NO PLUMBERS ALLOWED: Shroom 3-3

A jaw-cracking yawn forced its way through, drawing a few looks ranging from concern to offended. Before he could say anything, he covered his mouth to try and muffle another.

“Sorry,” Brian finally managed. “Night job.”

That seemed to be enough for the other patrons in line behind him, and the barista handed him his coffee.

“Here you go man,” she said cheerfully. “Are you sure you don’t want any sugar or cream?”

“I’m good,” Brian assured her. He paid her the exact change and walked out with his cup in hand. “Ugh, this job is killing me.”

Being a bouncer had seemed like easy money at first. Brian was a big guy, broad shouldered and fit, and he had copied his dad’s “don’t even think about it” glare pretty well if he said so himself. All he had to do was stand in front of the door to the club, enjoying the music filtering outside, and stare down any fool who tried to make trouble. And if they were too drunk to get the hint right away, letting his darkness out would scare them off.

Not that his power would help all that much on its own, but the drunks didn’t know that.

But the thing about nightclubs is that they were only open at night, and he hadn’t quite adjusted to the late hours yet. Hence, coffee as black as his fog. Too bad the coffee sucked.

Brian grimaced as he took a swig. The bitter taste did as much work waking him up as the caffeine did.

The nightclub paid well enough, since he was doing both shifts, but it left him with very little time to sleep, with all the things he needed to do during the day as well. He’d managed to catch a quick nap right after work, but now he was killing time until it was time to pick his sister up from school. Dad was busy with his own job, and their mom certainly wasn’t going to do it.

It was a step down from his previous… freelance work, he thought, not fully willing to admit what he had been up to even in the privacy of his own thoughts. The nightclub may not have been glamorous but it didn’t leave him feeling dirty like scaring the daylights out of some poor schmuck who just had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

…Honestly, the whole being a criminal thing didn’t bother him half as much as the suspicion that his employers were cheating him on his cut of the loot.

The job was making things tense between them, Aisha and Brian. He tried, he really did, he tried to be there for her when neither of their parents were, but now he had to spend almost all day asleep just so he wasn’t dead on his feet at work. He got the impression that she also thought going from gang enforcer-for-hire to bouncer was a serious downgrade, but he preferred the consistency and reliability of his current gig, even if it meant losing the excitement. She’ll understand one day, hopefully.

Brian crushed the empty cup and tossed it in a trash can as he passed it by. He really needed to find a good job, but those were few and far between in the Bay…

As he turned the corner onto a less busy street, another man started keeping pace with him.

Brian looked at him out of the corner of his eye, being careful not to be obvious about it. The man wasn’t wearing anything special, but he was in decent shape and carried himself with confidence. He was also, crucially, white and wore a buzzcut. Not a reassuring combination.

Brian wanted to get away from this guy, and since he wasn’t willing to put his back to him he slowed his pace to let him get ahead. Maybe it was just a coincidence.

The other guy slowed his pace as well. And there was hardly anyone else on the streets now.

Shit. He was really alert now, and so Brian noticed that there were several more similarly-dressed guys nearby. One keeping pace with them across the street. Another was approaching them from the direction they were walking to, and he could bet that if he turned around he’d see yet another tailing him.

“Brian Laborn,” the man said, turning just slightly to look at him. “My employer has been watching you--”

Yeah, no, that was all he needed to hear. Before he could have a chance to regret his decision, he sucker punched the guy in the face and legged it before he could recover.

As luck would have it there was a handy alley just nearby, and he ducked in, knocking over a trash can as he passed. He spared a glance to see one of them jump over the hurdle easily, tossing his jacket to the side as he did. The guy he’d punched followed suit, ignoring his bloody nose, and Brian turned his focus back to running.

His pursuers didn’t shout or get angry as they chased him, which was deeply worrying. That probably meant he was dealing with A) professionals, B) a premeditated assault, or C) both. Not good. Pretty bad, actually. Brian was pretty realistic about his abilities. He was confident that he might be able to take any one of them on, though perhaps not without effort, but three? Or even more?

Best to keep running. He turned a corner and started leaking darkness. There weren’t any forks ahead he could see, but it would slow them down.

Wait, fuck. They knew his name already. Were they after Brian or were they after Grue? Had he made a stupid mistake? Fuck.

A startled shout behind him (closer than he’d like) signaled that the first guy had reached the cloud already, and he looked back again. The man looked disoriented but not surprised. Brian wasn’t sure what that could mean. Did they already know? Was that better or worse?

Whatever. Getting away now. Another turn, left this time, knocking over another trash can for good measure. He knew this part of town pretty well, and he was pretty sure that this one let back out into a little marketplace that was pretty consistently busy, surely these guys wouldn’t try anything in a crowd right?

He made a final turn, lurching to the side to avoid a disused dumpster that looked a strong sneeze away from falling apart, and--Oh.

“Wait, no.” Brian smacked himself. “No, that alley was the one between Big Tony’s and the laundromat. This one’s a dead end. Shit.”

Calling it a dead end was slightly misleading. It opened up, certainly… right into a big wooden fence that, in stark contrast to the dumpster next to him, was well maintained. It was also made of wooden boards rather than chain link, and therefore unclimbable, as well as too tall for him to lift himself up easily.

Those footsteps were getting closer now. The darkness didn’t slow them down as much as he’d hoped. He looked around for anything he could use to make a getaway. No fire escape. No window that wasn’t boarded up. No door with a weak-looking lock he could kick open. The fence didn’t have any loose boards, and even if it did he was too broad to squeeze through.

Brian eyed the dumpster. It looked more like garbage than anything inside it could have, but if it could support his weight he might be able to jump from it to the fence and get an easier leg up.

He braced a leg against the corroded metal, and it collapsed into a cloud of rust instantly.

Brian watched, dumbfounded, as the dumpster fell apart, each side falling over one after another like something out of a cartoon. And then, with a chirpy sound and the crunch of concrete shifting, a green… tube… extended out of the ground like a weed growing through a crack in the sidewalk.

Morbidly curious, he leaned over to look inside. It was deep enough he couldn’t see the bottom.

“Huh.”

Those footsteps were very close now, and gaining speed. No time to wonder what the hell this was. He climbed up on top of the pipe and tried to balance long enough to jump to the fence.

And then he slipped, falling inside, hearing that same chirping sound as he fell.

A moment later, the pipe receded into the ground.

---

The men rounded the corner less than a second later and stopped short.

“...where’d he go?”

“He… must have jumped the fence.”

“Bullshit, you see that thing? Could you jump that thing?”

“He’s a cape, Drew, who knows what he can do?”

“...So much for recruitment. Coil isn’t going to be happy with us.”

“Crap. Let’s go, maybe we can loop back around and run into him again.”

They hurried back the way they came, ignoring the destroyed dumpster and the circle of cracked cement against the wall. It wasn’t until the alley was silent once more that the dumpster folded itself back together.

Honestly, poor timing on their part.

-----------------------------------

Taylor walked slowly, taking everything in. “This is a bigger problem than I thought it would be.”

They were inside a giant pipe. A huge green tube with stone floors on either side of a canal of water. Holes dotted the walls and ceiling, and every now and then a short rush of water would fall into the canal with a splash. Or at least, Taylor was going to continue thinking of it as water.

The pipe she’d fallen down had spat them out in a room very much like this one, and then they couldn’t get back out of it. This was mostly because it was poking out of the ceiling, and while Taylor could reach it with her super jump, for whatever reason she just couldn’t go inside. There was no suction like she was used to from pipes, and any attempt to climb up it the conventional way failed due to her complete inability to find purchase inside of it. It was like the inside of the pipe was covered in grease.

So now they were searching for another way out.

“How is everything so clean?” she asked. “If this is what I think it is--”

“It is,” Rigel confirmed. He looked faintly awed, looking around.

“--So if this really is a sewer the pipes have taken over, how is it this spotless? That water looks clean enough to drink.” Not that she would. Taylor wouldn’t touch it even if you paid her, but it looked clean. “It doesn’t even smell that bad.”

“Pipes, or at least the type we made, are a lot like plants. They can absorb the, er, nutrients they find as the water passes through them, leaving it somewhat purified.” Rigel scratched his ear. “Or at least that’s how it was explained to me. I’d need to ask someone, pipes are kind of a specialist thing.”

“I don’t think a normal plumber is going to be able to help with this,” Taylor said dryly.

Rigel shrugged noncommittally. “Maybe.”

“Do you think it covers the entire city?” Nobel asked. He was struggling to stand taller than normal. Almost walking on his toes. It might have looked clean, but it was still a sewer, and his face was a lot closer to the ground than the others.

“There’s really only one way to tell,” Taylor mused. “I’ll need to contact Armsmaster first thing when we get out of here.”

It was bizarre. It didn’t look like something naturally grown. Or, unnaturally, she guessed. Taylor walked over to the nearest wall and felt it, and from what she could tell it was smooth metal… -loid, plastic? It was cold to the touch and had a sheen where the light touched it--and where was the light coming from? It wasn’t bright but she could see just fine, and there didn’t seem to be a--No, no, one problem at a time, she needed to focus right now. The pipes certainly seemed to be metallic. Iron? Something lightweight, perhaps an alloy?

Her power told her that pipes could be made of any solid material, from metal to wood to glass, but it didn’t get more specific than that. What kind of metal? The metallic kind, apparently. Taylor wondered what properties it would have, if she tore some up and melted it down for use elsewhere. Would it hold a sharp edge? Was it conductive? If it was useful for anything other than pipes, and she could just grow it like a plant, it was a functionally infinite source of metal; the very idea made her mouth water.

She was itching to figure it out, but before she could do anything she had to get out of here.

“Rigel, I don’t suppose you can find a way out?” she asked.

“How am I supposed to know?”

“Can’t you, like, smell fresh air and follow that to an entrance?” Nobel suggested.

Rigel blinked. “Can I?” He sniffed, frowning in concentration. Getting down on all fours, he traced a circle around them, nose to the ground. Taylor and Nobel watched him, waiting for the results, until Rigel stood back up and folded his arms. “...No, I cannot.”

Nobel’s fuse sparked in irritation. “Okay, so how do we get out of here? We can’t just wander around.”

“Well, I do hear something,” Rigel offered. His ear twitched and he twirled to point down the nearest side tunnel. “This way!”

Nobel followed, grumbling, and Taylor trailed behind, looking around. There were side tunnels on the other side of the water, too. She was pretty sure she could jump the distance if she had to, since she really didn’t think she wanted to wade.

They entered the smaller pipe, and it got even darker ahead. Rigel’s eartips glowed faintly, but they wouldn’t be enough to light the tunnel if it got any dimmer. Could Nobel light his fuse and then just sort of… keep it lit without burning down?

Yes, he could, but it would be stressful and give him a headache after too long. He hasn’t had practice doing that, so he’d need to rest after a few minutes. It’d be like a sneeze that built up but suddenly stopped at the last moment, but extended over several minutes. Not fun.

Taylor blinked. Where did that information come from? She hadn’t gotten anything like that in a while.

Rigel came to a sudden stop. “Hey, I hear something else now.” He frowned, focusing. “That almost sounds like…”

The starbunny bounded ahead, the others right behind him, before turning into another tunnel. Just ahead, they saw another pipe, one more like the one that dropped them down here, except this one extended all the way to the floor, turning at a right angle to rest on the ground. And it was rattling in place.

Taylor watched, fascinated, as a bulge deformed the metal where it met the ceiling, and then, like something straight out of a cartoon, the bulge traveled down the pipe before something shot out like it was a cannon. A man flew into the opposite wall, coming to stop ass over head.

He groaned, falling over. “What the hell just happened…?”

Taylor hurried over and tried to help him up.

Tried to, because the moment she touched him he jerked away, banging his head against the wall and flinching.

“Ah, shi--shoot, what the--wait, you’re not one of those guys.” He sat up, rubbing his head before looking up. He took them in: a guy(?) in overalls and welding goggles, a glowing rabbit, and a bomb with eyes. The man’s face went blank. “Oh, great.”

“Are you alright, mister?” Rigel asked, hopping closer.

“I--”

“Oh wait!” Rigel ignored him and turned to the pipe instead, smiling widely. “If he came down here, that means we have our way out!”

Taylor glanced at the stranger, then turned her attention to the pipe. She laid a hand on it, then frowned under her mask. Something was bugging her.

“It’s one-way only.”

“How can you tell?” Nobel asked.

She blinked. Did she say that out loud? “It--” She waved a hand in front of its exit, feeling the air. “Air’s flowing in but isn’t flowing out,” she explained. She looked over her shoulder, not seeing anything but wall. If you’re one of Rigel’s friends helping me out again, you can just come out and say so, she thought, half-expecting an answer. But there was only silence.

Hmm.

The stranger started. “Wait a minute, I know who you are, I heard about you from my sister. You’re…” He snapped his fingers, searching for an answer. “...Toymaster?”

“Toymaker,” she corrected. “Also, that’s still only a placeholder.”

The stranger shrugged, getting to his feet and stretching. Taylor, mysteriously, felt the need to turn her head away.

“So, okay, this is cape stuff,” the stranger said. “I guess that explains everything. So this is, what, your secret underground lair or something?”

“No, it’s…” Taylor paused, considering. “Well, I guess it could be, eventually… I’d need to wait for things to stabilize before moving anything down here, there’s still pipes growing and vanishing and changing course--” She shook herself. “No. We fell down here by accident and were looking for a way out ourselves.”

He grimaced. “Damn. Well, I guess I’m following you then?”

“Sure, why not,” Taylor said, turning to face the rest of the tunnel. “We might as well keep going this way guys, c’mon.” She took a few steps before remembering. “Oh, what’s your name?”

He considered the question for a long moment, looking between the three of them, before coming to a decision. “I’m Brian.”

…

This tunnel was very very long. Taylor thought it was sloping down, too. It had been a while since the last split path they passed, when Brian spoke.

“Do you guys smell anything?” he asked, wrinkling his nose. It was getting darker as they kept going. Almost too dark to see at all, if it weren’t for Rigel’s glow.

Nobel didn’t have a nose and Taylor’s was covered, so they turned to Rigel.

The starbunny shrugged helplessly. “I think starbunnies don’t have very good noses after all. No point, in the vacuum of space. I don’t smell anything.”

“What’s it smell like?” Taylor asked.

Brian struggled to describe it. “It’s like… How raisins taste, but bad--”

“So like regular raisins then.”

“Shut your mouth, they’re good. It almost smells like…” Brian took a deep sniff, and his expression suggested he regretted doing so. “Eurgh, whatever it is it’s so sweet I almost want to hurl. And it’s everywhere now…”

Taylor thought about that. She’d never smelt anything like that before to her knowledge, but that description was ringing a bell. It was probably something to do with her Tinker stuff. She concentrated, trying to pull the information from the depths of her mind, but then the air suddenly grew warmer and they felt the space open up, indicating they’d gone from the tunnel into a larger room. And they couldn’t see anything.

“Hold on, I think I can…” Taylor trailed off, pulling a number of small pieces of junk out of her pocket. “I think I can produce a small light with this, I just need to cannibalize one of my badges…”

“Use the Zap Tap,” Rigel suggested. “It should be able to act as a battery.”

Brian cleared his throat. “I have a better solution.” He pulled out his phone and turned on its flashlight, illuminating the room.

Taylor stared, then slapped herself. “Duh.” She pulled out her own phone and managed to turn her own light on after a moment of fiddling, not used to the controls yet.

The room was green. They had all been so far, being made of pipe, but these were a different sort of green. The kind with leaves. Vines covered almost every surface, and Taylor could swear they moved. Leaves twitched, vines shifted, and if she strained she could hear something slithering.

And every space the vines weren’t obscuring was instead covered by a dense purple liquid.

Taylor choked. “I can smell it now. Whew!” She fished in her pockets and came away with a dirty rag which she handed to Brian. “Here, it’s not the cleanest, but it’s better than putting up with this smell.” She continued holding it out, and when he didn’t take it she turned to see Brian swaying on his feet, looking flushed. “Whoa, are you alright?”

“Huh?” He squinted at her, trying to focus and failing. “Myeah, ‘m good. Hehhh.”

He tried to take a step forward and staggered two steps back, prompting Taylor to catch him and support him. She found him surprisingly lighter than she expected, but his size meant it was still hard to hold him up. “Guys, how are you feeling?”

“All good, Boss!” Nobel reported. “Rigel’s dead though.”

“What?!”

She whipped around to see Rigel face-down on the ground. Nobel kicked him onto his back and the rabbit groaned.

“Wait, he’s just out of it, sorry,” Nobel said with an impressive deadpan. The Bob-omb managed to scoop him up on top of his fuse. “We should go back, I think, Boss.”

“You’re right, we--”

The vines moved. With a rustle of leaves made almost deafening in the confined space, the vines slithered over each other like snakes, leaning in towards the light of their phones, until a yellow and red-spotted head emerged from the mass. There were several of them actually, the largest of them nearly the size of Cici. They had no eyes and yet Taylor could feel their hungry stares drilling into her, as pure poison dripped from sickeningly purple teeth.

Rigel stirred, cracking open one eye, and whimpered. “I hate Piranha Plants…”

“Boss, I really think we should go back,” Nobel said, a touch nervously.

One Piranha’s cheeks bulged, and Taylor jumped backwards in time to avoid a glob of the sickly sour poison. If Brian and Rigel were this bad just from being around it, she didn’t want any of it touching her.

She wouldn’t have anyway, but especially not because of the other thing.

Taylor shifted Brian onto her back and ran, Nobel with Rigel hot on her heels.

The vines sprang into action, uncoiling and reaching after them, but plants weren’t meant for fast locomotion. Nobel felt them pulling at his key, but soon they were left behind.

It felt like it took far less time to get back to Brian’s pipe than it had to get to the poisoned room. Once she felt they were safe, Taylor propped her passenger against the wall to take a look at him.

It was hard to tell with his dark skin, but he looked distinctly green. Though, that could just be light reflecting off the walls. He was still thoroughly out of it, staring at nothing with a slightly doofy grin.

Rigel was definitely green, clutching his stomach like he was about to throw up.

Taylor and Nobel exchanged a look. “...I know I’ve already said this, but exploring with Armsmaster is officially at the top of the priority list. Don’t let me forget that, Nobel.”

“You got it, Boss.”

Rigel grunted, and then belched. Taylor grimaced at the cloud of noxious purple gas he spat up, waving it away. “Was that it, are you okay now?” she asked.

The starbunny just nodded, still looking nauseous. “...can we go now?”

Taylor looked at Brian, who was still looking bad. After a moment’s thought, she unpinned her Feeling Fine and stuck it to his jacket.

He jerked in place, green fading from his skin and he moaned in pain. “Ugh, I have got the worst hangover…”

Taylor tilted her head at him. “You don’t look that much older than me, I think.”

The unspoken question caused him to sit up, wincing. “Well, uh, not that I’ve ever drank of course. But I’ve seen how my mom gets in the mornings, and I feel like that. Yeah.”

“Of course.” Taylor turned to the pipe with a scowl. “I’ve had just about enough of today, I think. Let’s get out of here.” Her power advised against it, but there was a way to enter a one-way pipe from the other side. Unfortunately, her resources were limited and so she really only had one option, crude though it was. “This isn’t going to be fun, you guys, but here goes.”

Brian looked at her, confused. “Why, what are you--”

The Piranha Plants roared in the distance.

“--You know what, I don’t care. Get us out of here.”

Taylor laid her Zap Tap on top of the pipe, taking care to balance it so it didn’t slide off. Then she took her hammer and smashed it to smithereens.

The ZapTap exploded into a shower of electricity, and the pipe shuddered as the energy coursed up its length. Then the air flow coming out of it reversed, and sucked them all inside.

-------------------------------

“Hello.”

Colin answered the call without looking away from his work. The GBH had refused to yield all of its secrets, but it had proven helpful. He had managed to copy its mapmaking capabilities and integrated the function into his onboard computer. The range wasn’t as impressive, but it provided a minimap on his HUD that gave information on everything in a radius of ten meters, in three dimensions.

Extremely useful, but unfortunately a bit of a glutton for processing. It would be most useful for keeping track of opponents and allies during skirmishes, but it would be impractical to run the map and the combat programs at the same time.

A problem for later. For now, he was in the process of putting it back together. Having determined that this instance of the GBH was incapable of displaying locations the user did not currently occupy, he would be giving it back to Toymaker the next time he had an opportunity. It would give him an opportunity to check on the mushroom crop, perhaps broach the subject of interacting with the Wards… He had planned to do so when she called him about the pipe situation.

“I’m calling about the Pipe situation.”

Colin blinked. “Toymaker?” He set his tools aside and straightened up, giving the call his attention. “I’ve been expecting your call for some time now.”

“Oh,” she said, sounding surprised. “So you already know about the poisonous, carnivorous plants growing in the sewers?”

He was alone in his lab, and so there was no real reason to school his expression. It was purely habit that had him doing so anyway. “Of course. I assumed they were yours.”

“Well they--they are but they aren’t? I don’t know where they came from and I don’t think I made any Piranha seeds. They aren’t near the main Pipeline yet but I’m worried their poison might get into the water supply.”

“Hmmm.” That was worrying. “Why don’t you tell me more? I’ll meet up with you at the Docks.”