After the blinding, focused light, it was hard to make out details. Sieben walked at the roof’s edge, a matter of ten feet behind Drei. She had company. A figure loomed tall enough that it was five feet taller than Sieben. A human shape topped it, and about ten feet of tail followed after, lumpy and faintly sour smelling. Like rancid garbage. The height was simply the parahuman raising themselves up. I could see the shape of him move as he dropped down, almost falling. His upper body traced the wall as he flowed down it at a diagonal, a caterpillar body of trash bags and cardboard boxes following after him.

He gathered the body under them, all coiled up, reshuffled, then launched off the wall. His upper body stuck out at the top, while legs and hips were lost in an amorphous blob of detritus. The bags and boxes contained gas, and hoses trailed beneath, each hose producing puffs of that same gas. He took a course that put him some distance from the building and his squad.

Chugalug. Trash changer. He gathered garbage and sewage as a body he could configure into a few different forms. That trash was slowly consumed and turned into a material that would be, as required, solid, gas, or liquid, typically in quantities far greater than what was reasonable for what he’d absorbed. His namesake technique was from how he ‘gathered’ raw sewage to fill out his body. Moose had covered that.

Guy didn’t really associate with his squad, or his squad didn’t want to associate with him.

I withdrew my hand from Precipice’s face. He made a face as he inhaled.

It smelled bad. Like shit that had been eaten, puked out, eaten again, and laced with sour garbage smells and other general human smells. There was something perfumey in it, too. Like air freshener or a shampoo, but cloying, seemingly designed to trick the nose and tastebuds into thinking that there was no need to shut down or ignore things anymore, just so they involuntarily opened up to the greater odor.

A trace of something minty or fruity followed by a punch of a smell like old man diaper soaked in month-old tuna water. And we weren’t even close to the source. He had passed thirty feet over us in a form that apparently wasn’t about the gas or the stench, and that was it.

“A lot of activity,” Rain managed, his own hand over his lower face now.

“Last patrol before shift change. We stay here.”

He nodded.

Next part is going to be hard. Adapting to new schedules and patterns.

“It’s worth it?”