.


















And Emma.










































“Skitter!” Grue roared, “Move!”







Somehow, I doubted he’d missed them.








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53 thoughts on “Tangle 6.5

  1. This could be interesting. It’s either got the potential to be the point where Taylor turns the group in or could be the point that makes it impossible for her to have a trusting relationship with heroes in the community for a long time.

  2. I wonder if Regent hadn’t just sold the group out himself. After all, Armsmaster and Militia weren’t in the fight–and neither was Regent.

  3. i can think of one way they might still get away clean. but it’s kindof a long shot, and it’d take the moral of the story a longish step in a direction i’m not sure if wildbow wants to take it, so i dunno. i guess Saturday will tell.

  4. Actually, there’s a good chance Tattletale blew the whistle. If I knew Taylor was a hero in disguise and had an idea of her internal conflict, the best way to make her into a solid villain would be to have her arrested. After all, it would only be her first strike, not the third.

  5. PS:
    Why would any EMP disable what is basically a large, gas-propelled spray without electronics? And why can’t Taylor simply cut the tube open just below the valve with her knife anyway?

    • Ah, but it’s tinker designed, so be sure to cast aside all assumptions as to operating mechanisms and whatnot. 😉

      In this case, I’m not spoiling anything by saying (and it’s not necessarily something Taylor would know), but the nozzle itself maintains a specific electromagnetic current along the interior of the ‘nozzle’ for lack of a better word, to keep the containment foam from adhering to it. (“If that glue sticks to everything, why isn’t it sticking to the container?” In this case: “Electricity!”)

      As for cutting the tube open, while I’m not 100% sure what you mean, I’m assuming you’re referring to how she might cut the tube below the nozzle she’s holding, and try to get some on Armsmaster?

      Probably would get more foam on herself than him, and once that happened, she’d -really- be in trouble.

  6. Heh. Kind of reminds me when some scientist tried to sell some fluorine-based flamethrowers to the germans during WWII. Fluorine can burn just about anything in intense, almost explosive flame, including things like fire-resistant bricks, steel, frozen meat, water and other things that supposedly don’t burn. It also reacts with all known enements, being able to corrode gold, platinum, palladium and even iridium if it is heated first.

    Guess what happened when containment failure occured in those flamethrowers? The content burned through the flamethrower, the user and then burned a nice hole into the building’s foundations.


  7. Hey Wildbow, I don’t know if it’s kosher to do this or not but I just read a piece of webfiction you might find interesting.


    One of the main characters can transform into a swarm of insects. So I figured you might find how that was handled interesting. i found it very engrossing so if you have some free time you might like to check it out.

  8. Or the French Resistance’s sticky grenades. Designed to blow up Nazi tanks, they had an unfortunate tendency to stick to the soldier trying to attach them to those tanks.

    So, we have an armed Armsmaster with something that kills bugs in an area around him, and the ability to fire an EMP blast that doesn’t affect everything around. Given the unfortunate lack of termite suicide bombers or bombardier beetles, this doesn’t look good for our beloved villains. I’d suggest low-tech solutions, but I think pulling a knife or baton on that guy, while possibly so dumb it would be unexpected, is the wrong way to go.

    This leaves us with a few options. 1st, Cockroaches. Nasty little buggers are all over the place and can survive anything. Doesn’t matter how swanky a place, they are around somewhere in massive swarms. Why are there so few planets without atmosphere or any type of life whatsoever? Only way to keep cockroaches from living there, that’s why.

    2. A mass of spiders pulling off a stealth AT-AT tripping maneuver using spider web. Given the amounts involve, this would be a good time for the evil heroes to spout off a monologue. Something truthy and justicey, with plenty of hypocrisy considering Emma and her dad’s presence.

    3. Considering Emma and her dad’s appearance, along with that of other rich people in the area, it’s hostage time! If that’s a problem, it’s bluffing time! The heroes have no way to no for sure that she didn’t plant a black widow in the hair of some rich lady who wouldn’t know what a wash rag was if her maid slapped her in the face with it.

    4. A friggin’ machine gun? Regent oughta make sure there’s a hero in a line with him and Militia, because big enough guns have this tendency to go through things, and it negates the value of a hostage when you can’t fire on them. Much worse, too, when said hostage can cause your finger to stay on the trigger and let the recoil dance it around the room a bit out of your control.

    There’s not much of a way out of this without further bad blood between Taylor and Armsmaster. Also, sorry for the whole lengthy treatise on armchair generalship, it’s something I do at times. If it helps, I can get people’s hopes up and let you dash them quite beautifully. I even have a sly idea I’m not sharing about a possible way this could go…mwahaha…but first, back to building a robot out of nothing but sticky grenades and machine guns!

    • /rewrites to avoid all of the above

      As far as Miss Militia goes, her gun could have any kind of ammunition. Rubber bullets, perhaps, or hollow points for reduced chance of penetration? It’s entirely possible that she could swap ammunition without even touching the cartridge.

      • Any kind of ammunition? Like the gun Dr. Nefario designed for Gru in Despicable Me? Because that was supposed to be a DART gun, not *stops to wave away the smell*

      • i don’t know how well machine guns do with rubber bullets. those things are usually pretty low velocity — for obvious reasons — and underpowered ammo tends to mess with a lot of fully automatic firearms. hollowpoints would work, especially if it’s a submachinegun firing pistol-caliber ammo, but would obviously be quite deadly to anyone not wearing good body armor. plus, she’d have to be very confident of hitting — a miss is the same as an overpenetration, no matter what ammo you’ve loaded, and she seems to have a room full of civilian bystanders for a backstop here.

        (there’s a Schlock Mercenary strip about that, but it ran years ago and i don’t have time to dig it up now. it’s hilarious if you’re a gun nut, though.)

        really, miss militia strikes me as a natural black hat from what we’ve seen of her so far. unless she took special classes in bean bag rounds and tear gas guns, what we’ve seen of her powers the couple of quick times she’s shown up has been pretty far from non-lethal.

        (okay, i’ll try to disable my gun nut mode now.)

      • iirc you don’t shoot rubber bullets *at* people…that can still kill, gotta aim at the ground in front of a crowd you need controlled and let them bounce first. not sure how accurate it’d be shooting just regent with ricochets from a machine gun.(and with the guestlist even harmlessly bruising somebody would be bad news)

    • No, no. Gun nut mode is useful for me. I research what I can, but guns and ammo are one of those things where there’s just so much stuff out there that I can’t really be sure of anything without more work than it’s worth.

      So it’s good to get some validation one way or another as far as whether I’m on the right line of thinking.

      • Guns aren’t really a good option for being nonlethal. Even if you use bean bags or rubber bullets, there’s the possibility that you could still hurt someone pretty badly. I believe it was a tear gas canister or a rubber bullet that put one Iraq veteran Occupy protestor critical condition. Probably the canister.

        Plus, guns have the psychological effect of putting someone in a life or death situation. They decide, “Ok, this person has a gun, this isn’t something where I walk out with a few bruises, this is a trip to the morgue,” and that makes them more desperate. It also makes them more willing to try lethal force in reciprocation. Put another way, if supers were known for killing criminals, crime wouldn’t stop. The criminals would just start showing up with better protection and with much stronger, consistently lethal, weaponry. Or they’d become much sneakier.

        That mindset might be part of why most supers don’t get demasked if defeated or their family attacked. If they did that, it would escalate and become ever deadlier. People would start setting up explosives to go off if their masks were disturbed, rather than just let themselves be arrested, or leave poisons on the exterior of their mask. Anything to keep their family from being attacked by supervillains or discriminated against and shunned by law-abiding society.

      • I like that interpretation in that last paragraph, Gecko.

        As far as the gun thing & Miss Militia, I feel like I should do an interlude around her. Not just because it would clarify matters (and shed some insight into her power, the use of guns) but because, as some have mentioned, there’s a lack of perspectives showing the heroes as genuine good guys.

        But not at the end of Tangle, methinks. Got something in mind for that, already.

  9. Not noticing Armsmaster is moving around the place, killing your bugs and taking one of your allies hostage? Bad move, Taylor. Next time, don’t get distracted by the whole “fighting superheroes and getting blasted around” bit.

  10. “hinged on Grue, Tattletale and I.”
    I know everybody always corrects ‘me to ‘I’ but I’m pretty sure it IS suppossed to be ‘me’ in this case. The subject of the sentence is ‘Everything’, not Taylor. (‘Everything hinged on’). To put it another way, if you take out Grue and Tattletale, the sentence would be “everything hinged on me”, not “everything hinged on I”

  11. “Grue directed a stream straight at Assault, but the first second of [b]fire[/b] seemed to skim right off the man.”

    Is this a typo that should read “foam” or does Grue have a flamethrower instead of a foamthrower?

  12. Is this the first in story appearance of Triumph? In any case, it’s close enough for a random comment about him.

    I don’t know if it’s an archetype I’m unfamiliar with, but “physically buff male hero with super shouty powers” has come up in three places I can recall: Triumph in worm, Sonic Boom (aka Gymteacherman) in the movie Sky High, and The Howler in the Wild Cards series (shared world novels edited by George R.R. Martin of Game of Thrones fame.)

  13. The paragraph describing containment foam contains a slightly awkward number of “it”s. Most are hard to remove unless you want to say “The foam” or “Containment foam” or something, but the following…

    “It was flexible and it was porous when fully expanded…”

    …could be replaced with “It was flexible and porous when fully expanded…” easily.

  14. and here i thought there would be biometric security on the equipment or something for just that reason. so no one could abuse it, it would have a fingerprint sensor or something(hey bakuda had it on her rpg) that would cause it to spray foam on the user or something if they weren’t registered. Man tinkers how dangerous.

  15. “I felt weirdly calm as my eyes swept over the room.” This is Taylor’s real superpower. It could also seem pretty cheesy, easy for the writer to make it look contrived. I think wildbow did a great job making her capable yet somehow believable. Or somehow other aspects of Taylor’s character are just so engaging that I am willing to suspend my disbelief and let her get away with cheating.

  16. New here been resisting commenting on old posts but i can’t keep it up any more. Why oh why didn’t u just fill the room with bugs write screw u on the window in spray paint and run of cackling maddly at an epic practical joke? So much safer :p oh well. Love this series

    • that plan would have been a good plan.
      embarrass them the bossman said.
      tweaking their nose and not even dignifying it with a fight or profitable crime seems *more* embarrassing than actually crashing in and beating them

  17. I’m having a hard time getting over the fact that Grue could have just left the darkness around all the heroes and sprayed them himself while they were blind and deaf. I don’t see the problem with that plan.
    I guess Armsmaster still would have shown up and we’d end up in pretty much the same situation.

    • I was just thinking the same exact thing while rereading this chaper. Why doesn’t Grue just spray them all down while Skitter distracts and vaguely keeps track of them / anyone moving around with her bugs… no need to remove the darkness. (For that matter, how much comtainment foam is in a given pack? I thought I remembered it being quite a bit, but it’s been a while since my initial read. Could they not have also just blanket sprayed the area and made a run for it right then? Let Grue’s darkness fade on its own.) Also, it wasn’t explained how Miss Malitia was able to see well enough to grab Regent.

  18. “This was over from the moment you stepped into the room.”
    Up until now I thought of Armsmaster as someone like Iron Man, Blue Beetle or even Green Lantern- he has a lot of wonderful toys and the ability to design and make new ones between fights, but he still uses them directly and in a person-to-person fighting style, rather than going off into a gun-based or other ranged combat mode.
    After this line I recognized him as also essentially being Batman. If he has any physical powers, they’re not very significant- he might be Captain America strong, but certainly not Superman strong or even Mammoth strong- and he’s smart enough to see that and compensate by being prepared.
    Looking back, I realize this fits into his original description in a very clever way. He was mentioned as being a guy who would be out on one wing of the classic V-formation superhero group shot. In the Justice League, Batman stands right next to the center… but that’s for out-of-story branding reasons (Batman sells a lot more comics than Martian Manhunter or even the Flash), and goes directly counter to how Batman actually does business. If he had his choice, he wouldn’t be in that group shot at all.

  19. What I love about this chapter is that it’s the first chapter that shows a good side of Armsmaster. Taylor kinda sees him as dick, which he is, but he is not 100% a dick. I mean he cares about the dogs, it shows that Taylor’s perspective is not always 100% accurate/fair.

  20. It would have been funny if when the Undersiders crashed in one of the Wards yelled “Thank God!” implying they were finding the party really boring.

  21. That was aweosme.
    And incredibly stupid of them lol. 5 guys and 3 dogs against most of the OP super heroes of the city.

    It’d be hilarious if the boss was a hero and had them do small time jobs slowly escalating to get them caught. But nah, my moneys on Dealer or someone we haven’t been introduced to yet.

  22. «Everything else, our success or our humiliating arrest, hinged on Grue, Tattletale and I.» simplified, «Everything else hinged on I.» “I” is only used as the subject. This is another example where you should have used “me”. I think you may be hypercorrecting, using “I” everyplace it is part of a compound? I remember one of the first was a preposition that takes two objects, like «between SomeName and I» which also looks locally like a compound.

  23. “If a few more of the biting and stinging sort headed in Emma’s general direction, it wasn’t due to a conscious choice on my part.”

    Okay, even through all this, this is what called attention to me. I said before that I’m new to this, so yeah… But I’m going to guess that the bugs are beginning to respond to her subconscious thoughts?

    Loving the story by the way!

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