I flew to the group. They were fighting to stay upright. Roman was crouched, feet slowly losing traction on the rooftop. With the lip at the edge of the roof it didn’t look like anyone was about to fall off, but they were sitting ducks.

I reached out with my forcefield. Many hands for many people. But strength wasn’t traction, and the forcefield hands slid off, leaving brief, streaky handprints.

“Cloth,” I said, looking at Parian. She turned empty doll eyes my way.

She unspooled cloth, but the vast majority of it was slimy. The stuff permeated everything, seeping through cloth.

As her power reached cloth, it formed bubbles, the power forcing slime out and finding the miniscule gaps in the fabric.

Above us, Oberon reached the apex of his leap. Clouds parted in his wake, forming a ripple in the sky.

Which wasn’t enough. There were too many people on this rooftop, and not nearly enough clean cloth for those people to grab onto.

More of the slimy mist continued to settle around us. Parian wiped at her mask, trying to get slime out of the eye sockets.

At the same time, my forcefield was collecting it. Most of it wicked off, but it was viscous enough that the ‘wicking’ took a few moments.

I couldn’t drop my forcefield and use my coat, because then I’d be in the same boat as the rest of the group. I could just take the mostly dry end of the long bit of cloth and try to hug my forcefield around it to try and keep it dry.

“Here!” Parian called out, knotting the end of the long roll of cloth she carried on her back, now completely undone, every bit of cloth spent. “Come!”

As Roman and Juliette approached, Parian lasso’ed them, tightening it around their armpits.

The slime was slippery enough that they were squeezed out and sent sprawling like bars of soap in wet hands.

“No, no, no,” Parian said.

Above us, Oberon crashed into solid smoke, clearly intended at interrupting his descent. The smoke had some slime on it, and he tumbled head over heels as he fell.

“Impale someone!” I told Foil. “Skewer them to the cloth!”

“Won’t work!” Foil answered. She was being tied together with Parian, and there wasn’t enough slime there to make it slip. Enough telekinetic power in the cloth itself, apparently.

“Chastity!” Roman called out. “Berserk strength! I know it’s weak but—”

“I have my whip!” she raised her weapon. She’d managed to keep ahold of it.

“I have to hit someone!”

“Then hit Juliette!” Chastity said, voice pitched.

“Ugh!”

The Heartbroken were running for it instead of taking my suggestion. ‘Running’ being a polite way of phrasing the way they waded through slime. It was maybe the first time I’d seen them working together.