Light's Fright (formerly Lightwielder in China)

Clogging Clogs (Chapter 16)

Chapter: Clogging Cogs

They were fast, efficient, worked as a team that built on each other's work, and yet were not human! Unfortunately, they also happened to be extremely suicidal.

They were cogs.

Yes, that was the English translation of their name. Or maybe it was clogs. Understanding panicked half-explained English being whipped at you as the taxi takes a manner of whiplash-inducing twists while the small child next to you is screaming at the top of her lungs as if she's on a roller coaster, giving you a splitting headache...not easy.

So these cogs, which I've decided is the name, are mini beavers the size of a plump mole, that somehow also end up resembling a snake by the lack of hind legs and long body being dragged about by two strong legs in front. I've also seen them slither too, if they want to go even faster.

Basically, they're a type of burrowing pest that infests sewers and has recently taken to running up to traffic, plugging the car exhaust pipe with their bodies, and the car combusts explosively due to the large buildup of those gases.

It is a suicide mission for the little critters, sadly. First of all, headfirst clogging a car exhaust pipe filled with all those noxious gases would kill ME. The mini-beaver-snakes don't stand a chance. And even if they could survive that, the car explosion that happens subsequently is the other death-inducing part. I'd feel really, really bad for the little cogs, except the cars exploding tend to kill the people inside. So it's time to be a hero again today.

I swing out on top of the taxi roof as it races through the streets, despite Li Jie and Maylin's protests. Lixue is the only one who cheers me on. A cog sitting on top of a totaled vehicle we pass leaps out to bite me, but I wring it to death with a light rope, tie the dead body into a gruesome sort of organic lasso, and use it plus a light rope extension to yank a new cog trying to squeeze itself into our taxi's own tailpipe.

Everything's still a mess. The carpet of cogs has mostly split up and attacked separate targets, such as the cars, but also to harass the people running away from them in the streets. These rodents are such stark raving mad insane fur balls and I don't know how to take all of them on at once by myself. The zippercut was easier to deal with rather than this. There's just too many! Unless...glitter bombs!

I lightwield one and snap it right into a cog chewing on an abandoned car's tires. When the glitter bomb "explodes," the cog shrieks and runs into a street grate.

Glitter bombs are a minor lightwielder attack, one that doesn't actually hurt anyone other than the occasional punctured eardrum or detached retina. They're tiny floating light spheres the size of a marble that one sends right in front of the target, they explode on command into a brighter white light and alarming loud noise, and what the advantages to this are are that they startle and cost little energy to produce. Glitter bombs ruin ambushes, separate riots, and help with scattering animals afraid of sudden bright lights and noises that pop in front of their snouts.

Ping! Ping! Ping! I've got all the cogs running away from their targets, back to the sewers they came out of! The taxi I'm standing on top of slows down and I hop off after we come to a complete stop. Li Jie and Maylin get out and start praising me while Lixue hugs my leg. The taxi driver is not particularly impressed with me and mutters something in Chinese under his breath about Americans (that I can only assume was derogatory), then hurriedly drives off.

We've stopped back at the zoo, and considering this is the second city I've saved, I just want a break for today, so we head over to where Ar Jo and his friend were waiting for us.