Here they are, appearing in a flash of blue light.

"Good morning."

They were all holding hands for the teleport, but the short statured one with purple hair stops that immediately. "Hello, status on saline and sprayer acquisition and triage setup?"

Baek Ji-woo: not a woman of much formality in a crisis.

Valerie has not personally worked with Baek Ji-woo before but she does read the notes DRT coordinators leave on profiles when receiving extremely capable international espers.

"When I last checked the saline is acquired and there's a likely source for the sprayers, but Lt. Jin here has a more up-to-date understanding of the picture and is ready to take you to where triage is already happening," she says, smiling and gesturing to the man to her left.

"Uisa? If you'd follow me,"

"You might want to check home center stores, the sprayers will not be properly sterilized, but it is all going to be getting coughed up anyway," she says, but - yes okay she can go instead of bossing around Valerie in particular.

And Ji-woo is gone in a poof of smoke competent medical logistics.

"Mr. Min Woo-young, Mr. Seo Tae-hwan," (she mispronounces their names slightly, in the way English-speaking foreigners usually do) "on behalf of the entire city, thank you both so much for coming out here on such short notice. I'm Valerie Novak, DRT Regional Coordinator. Do either of you need anything to eat or drink before we drive over to Infested Wasteland's portal?" She can brief them on the way over, it'll be about a ten minute ride.

"...no but I do need to ask if you're really attached to the car ride."

There's a moment of visible confusion before the gears click, but she's too professional to look embarrassed. "Ah."

Her 2-in-1 is already in tablet mode - she unlocks it as she asks him what info he needs teleport the three of them to the portal site.

"Honestly, cheapest to just text me the coords," he says, opening his commscreen. The overall power expenditure of using coordinates is less than him doing it personally and so if he just feeds the battery the same amount it'll come out better.

She has to call a guy real quick but then he can get the coords sent straight to his commscreen, yep.

Vworp.

There was obviously a building here, at some point. There even more obviously isn't, anymore.

The nearby towers (several of them obviously marred or worse by debris or deeper structural damage, but all still standing) give a good guess as to their former comrade's height.  

The air is full of dust. There's a lot of noise, of the kinds you'd expect from dozens of emergency response workers trying to sort through rubble and establish a perimeter and set up seismographic equipment.

The portal hovers menacingly in the air above them. In the distance, the unmistakable sound of a worm screaming can be heard.

"Shit," she says, before she can catch herself. She's seen the video feeds, but...

"Holy shit."

"You can stop it," Woo-young says, encouragingly. "No more worms are leaving this dungeon."

"I know. Just... Jesus."

She composes herself. "How familiar are you with Infested Wasteland?" It's behaving weird, presumably for confluence reasons, but she's not sure if they have a baseline or not. 

"Only what I read in the briefing document. Starts out by hiding its portal, spews out sandworms that can swim through concrete, they eat people and bring them back inside, it's a sandstorming desert."

She nods. "All correct. This time around portal wasn't hidden, but it seems like the worms are better at hiding their tracks, somehow. We're still figuring it out, but we expect them to show up here once they do return, just with very little warning. When one does, we'll be looking to have you stop it in place." She says this last bit to Tae-hawn directly, of course. 

"Can do. How, uh, big are they? Usually?"

Here's a picture of one breaching at the ROM! It's pretty big.

Can he guesstimate the mass of one?

Substantially more than a commercial airliner!

...but if it helps, the individual segments of worm probably only weigh as much as a minivan packed for camping with a family of 5? 

How fast do they move?

Terrifyingly fast for something that big, but even when breaching (which is as fast as they go, really) they max out at like 120 kmph. 

"Yeah that's doable."

That earns him a very warm smile from behind her tired eyes. "Excellent. I believe you should both be patched into our network via your commscreens - you'll be alerted as soon as we spot one incoming." 

"Cool. And I got good reaction times, even if one showed up unannounced I'd be able to stop it. 

"Whereabouts in the worms do victims usually get stored?"

"About a third of the way back, in a special sack for it." It's the only non-duplicated part of the creatures, besides the ends. 

"Then I'll try to focus on that part to keep the victims safe."

Brisk nod. "They're somewhat protected from the normal motion of the worms in there, so consider that lower priority than stopping one, especially in the portal, but - if you can, please do." 

"I think I should probably try to focus on stopping individual segments rather than the whole worm and let physics do its job to the rest of its body, for backlash efficiency, so having that as my point of focus is probably good anyway."

She stops to think that through, and then nods. It should work, and with a little luck, it might even do more to the worm than stopping it all at once. (Luck is not a plan; she's not counting on it.)

"Alright. Do either of you have any more questions at this time?" 

"So the plan is to park here at the entrance and wait? Imagine it's tomorrow and you're told this plan went wrong. What do you think the reason it went wrong was?"

"Ah, apologies if that sounds condescending, I just want to make sure I understand the tactical situation well enough."

(Woo-young is really happy when Tae-hwan gets to be professional and competent. He's in his element, it's so nice to watch.)

"No, it's a good question." She pauses to think. "Your power can't affect worm segments individually. The worms move in such a way that stopping a segment doesn't meaningfully impair their ability to get back into the portal without requiring unsustainable power usage from you. Infested Wasteland decides to become S-rank at noon and" another momentary pause as she tries to come up with Some Dungeon Bullshit "breaches with one of its lung-shredding sandstorms in addition to the worms."

"My power can affect individual limbs in a person, it should probably affect the worm. That not stopping the worm meaningfully... maybe, yeah, won't know until we try. If it tries to dump a sandstorm on us I can actually force it to settle, it's not the most elegant or efficient but I can."

"If there's a sandstorms breach I strongly advise you two to evacuate the area until we teleport Skybreaker in to contain it," Novak says, tiredly. "And - good to know, about the limbs."

"...you don't suppose I could get an autograph if that happens?"

...heh. "I'll see what I can do."

"Awesome."

She smiles at them. "Alright. I need to..." she looks around for the -

car that they did not take. Right. "...request a teleport back to HQ, but if you need anything, please reach out via comms, I'm doing very little that can't be interrupted if it's high priority - and by default several other people will see, there should be someone available to help if you need it."

"Roger that."

"And I'll be on snuggling duty."

"Alright. Good luck out here. And thank you both, again." 

She teleports out.

Someone has been analysing the pattern of worm attacks. That someone has been getting more and more disturbed by them. She's thinking this isn't adding up. And she doesn't know what it means and needs someone else to look at it because she's going insane.

That somebody is going to be Novak, who has "get a status update from Pearce re: worm movements" as the next thing on her to-do list and therefore appears with a flash of blue light in the analyst area and makes a beeline for the woman. 

"Ms. Novak, I have absolutely no idea what to make of this data," she says without preamble. "Or, I have hypotheses, but I'm going to bias you if I tell you them and I'm not confident in any of them. The most model-agnostic reading of this," and she has a map on her tablet to illustrate, "is that the worms are appearing at arbitrary locations in the city, doing heavy but weirdly localized amounts of damage, and then vanishing back underground.

"And if you compare this to Casablanca last time," she pulls up the Casablanca map, "the worms are usually somewhat stealthy and go very far underground at first when leaving the portal but not that stealthy, and you can find the radial lines of reduced but still extant damage radiating from where the portal was, then they reach their apparent goal and their behaviour switches to something you might call exploratory, hitting various locations around that goal one after another, before either moving to a different location or going back to the portal.

"What's most confusing is the timing, though. Previous attacks show patterns consistent with the worms travelling in straight underground lines at approximately constant speed until they reach their location, all having left roughly simultaneously. Tracing the lines from the portal here to the worm attack sites and plotting the times when the attacks occurred does not fit a model of simultaneous deployment and constant speed."

This is confusing and she doesn't like it! She peers at the monitors. 

 (...the initial attack was simultaneous. Not staggered at all. Could they have waited deeper underground...)

Stop. She's not an analyst. And her analyst is telling her that the data is confusing. "Understood. You said you're not confident in any of your hypotheses. Is incoming data making that better or worse?" 

"Well it's making my craziest hypotheses more likely! And you know the saying, when you eliminate the impossible, whatever's left is probably way less plausible than the hypothesis that you made a mistake in your impossibility proofs."

It's a confluence. One of the crazy hypotheses might well be true. The problem is which.

"We're short on time and answers. I want you to take this to a psychic analyst. I'm sending you a shortlist of profiles, but you know what you're seeing better than me - pick one who'll be a good fit and reach out with what you have. Work with Wentworth if they need anything unusual. Got it?" 

"Yes, ma'am. Thank you."

She nods briskly. "Page me when you have something." And then she walks away, briskly. They need her in the rubble clearing triage war room. 

Now who does she have on the list of psychics to help with this bullshit—

—Causal Web. Her. Pearce wants her. Can they afford her?

They can afford anyone who's on the list, at their confluence rates.

Causal Web can be sent an urgent DRT consult request. What does Olive want to put into the initial outreach message?

She thinks Arr- sorry, Infested Wasteland has leveled up this confluence and is doing something really unexpected and she doesn't know which of her crazy hypotheses about how it did that is true. If any. Basically.

Causal Web replies in a little under 40 seconds.

Understood. I'll be there in fifteen minutes. Please send me teleportation coordinates for a suitable location to meet in, for myself and a partner with security clearance.

A minute later:

Additionally, please have people gather and bring us rubble samples from as many of the initial attack sites as you can. 

Understood.

She can do both things over a few minutes.

Teleporting in five. 

And indeed, five seconds later, she appears, hand in hand with a short green-haired androgynous esper with several facial piercings and a pair of big headphones. 

She scans her arrival room.

It's a not-very-descript meeting room with a long meeting table on which some pieces of rubble are arrayed and some projected screens with maps.

"Causal Web, it's a pleasure to meet you. I'm Olive Pearce, DRT analyst," she says, offering a hand to shake.

Causal Web can do a handshake! "A pleasure to meet you as well," she says, a bit quickly. "Thanks for getting everything ready."

"Of course. So, I'm not sure how you prefer to work, how much context do you have and want or need?"

"I've looked over your data while getting ready and I think I have all the context we need," she says, letting go of Pearce's hand. "You're right that something inexpiable by historic trends is happening; good job flagging that quickly and escalating it. With samples from the attack sites and my power, I should be able to figure out what, hopefully without needing too much time." She starts collecting a tiny piece of each sample as Pearce digests this. 

She's so cool. Olive is being professional but Causal Web is so cool.

She finishes collecting the samples. "Alright. I need to sit down for this. Is in here okay?"

"Yeah, make yourself at home." Wait was that a weird thing to say. It was totally a weird thing to say. Whatever she said it.

(Well, Pearce gets a little smile for it, so it can't have been that weird.) 

Causal Web sits down carefully on the floor. Her green-haired guide, still watching something on their phone, shuffles around so that they can get a decent amount of skin contact from behind her. 

She closes her eyes, and holding seven different tiny pieces of rubble in her hands, she reaches.

Sometimes, her power gives her probabilities and possibilities and it's a lot of work for her to prune them down.

Other times...

These pieces of rubble were [collected|summoned|brought here] <= [Ù̸̱͇Ṣ̴̛̈E̶̺̳̔̚Ṙ̶̬͝/̵̬̊Ą̷̯̑̓D̴̼̥̍M̷̪̈́͛I̷͙͚̽͑Ṅ̶̮̙̚] requested that some rubble be gathered for her investigation <= each piece of rubble was once part of a building or road that [collapsed|was sundered] <= each one was [broken|sundered] by a [S̸̞̒a̸͖̬͒n̴̺̼̅̍d̷̦̬̊w̶̯͙͑̈́o̷̅ͅr̸̙̉ͅṁ̵̙̋] from [A̸̡̢̭̟͒r̵̹̆͒͒͘͝ŗ̸̖̯͇̠̑͋͐a̴͖͙̪͕͊͂̚͠k̴͙̤̻͗̈́i̷̧̓s̶͙̼̝͋̿͋͂̄] that breached through the ground <= the [S̸̞̒a̸͖̬͒n̴̺̼̅̍d̷̦̬̊w̶̯͙͑̈́o̷̅ͅr̸̙̉ͅṁ̵̙̋s] appeared in the ground -

Oh no.

(...but does it really matt - obviously it matters, yes.)

Her voice is a bit strained, but she gets the words out as fast as she can. "It made secondary portals, underground. One for each worm."

"What." That was not one of her hypotheses!!!! ...granted, it's not much different from her "teleporting worm" hypothesis but. Still!

Yeah. (This is an unsalvageable mess - no it's not. It's admittedly pretty bad, but they can definitely adapt.)

She leans back into Sam's arms, pulling up her commscreen. "Unfortunately, I'm very sure that's what happened. I'm going to sharing the preliminary findings now, if you don't mind..." (She doesn't really phrase it like a question, because it isn't one.)

"Yeah, please, go ahead." Olive will just... lean against this chair a bit. Individual portals—

[Postcog-verified] Worms deployed via secondary underground portals. Further analysis required but containment via primary portal nonviable

She sends it to approximately everybody involved, high priority.

Well. That's... that, then.

Olive kind of hates confluences.

"So how long does it usually take for worms to appear," Tae-hwan says after what feels like an eternity. He's been watching buildings get demolished in the distance, aware that he could stop any one of them, and save those people. Aware that those people are dying and he could stop it and he is instead sitting here. Not doing anything. Not even stopping something else. Just waiting.

And it's getting to him.

"I... think usually one should already have, but I'm not sure," Woo-young admits.

Silence. Stillness.

"It's eerie," one of the nearby uniformed men admits, looking up from the screen he's hunched over. "Not a whisper on the seismograph since we got set up here. The worms must be taking their time to come home." 

"Are they attacking elsewhere? Should I be sent there?"

"I haven't heard -" 

He's interrupted by the sound of wormsong from the north. 

"We have now heard!!!"

Wince. "I'm obviously not in charge of either of you but I thought the plan was to have you here for containment? A bunch of local espers are out there already." 

"Yeah, that's the plan. I'm not deviating from the plan. I'm just wondering if the plan should change or if there's a reason the plan is failing."

You have access to the same feed I do He is not going to be rude to the boyfriend of the best teleporter in the world.

Also, he's a seismograph operator, not an esper liaison.

"Frank!" 

A man, presumably Frank, jogs over and, following the jerk of a head, approaches the Korean pair. "What's up?" 

"Do we have leads on what's up with the worms? The projections seemed to suggest that they should've shown up already and I'm wondering if we should be being more proactive about being confused."

"We have analysts looking into it. My understanding is that the current guess is that the worms are hiding deep underground between strikes and gathering more victims before returning to the portal, but I can check the feed for you to see if anything new has come in?" 

"I'd appreciate that, thank you."

As he pulls up his phone, all three of them get the same message on their devices:

[Postcog-verified] Worms deployed via secondary underground portals. Further analysis required but containment via primary portal nonviable

"...shit." 

"You're joking."

"...okay is there a reason for us not to teleport to observed sites of destruction right now and deal with the worms one by one, then?"

"...I'm not thinking of on-" 

Video call incoming from Valerie Novak! 

He opens it on his commscreen, making the hologram bigger so everyone can see.

"I assume you've seen the bad news already," she says rapidly. "I'm going to mark worm locations for you two by priority. Engage at will, and let me know if you need any backup." 

"Understood, we will. Thank you."

She nods briskly. "Good luck out there." 

"Thank you."

"Thank you."

And: locations?

Highest priority is this wor -

no, actually it's this worm just breaching over here at this central train station! 

Vworp.

Status?

Well. This was a perfectly normal train station, a few minutes ago.

It's still most of a perfectly normal train station, but there's a rapidly-growing zone of disaster and destruction, right there.

The wormsong is almost-unbearable, at this range, the maw of the just-now-breaching worm barely 10 meters from the two of them.

Oh wow! He hates that!

Does the location with the victims look obvious?

Nope! All that's visible is 4 meters of mouth.

...8 meters of mouth...

(there's a horrible crunching noise as it breaks through the high rooftop above them and continues upward)

Which unless these worms are much longer than usual (the reports haven't said so) means that the safe spot in case this worm has already eaten victims should be—there—

—and now a couple of worm segments, which used to have a speed relative to him, Instead Don't.

"Fuck," he says, stumbling in place.

His partner is right there on snuggling duty.

This causes several things to happen!

The first is that the worm's head and upper segments briefly continue their motion and then snap backwards, pulled violently out of its intended motion, with a truly horrible wet squelching sound that is abruptly the loudest sound present as the wormscream cuts out in surprise. 

The second is that the worm's lower body slams into the stopped segments. The noise of this is muted, because it's happening underground, but the internal damage is far heavier. These things are not designed to slam into each other at maximum speed.

The third is that the pain signals travel between the segments from horribly mangled and squished parts of the worm upward to the mouth!

It wails in pain and anger, and begins to thrash around violently.

"Hyung, get the civilians clear of the worm?" he asks.

"On it," he says, and teleports to the upper floor to find any civilians that he needs to rescue.

The backlash cost is less than he'd feared, because the worm segments are pretty separate, so he can hold on for a bit. The worm segments he's holding still in the air are kept in place so as to not hurt civilians that may or may not be trapped inside, but the head is going to...

...Tae-hwan's had years to perfect this. He thinks this is really cool. It's really cool when he gets to do this.

What it'll feel and look like is that the worm head is banging its head against an invisible wall. This turns out to be really backlash-efficient, because he doesn't need to hold for long, just let the momentary impact disorient the target.

This sucks!!! The worm hates this!!!! A lot!!!!!

-but it's less stunned than most things would be, getting this kind of heavy physical impact in the head. (The briefing material explained that each segment handles some of the worm's thinking - even decapitated, they're still a major threat.)

It will, each time it recovers, keep trying to squish and murder everything it can reach, and maaaaaybe emerge further from the ground? (It's having a lot of trouble with the latter, though.)

That's fine, Tae-hwan just needs to wait until hyung has managed to clear everyone nearby, short distance teleports are really cheap and he thinks the worm won't be very good at moving much after this. 

...he'll start jogging in circles, though.

SLAM!!!

SLAM!!!

SLAM!!!

SLAM!!!

SLAM!!!

SLAM!!

SLAM!!

SLAM!!

SLAM!

Hyuuuuuuuung how much longer are you gonna take to rescue every—

Vworp.

"Got 'em," he says, dropping most of his weight on Tae-hwan.

Oh thank fuck okay he can bridal carry Woo-young and continue to jog in circles but now the worm is no longer being actively contained and if Tae-hwan doesn't miss his guess those slams were starting to get really half-hearted there.

slam.

......

It's hard to read emotion in a creature this large, and this alien.

But as the worm's head and several segments of body smash into the ground instead of getting stopped by Tae-hwan's power, the bellowing sound from its mouth sounds less like an angry scream and more like a surprised yelp.

"Get fucked and die, asshole."

...since the the two of them are now the only moving thing in the area, it is definitely going to pick itself up off the ground and try its level best to squish or chomp them.

It sure can try. "I said get fucked and die, asshole," he says, grabbing his gun from its holster and with a practised motion shooting at an angle where there's no one around and locking the worm's head onto the bullet for just a fraction of a second.

Arrakis's sandworms are very durable. Infamously so!

...however, having your head's velocity instantly changed from an effective standstill to well over three hundred meters per second instantaneously is not, typically speaking, a thing that results in you continuing to have a head in the sense of it being still attached to the rest of your body. (Sandworms are durable, not indestructible.)

The sheer force of it rips the first three worm-sections violently apart. The head, imbued with a frightening amount of kinetic energy, flies upward and slams through the ceiling, demolishing large amounts of concrete, wood, and construction steel. It's very loud.

Okay fuck that was probably a bad idea he's gonna need to turn his jogging in a circle into actual running.

Woo-young has finished sending a request that someone who can tell whether people are in a worm and help them come here into the system so he says, "Alright, guiding tents?"

"Yes please!" He literally cannot stop moving right now, fuck, that was such a bad idea—

It really was.

Vworp.

(The worm, as it turns out, is not fully dead, but it's wounded beyond ability to further act, and it's so badly damaged by the experience that it takes hours for it to withdraw through the portal, an impact which could also be measured in lives saved and millions of dollars in prevented property damage.)