Only Miriam grabbing Oli’s foot with one of her unmentionable growths saved Alex from being cleaved into four pieces. As it was they had some surface-level cuts to their arms, which they could barely feel. Nerve damage had its perks.
‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ screeched Miriam.
The blades sliced effortlessly through her polyp barrage. Tongues lapped at Oli’s legs: he kicked them away. Lasers surged from his hands at all angles: layer upon layer of flesh sprung up to absorb the impact.
‘What the fuck is wrong with you!?’ he shouted back.
Oli leapt into the air and brought his heel crashing down onto Miriam’s head. His foot was swallowed in a dripping orifice halfway down: it tore straight through. Only Miriam’s reflexes, and the fact that she was stood on a shifting platform of phalli, saved her from her head caving in.
Alex could barely follow them. They wanted to duplicate something, anything, to help Miriam; but their powers were weaker since Hayley’s fire, and they could barely see Oli, let alone duplicate anything at him. All they could do was double tables in front of themself to block any stray… shit. A laser burst through three tables, and almost the fourth. They tried to duplicate the floor instead, but it wouldn’t come.
‘Infinite power at your fingertips!’ Oli was yelling. ‘The power to change humanity! And here you are, paralysed by fear, running a coffee shop!’
He stabbed straight into Miriam’s cheek. A tentacle grabbed his arm and forced it away, but Miriam was still wiping blood from her face.
‘It’s more of a bakery actually,’ she said.
‘You think I like this!?’
Oli’s roundhouse kick thudded through the fleshy barrier and impacted hard with Miriam’s side. The woman flew through the air and hit a rippling cushion that grew out of the walls, but she didn’t get up straight away.
‘You think I like working for somebody who asks me to kill his kid, just because the kid wants to take his mother’s name? You think I want to indulge that level of megalomania!?’
‘So don’t then, idiot,’ said Miriam.
Alex felt they ought to have been more surprised, or disappointed, or feeling something more than just flat acceptance that their father was trying to kill them for something that petty. They were perhaps too busy being ashamed at their inability to help at all. They propelled a duplicate chair towards Oli’s face: he slashed it in two without even looking.
‘But then we end up with you,’ said Oli. ‘So afraid of your past you can’t and won’t see the future. When good men do fuck all, can you blame people for making deals with devils?’
Miriam got up then, supported by a titanic pair of buttocks, and hit Oli square in the stomach with an erection the size of her arm. With the man on his back, she half-leapt half-fell onto him with a cry, holding something Alex’s mind stubbornly refused to parse, and smashed him across the face.
It took her, and Alex, a moment to realise Oli had stabbed her in the chest as she did so.
‘Oh dear,’ she said, and laughed slightly.
‘MIRIAM!?’
Oli kicked her off. She staggered backwards, falling into a pile of organic debris. There was a lot of blood, and not all of it had been there before she fell.
Oli was shaking slightly as he stood up, wiping white fluid from his chiselled jawline. He walked slowly over to Miriam, parrying another ineffectually duplicated chair, because Alex was absolutely useless in this state and unable to help at all.
‘I know how this sounds,’ he said, ‘but a few deaths to madness, a few more to stop you lot taking the Wordstone back: they’re nothing compared to what humanity will see in our near future, if we don’t change and change fast. For that, we need Ash Brytic. We have nobody else, and we certainly don’t have you. I’m sorry.’
Useless useless useless. They watched helplessly as Oli Godpraise raised his right hand, to kill Miriam, then to kill them, all the while calling them “Andrew” and saying how fucking sorry he was for serving the man he’d helped for twenty-plus years to eliminate his rivals, acting like he was doing it for the good of humanity and not just because Ash had stapled a pair of legs onto him for free which was more than he’d done for any of his children…
Oli’s right arm doubled. Then it tripled. The fourth one bent back into his own face.
‘No!’ he screamed.
The blasts went off all over the room as he, like Porthos before him, struggled with his new anatomy. Except Porthos was dead now, and this fuck had killed him.
He raised his other hand, only to find himself with several new pairs of legs. They skittered as the few remaining nerves tried to move them in concert. One more leg… and one more… and he was down, his phalanx of legs waving in the air in horror.
He wouldn’t have that problem if he didn’t have Alex’s father’s stapled-on legs.
Now. One last almighty heave. For Miriam. For Porthos. For everyone. And to rub in their stupid fucking father’s stupid fucking face!
…there was a pause.
Alex opened their eyes, and wiped the blood off their lips. Oli Godpraise’s legs, only two of them now, were trapped beneath duplicated tranches of the Dragon’s Nook’s basement’s ceiling. They stretched from the floor throughout the entire height of the room, crammed into the space. Oli himself seemed to have passed out from the pain. Alex vaguely remembered a scream, cut short, during the time they had their eyes closed.
Miriam!
They rolled between bisected chairs and scattered tables to get to her. Her breath was light, and blood was streaming over her apron. There was a lot of blood.
‘Hold on,’ said Alex, ‘I’ll get something to stop it.’
Except the things to stop it were upstairs, and Alex didn’t have the arm strength to make it up the ramp on their own. They tried to take their hoodie off to put it over the wound, but their body complained vociferously.
‘Don’t you have more important things to worry about?’ said Miriam, quietly but sharply. ‘Your friends…’
‘They’ll manage!’
‘Don’t be a fool Alex. They need your help. I was here to protect you from surprise attacks, and I’ve done that. Now you do your part or I’ll bleed on you.’
Alex opened their mouth, shut it again, put on the headset, and re-enabled the video link.
‘Sorry about that Charlie, we had a little mishap. You want the… Miriam? …she’s fine, she dealt with it. Like she usually does. You want the smaller door at the end of the hallway, that’ll take you to Ash’s lab.’ They looked at Miriam. ‘And be safe, all right? No, I’m not crying.’
‘Alex…’
Alex looked at her through the glasses. Seeing her superimposed onto a mess of broken dead robots was something they struggled to handle.
‘For what it’s worth,’ said Miriam, ‘I’m glad you’re alive.’
Content Warnings: blood, internalised ableism, parent killing child (mentioned), standard Miriam battle stuff
Balladeer - Ballads and Words 