The world within the girls’ BUBBLE was an endless expanse of hazy orange skies and titanic tree-like stalks sprouting from the earth and reaching high into the amber clouds above. And from each stalk spread numerous, horizontal(ish) branches at different levels of elevation connecting to other nearby stalks, essentially acting as bridges and roadways between them.
And all along these stalks were insectoids of all shapes and sizes – humanoid ants taking leisurely walks along the branch bridges, bulldog-sized bees buzzing freely in the air, weaving their way around, beneath, and over the branches, and ten-foot-tall fleas vertically climbing the stalks to reach the higher levels.
But the giant bugs of this world were not confined merely to the stalks, which, upon closer inspection, appeared to be constructed in clusters akin to cities. There were vast stretches of wilderness between the main hubs of the giant stalks – massive forests and jungles with building-sized mantises roaming about, and wide-open grasslands covered in elephant-sized beetles clashing with one another.
Fortunately, the higher levels of the sky, where the BUBBLE was, did not seem to be home to any of the giant bug people of this realm. Only tiny, normal-sized bugs were up that high, although to BB, they might as well have been just as terrifying as the monsters below.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” she screamed as she fell through the skies and her body collided with a dozen tiny little flies. Her arms and legs flailed around wildly in a feeble, panicked attempt to swat the things away, though in actuality, all she was really doing was touching even more of them than she would have.
“Wh-whoa…!” Mira gasped as she came through the BUBBLE next and immediately went into free-fall. Though, free from the mind haze of bug fear, she was quick to remember Samir’s instructions on the jetpacks, and quickly closed her gloved palms.
The jetpack on her back immediately kicked on, blasting out flames and shooting her downward like a bullet. “O-oh my God…!” she hollered from both shock and excitement. As she held her hands out behind her, she could feel her body’s trajectory adjust, and was quick to develop a basic understanding of how she had to aim her hands to maneuver in the air.
Soon enough, her excitement won out over her fear, and she found herself enjoying the feeling of shooting through the open skies. “WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
BB was not having the same experience. Her eyes were glued shut, she still hadn’t activated her jetpack, and was still swinging her arms and legs, doing flips and spins as she fell, and screaming high-pitched curses with each fly and mosquito that splatted against her. Just about the only upside to her situation was that, miraculously, none of the bugs had ended up in her mouth.
“Hang on, BB!” Mira called, angling her flight towards her younger coworker. Although, when she approached, she wasn’t quite sure what to do next. Was it safe to grab her and carry her down, or did she have to get BB to use her own jetpack? Hell, even if she decided to hold BB, she wasn’t sure how, as the young woman was throwing vicious swipes and kicks in every direction, and there was no way Mira would have been able to breach that deadly bubble of violence without taking a few nasty hits herself.
“BB! You have to relax, sweetie! You’ll be ok-”
“FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOOOOOUUUUUU!” BB screamed. “AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! GET ME THE FUCK OUTTA HEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRREEEEEEEE!”
Mira looked down. They were rapidly approaching one of those city-like stalk clusters, and if BB didn’t get her jetpack on, it was almost guaranteed she’d splat upon one of the bridges just like a bug…
“BB! Turn on your jetpack! Close your hands and-!” She reached out to try and help her, but immediately took an errant boot to the stomach that knocked the wind out of her and sent her zooming off at an awkward angle.
Eventually, BB did at least open her eyes as the winds rushed past her face, though she came to immediately regret it, as she saw that she was flying head-first towards a bee the size of a housecat.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!” she yelped, crossing her arms in front of her face and, coincidentally, closing her hands into tight fists. Her jetpack finally kicked on and sent her blasting down towards the incoming stalk cluster like a missile, tearing through the big fat bee and reducing it to goop and dust.
Unfortunately, as her arms guarded her face and completely obscured her vision, she did not see the incoming branch bridge, and clipped the edge of it with her shoulder, transmitting a surge of pain into her side and sending her careening away.
She hit another branch several dozen feet below, bouncing off of it before spinning around and landing on another below that one, smashing the jetpack beneath her.
Mira recovered from BB’s kick just in time to save herself from a similar fate, and redirected herself to fly down to where her fellow GLYPH agent had crashed.
“BB?! Are you alright, sweetie?!” she reached for the girl’s face, and confirmed she was still breathing at least. A few moments later, BB slowly peeled her eyes open, and though she was clearly dazed from the nasty collision, she wasn’t dead at least, so Mira breathed a sigh of relief. “That was, um…messy, to say the least. But at least you’re okay.”
She wouldn’t be “okay” for very long, however. The ruckus the GLYPH girls caused had attracted the attention of a crowd of bug folk nearby, who cautiously approached the weird-looking alien species lying in the middle of the branch bridge, observing from a distance. And all it took was one glance in their direction for BB’s face to grow pale.
“G-get away from me!” she blurted, pushing away from both them and Mira, sloppily scrambling to put some distance between her and the bugs.
“BB, relax, I don’t think they’re dan-”
But BB couldn’t hear anything other than the panicked thumping of her own heartbeat ringing throughout her entire body. She rushed to her feet, stared up at the sky, and began jumping up and down, flexing her hands open and closed. “C’mon! C’mon, you stupid fuckin’ thing! Get me the FUCK outta here!”
Mira turned her gaze to the jetpack on BB’s back, and noticed a few nasty gashes in the metal box, coming to a fairly natural conclusion. “Uh oh…I think yours is damaged, honey.”
“Then gimme yers, dammit!” BB rushed over to Mira and began grabbing at the older woman’s jetpack and gloves.
“H-hey! Let go! BB!” Mira kept the frantic BB away, quickly growing frustrated at the younger woman’s antics. “Stop it! Get a hold of yourself!”
BB growled, brute forcing her way through Mira’s defensive arms. “Shut the fuck up! I ain’t stayin’ here in this shithole!”
“What about the mission?!”
“FUCK the mission! YOU go get that stupid fuckin’ FORMA if you want! I don’t give a FUCK!”
Mira hissed as her body was suddenly jerked to the side as BB attempted to unstrap the jetpack from her back. She wanted to tell her off and push her away, but BB was much stronger than her, and she knew she had no chance. While the smarter thing to do would be to fly back to the BUBBLE together and drop BB back home, from how BB was acting, she was highly convinced that BB was about to snatch her jetpack and leave her completely stranded here alone until Samir could come back for her. It was a scary, ugly thought, but BB hadn’t given her any reason to trust her not to do something like that.
And Mira, overwhelmed at the sudden rush of annoyance at BB, for the actions she’d taken and the ones Mira imagined her being prepared to take, slapped the girl across the face. “GET OFF OF ME!”
It wasn’t a strong enough hit to deter BB, but it did make her hesitate for a moment. The power behind the slap was ignorable, but the emotional intent gave it a sting.
And it was in that moment of BB’s hesitation that one of the insectoid’s watching from a distance came approaching, tapping BB on the shoulder with a fing- er, no, with a claw at the end of one of her eight spider legs. “Excuse me? Are you two in need of assistance?”
The voice was quite similar to a human girl’s, to the point that BB turned around to address her as such, temporarily forgetting they were in a world of bug people. “Eh? What are you gonna help us w-?”
But when she turned to face the speaker, she was not greeted by a young human girl, at least not a “proper” one.
No, standing before her was a seven-foot-tall spider girl. While her upper half was quite humanoid in shape, her lower body was undeniably that of a gigantic-ass spider ass, with eight full, segmented legs.
And at the mere sight of the spider girl standing here inches before her, BB immediately passed out.
The world within the boys’ BUBBLE was an endless expanse of bright blue skies and huge oceans of mountain and forest as far as the eye could see, and, even better than that, it seemed to be completely devoid of big gross bug monsters.
And to Warren, the view was made even more breathtaking as he flew through the wide open sky at high speeds, able to freely take in the sights. Though they’d only been in the world for a few moments, something about it felt very peaceful. Maybe it was the quiet atmosphere, maybe it was the clean air devoid of any technological pollutants, maybe it was being held in HYPER HAWK’s big, strong, manly arms. Er, ahem. Either way, it was, unbeknownst to him, a much better BUBBLE world than BB and Mira’s.
“Hey, so, uhh…” HYPER HAWK began, angling his helmeted head around to look down at the world, only to see nothing but samey mountains and trees. “Where we goin’, anyway?”
Warren opened up the mission folder, taking extra care to grip onto the files as tightly as he could so they didn’t fly off or get burned up by the flaming scarf flowing around HYPER HAWK’s neck. “Hm…it says the FORMA was spotted being taken by some kind of…winged humanoid? It says they theorize it’s a harpy, so we should try and look for their nesting grounds in the mountains to find them.”
“A harpy?” HYPER HAWK asked. “You mean the instru-?”
Hazird manifested over his shoulder and his shadowy form phased through the superhero’s helmet, allowing him to peck at Hiroto’s actual fleshy temple. “Don’t ask if it’s the instrument again, you already learned what harpies are, idiot!”
“…I did?”
“Newsflash, genius: we’ve been to this world before. It’s where you met that harpy girl. Hezy.”
It (sadly) took a few moments for HYPER HAWK’s brain to work its way around what Hazird was getting at, but at the very least, it did reach its destination eventually. A few months prior, Hiroto and Hazird had been transported to this very world to carry out a different, non-GLYPH-oriented mission. While there, they’d met a curious young harpy girl named Hezy, and she’d proven very helpful in their search back then, too.
“Oh yeah! Now I remember! Haha, whoa, never thought I’d come back here! Wonder how Hez’s doin’?”
“Hez?” Warren asked, still finding it difficult to adjust to Hiroto’s seemingly-random personal conversations. Especially when Hiroto and Hazird continued having it without clueing the younger boy in…
“She’s probably our best bet in finding the harpy who took the FORMA,” Hazird offered. “Hell, it’d be even better if she’s the one who took it. Two birdgirls, one stone.”
HYPER HAWK nodded enthusiastically, excited at the prospect of seeing his quirky little friend again (and, more truthfully for the meathead horndog, of getting to fuck her again). “Haha, cool! You remember where we met her?”
Hazird rolled his non-existent eyeballs. “You don’t actually think we’d conveniently find her at the exact same place we did last time, do you?” Right as Hiroto opened his mouth, Hazird then said, “Don’t answer that. You’ll get it wrong. I can vaguely sense where she’s at, so just keep flying towards that and I’ll probably be able to hone in on her.”
“Cool! Good work, Haz!”
While Warren was used to being left out, that didn’t make it sting any less, even when it was something as innocuous as this. But Hiroto had been nice to him so far, and Warren wanted to try and build a genuine friendship with the older agent. So, as awkward as it felt to butt into the conversation, he managed to push himself to do it anyway. “Uh, wh-what’s going on? Do we have a plan?”
HYPER HAWK nodded. “Yeah, but you don’t gotta do anything, bro! I’m just gonna keep flyin’ around, and Haz’ll point us to where we gotta go!”
“Oh, uh…c-cool. Well, if we’re just gonna be flying around, it’s good the weather’s nice, at least.”
He didn’t even finish that last sentence before a dark shadow swallowed the flying trio, and the familiar rumble of a thundercloud echoed above them.
Hazird sighed. “We need to duct tape this fuckin’ kid’s mouth shut.”
Before Warren could apologize and HYPER HAWK could ask why they named tape after ducks and not an actual sticky creature like a spider or something instead, a massive lightning bolt shot out from the thundercloud, and struck the superhero dead-center of his back.
HYPER HAWK’s body went limp, and he dropped his hold on Warren. Both of them plummeted down to the ground far below, Warren screaming and Hiroto momentarily paralyzed. Without the controlled flight of HYPER HAWK’s abilities, they were both suddenly captured by this world’s fierce, tempestuous winds, and carried in different directions by the rushing gale streams.
