Chip

Chip Spoilers for Grimm Fairy Tales presents Code Red #1–5. There's a pretty nasty distinction in Code Red between beating the person standing in front of you and actually stopping the thing using that person. Chip is where that becomes a problem. You can knock his host unconscious, tie him up, put him in a cell, and still have to figure out what you're going to do with the parasite inside him. That's what I found interesting about him. The human body gives Britney something she knows how to fight. The thing behind the eyes is a different matter, and the person stuck sharing that body isn't somebody she can just write off. When Chip encounters her in the woods, he brings up Alexander, someone he'd previously left in terrible condition. He knows Britney tried to help. He's deliberately reaching for something that will hurt her, not just threatening what he'll do next. She also remembers him using a host to murder elderly women. This isn't some confused creature that accidentally ended up inside somebody. He knows what he's doing with that access. Britney manages to incapacitate his current host with a pressure-point attack and leaves him tied to a tree while she deals with the orcs. Later, HiboCorp has him contained behind an energy barrier. For a little while, that looks like an answer. He's captured, he can be questioned, and he isn't loose in the woods anymore. Except the prison still depends on the building around it. When the Dark Horde attacks the base, that arrangement falls apart. HiboCorp has put a dangerous prisoner somewhere that can contain him under normal conditions, but these are very much not normal conditions anymore. The next confrontation is where the host-versus-parasite difference really pays off. Britney lands repeated blows, but Chip starts acting like she's put herself exactly where he wanted her. His eyes flare, and his actual monstrous presence comes pouring out of the host toward her. She doesn't solve that by hitting the human body harder. She presents the Cyclops' Eye, and Chip is drawn into it instead. The thing that had been using a person is now trapped in something else. That leaves the host, Derrick, unconscious on the floor. Britney calls him by name and promises she'll come back. I like that the story pauses for that. In the middle of the attack, he's still a person she wants to get out, not just the discarded body from a fight she's finished. And then his hospital scene makes the whole thing worse in a quieter way. Derrick initially says he's fine. Britney talks to him about knowing what it's like to have something foreign inside your head, and he finally asks whether the whispering ever stops. We don't get a clean answer. That scene doesn't establish that Chip is secretly still possessing him, and I wouldn't turn it into a diagnosis either. What it does establish is that removing the creature hasn't made Derrick's experience disappear. That's the part of Chip that sticks with me. His defeat is clear enough to see on the page, but the person he used doesn't get an equally simple ending. Britney can get the parasite out. She can't promise him that everything it left behind will go quiet.