Taylor wakes in an unfamiliar place.
An unfamilar place is about to have a very, very bad day.
An unfamilar place is about to have a very, very bad day.
Taylor is DOOMed
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Taylor is DOOMed (Worm very AU)
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Introduction
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
The fanfiction I write is entirely for fun, with no commercial use implied, intended, or permitted. All original copyright holder's rights are acknowledged.
More specifically, as a basic, non-exhaustive disclaimer for main line or omake story elements currently used to date:
DOOM is the property of Id Software, Bethesda Sofworks, and others.
Basically, if you recognize it from a movie, comic, book, or other published work, it's owned by the rightsholders for that work. Anything else is my fault.
Reader contributed Omakes may incorporate other elements not listed above, and are otherwise © their respective authors. And much thanks is due to those authors for adding to my and your enjoyment!
Does anyone even read these? Does anyone even care about these?
More specifically, as a basic, non-exhaustive disclaimer for main line or omake story elements currently used to date:
DOOM is the property of Id Software, Bethesda Sofworks, and others.
Basically, if you recognize it from a movie, comic, book, or other published work, it's owned by the rightsholders for that work. Anything else is my fault.
Reader contributed Omakes may incorporate other elements not listed above, and are otherwise © their respective authors. And much thanks is due to those authors for adding to my and your enjoyment!
Does anyone even read these? Does anyone even care about these?
This introduction may change as time goes on, as I will answer common questions and address issues here, as well as announce the status of the story should it change. Check here first if you have any queries. I can't promise that you will always find an answer, but I'll try
Another one that started in my random ideas thread, I'm afraid. Some people seem to want it to continue as a real story, so I think if I put it here as its own thread, that will give me impetus to continue it. Nevertheless, I have other stories too that will probably take priority, so updates may well be sporadic and random...
As always, I will say the following, my standard boilerplate for a story:
I'm always open to corrections, typo spotting, math error checking, and all sorts of things like that, and I like hearing ideas about the way things could go and suggestions for interesting scenes. Or even simply discussing the story. Make a good point and I will probably use it in one way or the other if I agree with it.
On the other hand I will ignore demands to change parts of the story to fit your particular likes. This is not in any way meant to be rude, but the first rule of fanfiction is the same as the first rule of life, which is:
It's entirely impossible to please everyone at the same time with anything.
Trying to do so is an exercise in frustration for all involved and therefore pointless. I would rather concentrate on writing the story rather than arguing about how to write the story, especially as that is a zero-sum game in the first place.
Bear in mind that this is an alternative universe, which means that some of the canon powersets may work in slightly different ways if it made it more convenient for the story. Most are meant to be more or less unchanged, though, so it's not impossible I made a mistake. If you aren't sure, don't worry about asking for clarification, I don't mind at all. I respond well to polite questions and genuine interest in why something happened the way it did.
Now that I've said my piece, on with the story, in which Taylor finds herself facing her DOOM.
And is not even slightly happy about it.
There may be trouble ahead...
Last edited:
1. DOOMed, DOOMed I say!
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
"What… the fuck?!"
Taylor rolled over, unmentionable things squelching under her as she moved, while gagging at the stench of old blood and even less salubrious substances that rose in a toxic miasma and made it hard to breath. Choking on the stench, furious beyond belief, and totally disorientated, she stared at the ceiling for some time before the thought entered her mind…
"Where the fuck am I?"
The last thing she could clearly remember was fucking Sophia Hess laughing in the irritating manner she was so used to these days, perfectly conveying the sadistic pleasure the bitch took in causing pain to anyone who got in her way. Doubly so if that person was Taylor Hebert. Taylor hadn't actually seen who had shoved her into her own god damned locker, but she knew beyond any doubt who had done it. That laugh, and a very familiar hand right in the middle of her back, left her completely certain who was behind this latest little attempt to break her.
She would not break. She'd made that decision more than eighteen months ago, shortly after her own personal hell began, and it had become abundantly clear that there would be no respite. Not from the bitch Sophia, not from the girl who she'd grown up with who was if anything even worse, not from the little sycophant Madison, and sure as fuck not from the school administration who were supposed to stop this sort of shit.
The same administration who had basically ignored her, when they weren't actively sabotaging her initial attempts to get justice. Or even someone to simply tell those fucking girls to knock it off.
All three of them had been there, she was certain. Madison's evil little giggle, and a sound of satisfaction that could only have come from the arch-betrayer Emma, proved that to her. They must have been setting up their latest 'prank' for weeks. The sight of the garbage and bloody waste in her locker, and the wave of rotting stinking almost visible stench that had rolled out when she'd opened the door, showed that the stuff had to have been in there probably over the entire Christmas break. And there was so much of it that it couldn't possibly have been only one day's worth, it was something they'd been collecting for quite a long time. More than long enough to show it was very definitely premeditated and not a spur of the moment thing.
All that had gone through her appalled mind the moment she'd laid eyes on the crap, and even as her rage rose to the forefront, overcoming the self-control she'd forced on herself for months and months of unwarranted attacks, she'd found herself violently shoved into the stuff. The door had slammed behind her and she'd distinctly heard a click as the lock was engaged, even over the disorientation of both the ghastly smell and smashing her head on the rear wall of the metal coffin.
It had taken her a few seconds to recover enough to kick backwards as far as she could with an inarticulate growl of fury, and by then it was too late. The door was, although not all that thick, not thin enough that a fifteen year old beanpole could kick it off its hinges, especially with so little leverage. Even in a killing rage, which by that point she was.
She got it from her father. He was calm and reasonable right up to the point when very abruptly he wasn't. People tended to remember those times, and go well out of their way to avoid a repeat. She took after him in more than her height, having far more self control than most people suspected. Partly that was down to not wanting to disappoint her mother, who had always said it was important to keep your temper under control and think, rather than just stomp around in a foul mood.
Remembering that advice had helped over the years since the elder Hebert had passed on, through the depression that both she and her father had suffered, and still suffered from, and then over the last close to two years of absolute hell caused by her former best friend and the two psychos who followed her around.
It would have been so easy to lose it, punch Emma in the eye, and get at least a little satisfaction from that. She'd been tempted over and over, but every time she found her hand curling into a fist, two things stopped her; the look of disappointment her mother would have given her, and the knowledge that Sophia would then have kicked her ass. The other girl had a lot more muscle than she did, after all.
Even so, it would almost have been worth it. And she knew that blind rage could cause a lot of damage. Fury had a power all its own. Not necessarily in a good way, but still…
Somehow, after all the shit she'd just taken without reacting, she hadn't snapped and burned the entire fucking school down. Even though in her darker moods at three AM she'd spent a lot of time working out where the best place to pour the gas would be, and how to arrange an ignition source and an alibi.
She gagged again as a fresh wave of stink rolled over her at a slight movement, and decided then and there that someone was going to die for this.
However, that particular thought was pushed to the side as she kept staring upwards. A number of things entered her mind, slightly reducing the overwhelming feelings of anger, disgust, and injustice that had been there.
There were a number of problems with what she was experiencing, outside the sheer ghastliness of the entire locker full of rotting waste.
One of the main ones being, how the hell could she possibly be lying flat on her back on what felt like a concrete floor, staring fifteen feet up at a similarly concrete ceiling with a number of odd looking lights in it, while still being in her locker?
And why did she feel so light?
And what was that noise?
After mulling all these things over somewhat dizzily, still disorientated from the blow to her forehead which was dully aching, the overwhelming smell which was like trying to breathe while immersed in a septic tank, and extremely confused by the whole 'where am I' bit of the entire situation, Taylor rolled her head to the right. She could make out in the rather dim and uneven lighting a wall about twenty feet away, made once more of the same stained and old-looking concrete.
Repeating the exercise in the other direction, while trying to ignore the awful squishing sound as the stuff that was trapped under her head gave way in a revolting manner, she saw the exact same thing.
Several seconds passed while she tried to work out what was going on. The smell was giving her a hard time and she wasn't getting used to it at all, if anything it was getting worse. Her head was also hurting like hell, which didn't help the clarity of her thoughts. And over all of that was a burning rage that made her breathe more rapidly than at the moment was entirely advisable, considering the conditions.
She closed her eyes and very slowly counted backwards from fifty, syncing it to her heartbeat which was thundering in her ears, as she tried to regain some semblance of control. It helped a bit, the feelings of anger damping down and her heart-rate slowing, which in turn caused her headache to subside enough that she no longer felt like she was going to pass out. When she was as calm as she could manage under the circumstances, she opened her eyes again and looked around once more.
The scene hadn't changed. Still concrete below, above and to the sides of her, still the same slightly flickering and subtly wrong lighting, and still that weird feeling of lightness. And the peculiar and somewhat disturbing sounds on the threshold of hearing, coming from somewhere in the distance.
Taylor raised a hand to her head, feeling things peel off her arm and drop to the floor, then felt her brow. There was a fairly large lump there, proof of how hard she'd hit the inside of her locker. Once again she vowed bloody vengeance.
Her mother would understand. Sophia needed to die. Preferably painfully.
Dropping her arm to the floor, she felt around, finding that it definitely was concrete or stone of some sort. Painfully sitting up, she looked down at herself, gagged at the sight of things that should never exist outside a medical waste bin, and raised her eyes again. She peered around.
"What the fuck is going on?" she mumbled under her breath. The inspection of her surroundings showed she was in the middle of a large room, entirely made of concrete, aside from directly in front of her where there was a big metal door that looked like something out of a movie. It was rusty and damp, with faded paint on the dark surface that was almost illegible due to what looked like age and neglect. In the dim lighting she had to squint and even then couldn't really see it properly.
Reaching up she adjusted her glasses, only then realizing that one lens was cracked. "Oh, you bitches are going to pay for this," she snarled. Not only had they pulled of that fucking locker thing, but then they'd taken her and dumped her inside some old warehouse or something after she passed out from the stench? That was so far past 'too far' she didn't have the words to describe it.
Dying was too good for them. Dying in pain was called for. Possibly on fire.
Looking around again, Taylor tried to work out where the bitches had taken her. Maybe some sort of old cold storage room or something? The place was obviously industrial, based on the pitted concrete, heavy duty lighting, and exposed power conduits and other infrastructure. She'd seen the same sort of thing many times at her dad's workplace, although the people there actually looked after their buildings. Whoever owned this place looked like they hadn't done any maintenance for decades.
There were piles of metal crates against the rear wall, at least half of them lying open and bent like someone had smashed their way in. They ranged in size from about the dimensions of a microwave oven to something large enough to get a small car inside, and again had faded and scarred painted labels across them She could see something that appeared to be a logo of sorts, which seemed to be present all over the place, including when she double checked, on the door.
All in all it gave the impression of somewhere that hadn't been visited for twenty or thirty years. She could hear dripping water somewhere in the dark to the side, and looking at the lights above her could tell that they were on their last legs. If this was one of the abandoned warehouses on the docks it was something of a miracle that they worked even this well. The power should have been cut years ago as far as she knew.
Finally feeling able to stand up, and finding that her anger had subsided more than she'd have expected due to the distraction of trying to work out her location, Taylor pushed herself to her feet, then nearly fell over again as she managed to do that far more easily than she'd expected.
"What…?" She looked down at her feet, then experimentally hopped into the air.
"Holy shit!" she squawked in shock as she went noticeably higher than she should have. The really strange thing was that she fell more slowly than was correct too. "That's… impossible?"
Trying again had the same result. "OK, what's going on?" she demanded of no one. Why was gravity playing silly buggers? Was she in some bizarre Tinker-made place? If so, how the hell had Emma and her co-conspirators managed to find it, and get her here in the first place?
Struck by that thought, she looked at the floor where she'd been lying which had a large mound of what she'd been lying in, something she was trying very hard not to think about. A disgusting liquid was seeping out of it, and spreading out across the concrete. She could also see dust, what looked like ash, random bits of detritus scattered about such as small fragments of metal and plastic… The one thing she couldn't see was the weird part.
No footprints.
Turning in a circle, she checked carefully, but could see no evidence at all that anyone but herself had been in here for years. There was no sign of how she could have been carried in, no footprints, drag marks, or anything else. The dust and other stuff underfoot was entirely undisturbed except in a small radius around her current position, which she'd done herself.
"This doesn't make any sense," she finally grumbled to herself. "How did I get here? And where is here anyway?"
Jumping again, just to double check, she wondered anew at the odd sensation of falling too slowly. It was extremely disconcerting, in more ways than one. The implications were that there was some Parahuman involvement to what was going in, which seemed to suggest that either those fucking girls had help of a nature she hadn't expected, or someone else was responsible for this part of her own personal hell.
Why that would happen, she didn't have a clue. But then, she still didn't know why Emma had turned on her either.
'Fuck it. I need to get out of here and get home,' she thought to herself. 'Figuring out who did what can wait until I can get a gallon of gas and a lighter.' She was in no mood to be sensible any more. It seemed to her that the time had most definitely come for a touch of the old ultraviolence, as that book her mother had taken away from her when she was eight had put it.
She was aware at the back of her mind that she should have been terrified, but she'd had so much shit flung at her over the last year and a half that she'd just run out of fucks to give as far as being scared went.
She was angry. And someone was going to pay for that.
And when she was done with them, she'd tell her dad. Then they'd really have something to be worried about.
Winslow was going to be lucky to still be there next week.
Taking her hoodie off she used the small number of almost clean parts of it to wipe the worst of the crap off her, then shook her head and dropped the now soiled past recovery garment onto the pile of waste and moved away from it. She stumbled a few times due to the unexpected bounciness of her steps, but managed to compensate fairly quickly. While not being in particularly good condition she'd always had better than average balance and didn't find it too hard. She was extremely puzzled about how such a thing could happen, though. It wasn't her imagination, when she'd dropped her hoodie it had fallen too slowly as well, so whatever was going on was real.
It definitely pointed at some sort of Parahuman involvement but that just made the entire thing that much stranger, and more worrying.
Deciding that she couldn't do anything about it right now and it was more important to get out and get home, she headed for the door. Reaching it she prodded the thing, finding it was very solid and rather damp metal, which didn't have any give in it at all when she thumped it with a fist. The thing was clearly pretty thick, more so that seemed reasonable.
Examining it she saw it seemed to split down the middle, and as far as she could tell probably retracted into the walls for some reason. There was a block of machinery above each half that clearly drove the mechanism and she could see where the doors would slide inside the thick walls. It looked more like something out of a movie the more she studied it.
Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be any way to persuade it to open. There was no handle, or obvious switch panel, or anything else of that nature. Hitting it again, then kicking it, she glared at the thing for a minute or so, trying to work out what to do. With no phone, not that it would work inside here in all probability, she couldn't even call her dad and get him to come and get her. She was on her own for now, and didn't particularly feel like sitting around waiting for either Emma and her cronies to come back, or whatever Tinker owned this place.
Or, for that matter, for some random Merchant or whatever.
After a few dark mutterings about the parentage of one Sophia Hess, Taylor had a thought and looked carefully at the motors or whatever they were that seemed to drive this annoying impediment to her escape. She saw there was what looked to be a power cable coming out of the mechanism and running across the wall to one side. Tracing it with her eyes, she followed it all the way to the side wall, along that, and down behind one stack of crates.
'Damn it,' she thought irritably. 'Who piles all this stuff in front of a door control? Assuming that's what's on the other end of the cable, of course.' Stopping in front of the pile she inspected it. Several of the smaller ones had fallen or been dropped, and were broken and dented on the floor, while the rest seemed to have been shoved into the corner without any concern for ease of access or any sane storage method. It was like some idiot had just tossed them there.
Bending down she picked up one of the smaller empty ones, finding it wasn't as heavy as she'd expected, and tilted it a little so she could see the faded label on the side in the inadequate lighting.
'U...' She rubbed the dirt off the paint. '...is that an A… C? UAC? I wonder what that is?' The 'A' seemed to be a weird graphic rather than a normal letter, in the style of a company logo, but she didn't recognize it. The same logo was on the door, the paint there so damaged that it was nearly unrecognizable.
Looking inside the crate she found it empty except for traces of some sort of foam lining which had elderly grease marks on it. After turning it over in her hands for a moment, wondering what all the other codes written on it along with a strange looking sort of barcode thing meant, she shrugged and tossed it to the side. It clanged across the floor making her wince with the racket, which echoed horribly in the concrete room.
When the sounds died down, she sighed and started moving the remaining crates, trying to make enough of a gap that she could squeeze in behind them and hopefully find some way to open the door. They were easier to move than she expected, until she remembered the odd gravitational effects this place seemed to be suffering from.
'Useful, I guess,' she mused as she heaved one of the larger ones to the side, dragging it across the floor with a scraping sound. It was clearly still full of something. 'I wonder what's in this thing?'
Moving a few more, she finally managed to stick her head into the gap behind the last one, the largest of the lot, and barely make out in the near-complete darkness back there a box on the wall which the cable terminated in. To her relief it seemed to have several small LEDs lit on it, which suggested it was active. Hopefully it would have a nice and simple button helpfully labeled 'Open' on the middle of it.
Pulling her head out, she braced her foot on the wall and heaved on the crate. Nothing at all happened. 'Fuck.' She tried again, pulling as hard as she could. 'FUCK!'
The damn crate was too heavy. She couldn't move it at all. After a couple more tries, she growled and kicked it, then hopped around swearing for a while. Her sneakers weren't up to the job of kicking a ton of metal box out of the way and she was no Brute either.
Sitting on one of the smaller boxes she glared at the big one standing between her and freedom. This would not stand. Somehow she was going to have to shift the fucking thing, but how? She didn't have any tools, she wasn't strong enough to move it as she'd found out just now, and it wasn't like there was any help around.
'Maybe I can empty it?' she thought, getting to her feet and walking around it while inspecting it. 'If I can get it open, that is...'
After a few minutes, she finally found what looked like some sort of latch mechanism on the side of the crate, disguised well enough that it was barely visible. Running a finger over it she tried to work out how it operated, but it took another five minutes to discover that she could press hard in the right place and a small handle-thing would pop out. That could then be turned a hundred and eighty degrees to open the latch.
Based on that one, she quickly found three more down the side, and another four on the other side. When she'd opened the last of them, she jumped out of the way as the entire front of the crate separated from the rest of it and crashed to the floor, barely missing her.
"That was close," she commented to no one, before turning to see what was inside the seven foot high crate.
Her eyes widened.
"Holy shit..."
Following a considerable amount of staring, she finally reached out and gently touched the gleaming dull greenish-black surface of what appeared to be an honest to god suit of power armor that was standing upright in the crate, strapped in place. Clipped to the walls of the box were several other items straight out of a PRT brochure, including a very impressive sort of rifle-type weapon, the look of it making it abundantly obvious it wasn't even close to normal technology.
Apparently she'd found some Tinker's stash of toys, and whoever it was made stuff that would make Armsmaster himself envious.
Taylor gaped at the contents of the box for some time, before she finally noticed a thick manual in a pocket on the wall. Curiosity overriding everything else as her reading instincts kicked in, she reached for it. Moving to a position directly under one of the flickering lights, she raised her head as she heard something odd. The strange sounds she'd been intermittently hearing got louder momentarily, something making a sort of grunting noise like an animal. She couldn't work out where it was coming from but thought it was outside the room.
"Hello?" she called, in case it was help coming for her. "Is anyone there?"
There was no reply, and after a careful look around she decided it was probably a raccoon or something scuttling around in the air vents, assuming this place even had air vents.
"OSHA violations everywhere," she muttered. "Dad would freak out." Returning her attention to the manual she studied the front cover. "What the hell is the Union Aerospace Corporation?" She'd never heard of it.
The image on the cover was of the power armor in the crate, and gave it a long military-looking identity number. It seemed to be a UAC Mk.9 Mod. 16 WC/04/2147-92B, whatever that was.
She looked at the armor again. "Yeah, I'm calling it power armor. Not a Mk.9 whatever."
Flipping the manual open, she started reading, her interest piqued despite her situation and the suppressed but still boiling under the surface anger deep down. It wasn't every day you found Tinker tech just lying around, after all.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Three hours and nineteen minutes later:
"Mars?!"
Taylor rolled over, unmentionable things squelching under her as she moved, while gagging at the stench of old blood and even less salubrious substances that rose in a toxic miasma and made it hard to breath. Choking on the stench, furious beyond belief, and totally disorientated, she stared at the ceiling for some time before the thought entered her mind…
"Where the fuck am I?"
The last thing she could clearly remember was fucking Sophia Hess laughing in the irritating manner she was so used to these days, perfectly conveying the sadistic pleasure the bitch took in causing pain to anyone who got in her way. Doubly so if that person was Taylor Hebert. Taylor hadn't actually seen who had shoved her into her own god damned locker, but she knew beyond any doubt who had done it. That laugh, and a very familiar hand right in the middle of her back, left her completely certain who was behind this latest little attempt to break her.
She would not break. She'd made that decision more than eighteen months ago, shortly after her own personal hell began, and it had become abundantly clear that there would be no respite. Not from the bitch Sophia, not from the girl who she'd grown up with who was if anything even worse, not from the little sycophant Madison, and sure as fuck not from the school administration who were supposed to stop this sort of shit.
The same administration who had basically ignored her, when they weren't actively sabotaging her initial attempts to get justice. Or even someone to simply tell those fucking girls to knock it off.
All three of them had been there, she was certain. Madison's evil little giggle, and a sound of satisfaction that could only have come from the arch-betrayer Emma, proved that to her. They must have been setting up their latest 'prank' for weeks. The sight of the garbage and bloody waste in her locker, and the wave of rotting stinking almost visible stench that had rolled out when she'd opened the door, showed that the stuff had to have been in there probably over the entire Christmas break. And there was so much of it that it couldn't possibly have been only one day's worth, it was something they'd been collecting for quite a long time. More than long enough to show it was very definitely premeditated and not a spur of the moment thing.
All that had gone through her appalled mind the moment she'd laid eyes on the crap, and even as her rage rose to the forefront, overcoming the self-control she'd forced on herself for months and months of unwarranted attacks, she'd found herself violently shoved into the stuff. The door had slammed behind her and she'd distinctly heard a click as the lock was engaged, even over the disorientation of both the ghastly smell and smashing her head on the rear wall of the metal coffin.
It had taken her a few seconds to recover enough to kick backwards as far as she could with an inarticulate growl of fury, and by then it was too late. The door was, although not all that thick, not thin enough that a fifteen year old beanpole could kick it off its hinges, especially with so little leverage. Even in a killing rage, which by that point she was.
She got it from her father. He was calm and reasonable right up to the point when very abruptly he wasn't. People tended to remember those times, and go well out of their way to avoid a repeat. She took after him in more than her height, having far more self control than most people suspected. Partly that was down to not wanting to disappoint her mother, who had always said it was important to keep your temper under control and think, rather than just stomp around in a foul mood.
Remembering that advice had helped over the years since the elder Hebert had passed on, through the depression that both she and her father had suffered, and still suffered from, and then over the last close to two years of absolute hell caused by her former best friend and the two psychos who followed her around.
It would have been so easy to lose it, punch Emma in the eye, and get at least a little satisfaction from that. She'd been tempted over and over, but every time she found her hand curling into a fist, two things stopped her; the look of disappointment her mother would have given her, and the knowledge that Sophia would then have kicked her ass. The other girl had a lot more muscle than she did, after all.
Even so, it would almost have been worth it. And she knew that blind rage could cause a lot of damage. Fury had a power all its own. Not necessarily in a good way, but still…
Somehow, after all the shit she'd just taken without reacting, she hadn't snapped and burned the entire fucking school down. Even though in her darker moods at three AM she'd spent a lot of time working out where the best place to pour the gas would be, and how to arrange an ignition source and an alibi.
She gagged again as a fresh wave of stink rolled over her at a slight movement, and decided then and there that someone was going to die for this.
However, that particular thought was pushed to the side as she kept staring upwards. A number of things entered her mind, slightly reducing the overwhelming feelings of anger, disgust, and injustice that had been there.
There were a number of problems with what she was experiencing, outside the sheer ghastliness of the entire locker full of rotting waste.
One of the main ones being, how the hell could she possibly be lying flat on her back on what felt like a concrete floor, staring fifteen feet up at a similarly concrete ceiling with a number of odd looking lights in it, while still being in her locker?
And why did she feel so light?
And what was that noise?
After mulling all these things over somewhat dizzily, still disorientated from the blow to her forehead which was dully aching, the overwhelming smell which was like trying to breathe while immersed in a septic tank, and extremely confused by the whole 'where am I' bit of the entire situation, Taylor rolled her head to the right. She could make out in the rather dim and uneven lighting a wall about twenty feet away, made once more of the same stained and old-looking concrete.
Repeating the exercise in the other direction, while trying to ignore the awful squishing sound as the stuff that was trapped under her head gave way in a revolting manner, she saw the exact same thing.
Several seconds passed while she tried to work out what was going on. The smell was giving her a hard time and she wasn't getting used to it at all, if anything it was getting worse. Her head was also hurting like hell, which didn't help the clarity of her thoughts. And over all of that was a burning rage that made her breathe more rapidly than at the moment was entirely advisable, considering the conditions.
She closed her eyes and very slowly counted backwards from fifty, syncing it to her heartbeat which was thundering in her ears, as she tried to regain some semblance of control. It helped a bit, the feelings of anger damping down and her heart-rate slowing, which in turn caused her headache to subside enough that she no longer felt like she was going to pass out. When she was as calm as she could manage under the circumstances, she opened her eyes again and looked around once more.
The scene hadn't changed. Still concrete below, above and to the sides of her, still the same slightly flickering and subtly wrong lighting, and still that weird feeling of lightness. And the peculiar and somewhat disturbing sounds on the threshold of hearing, coming from somewhere in the distance.
Taylor raised a hand to her head, feeling things peel off her arm and drop to the floor, then felt her brow. There was a fairly large lump there, proof of how hard she'd hit the inside of her locker. Once again she vowed bloody vengeance.
Her mother would understand. Sophia needed to die. Preferably painfully.
Dropping her arm to the floor, she felt around, finding that it definitely was concrete or stone of some sort. Painfully sitting up, she looked down at herself, gagged at the sight of things that should never exist outside a medical waste bin, and raised her eyes again. She peered around.
"What the fuck is going on?" she mumbled under her breath. The inspection of her surroundings showed she was in the middle of a large room, entirely made of concrete, aside from directly in front of her where there was a big metal door that looked like something out of a movie. It was rusty and damp, with faded paint on the dark surface that was almost illegible due to what looked like age and neglect. In the dim lighting she had to squint and even then couldn't really see it properly.
Reaching up she adjusted her glasses, only then realizing that one lens was cracked. "Oh, you bitches are going to pay for this," she snarled. Not only had they pulled of that fucking locker thing, but then they'd taken her and dumped her inside some old warehouse or something after she passed out from the stench? That was so far past 'too far' she didn't have the words to describe it.
Dying was too good for them. Dying in pain was called for. Possibly on fire.
Looking around again, Taylor tried to work out where the bitches had taken her. Maybe some sort of old cold storage room or something? The place was obviously industrial, based on the pitted concrete, heavy duty lighting, and exposed power conduits and other infrastructure. She'd seen the same sort of thing many times at her dad's workplace, although the people there actually looked after their buildings. Whoever owned this place looked like they hadn't done any maintenance for decades.
There were piles of metal crates against the rear wall, at least half of them lying open and bent like someone had smashed their way in. They ranged in size from about the dimensions of a microwave oven to something large enough to get a small car inside, and again had faded and scarred painted labels across them She could see something that appeared to be a logo of sorts, which seemed to be present all over the place, including when she double checked, on the door.
All in all it gave the impression of somewhere that hadn't been visited for twenty or thirty years. She could hear dripping water somewhere in the dark to the side, and looking at the lights above her could tell that they were on their last legs. If this was one of the abandoned warehouses on the docks it was something of a miracle that they worked even this well. The power should have been cut years ago as far as she knew.
Finally feeling able to stand up, and finding that her anger had subsided more than she'd have expected due to the distraction of trying to work out her location, Taylor pushed herself to her feet, then nearly fell over again as she managed to do that far more easily than she'd expected.
"What…?" She looked down at her feet, then experimentally hopped into the air.
"Holy shit!" she squawked in shock as she went noticeably higher than she should have. The really strange thing was that she fell more slowly than was correct too. "That's… impossible?"
Trying again had the same result. "OK, what's going on?" she demanded of no one. Why was gravity playing silly buggers? Was she in some bizarre Tinker-made place? If so, how the hell had Emma and her co-conspirators managed to find it, and get her here in the first place?
Struck by that thought, she looked at the floor where she'd been lying which had a large mound of what she'd been lying in, something she was trying very hard not to think about. A disgusting liquid was seeping out of it, and spreading out across the concrete. She could also see dust, what looked like ash, random bits of detritus scattered about such as small fragments of metal and plastic… The one thing she couldn't see was the weird part.
No footprints.
Turning in a circle, she checked carefully, but could see no evidence at all that anyone but herself had been in here for years. There was no sign of how she could have been carried in, no footprints, drag marks, or anything else. The dust and other stuff underfoot was entirely undisturbed except in a small radius around her current position, which she'd done herself.
"This doesn't make any sense," she finally grumbled to herself. "How did I get here? And where is here anyway?"
Jumping again, just to double check, she wondered anew at the odd sensation of falling too slowly. It was extremely disconcerting, in more ways than one. The implications were that there was some Parahuman involvement to what was going in, which seemed to suggest that either those fucking girls had help of a nature she hadn't expected, or someone else was responsible for this part of her own personal hell.
Why that would happen, she didn't have a clue. But then, she still didn't know why Emma had turned on her either.
'Fuck it. I need to get out of here and get home,' she thought to herself. 'Figuring out who did what can wait until I can get a gallon of gas and a lighter.' She was in no mood to be sensible any more. It seemed to her that the time had most definitely come for a touch of the old ultraviolence, as that book her mother had taken away from her when she was eight had put it.
She was aware at the back of her mind that she should have been terrified, but she'd had so much shit flung at her over the last year and a half that she'd just run out of fucks to give as far as being scared went.
She was angry. And someone was going to pay for that.
And when she was done with them, she'd tell her dad. Then they'd really have something to be worried about.
Winslow was going to be lucky to still be there next week.
Taking her hoodie off she used the small number of almost clean parts of it to wipe the worst of the crap off her, then shook her head and dropped the now soiled past recovery garment onto the pile of waste and moved away from it. She stumbled a few times due to the unexpected bounciness of her steps, but managed to compensate fairly quickly. While not being in particularly good condition she'd always had better than average balance and didn't find it too hard. She was extremely puzzled about how such a thing could happen, though. It wasn't her imagination, when she'd dropped her hoodie it had fallen too slowly as well, so whatever was going on was real.
It definitely pointed at some sort of Parahuman involvement but that just made the entire thing that much stranger, and more worrying.
Deciding that she couldn't do anything about it right now and it was more important to get out and get home, she headed for the door. Reaching it she prodded the thing, finding it was very solid and rather damp metal, which didn't have any give in it at all when she thumped it with a fist. The thing was clearly pretty thick, more so that seemed reasonable.
Examining it she saw it seemed to split down the middle, and as far as she could tell probably retracted into the walls for some reason. There was a block of machinery above each half that clearly drove the mechanism and she could see where the doors would slide inside the thick walls. It looked more like something out of a movie the more she studied it.
Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be any way to persuade it to open. There was no handle, or obvious switch panel, or anything else of that nature. Hitting it again, then kicking it, she glared at the thing for a minute or so, trying to work out what to do. With no phone, not that it would work inside here in all probability, she couldn't even call her dad and get him to come and get her. She was on her own for now, and didn't particularly feel like sitting around waiting for either Emma and her cronies to come back, or whatever Tinker owned this place.
Or, for that matter, for some random Merchant or whatever.
After a few dark mutterings about the parentage of one Sophia Hess, Taylor had a thought and looked carefully at the motors or whatever they were that seemed to drive this annoying impediment to her escape. She saw there was what looked to be a power cable coming out of the mechanism and running across the wall to one side. Tracing it with her eyes, she followed it all the way to the side wall, along that, and down behind one stack of crates.
'Damn it,' she thought irritably. 'Who piles all this stuff in front of a door control? Assuming that's what's on the other end of the cable, of course.' Stopping in front of the pile she inspected it. Several of the smaller ones had fallen or been dropped, and were broken and dented on the floor, while the rest seemed to have been shoved into the corner without any concern for ease of access or any sane storage method. It was like some idiot had just tossed them there.
Bending down she picked up one of the smaller empty ones, finding it wasn't as heavy as she'd expected, and tilted it a little so she could see the faded label on the side in the inadequate lighting.
'U...' She rubbed the dirt off the paint. '...is that an A… C? UAC? I wonder what that is?' The 'A' seemed to be a weird graphic rather than a normal letter, in the style of a company logo, but she didn't recognize it. The same logo was on the door, the paint there so damaged that it was nearly unrecognizable.
Looking inside the crate she found it empty except for traces of some sort of foam lining which had elderly grease marks on it. After turning it over in her hands for a moment, wondering what all the other codes written on it along with a strange looking sort of barcode thing meant, she shrugged and tossed it to the side. It clanged across the floor making her wince with the racket, which echoed horribly in the concrete room.
When the sounds died down, she sighed and started moving the remaining crates, trying to make enough of a gap that she could squeeze in behind them and hopefully find some way to open the door. They were easier to move than she expected, until she remembered the odd gravitational effects this place seemed to be suffering from.
'Useful, I guess,' she mused as she heaved one of the larger ones to the side, dragging it across the floor with a scraping sound. It was clearly still full of something. 'I wonder what's in this thing?'
Moving a few more, she finally managed to stick her head into the gap behind the last one, the largest of the lot, and barely make out in the near-complete darkness back there a box on the wall which the cable terminated in. To her relief it seemed to have several small LEDs lit on it, which suggested it was active. Hopefully it would have a nice and simple button helpfully labeled 'Open' on the middle of it.
Pulling her head out, she braced her foot on the wall and heaved on the crate. Nothing at all happened. 'Fuck.' She tried again, pulling as hard as she could. 'FUCK!'
The damn crate was too heavy. She couldn't move it at all. After a couple more tries, she growled and kicked it, then hopped around swearing for a while. Her sneakers weren't up to the job of kicking a ton of metal box out of the way and she was no Brute either.
Sitting on one of the smaller boxes she glared at the big one standing between her and freedom. This would not stand. Somehow she was going to have to shift the fucking thing, but how? She didn't have any tools, she wasn't strong enough to move it as she'd found out just now, and it wasn't like there was any help around.
'Maybe I can empty it?' she thought, getting to her feet and walking around it while inspecting it. 'If I can get it open, that is...'
After a few minutes, she finally found what looked like some sort of latch mechanism on the side of the crate, disguised well enough that it was barely visible. Running a finger over it she tried to work out how it operated, but it took another five minutes to discover that she could press hard in the right place and a small handle-thing would pop out. That could then be turned a hundred and eighty degrees to open the latch.
Based on that one, she quickly found three more down the side, and another four on the other side. When she'd opened the last of them, she jumped out of the way as the entire front of the crate separated from the rest of it and crashed to the floor, barely missing her.
"That was close," she commented to no one, before turning to see what was inside the seven foot high crate.
Her eyes widened.
"Holy shit..."
Following a considerable amount of staring, she finally reached out and gently touched the gleaming dull greenish-black surface of what appeared to be an honest to god suit of power armor that was standing upright in the crate, strapped in place. Clipped to the walls of the box were several other items straight out of a PRT brochure, including a very impressive sort of rifle-type weapon, the look of it making it abundantly obvious it wasn't even close to normal technology.
Apparently she'd found some Tinker's stash of toys, and whoever it was made stuff that would make Armsmaster himself envious.
Taylor gaped at the contents of the box for some time, before she finally noticed a thick manual in a pocket on the wall. Curiosity overriding everything else as her reading instincts kicked in, she reached for it. Moving to a position directly under one of the flickering lights, she raised her head as she heard something odd. The strange sounds she'd been intermittently hearing got louder momentarily, something making a sort of grunting noise like an animal. She couldn't work out where it was coming from but thought it was outside the room.
"Hello?" she called, in case it was help coming for her. "Is anyone there?"
There was no reply, and after a careful look around she decided it was probably a raccoon or something scuttling around in the air vents, assuming this place even had air vents.
"OSHA violations everywhere," she muttered. "Dad would freak out." Returning her attention to the manual she studied the front cover. "What the hell is the Union Aerospace Corporation?" She'd never heard of it.
The image on the cover was of the power armor in the crate, and gave it a long military-looking identity number. It seemed to be a UAC Mk.9 Mod. 16 WC/04/2147-92B, whatever that was.
She looked at the armor again. "Yeah, I'm calling it power armor. Not a Mk.9 whatever."
Flipping the manual open, she started reading, her interest piqued despite her situation and the suppressed but still boiling under the surface anger deep down. It wasn't every day you found Tinker tech just lying around, after all.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Three hours and nineteen minutes later:
"Mars?!"
2. DOOMed II: Still DOOMed
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
Still perched on the crate she'd been using as a chair for hours now, Taylor stared blankly at the much larger one and the power armor within, which was highlighted by small lights scattered around the open end of the box. She absently wondered what was powering them since it was obvious that the crates, and this entire facility, had been here for a long time without anyone tending to it. The sheer amount of dust and decay all about her proved that. It must have been at least ten or twenty years, she thought, based on memories of similar buildings in Brockton Bay she'd seen with her father.
But that paled into insignificance when compared to the information she'd found in the manual that had been with the suit in the crate. Initially she'd skipped over the copyright date and other such information, having not really thought much about it, and had just gone for the first page of real information. It was only when, two thirds of the way through the several hundred pages of oddly fascinating data held in the book, her attention had been distracted by various terms she didn't recognize and couldn't immediately work out from context.
Most of the manual was surprisingly understandable, especially impressive bearing in mind that she had no former experience of this sort of thing, but she'd run into an entire section about hostile environment use including in toxic atmospheres, high or low temperatures and pressures, and zero gravity situations. That, along with some slightly unusual language constructions, had led her to wonder when and where the thing had been printed, so she'd flipped right back to the inside of the front cover.
She'd stared at that date for over a minute, her thoughts grinding to a complete standstill, then moved up to the location and pretty much suffered the human equivalent of a computer blue-screening.
Mars.
That was… impossible.
Wasn't it?
And a date that was a hundred and thirty six years into the future, yet was pretty obviously at least twenty years in the past from where she was sitting. Possibly more.
Possibly much more.
…
How the fuck could she have traveled over a century into the future and millions of miles through space, from her school locker? It was insane.
Taylor simply couldn't put all the information she'd discovered into a coherent whole. She had no memory of anything that could possibly result in her current predicament, and couldn't think of any plausible, or for that matter, implausible, way for Emma and her two bitches to have done it either. They were only school kids, same as she was. None of them could possibly be capable of booting Taylor through time and space, nor did it seem likely that they'd know anyone who could. Or would, for that matter. Even assuming some sort of weird-ass Parahuman power that could pull it off, which seemed pretty unlikely to start with, why would someone do it? And to her? She was nobody.
Her thoughts circled around and around as she tried to work out if this was real, how it could have happened if it was, and what she could do about it. If anything.
Strangely enough the part that was giving her the most trouble at the moment was the idea of being on Mars. Time travel was pretty weird, true, but thinking that she'd popped up in an abandoned warehouse on an entirely different planet was so far past weird that the word didn't do it justice.
Although…
She held the manual out at shoulder height and dropped it, watching as it fell to the floor. It took noticeably longer than it should have done. As far as she could remember Mars had a gravity a bit less than half that of Earth, and it looked to her at a glance like the manual fell about half the normal speed. That was one point in favor of her current location being what the manual implied.
Shivering a little, she wrapped her arms around herself and stared at the book on the floor, trying not to scream in frustration and worry. Her rage was being suppressed by the sheer bizarreness of the situation she found herself in, although at some low level she could feel it building again. Mainly because this was all so totally unfair. She'd done everything she could to deal with things through massive unrelenting torment and not only was her reward to be half drowned in bloody waste, but somehow she'd been flung through time and space into the bargain? And even taken the fucking waste with her.
It was infuriating. And somehow she just knew that Emma would be looking smug about it if she was here.
She wondered how long ago her former friend had died.
That set her off on the horror of the thoughts that everyone she'd ever known was dead. Long, long ago.
"Dad," she whispered, tears streaming down her face. She hadn't even told him what was going on, and he'd probably lived the rest of his life never knowing what happened to her.
The thought of that was so gut-wrenching that she abruptly raised her head and screamed, in grief, rage, and horror.
When she finally came back to her senses some time later, she was huddled on the floor next to the crate she'd been sitting on, rocking back and forth and holding herself. She had no idea how long she'd been doing that.
It took at least another twenty minutes of trying to pull herself together before she managed to force the thoughts of her parents out of her mind and stand up. She looked at the pile of crap on the floor where she'd woken up and glared at it so hard she was mildly surprised it didn't vaporize from the sheer fury she was now feeling. 'I got here somehow. There's a way back. There has to be. And I will find it. No matter how long it takes or what I have to do, I'm going home. Fuck the universe, fuck time travel, fuck everything. I am going home.'
She burned that thought into her mind. It was going to happen. As long as she kept thinking that, it was going to happen.
Somehow.
After a couple of minutes, Taylor wiped her eyes on the fouled sleeve of her shirt, not even really noticing the blood and smell now, and turned to the huge open crate with a sense of determination in her heart. "Right. Move crate, open door, find out what the hell is on the other side. Little steps. Can't move the crate, it's too heavy. So I either need to make it lighter or get stronger."
Contemplating the power armor, a grim smile grew on her face. "I know how to do both things at once, I think..." she mumbled, bending down and retrieving the manual again. Turning pages until she found the right section, she studied 'Initial configuration and activation of system for new user.'
Yeah.
This was going to be simple enough.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"This is not simple!" Taylor glared at the power armor, then shoved as hard as she could. The monstrously heavy machinery rolled far enough to the side that she was able to slide out from under it, then stand up, rubbing her ribs and swearing under her breath. "Fucking idiot fucking UAC fucking engineers who didn't fucking think that someone might need to unload this fucking armor without any fucking help!" she growled, limping back to the crate. Finding out how to remove the restraints that held the large armor set in place in its box hadn't been too hard.
Jumping out of the way as the damn thing promptly lunged for her and knocked her flat on its way to the floor had been just that little bit past her ability and reactions as it turned out.
She hadn't expected it to simply fall over.
Luckily she'd got just far enough of the direct line of fire that, combined with the lower gravity, she was only bruised rather that dealing with broken ribs, but she was still not even slightly happy about it. Rubbing her left side which she was certain would have some impressively black and blue marks sooner or later, she studied the remaining stuff in the box, then turned to regard the prone armor set.
Then she picked up the now well thumbed manual and leafed through it. "Ah. Tool set MK-14/S/162. Why not just call it the damn tool kit?" Walking into the crate, which was big enough to almost double as a maintenance shed for the power armor, she looked around. The dim greenish lighting which emanated from strips set into the walls was just bright enough to let her read the labels. "Honking big gun. Ammo for honking big gun. Grenade things… I think. Medical packs? Must be, red cross on them. Spare parts… AHA! Tool kit." She grabbed the heavy plastic case and yanked it free of the clamps on the wall, then took it out to the armor. Kneeling down she put the manual next to her, then with some effort flipped the catches on the tool kit and opened it.
Inside the two foot square box were a large array of tools and instruments, some of which she recognized and some of which looked like something Armsmaster would have salivated over. She picked up one small electronic device and inspected it, finding what looked like the power switch after a few seconds. Flipping it resulted in the device lighting up with a polite 'bing!' sound, then a display showing an error message she couldn't work out at all. Shrugging, she turned it off again and put it back where it lived.
Sitting back on her heels she grabbed the manual and read the relevant section again, nodding intermittently, and occasionally referring to the tool kit. Some time later she smiled.
"OK, so I need this thing, and this one, and two of these, and one of these, and that." Taylor plucked the relevant odds and ends out of the kit and, while glancing between the diagrams in the documentation and the power suit, connected them to the relevant locations. It took some time and a lot of careful checking but in the end when she turned on the thing that the manual called a 'configuration override interface module' the display on it went through a long diagnostics sequence that matched what the book said.
The girl smiled as the armor started to emit a faint hum, right on the threshold of hearing, and several small lights came on in various places. "So that works. Great. What next?"
Quite a lot as it happened. She was beginning to get the impression that there was probably a lot of training involved in doing what she was doing, and just reading the manual wasn't the ideal method to learn on the fly. If nothing else the sheer number of warnings about what not to do was somewhat worrying. That said, it was working, and she was being careful to memorize as much of it as she could as she went along. The knowledge was bound to come in handy one day.
Who knew, if she… when she got home, she might be able to sell some of the things she was learning. It was as good as Tinker tech, but it was also better, since it was real engineering and not powers bullshit. The manual did after all go into quite a lot of the theory behind much of what the suit used, and she was fairly certain that a 'micro fusion cell' was probably pretty advanced.
There were two spares of that particular unit in the crate. The specifications in the book gave numbers that seemed pretty impressive to her admittedly fairly limited knowledge of the subject. A megawatt was quite a large amount of power, she remembered, and the things produced a lot of them.
Hopefully she could drag some of this stuff home with her. She'd found it, and as there was no one around who seemed to care about it, that seemed to her to mean she could keep it.
It wasn't like anyone was telling her she couldn't…
Almost enjoying herself in a sort of furious and terrified way, she kept working for what must have been a couple of hours. She'd long since lost track of time, not that she had the vaguest idea what time it had been when she woke up in the first place, and was not only very thirsty by now but starving too. But eating and drinking was something that was going to have to wait until she got out of this room, and moving the stupidly heavy crate was a prerequisite for that.
And using this power armor was probably the only practical method available for her to achieve that goal.
So she had to get it turned on, get inside it, and move the fucking box.
Suppressing her hunger pangs, Taylor persisted, and eventually finished the last step of a completely ridiculous checklist. Everything was as it should be according to the manual, so she did the relevant actions to finally initialize the armor systems. A fairly long series of messages scrolled past on the screen of the device she was holding and the hum from the armor grew louder, deepened to below the level she could still hear it, making things rattle a little for a moment, then seemed to stop.
The armor beeped twice and the back slid open, while the helmet detached and rolled a little to the side.
"Finally!" she smiled. "It worked."
Strictly speaking the manual said that the armor should have been on a stand that wasn't included in the other stuff that she'd found in the box, but lacking that, she was going to have to somehow squeeze into it on the floor. It was probably not intended for a fifteen year old girl, admittedly. Luckily she was taller than average for her age and gender so it wasn't impossible to use the thing, and she was slender enough to manage to wriggle inside without the rest of the hardware that was normally required. Standing up she looked down at herself, then at the crates around her.
'Wonder if there's anything that I can clean the rest of this crap off with in those?' she thought. Moving over to the nearest one, she peered at the label again. The manual had given her enough background information on the jargon that UAC seemed to like that she was able to puzzle out quite a lot more now than she'd managed to begin with.
Strangely, she'd found learning this sort of thing much easier than she'd expected. It seemed to come naturally to her, which was a slight surprise, but welcome under the circumstances.
'OK, that's… um… probably something like bolts, if I'm reading this right,' she thought, studying the acronyms. 'That one is… more bolts. Why did they need so many bolts? This one is… ammunition. Great. If I need to shoot anything I've got lots of bullets. Plasma. Whatever the hell that fucking thing fires.' She moved around the room examining the boxes, finding enough ammo and weapons to fight a small war, plenty of power cells for something or other, yet more bolts, an entire crate full of tools that looked like perfectly normal wrenches and sockets to her, a small one full of more manuals which she moved to the side for later perusal, another one containing some sort of futuristic equivalent of USB sticks as far as she could make out, and finally one that had all sorts of cleaning supplies in it.
'Thank fuck for that,' she thought as she opened it, the last latch needing a solid blow from one of the wrenches from the crateful she'd found to release. Lifting the lid she looked at the contents, seeing the UAC logo on many of the smaller containers inside, along with several more she didn't recognize at all. After unpacking half the contents onto the floor she found a box of what looked for all the world to be perfectly normal baby wipes, which she quickly opened and made use of.
When she finished, she was standing in her underwear but otherwise as clean as could be managed without a proper shower.
She'd have cheerfully killed someone for a shower by now.
And some food.
And some water.
Lacking any of those, she returned to the armor and knelt down again, then contorted herself enough to get both feet into the open back. Five minutes of grunting and swearing later she finally got both arms inside and her head through the neck ring. Feeling like an idiot, she said, "Initiate user biometric lock process Alpha Two Tango execute," while hoping it worked.
There was a faint hiss from somewhere inside and something poked her in the hip, feeling like someone had stuck a needle into her. "OW! Son of a goddamn bitch fucking UAC bastards!" she squawked. The documents had said the armor would take a DNA sample during activation but it hadn't mentioned stabbing her!
A few seconds later, she heard a confirmation tone sequence, then the cool air on her back vanished as the armor closed up. A moment later there was another pain right at the base of her neck, which made her yelp and swear creatively. Immediately following that, she felt it come alive around her, causing her to grin. "Excellent," she said gleefully, moving her right arm and finding that the armor moved as fluidly as she could have hoped for, so smoothly and quickly it was like she wasn't wearing it. There was no lag, and no weight on her limbs at all.
She wondered if Armsmaster's armor, or Dragon's, was this good.
Carefully rolling over onto her back, hearing the armor grate on the concrete, she then sat up, lifting her metal-clad hands in front of her face and looking at them in wonder. She made a fist, then wiggled all her fingers. Everything seemed to work, far better than she'd expected.
Standing up as easily as if she wasn't wearing close to half a ton of machinery, she lifted one leg, then put it down and repeated the process with the other one, before very cautiously hopping on the spot. Even with a bare minimum of effort she nearly hit the ceiling, then almost fell over when she landed. "Holy crap!" she said in shock. Clearly the armor's specifications were entirely real.
"Well, that'll make this easy," she smiled, clomping over to the crate. Moving down the side of it to the wall, she braced one hand on the concrete while wrapping the other around the back of the huge metal box, then heaved. The crate grated across the floor like it was made of cardboard.
"Yes!" she crowed in glee. "I did it!"
Feeling briefly happy for the first time in many hours, she pushed the box a little further away from the wall, then slipped behind it to examine the keypad she found there. As she'd hoped, it only had two buttons on it, one marked OPEN and the other one CLOSE.
She pressed the open one without another thought.
From the other side of the room she heard a loud clunk, then a grinding noise that rose in pitch, before there was a sort of crunching sound and a rumble. She emerged from behind the crate in time to see the door slowly slide open, splitting down the middle as the gap widened.
Her smile of satisfaction changed rather suddenly into a look of shock when a head-sized fireball roared through the opening directly at her.
"Jesus Christ!" she screamed as she dived out of the way, her enhanced strength due to the armor carrying her half-way across the room. "What the fuck?"
The humanoid monster that followed the fireball into the room made her stare in horror.
It was fair to say that this was not what she'd been expecting.
The ghastly thing, which looked like a distorted and skinned human that had three-fingered, clawed hands and armored sections on it in various places, emitted a cry of triumph and jumped at her, covering a preposterous distance in one move almost too quick to see. Reflexively she ducked again, while swinging at it defensively with one hand.
The wet crunching sound that met this action was followed by a crash on the other side of the room, and another cry, this one gurgling into silence. Opening her eyes which she'd closed as she swung without thinking about it, she stared at the… whatever it was.
Which was now a dead whatever it was, lying in the wreckage of one of the crates she hadn't opened yet, a number of smaller containers scattered around it.
"Fuck..." she breathed, straightening up cautiously. Very slowly walking over to it, she stopped at a safe distance and studied the thing. It was even less human-looking up close, the enormous claws on the hands and feet combined with a sort of triangular face leading to a jaw full off fangs giving the impression of something lethal that had really wanted her head to chew on.
"What the hell is that?" she wondered out loud, horror-struck. She'd never seen anything like it, even in history class about Nilbog and his bizarre minions.
Looking at her gauntleted fist she saw it was dripping with gore. There was a deep impression on the side of the thing's head that perfectly matched her fist. She'd obviously managed to hit it completely by accident hard enough to kill it instantly.
A grunting sound from behind her made her whirl around and stare suspiciously at the open door.
She suddenly had a pretty good idea what had been making that noise.
And by the sound of it, there were more than one of these things out there.
A lot more.
After a couple of appalled seconds, she rushed behind the crate and slapped the close button, then peered around the box to watch the door rumble shut again, not relaxing until it closed with a thud. Then she went back to the middle of the room and stared at the dead monster for a while.
Her face hardened.
Fuck it. Fuck them. Whatever they were.
She'd made a promise to herself and she was keeping it, martian monsters or no martian monsters. Taylor looked around, spotted the helmet for her armor, and retrieved it, carefully fitting it in place. It locked down with a click and a number of heads up displays came on, along with the view of the room brightening to normal levels, which was a bit of a shock after getting used to the dimness for so long.
Feeling slightly safer now that the armor was fully donned, she thought for a while. Deciding that she needed to finish seeing what she had to work with, she went back to checking the crates. It was only when she'd gone thought all of them that she thought to see what had been in the one the monster had crushed. Picking up one of the smaller containers she read the label on it, before her eyes widened.
"UAC Emergency Ration Pack?" she said out loud, before sighing. "Why the hell didn't I look in this one six hours ago?"
Her stomach gurgling like a drain after a storm, she ripped the pack open and examined the contents, before removing her helmet again and sniffing one of the blocks of dried something or other that was included. The foil packet it had come out of claimed it was beef stew. It looked more like road tar, but it smelled delicious. Although by this point even the road tar probably would.
Experimentally nibbling one corner, she read the outside of the ration pack box again. The expiry date was given as nearly fifty years after the packing date, which was 2140. She wondered if it was still good, not having any idea what the date actually was. Regardless, she was going to eat it. And a number of its friends.
When the first cube was on the way down, she opened the pouch labeled 'hydration pack' and drank the contents, finding it was basically water although it tasted like it had a little sugar and maybe some salt in it. Whatever, it was a massive relief to her parched throat. She finished the first ration pack in under ten minutes, and the second one in another twelve.
The third one took nearly twenty.
When she was finally full and no longer feeling like she wanted to eat her own feet, she sat on one of the smaller crates and thought for some time, glancing at the dead thing to the side every now and then. After a while, she nodded to herself, got up, put her helmet back on, and headed for the big crate. There was another manual she needed to read.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Making sure that the last of the compartments in her armor were stocked with all the consumables she could load it with, and that everything else was in place, Taylor prodded the open button again. As the door slowly opened and the distant sounds of more monsters came through it, she hefted the energy rifle she was holding, flicked it on, and advanced on the portal to god knows what.
One way or another, she was going home, and screw anything that got in her way.
She left the room, walked down the corridor outside it, and went around the corner. The shooting started seconds later.
But that paled into insignificance when compared to the information she'd found in the manual that had been with the suit in the crate. Initially she'd skipped over the copyright date and other such information, having not really thought much about it, and had just gone for the first page of real information. It was only when, two thirds of the way through the several hundred pages of oddly fascinating data held in the book, her attention had been distracted by various terms she didn't recognize and couldn't immediately work out from context.
Most of the manual was surprisingly understandable, especially impressive bearing in mind that she had no former experience of this sort of thing, but she'd run into an entire section about hostile environment use including in toxic atmospheres, high or low temperatures and pressures, and zero gravity situations. That, along with some slightly unusual language constructions, had led her to wonder when and where the thing had been printed, so she'd flipped right back to the inside of the front cover.
User and Maintenance Manual
Mk. 9 Mod. 16 WC/04/2147-92B Series
Classification TOP SECRET
Security Level 7 or higher required
Union Aerospace Corporation
Advanced Military Research and Development Division
Hellas Plain
Mars
Copyright © 2147 UAC Technical Publications
All rights reserved.
Mk. 9 Mod. 16 WC/04/2147-92B Series
Classification TOP SECRET
Security Level 7 or higher required
Union Aerospace Corporation
Advanced Military Research and Development Division
Hellas Plain
Mars
Copyright © 2147 UAC Technical Publications
All rights reserved.
She'd stared at that date for over a minute, her thoughts grinding to a complete standstill, then moved up to the location and pretty much suffered the human equivalent of a computer blue-screening.
Mars.
That was… impossible.
Wasn't it?
And a date that was a hundred and thirty six years into the future, yet was pretty obviously at least twenty years in the past from where she was sitting. Possibly more.
Possibly much more.
…
How the fuck could she have traveled over a century into the future and millions of miles through space, from her school locker? It was insane.
Taylor simply couldn't put all the information she'd discovered into a coherent whole. She had no memory of anything that could possibly result in her current predicament, and couldn't think of any plausible, or for that matter, implausible, way for Emma and her two bitches to have done it either. They were only school kids, same as she was. None of them could possibly be capable of booting Taylor through time and space, nor did it seem likely that they'd know anyone who could. Or would, for that matter. Even assuming some sort of weird-ass Parahuman power that could pull it off, which seemed pretty unlikely to start with, why would someone do it? And to her? She was nobody.
Her thoughts circled around and around as she tried to work out if this was real, how it could have happened if it was, and what she could do about it. If anything.
Strangely enough the part that was giving her the most trouble at the moment was the idea of being on Mars. Time travel was pretty weird, true, but thinking that she'd popped up in an abandoned warehouse on an entirely different planet was so far past weird that the word didn't do it justice.
Although…
She held the manual out at shoulder height and dropped it, watching as it fell to the floor. It took noticeably longer than it should have done. As far as she could remember Mars had a gravity a bit less than half that of Earth, and it looked to her at a glance like the manual fell about half the normal speed. That was one point in favor of her current location being what the manual implied.
Shivering a little, she wrapped her arms around herself and stared at the book on the floor, trying not to scream in frustration and worry. Her rage was being suppressed by the sheer bizarreness of the situation she found herself in, although at some low level she could feel it building again. Mainly because this was all so totally unfair. She'd done everything she could to deal with things through massive unrelenting torment and not only was her reward to be half drowned in bloody waste, but somehow she'd been flung through time and space into the bargain? And even taken the fucking waste with her.
It was infuriating. And somehow she just knew that Emma would be looking smug about it if she was here.
She wondered how long ago her former friend had died.
That set her off on the horror of the thoughts that everyone she'd ever known was dead. Long, long ago.
"Dad," she whispered, tears streaming down her face. She hadn't even told him what was going on, and he'd probably lived the rest of his life never knowing what happened to her.
The thought of that was so gut-wrenching that she abruptly raised her head and screamed, in grief, rage, and horror.
When she finally came back to her senses some time later, she was huddled on the floor next to the crate she'd been sitting on, rocking back and forth and holding herself. She had no idea how long she'd been doing that.
It took at least another twenty minutes of trying to pull herself together before she managed to force the thoughts of her parents out of her mind and stand up. She looked at the pile of crap on the floor where she'd woken up and glared at it so hard she was mildly surprised it didn't vaporize from the sheer fury she was now feeling. 'I got here somehow. There's a way back. There has to be. And I will find it. No matter how long it takes or what I have to do, I'm going home. Fuck the universe, fuck time travel, fuck everything. I am going home.'
She burned that thought into her mind. It was going to happen. As long as she kept thinking that, it was going to happen.
Somehow.
After a couple of minutes, Taylor wiped her eyes on the fouled sleeve of her shirt, not even really noticing the blood and smell now, and turned to the huge open crate with a sense of determination in her heart. "Right. Move crate, open door, find out what the hell is on the other side. Little steps. Can't move the crate, it's too heavy. So I either need to make it lighter or get stronger."
Contemplating the power armor, a grim smile grew on her face. "I know how to do both things at once, I think..." she mumbled, bending down and retrieving the manual again. Turning pages until she found the right section, she studied 'Initial configuration and activation of system for new user.'
Yeah.
This was going to be simple enough.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"This is not simple!" Taylor glared at the power armor, then shoved as hard as she could. The monstrously heavy machinery rolled far enough to the side that she was able to slide out from under it, then stand up, rubbing her ribs and swearing under her breath. "Fucking idiot fucking UAC fucking engineers who didn't fucking think that someone might need to unload this fucking armor without any fucking help!" she growled, limping back to the crate. Finding out how to remove the restraints that held the large armor set in place in its box hadn't been too hard.
Jumping out of the way as the damn thing promptly lunged for her and knocked her flat on its way to the floor had been just that little bit past her ability and reactions as it turned out.
She hadn't expected it to simply fall over.
Luckily she'd got just far enough of the direct line of fire that, combined with the lower gravity, she was only bruised rather that dealing with broken ribs, but she was still not even slightly happy about it. Rubbing her left side which she was certain would have some impressively black and blue marks sooner or later, she studied the remaining stuff in the box, then turned to regard the prone armor set.
Then she picked up the now well thumbed manual and leafed through it. "Ah. Tool set MK-14/S/162. Why not just call it the damn tool kit?" Walking into the crate, which was big enough to almost double as a maintenance shed for the power armor, she looked around. The dim greenish lighting which emanated from strips set into the walls was just bright enough to let her read the labels. "Honking big gun. Ammo for honking big gun. Grenade things… I think. Medical packs? Must be, red cross on them. Spare parts… AHA! Tool kit." She grabbed the heavy plastic case and yanked it free of the clamps on the wall, then took it out to the armor. Kneeling down she put the manual next to her, then with some effort flipped the catches on the tool kit and opened it.
Inside the two foot square box were a large array of tools and instruments, some of which she recognized and some of which looked like something Armsmaster would have salivated over. She picked up one small electronic device and inspected it, finding what looked like the power switch after a few seconds. Flipping it resulted in the device lighting up with a polite 'bing!' sound, then a display showing an error message she couldn't work out at all. Shrugging, she turned it off again and put it back where it lived.
Sitting back on her heels she grabbed the manual and read the relevant section again, nodding intermittently, and occasionally referring to the tool kit. Some time later she smiled.
"OK, so I need this thing, and this one, and two of these, and one of these, and that." Taylor plucked the relevant odds and ends out of the kit and, while glancing between the diagrams in the documentation and the power suit, connected them to the relevant locations. It took some time and a lot of careful checking but in the end when she turned on the thing that the manual called a 'configuration override interface module' the display on it went through a long diagnostics sequence that matched what the book said.
The girl smiled as the armor started to emit a faint hum, right on the threshold of hearing, and several small lights came on in various places. "So that works. Great. What next?"
Quite a lot as it happened. She was beginning to get the impression that there was probably a lot of training involved in doing what she was doing, and just reading the manual wasn't the ideal method to learn on the fly. If nothing else the sheer number of warnings about what not to do was somewhat worrying. That said, it was working, and she was being careful to memorize as much of it as she could as she went along. The knowledge was bound to come in handy one day.
Who knew, if she… when she got home, she might be able to sell some of the things she was learning. It was as good as Tinker tech, but it was also better, since it was real engineering and not powers bullshit. The manual did after all go into quite a lot of the theory behind much of what the suit used, and she was fairly certain that a 'micro fusion cell' was probably pretty advanced.
There were two spares of that particular unit in the crate. The specifications in the book gave numbers that seemed pretty impressive to her admittedly fairly limited knowledge of the subject. A megawatt was quite a large amount of power, she remembered, and the things produced a lot of them.
Hopefully she could drag some of this stuff home with her. She'd found it, and as there was no one around who seemed to care about it, that seemed to her to mean she could keep it.
It wasn't like anyone was telling her she couldn't…
Almost enjoying herself in a sort of furious and terrified way, she kept working for what must have been a couple of hours. She'd long since lost track of time, not that she had the vaguest idea what time it had been when she woke up in the first place, and was not only very thirsty by now but starving too. But eating and drinking was something that was going to have to wait until she got out of this room, and moving the stupidly heavy crate was a prerequisite for that.
And using this power armor was probably the only practical method available for her to achieve that goal.
So she had to get it turned on, get inside it, and move the fucking box.
Suppressing her hunger pangs, Taylor persisted, and eventually finished the last step of a completely ridiculous checklist. Everything was as it should be according to the manual, so she did the relevant actions to finally initialize the armor systems. A fairly long series of messages scrolled past on the screen of the device she was holding and the hum from the armor grew louder, deepened to below the level she could still hear it, making things rattle a little for a moment, then seemed to stop.
The armor beeped twice and the back slid open, while the helmet detached and rolled a little to the side.
"Finally!" she smiled. "It worked."
Strictly speaking the manual said that the armor should have been on a stand that wasn't included in the other stuff that she'd found in the box, but lacking that, she was going to have to somehow squeeze into it on the floor. It was probably not intended for a fifteen year old girl, admittedly. Luckily she was taller than average for her age and gender so it wasn't impossible to use the thing, and she was slender enough to manage to wriggle inside without the rest of the hardware that was normally required. Standing up she looked down at herself, then at the crates around her.
'Wonder if there's anything that I can clean the rest of this crap off with in those?' she thought. Moving over to the nearest one, she peered at the label again. The manual had given her enough background information on the jargon that UAC seemed to like that she was able to puzzle out quite a lot more now than she'd managed to begin with.
Strangely, she'd found learning this sort of thing much easier than she'd expected. It seemed to come naturally to her, which was a slight surprise, but welcome under the circumstances.
'OK, that's… um… probably something like bolts, if I'm reading this right,' she thought, studying the acronyms. 'That one is… more bolts. Why did they need so many bolts? This one is… ammunition. Great. If I need to shoot anything I've got lots of bullets. Plasma. Whatever the hell that fucking thing fires.' She moved around the room examining the boxes, finding enough ammo and weapons to fight a small war, plenty of power cells for something or other, yet more bolts, an entire crate full of tools that looked like perfectly normal wrenches and sockets to her, a small one full of more manuals which she moved to the side for later perusal, another one containing some sort of futuristic equivalent of USB sticks as far as she could make out, and finally one that had all sorts of cleaning supplies in it.
'Thank fuck for that,' she thought as she opened it, the last latch needing a solid blow from one of the wrenches from the crateful she'd found to release. Lifting the lid she looked at the contents, seeing the UAC logo on many of the smaller containers inside, along with several more she didn't recognize at all. After unpacking half the contents onto the floor she found a box of what looked for all the world to be perfectly normal baby wipes, which she quickly opened and made use of.
When she finished, she was standing in her underwear but otherwise as clean as could be managed without a proper shower.
She'd have cheerfully killed someone for a shower by now.
And some food.
And some water.
Lacking any of those, she returned to the armor and knelt down again, then contorted herself enough to get both feet into the open back. Five minutes of grunting and swearing later she finally got both arms inside and her head through the neck ring. Feeling like an idiot, she said, "Initiate user biometric lock process Alpha Two Tango execute," while hoping it worked.
There was a faint hiss from somewhere inside and something poked her in the hip, feeling like someone had stuck a needle into her. "OW! Son of a goddamn bitch fucking UAC bastards!" she squawked. The documents had said the armor would take a DNA sample during activation but it hadn't mentioned stabbing her!
A few seconds later, she heard a confirmation tone sequence, then the cool air on her back vanished as the armor closed up. A moment later there was another pain right at the base of her neck, which made her yelp and swear creatively. Immediately following that, she felt it come alive around her, causing her to grin. "Excellent," she said gleefully, moving her right arm and finding that the armor moved as fluidly as she could have hoped for, so smoothly and quickly it was like she wasn't wearing it. There was no lag, and no weight on her limbs at all.
She wondered if Armsmaster's armor, or Dragon's, was this good.
Carefully rolling over onto her back, hearing the armor grate on the concrete, she then sat up, lifting her metal-clad hands in front of her face and looking at them in wonder. She made a fist, then wiggled all her fingers. Everything seemed to work, far better than she'd expected.
Standing up as easily as if she wasn't wearing close to half a ton of machinery, she lifted one leg, then put it down and repeated the process with the other one, before very cautiously hopping on the spot. Even with a bare minimum of effort she nearly hit the ceiling, then almost fell over when she landed. "Holy crap!" she said in shock. Clearly the armor's specifications were entirely real.
"Well, that'll make this easy," she smiled, clomping over to the crate. Moving down the side of it to the wall, she braced one hand on the concrete while wrapping the other around the back of the huge metal box, then heaved. The crate grated across the floor like it was made of cardboard.
"Yes!" she crowed in glee. "I did it!"
Feeling briefly happy for the first time in many hours, she pushed the box a little further away from the wall, then slipped behind it to examine the keypad she found there. As she'd hoped, it only had two buttons on it, one marked OPEN and the other one CLOSE.
She pressed the open one without another thought.
From the other side of the room she heard a loud clunk, then a grinding noise that rose in pitch, before there was a sort of crunching sound and a rumble. She emerged from behind the crate in time to see the door slowly slide open, splitting down the middle as the gap widened.
Her smile of satisfaction changed rather suddenly into a look of shock when a head-sized fireball roared through the opening directly at her.
"Jesus Christ!" she screamed as she dived out of the way, her enhanced strength due to the armor carrying her half-way across the room. "What the fuck?"
The humanoid monster that followed the fireball into the room made her stare in horror.
It was fair to say that this was not what she'd been expecting.
The ghastly thing, which looked like a distorted and skinned human that had three-fingered, clawed hands and armored sections on it in various places, emitted a cry of triumph and jumped at her, covering a preposterous distance in one move almost too quick to see. Reflexively she ducked again, while swinging at it defensively with one hand.
The wet crunching sound that met this action was followed by a crash on the other side of the room, and another cry, this one gurgling into silence. Opening her eyes which she'd closed as she swung without thinking about it, she stared at the… whatever it was.
Which was now a dead whatever it was, lying in the wreckage of one of the crates she hadn't opened yet, a number of smaller containers scattered around it.
"Fuck..." she breathed, straightening up cautiously. Very slowly walking over to it, she stopped at a safe distance and studied the thing. It was even less human-looking up close, the enormous claws on the hands and feet combined with a sort of triangular face leading to a jaw full off fangs giving the impression of something lethal that had really wanted her head to chew on.
"What the hell is that?" she wondered out loud, horror-struck. She'd never seen anything like it, even in history class about Nilbog and his bizarre minions.
Looking at her gauntleted fist she saw it was dripping with gore. There was a deep impression on the side of the thing's head that perfectly matched her fist. She'd obviously managed to hit it completely by accident hard enough to kill it instantly.
A grunting sound from behind her made her whirl around and stare suspiciously at the open door.
She suddenly had a pretty good idea what had been making that noise.
And by the sound of it, there were more than one of these things out there.
A lot more.
After a couple of appalled seconds, she rushed behind the crate and slapped the close button, then peered around the box to watch the door rumble shut again, not relaxing until it closed with a thud. Then she went back to the middle of the room and stared at the dead monster for a while.
Her face hardened.
Fuck it. Fuck them. Whatever they were.
She'd made a promise to herself and she was keeping it, martian monsters or no martian monsters. Taylor looked around, spotted the helmet for her armor, and retrieved it, carefully fitting it in place. It locked down with a click and a number of heads up displays came on, along with the view of the room brightening to normal levels, which was a bit of a shock after getting used to the dimness for so long.
Feeling slightly safer now that the armor was fully donned, she thought for a while. Deciding that she needed to finish seeing what she had to work with, she went back to checking the crates. It was only when she'd gone thought all of them that she thought to see what had been in the one the monster had crushed. Picking up one of the smaller containers she read the label on it, before her eyes widened.
"UAC Emergency Ration Pack?" she said out loud, before sighing. "Why the hell didn't I look in this one six hours ago?"
Her stomach gurgling like a drain after a storm, she ripped the pack open and examined the contents, before removing her helmet again and sniffing one of the blocks of dried something or other that was included. The foil packet it had come out of claimed it was beef stew. It looked more like road tar, but it smelled delicious. Although by this point even the road tar probably would.
Experimentally nibbling one corner, she read the outside of the ration pack box again. The expiry date was given as nearly fifty years after the packing date, which was 2140. She wondered if it was still good, not having any idea what the date actually was. Regardless, she was going to eat it. And a number of its friends.
When the first cube was on the way down, she opened the pouch labeled 'hydration pack' and drank the contents, finding it was basically water although it tasted like it had a little sugar and maybe some salt in it. Whatever, it was a massive relief to her parched throat. She finished the first ration pack in under ten minutes, and the second one in another twelve.
The third one took nearly twenty.
When she was finally full and no longer feeling like she wanted to eat her own feet, she sat on one of the smaller crates and thought for some time, glancing at the dead thing to the side every now and then. After a while, she nodded to herself, got up, put her helmet back on, and headed for the big crate. There was another manual she needed to read.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Making sure that the last of the compartments in her armor were stocked with all the consumables she could load it with, and that everything else was in place, Taylor prodded the open button again. As the door slowly opened and the distant sounds of more monsters came through it, she hefted the energy rifle she was holding, flicked it on, and advanced on the portal to god knows what.
One way or another, she was going home, and screw anything that got in her way.
She left the room, walked down the corridor outside it, and went around the corner. The shooting started seconds later.
3. DOOMed III: ReDOOMed
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
"Fuck fuck fuck fuck!"
Breathing heavily and wishing she was in better condition, Taylor ran like a bastard, taking long leaps in the low gravity and with the aid of her armor. It had initially taken her some time to not end up bouncing down the corridors like a heavily armed demented pinball, but over the last four days she'd managed to learn how to do it smoothly. Even so, she clearly wasn't the presumably highly trained soldier who was meant to be using the power suit and was paying the price.
Although, she'd have been dead a hundred times over by now without it, so there was that.
The first encounter with what lay outside the room she'd found herself in had nearly made her scream. In fact, if she was honest to herself, she had emitted a yelp of shock. But she had also found herself instantly much too busy to be scared, and seconds after that way too angry to care anyway. The fucking monsters had just poured out of various rooms and corridors, all of them charging her with eerie yowls and cries, while firing so many fireballs at her that the constant whooshing sound and explosions had nearly deafened her.
After the momentary terror, she'd enthusiastically returned fire, hosing the things down with blasts of brilliant plasma in a display that made it look like the fourth of July. To begin with, only about one in ten of her shots actually hit anything other than the scenery, and that was being generous. Luckily, while the monsters were not all that smart as far as she could tell, they weren't entirely idiots, and a lot of them immediately retreated. The remaining ones made the job less complicated, and her energy gun was capable of killing one with only a single shot, so eventually she'd wiped the first wave out. In the process she learned a lot, and after shoving a new energy cell into her weapon and stuffing the depleted one back into one of the apparently too large on the inside storage compartments in the armor, had kept going.
By now she was a crack shot with the weapon, and was getting to be pretty good at the armor systems. In the very brief pauses between random monster attacks she'd kept reading the various documents she'd brought with her, trying to work out what everything did. Some of it was still a mystery but she was now able to understand the various displays inside the helmet, and use the target assist system, which she wished she'd known about when she started on this mission to get home.
Still, better late than never.
She'd absently noticed that her anger at the whole crazy situation hadn't abated. If anything, it had grown to a steady background rage that was unlike anything she'd ever experienced before, almost burning cold now rather than the hot fury she'd had when she awoke. But the odd thing was that it also seemed to give her clarity of thought, and she was finding her memory for all the new things she'd learned seemed aided by it too. Somehow, she was managing to keep track of dozens of different critical aspects of all of this horrifically dangerous environment she'd been thrown into, was learning how to read the ground far more effectively than she'd ever have thought possible, even somehow anticipating a lot of the monster attacks before they started almost like she could feel them coming… It was weird, but she hadn't had any time to sit down and think about it so far.
The fucking monsters were everywhere, unremittingly hostile, and some of them were very sneaky. That first type was only the tip of an iceberg of ghastliness that steadily exposed itself as she penetrated deeper into the massive complex she'd found lay beyond that storage room. It seemed to go on forever, on multiple levels, and a lot of it was wrecked beyond the point she could easily pass, so she had to backtrack quite often to make any progress.
Progress towards what she wasn't entirely certain, aside from some way to get home no matter what it took. She was perfectly prepared to wipe the damn things out to the last monster if that's what was required. And it well might be, since they just kept coming.
And some of the variants were way worse than a distorted vicious little homunculus with a penchant for fireballs. Those things were basically the cannon fodder in her mind. Yeah, they'd be very dangerous to an unarmored person, and easily capable of simply tearing you to pieces even without needing their Blaster power, since they were strong, quick, and had claws the size of her fingers. But they were also not that tough, since a single plasma bolt killed one immediately, and more than a few times she'd managed to get two with one shot if they were standing in line. The plasma went right through them and blew a pretty impressive hole.
They weren't immune to their own abilities either. She'd seen several cases of 'friendly fire' where one monster was incautious or overenthusiastic and managed to blast another one in the back. That had at least twice resulted in a bloody free for all where they'd wiped each other out while she watched incredulously. The things certainly didn't seem to work together aside from all wanting to kill her.
But as she'd progressed, she'd started running into much more dangerous and much smarter monsters. Like the ones chasing her at the moment. The intelligence of them increased the risk a lot, since these ones would cooperate, and would lay traps a little more sophisticated that just screaming and leaping at her out of a dark room.
By now when that happened she was so inured to it she didn't even flinch, just reacted and either blew the thing's head off or simply punched it hard enough to pulp the bastard.
She really liked the power armor.
So far she'd run across at least a dozen different monsters, with wildly different appearances, abilities, and tactics. She had no idea where the hell they were all coming from, but it seemed pretty obvious that the reason she hadn't found any actual people was most likely because the things had completely overrun this entire facility ages ago. The few times she'd found skeletal human remains they had all been fragmentary and looked very much like they'd been chewed on…
It must have happened a long time ago. As far as she could see more or less anything that wasn't plastic or metal had pretty much crumbled from age and decay. There were traces of paper here and there, in rooms that looked like they'd possibly been offices at one point, but almost nothing readable. It had made her wonder why the manuals were still fine, and a close examination showed they were actually printed on some sort of plastic stuff that looked like paper but was much tougher. Her best guess at this point was that this place had been exterminated a good fifty years ago at a minimum and possibly up to a century.
It amazed her that so much hardware was still intact and working. The power armor was fully functional according to all the tests she'd been able to run on it, all the other things she'd found in the crate with it were like new, and she was constantly stumbling across other odds and ends, many of which seemed to work. A lot of those things were weapons. By the looks of it the inhabitants of this place had put up a fucking big fight. There were holes in walls all over the place, a lot of the damaged sections were as likely to show damage from explosions as from the monsters, and she'd found some areas that were absolutely swimming in what looked like some weird sort of cartridge cases, along with piles of depleted energy cells. There was a lot of shrapnel from what she supposed had been grenades of some sort. As far as she could see, quite a lot of people had shot the fuck out of everything in sight.
The worrying part was that she got the distinct impression it hadn't helped…
And she was wondering why there were so few remains. Judging by the size of this facility it must have had probably thousands of people in it at one point. Had most of them managed to evacuate before they were overrun? Hopefully, but she wouldn't want to bet on it based on the trace evidence.
Diving around a corner just as a huge green fireball shot past, she winced at the massive explosion it made when it blew a hole in the wall at the end of the corridor. This particular monster was far more aggressive than the little ones had been, stood about ten feet tall, and was a much tougher opponent. It had been chasing her for nearly an hour now, and was fast enough to successfully evade her return fire so far. The only time she'd actually managed to hit it, it had roared in rage and barely slowed. She'd roared right back at it, emptied a power cell into the walls to slow it down, and legged it.
'I need something heavier than this,' she thought frantically, looking around for inspiration. The plasma rifle was a pretty impressive weapon, but against this particular creature wasn't going to cut it. As she'd explored she'd come across a lot of other weapons of various sorts, quite a number of which still worked, so she'd started collecting the better ones and all the ammo she could find. At first she'd wondered how she'd carry it all, but had found after a while, and to her considerable surprise, that it didn't seem to matter how much loot she put in the storage compartments on the outside of the armor which were designed for this exact purpose, they never appeared to fill up.
That explained something she hadn't really thought about when she left the initial room, having loaded the armor with everything in sight, including several cases of power cells, all the food, all the manuals, the contents of several crates that seemed to contain medical supplies of some sort, the tool kit and all the spares…
In retrospect she should have realized something weird was going on, but hadn't really thought much about it at the time, just assuming that the suit had big pockets. By now, she knew that the pockets were far too big to be anything other than something like that cape Circus at home had. Somehow everything she was shoving in there wasn't actually in the armor itself, it was somewhere else. She'd wondered at the description in the manual of a 'trans-dimensional logistical support module subsystem' but hadn't been able to quite work out what it was talking about.
Now she knew. And it was probably the only reason she was still alive, as she'd have run out of ammo way too soon if she'd been forced to carry the cells in a more normal manner.
Whoever these UAC people had been, they were as good as any Tinker she'd ever heard of in some ways, and their tech was first rate. Their manuals were pretty decent too, although obviously having been written for someone who wasn't an untrained fifteen year old. That said, she thought she was doing very well, all things considered.
It wasn't what she'd planned on doing, certainly, but was turning out to be remarkably good therapy for some weird reason. Every time she thought about those fucking girls, a new wave of fury rose in her and she was able to immediately take it out on the nearest horrible monster.
Even as she thought this, some of the little red ones piled out of a darkened doorway to her right, screaming and hissing. She screamed right back, blew the head off the first one, kicked the second without breaking step hard enough to fold it over her foot with a crunch and fly into the wall, shot the third one in the gut, punched four and five in the head as she passed, and emptied the last few shots from the energy cell into the final three. The entire encounter took about six seconds and barely counted as a fight at this point in time. She hadn't actually slowed down in the slightest.
Another huge green fireball impacted behind her, hitting the remains of the little imps or whatever the fuck they really were and completely vaporizing them in a massive blast which blew shrapnel past her. She yipped and ran harder, bouncing off the wall and around the next corner while trying to pop the cell out and shove another one in. Dropping the empty cell to the ground with a clink she fumbled with the replacement, dropped it as well, swore viciously in a manner that would have either appalled or impressed her father, then concentrated on running. She needed to find some place to hide for a moment to reload, and catch her breath.
A weird howl from behind was joined by a second one at a different pitch, making her sweat. 'Oh, fuck, there's two of them now!' she thought, checking the little mapping scanner display which she'd figured out how to use the day before. It was getting data from sensors all over the facility as far as she could determine, and building a map as she went, which it populated with little icons showing movement, which was invariably hostile. Unfortunately, it seemed that an awful lot of those sensors were dead now so the map had gaping holes in it, and the movement detector was anything but accurate. It gave a slight advantage in some places but certainly wasn't good enough to rely on. Presumably when it was designed it was more effective.
Right now, it seemed to be very good at telling her about things she'd already worked out for herself. Anything the armor's systems had scanned was shown in high resolution detail, but stuff in front of her was largely guesswork in her view. And sure enough, it was showing that there were two large moving icons following her, ones that she'd assigned to that particular monster.
'God damn it,' she thought, wishing she had Emma or Sophia handy to act as a decoy. She'd happily have thrown both of them to the monsters right now. And laughed.
The two monsters roared again.
"SHUT UP!" she screamed back, still running and looking around for somewhere to take cover. The mapper showed the corridor branched up ahead, one route curving more or less back until it broke up into random garbage, the other one turning sharp left and terminating in what looked like it might be some large rooms. Or more random garbage, of course. Deciding that it was worth a try, she went left and charged along the new corridor, smashing another little imp to pulp on the way with the stock of her weapon when it was stupid enough to drop from the ceiling onto her.
"Little fuckers," she grumbled, looking around frantically. "Aha!" There was a door ahead of her that was very heavily built, closed, and most importantly of all, showed a functional electronic lock on it. After some experimentation Taylor had become used to the locks and other equipment in this place and even as she skidded to a halt in front of it was punching in the sequence that made the door open. The lock beeped and the red LOCKED display changed to a green OPEN one, then there was a clunk followed by a familiar grinding sound. Most of the still powered doors worked, she'd found, but a lot of them were rather reluctant at first. Not surprising really if they'd been abandoned as long as she surmised they had. It was more remarkable that they worked at all.
"Come on, come on…" she muttered under her breath, while retrieving another power cell from her armor and shoving it into the gun, then arming it. The reassuring deep hum started up again as the weapon's display lit. The door grudgingly ground open, decades of detritus scraping in the mechanism, and as soon as the doorway was clear enough she squeezed through. Hitting the door close button with the back of her hand, she looked around quickly and carefully, panning her rifle about as she did. Nothing immediately jumped out at her, so she relaxed just a tiny amount, although still stayed alert.
With the amount of adrenaline running through her after a four day running battle, she probably couldn't relax more than that, she mused as she looked around.
The door clunked shut and locked again with a solid metallic click. It was nearly as thick as the one on the room she'd woken up in, which should keep the pair of monsters following her out for at least a little while, she hoped.
"What the hell is this place?" she mumbled, having developed a habit of talking to herself in lieu of anyone else to talk to. The room was large, perhaps a hundred feet across, and two stories high, with a walkway around the second story about twelve feet up. She looked suspiciously at it, then the ceiling above it, dim in the bad lighting. Only about a third of the lights were working at all, and several of those were flickering a lot, so much of the room was rather gloomy and hidden in shadows.
She was very aware of what could hide in shadows. Most of the things that did had jumped out of those shadows at her at one point or another recently. Sure, they immediately died messily, but it was the thought that counted, and she considered shadows a threat as a result.
Slowly moving through the room, looking all around her and not neglecting to frequently glance up, she kept panning her gun around waiting for something to have a go at her. Somewhat amazingly nothing did, and by the time she'd reached the far side, she was reasonably sure this particular room was monster-free. At least for the moment.
Stopping, she kept glancing about, but spent most of her attention on the banks of computer displays in front of her. They were very futuristic, being more like holograms floating in space than any monitor she was familiar with, but she'd seen enough of this tech so far that she was becoming inured to it and no longer just gaped in amazement. Several of the projections were clearly faulty, the image breaking up or showing random icons, but a couple seemed functional, so she moved over to them and studied them. The familiar UAC logo was present in the upper corner of each, as it was all over the place in this base, but she ignored that in favor of the rest of the display.
The left projection was cycling through a whole series of images that seemed to be from security cameras around the facility, many of the images merely showing the words 'System Fault' when they came up, presumably showing that the camera was broken, or missing entirely. Considering the amount of damage to this place that was hardly unexpected. Each image was accompanied by a reference number which seemed to locate the camera in question, and she watched for a while to see if there was any pattern to it. After some time she decided that the base was spread across at least forty levels based on the numbers, assuming the first digits were a level, which seemed likely based on the way the images were cycling. Taylor spotted several monsters on the images, two of which were one she'd not so far encountered, and both of these being on lower levels.
It agreed with her own impressions that the things got more vicious and dangerous the deeper she went.
The other projection was showing a display that appeared to be a map of the base, in three dimensions and different colors. It was much larger than she'd expected and far more complicated, she saw with some annoyance. Whatever computer was running this system seemed to still be updating the map over time, as she saw that a large percentage of the rooms and corridors on the map were marked as hazardous, damaged, in a couple of cases as flooded, and in one particular area near the bottom, radioactive and flooded.
She wondered what the fuck had happened there?
Whatever, it didn't matter right now. Leaning closer she studied the display intently. After a couple of minutes, she looked at the console the image was floating above, searching for the correct interface port. Spotting it, she lifted her right hand and did the relevant mental action that told the suit to deploy what the manual called the 'high bandwidth data interface connection probe' which was actually something like looked like a six inch long metal spike covered in tiny gleaming dots of light. It slid out from her wrist, and she poked it into the matching aperture on the console.
When she'd read the manual for the power armor, she hadn't really quite absorbed the fact that the 'subcutaneous neural induction tap' it talked about was actually some sort of mind reading computer interface that the fucking thing would stick into the wearer the first time it was worn. That had been the pain she'd felt in her neck when she initially put the armor on, she'd realized a while later. It had taken her an embarrassingly long time to work out that quite a lot of the HUD displays she was seeing seemed to be responding to her wishes and needs, not just randomly popping up useful information by coincidence. At the first point she'd been able to take a half hour break in a small storage room that was monster-free, she'd reread that part of the manual, felt her neck and found a small flat lump apparently bonded to the bone, grumbled to herself, and put her helmet back on. It wasn't like she had any way to remove the thing and it was helping keep her alive, so she'd just live with it.
By now she was getting pretty good at using it, and could operate a lot of really cool features the armor provided merely by thinking at it. She wondered if Armsmaster's equipment had been able to do the same thing.
Issuing a few commands she downloaded the map data into her armor's systems, watching as her own display updated to incorporate the new information. It filled in a lot of the holes although there were still missing bits. The room she was in was marked as the level four central command center, and from what she could see there were at least five more similar installations throughout the enormous base. Right down at the bottom was a section that was described as the high security research area, with a part off to one side labeled 'experimental dimensional transport lab.' That sounded like it might, possibly, be something she could find a clue to how she'd got here in.
Several of the locations were shown as requiring a physical high security access pass, and a few of them had 'Top Secret' designators too, with no other information given. That made her decide that one way or another she was going to get inside them and look around. Anything that was top secret was something she wanted a look at.
Possibly one of those labs had a time machine or something like that in it. If so, she wanted it.
Going through the rest of the data she found several storage areas that looked like they could have useful supplies in, and four armories, which she was definitely going to visit. The more weapons the better, and she was running low on energy cells. Perhaps she should switch to one of the other weapons she'd acquired on the way? She'd found several slightly lower tech but still fucking impressive guns, including one monster rotary cannon thing that was so huge only the power armor let her pick it up at all. She'd been astounded that the apparently bottomless storage pockets the armor contained had accepted it, but hadn't questioned her good fortune, merely stored it away along with as many cases of ammo for it as she could locate.
While she was flipping through the various screens of data, both in her HUD and on the holo display, she heard a massive THUD! against the door, causing her to check the mapping unit. It was showing movement outside, which meant the monsters that had been chasing her had tracked her down. The ululating roar of rage backed that up, it was all too familiar and far, far too close.
Disconnecting from the base computer, she spun around to stare suspiciously at the door, her weapon aimed and ready. A moment later she consciously realized what she'd seen on the projected screen as she'd logged off and turned back to stare at the thing.
It took Taylor a moment to come to terms with what was clearly a time and date. The projection seemed to have reverted to a default display once she'd closed the session, and the glowing blue figures floated under a slowly spinning UAC logo. Assuming the thing was right, she'd been pretty close in her estimate of how long ago this place had been overrun by monsters.
The screech from outside made her dismiss the time from her mind, since it wasn't important in the long run. The things trying to batter the door down and kill her were much more of an immediate problem. She watched the door vibrate as they attacked it, then heard several loud explosions from their plasma balls hitting the surface. The inside face of the metal portal began to glow a very dull red, and when she switched her view to the thermal imaging the suit provided, she could see it was heating up fast. Another internal command selected some sort of technology that let her see a short distance through solid objects, this vision mode showing a ghostly image of one of the big monsters pacing up and down outside, occasionally firing at the door again.
She wondered uneasily where the other one had got to now, and began to look carefully around, switching between light amplification, thermal, and whatever the seeing-through-walls mode was. There was still no sign of any hostile creature in the large room with her, but she clearly couldn't stay here much longer. The damn monster was bound to get in eventually if it kept up the attack, and she knew how persistent this type was.
Still, the door wasn't going to fail immediately, and seemed to have settled down to a slight glow, well below the point of melting, but probably far past the point the lock would still work. She could smell burning electronics and hot metal and assumed the mechanism that drove it was undoubtedly completely cooked by now. That meant she really needed to find another way out, so she turned back to the computer and plugged in again, then spent the next fifteen minutes poking around in the file-system looking for more useful information and downloading everything she could gain access to. The armor appeared to have a fairly comprehensive set of access credentials and could get through most security, although there were still sections that basically told her to fuck off.
"Aha," she mumbled, finally finding a more detailed set of plans of this entire section, which showed a lot of maintenance corridors and access hatches the original map hadn't. "OK, let's see… power conduit AN-12/W looks about big enough to get through. Now where the hell is… There. Access panel J3N/64. Which is…" She looked around. "Over there upstairs. Bet it's full of monsters."
That seemed likely. The little ones ended up everywhere. Like roaches, only a lot more dangerous.
She unplugged again and headed for the stairs to the second level, clomping up them and making the old metal vibrate under her boots, then moved along the catwalk to the access panel which looked like a part of the wall aside from a small notation on one corner. Inspecting it, she tried the special vision mode, which didn't show any movement on the other side, but did point out the presence of an empty space there. So it was definitely a hidden door. Feeling it, she eventually located a catch that was similar to the ones that had held the crate her armor had been shipped in closed, the thing nearly invisible to the eye but moving slightly when she passed her metal-clad fingers over it. Pressing hard in the right way, she was rewarded with a click and the latch popping out. Bending down she found the other one she'd guess would be there, popped it as well, then turned both of them and pulled.
Nothing happened, so after a moment, she pushed instead, finding this time that the panel sunk inwards about four inches, then slid a little to the side. She urged it further with a grating sound, to reveal a six foot square corridor lined with pipes and cables. When she cautiously stuck her head inside and looked both ways, she found there were small red emergency-style lights about every fifty feet along the ceiling, casting just enough illumination that normal eyesight would be able to navigate reasonably well. Several of them were out, but the remaining ones in conjunction with the low light mode of her armor would let her handle it fine.
The very low ceiling was more of an issue. The armor was close to seven feet tall, so she'd have to bend to get through, which would be a nuisance, but was something she'd just have to live with.
Pulling her head out she straightened up, then looked down at the main door. It was glowing more brightly as the huge monster on the other side kept firing at it. "Fucker doesn't give up easily," she grumbled, almost impressed. "Neither do I."
Checking her map, she examined the path the power conduit took, then slowly started to smile, in a way that if anyone had seen it would have made them start to back away. It looked very much to her like the access corridor went right over the main route on the other side of the door, and the plan showed another access panel that seemed to be immediately above where the monster was…
That gave her an idea.
About to turn back to enter the access route, she stopped when she spotted something on the other side of the room, only visible due to her elevated position. One of the consoles seemed to have several items sitting on it, including what appeared to be something bright yellow and about the size of a credit card, which looked an awful lot like the security pass she'd seen an image of in the computer records. The sort of pass that was needed to gain access to the high security areas somewhere far below her.
Quickly retracing her steps, she glanced at the by-now orange door as she headed to that console. Sure enough the yellow thing was indeed a security pass, one that had a code on that matched the record she'd seen. Quickly grabbing it and the other odds and ends next to it, she shoved the entire lot into her storage then hastily went back to the access panel and climbed through it, before closing it behind her. There was a fairly simple lever mechanism to lock it from this side, which she used out of sense of caution and not wanting something to come in after her, then she awkwardly but as rapidly as possible consistent with being quiet made her way through the conduit.
Moments later she passed over the main corridor, looking down with the penetrating vision to see the monster still apparently firing at the door to the control room. A few more cautious steps brought her to an area where the corridor gave way to a larger area that wasn't really a room so much as a place where a number of main power cables and a lot of control equipment gathered together. It was tall enough that she could straighten up properly, which she immediately did, before locating the access panel that led into the ceiling of the corridor below her. This took the form of a sort of sliding trap door, which had a winch mounted to the ceiling above it, and was presumably how all the equipment in here had been brought in.
Checking it Taylor could see it was simple to open, being again just a lever mechanism. Nodding to herself, she turned the plasma rifle off. It hadn't done the job so far, the thing battering at the door under her was apparently resistant to the shots from it as she'd already discovered, so perhaps it was now time for something else.
Very soon afterwards she was inspecting the fuck-off big gun she'd found earlier. It looked like something from a movie, even more than the plasma rifle, and probably weighed about a hundred pounds. There were a number of large barrels in a rotating mechanism, and a huge magazine underneath, along with two hand-grips, one on the top and one at the rear. Remembering something she'd read in the manual for the armor, she put it down very carefully, then dug out the documentation, flipping through it until she found the right section.
Sure enough, it showed an image of the weapon, which was apparently a 'UAC Armaments Division 0.50 caliber hypervelocity chain gun.' That sounded suitably dangerous, she thought with a grin. There was a documentation number on the page which referred to another manual, one she had a memory of packing away, so she dug around for that too, eventually finding it.
Quickly reading the thing while ignoring the roaring and explosions still coming from under her, she nodded every now and then, glancing between the gun and the page, until she was sure she understood how it worked. Putting the manuals away, she retrieved one of the very big ammo containers that had seemed to go with the weapon, fiddled with it until she worked out how to fit it, did exactly that, then picked the gun up again. Flicking the switch that armed it, she watched as her HUD came up with another weapon icon, along with a counter of how much ammo it had in it, which was 300 rounds.
Carefully maneuvering the enormous chain gun, she moved to the spot she felt was about right, prepared herself, then nudged the lever on the floor with one foot. The trap door groaned and moved to the side more rapidly than she'd expected, revealing the enormous monster below, caught in the middle of firing yet another of the virulent green fireballs at a now pitted and sagging door, molten metal running sluggishly down the surface. The thing whipped around at the sound above it, moving far faster that something that size should be able to, just as she pulled the trigger.
In under half a second the barrel assembly spun up with a whine, then the weapon roared even more loudly than the monster as a positive stream of glowing rounds ripped out of it, the strobing of the muzzle flash nearly a constant light. She was shocked at how fast the fucking thing chewed through ammo, the counter spinning down almost too fast to read, but not as shocked as the monster was at how fast the ammo chewed through it.
Chunks of gray flesh flew everywhere as the thing was hammered back against the door, hitting it with a sizzling sound and a cloud of steam. It let out a completely different scream and jerked, then sagged to the ground as she released the trigger, the counter reading zero. The gun spun down, until relative silence fell, broken by a continuous hiss of cooking monster and the clicking of the door slowly cooling.
"Fuck..." she whispered in awe, before looking at the chain gun with a very pleased and impressed smile. "This thing is amazing."
After a moment, she frowned. "Bit heavy on ammo, though. I don't have that much..." Deciding to reserve it for the serious problems, she dropped the now empty magazine, tossed it to the side, and stored the gun away again, retrieving her plasma rifle instead. She had a lot more energy cells than chain gun magazines after all.
Once she'd checked the movement scanner and assured herself that nothing was going to jump her, she dropped out of the trap door, landing on the floor without trouble, then studied the deceased giant she'd blown away. Smiling grimly, she turned and resumed walking, now with a clear destination in mind, many levels below.
When she rounded a corner a hundred yards further on, she was more than slightly surprised to come face to face with the other monster, which was standing motionless in the middle of the corridor apparently waiting for her, a fireball ready in each hand.
"Oh, fu…!" she managed to say, whipping her gun up, but all she saw was a green flash before everything went dark.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Taylor opened her eyes, very wide indeed, then sat up so fast she nearly gave herself whiplash, while frantically looking around. What the hell had happened?
A second later a familiar and appalling stench hit her nose, making her gag. She looked down, before freezing, staring at the mess surrounding her.
After some time, she swore at length, creatively and viciously, before getting up and stalking across the room to stand staring at a horribly familiar door. Then she turned around and inspected the crates on the other side of the room.
Then she glared at the ceiling in total fury.
"So it's like that, is it!?" she shouted. "Well, fuck you to hell! Fuck you, fuck this place, fuck everything!" She spun, punched the door, screamed in pain and rage, and stomped towards the crate she knew contained a set of UAC Mk. 9 Mod. 16 WC/04/2147-92B power armor.
It didn't matter how many times she had to do this. She'd fucking well do it, and when she did, whoever or whatever was behind her situation was going to die.
Slowly, painfully, and screaming her name.
She was looking forward to that part.
Breathing heavily and wishing she was in better condition, Taylor ran like a bastard, taking long leaps in the low gravity and with the aid of her armor. It had initially taken her some time to not end up bouncing down the corridors like a heavily armed demented pinball, but over the last four days she'd managed to learn how to do it smoothly. Even so, she clearly wasn't the presumably highly trained soldier who was meant to be using the power suit and was paying the price.
Although, she'd have been dead a hundred times over by now without it, so there was that.
The first encounter with what lay outside the room she'd found herself in had nearly made her scream. In fact, if she was honest to herself, she had emitted a yelp of shock. But she had also found herself instantly much too busy to be scared, and seconds after that way too angry to care anyway. The fucking monsters had just poured out of various rooms and corridors, all of them charging her with eerie yowls and cries, while firing so many fireballs at her that the constant whooshing sound and explosions had nearly deafened her.
After the momentary terror, she'd enthusiastically returned fire, hosing the things down with blasts of brilliant plasma in a display that made it look like the fourth of July. To begin with, only about one in ten of her shots actually hit anything other than the scenery, and that was being generous. Luckily, while the monsters were not all that smart as far as she could tell, they weren't entirely idiots, and a lot of them immediately retreated. The remaining ones made the job less complicated, and her energy gun was capable of killing one with only a single shot, so eventually she'd wiped the first wave out. In the process she learned a lot, and after shoving a new energy cell into her weapon and stuffing the depleted one back into one of the apparently too large on the inside storage compartments in the armor, had kept going.
By now she was a crack shot with the weapon, and was getting to be pretty good at the armor systems. In the very brief pauses between random monster attacks she'd kept reading the various documents she'd brought with her, trying to work out what everything did. Some of it was still a mystery but she was now able to understand the various displays inside the helmet, and use the target assist system, which she wished she'd known about when she started on this mission to get home.
Still, better late than never.
She'd absently noticed that her anger at the whole crazy situation hadn't abated. If anything, it had grown to a steady background rage that was unlike anything she'd ever experienced before, almost burning cold now rather than the hot fury she'd had when she awoke. But the odd thing was that it also seemed to give her clarity of thought, and she was finding her memory for all the new things she'd learned seemed aided by it too. Somehow, she was managing to keep track of dozens of different critical aspects of all of this horrifically dangerous environment she'd been thrown into, was learning how to read the ground far more effectively than she'd ever have thought possible, even somehow anticipating a lot of the monster attacks before they started almost like she could feel them coming… It was weird, but she hadn't had any time to sit down and think about it so far.
The fucking monsters were everywhere, unremittingly hostile, and some of them were very sneaky. That first type was only the tip of an iceberg of ghastliness that steadily exposed itself as she penetrated deeper into the massive complex she'd found lay beyond that storage room. It seemed to go on forever, on multiple levels, and a lot of it was wrecked beyond the point she could easily pass, so she had to backtrack quite often to make any progress.
Progress towards what she wasn't entirely certain, aside from some way to get home no matter what it took. She was perfectly prepared to wipe the damn things out to the last monster if that's what was required. And it well might be, since they just kept coming.
And some of the variants were way worse than a distorted vicious little homunculus with a penchant for fireballs. Those things were basically the cannon fodder in her mind. Yeah, they'd be very dangerous to an unarmored person, and easily capable of simply tearing you to pieces even without needing their Blaster power, since they were strong, quick, and had claws the size of her fingers. But they were also not that tough, since a single plasma bolt killed one immediately, and more than a few times she'd managed to get two with one shot if they were standing in line. The plasma went right through them and blew a pretty impressive hole.
They weren't immune to their own abilities either. She'd seen several cases of 'friendly fire' where one monster was incautious or overenthusiastic and managed to blast another one in the back. That had at least twice resulted in a bloody free for all where they'd wiped each other out while she watched incredulously. The things certainly didn't seem to work together aside from all wanting to kill her.
But as she'd progressed, she'd started running into much more dangerous and much smarter monsters. Like the ones chasing her at the moment. The intelligence of them increased the risk a lot, since these ones would cooperate, and would lay traps a little more sophisticated that just screaming and leaping at her out of a dark room.
By now when that happened she was so inured to it she didn't even flinch, just reacted and either blew the thing's head off or simply punched it hard enough to pulp the bastard.
She really liked the power armor.
So far she'd run across at least a dozen different monsters, with wildly different appearances, abilities, and tactics. She had no idea where the hell they were all coming from, but it seemed pretty obvious that the reason she hadn't found any actual people was most likely because the things had completely overrun this entire facility ages ago. The few times she'd found skeletal human remains they had all been fragmentary and looked very much like they'd been chewed on…
It must have happened a long time ago. As far as she could see more or less anything that wasn't plastic or metal had pretty much crumbled from age and decay. There were traces of paper here and there, in rooms that looked like they'd possibly been offices at one point, but almost nothing readable. It had made her wonder why the manuals were still fine, and a close examination showed they were actually printed on some sort of plastic stuff that looked like paper but was much tougher. Her best guess at this point was that this place had been exterminated a good fifty years ago at a minimum and possibly up to a century.
It amazed her that so much hardware was still intact and working. The power armor was fully functional according to all the tests she'd been able to run on it, all the other things she'd found in the crate with it were like new, and she was constantly stumbling across other odds and ends, many of which seemed to work. A lot of those things were weapons. By the looks of it the inhabitants of this place had put up a fucking big fight. There were holes in walls all over the place, a lot of the damaged sections were as likely to show damage from explosions as from the monsters, and she'd found some areas that were absolutely swimming in what looked like some weird sort of cartridge cases, along with piles of depleted energy cells. There was a lot of shrapnel from what she supposed had been grenades of some sort. As far as she could see, quite a lot of people had shot the fuck out of everything in sight.
The worrying part was that she got the distinct impression it hadn't helped…
And she was wondering why there were so few remains. Judging by the size of this facility it must have had probably thousands of people in it at one point. Had most of them managed to evacuate before they were overrun? Hopefully, but she wouldn't want to bet on it based on the trace evidence.
Diving around a corner just as a huge green fireball shot past, she winced at the massive explosion it made when it blew a hole in the wall at the end of the corridor. This particular monster was far more aggressive than the little ones had been, stood about ten feet tall, and was a much tougher opponent. It had been chasing her for nearly an hour now, and was fast enough to successfully evade her return fire so far. The only time she'd actually managed to hit it, it had roared in rage and barely slowed. She'd roared right back at it, emptied a power cell into the walls to slow it down, and legged it.
'I need something heavier than this,' she thought frantically, looking around for inspiration. The plasma rifle was a pretty impressive weapon, but against this particular creature wasn't going to cut it. As she'd explored she'd come across a lot of other weapons of various sorts, quite a number of which still worked, so she'd started collecting the better ones and all the ammo she could find. At first she'd wondered how she'd carry it all, but had found after a while, and to her considerable surprise, that it didn't seem to matter how much loot she put in the storage compartments on the outside of the armor which were designed for this exact purpose, they never appeared to fill up.
That explained something she hadn't really thought about when she left the initial room, having loaded the armor with everything in sight, including several cases of power cells, all the food, all the manuals, the contents of several crates that seemed to contain medical supplies of some sort, the tool kit and all the spares…
In retrospect she should have realized something weird was going on, but hadn't really thought much about it at the time, just assuming that the suit had big pockets. By now, she knew that the pockets were far too big to be anything other than something like that cape Circus at home had. Somehow everything she was shoving in there wasn't actually in the armor itself, it was somewhere else. She'd wondered at the description in the manual of a 'trans-dimensional logistical support module subsystem' but hadn't been able to quite work out what it was talking about.
Now she knew. And it was probably the only reason she was still alive, as she'd have run out of ammo way too soon if she'd been forced to carry the cells in a more normal manner.
Whoever these UAC people had been, they were as good as any Tinker she'd ever heard of in some ways, and their tech was first rate. Their manuals were pretty decent too, although obviously having been written for someone who wasn't an untrained fifteen year old. That said, she thought she was doing very well, all things considered.
It wasn't what she'd planned on doing, certainly, but was turning out to be remarkably good therapy for some weird reason. Every time she thought about those fucking girls, a new wave of fury rose in her and she was able to immediately take it out on the nearest horrible monster.
Even as she thought this, some of the little red ones piled out of a darkened doorway to her right, screaming and hissing. She screamed right back, blew the head off the first one, kicked the second without breaking step hard enough to fold it over her foot with a crunch and fly into the wall, shot the third one in the gut, punched four and five in the head as she passed, and emptied the last few shots from the energy cell into the final three. The entire encounter took about six seconds and barely counted as a fight at this point in time. She hadn't actually slowed down in the slightest.
Another huge green fireball impacted behind her, hitting the remains of the little imps or whatever the fuck they really were and completely vaporizing them in a massive blast which blew shrapnel past her. She yipped and ran harder, bouncing off the wall and around the next corner while trying to pop the cell out and shove another one in. Dropping the empty cell to the ground with a clink she fumbled with the replacement, dropped it as well, swore viciously in a manner that would have either appalled or impressed her father, then concentrated on running. She needed to find some place to hide for a moment to reload, and catch her breath.
A weird howl from behind was joined by a second one at a different pitch, making her sweat. 'Oh, fuck, there's two of them now!' she thought, checking the little mapping scanner display which she'd figured out how to use the day before. It was getting data from sensors all over the facility as far as she could determine, and building a map as she went, which it populated with little icons showing movement, which was invariably hostile. Unfortunately, it seemed that an awful lot of those sensors were dead now so the map had gaping holes in it, and the movement detector was anything but accurate. It gave a slight advantage in some places but certainly wasn't good enough to rely on. Presumably when it was designed it was more effective.
Right now, it seemed to be very good at telling her about things she'd already worked out for herself. Anything the armor's systems had scanned was shown in high resolution detail, but stuff in front of her was largely guesswork in her view. And sure enough, it was showing that there were two large moving icons following her, ones that she'd assigned to that particular monster.
'God damn it,' she thought, wishing she had Emma or Sophia handy to act as a decoy. She'd happily have thrown both of them to the monsters right now. And laughed.
The two monsters roared again.
"SHUT UP!" she screamed back, still running and looking around for somewhere to take cover. The mapper showed the corridor branched up ahead, one route curving more or less back until it broke up into random garbage, the other one turning sharp left and terminating in what looked like it might be some large rooms. Or more random garbage, of course. Deciding that it was worth a try, she went left and charged along the new corridor, smashing another little imp to pulp on the way with the stock of her weapon when it was stupid enough to drop from the ceiling onto her.
"Little fuckers," she grumbled, looking around frantically. "Aha!" There was a door ahead of her that was very heavily built, closed, and most importantly of all, showed a functional electronic lock on it. After some experimentation Taylor had become used to the locks and other equipment in this place and even as she skidded to a halt in front of it was punching in the sequence that made the door open. The lock beeped and the red LOCKED display changed to a green OPEN one, then there was a clunk followed by a familiar grinding sound. Most of the still powered doors worked, she'd found, but a lot of them were rather reluctant at first. Not surprising really if they'd been abandoned as long as she surmised they had. It was more remarkable that they worked at all.
"Come on, come on…" she muttered under her breath, while retrieving another power cell from her armor and shoving it into the gun, then arming it. The reassuring deep hum started up again as the weapon's display lit. The door grudgingly ground open, decades of detritus scraping in the mechanism, and as soon as the doorway was clear enough she squeezed through. Hitting the door close button with the back of her hand, she looked around quickly and carefully, panning her rifle about as she did. Nothing immediately jumped out at her, so she relaxed just a tiny amount, although still stayed alert.
With the amount of adrenaline running through her after a four day running battle, she probably couldn't relax more than that, she mused as she looked around.
The door clunked shut and locked again with a solid metallic click. It was nearly as thick as the one on the room she'd woken up in, which should keep the pair of monsters following her out for at least a little while, she hoped.
"What the hell is this place?" she mumbled, having developed a habit of talking to herself in lieu of anyone else to talk to. The room was large, perhaps a hundred feet across, and two stories high, with a walkway around the second story about twelve feet up. She looked suspiciously at it, then the ceiling above it, dim in the bad lighting. Only about a third of the lights were working at all, and several of those were flickering a lot, so much of the room was rather gloomy and hidden in shadows.
She was very aware of what could hide in shadows. Most of the things that did had jumped out of those shadows at her at one point or another recently. Sure, they immediately died messily, but it was the thought that counted, and she considered shadows a threat as a result.
Slowly moving through the room, looking all around her and not neglecting to frequently glance up, she kept panning her gun around waiting for something to have a go at her. Somewhat amazingly nothing did, and by the time she'd reached the far side, she was reasonably sure this particular room was monster-free. At least for the moment.
Stopping, she kept glancing about, but spent most of her attention on the banks of computer displays in front of her. They were very futuristic, being more like holograms floating in space than any monitor she was familiar with, but she'd seen enough of this tech so far that she was becoming inured to it and no longer just gaped in amazement. Several of the projections were clearly faulty, the image breaking up or showing random icons, but a couple seemed functional, so she moved over to them and studied them. The familiar UAC logo was present in the upper corner of each, as it was all over the place in this base, but she ignored that in favor of the rest of the display.
The left projection was cycling through a whole series of images that seemed to be from security cameras around the facility, many of the images merely showing the words 'System Fault' when they came up, presumably showing that the camera was broken, or missing entirely. Considering the amount of damage to this place that was hardly unexpected. Each image was accompanied by a reference number which seemed to locate the camera in question, and she watched for a while to see if there was any pattern to it. After some time she decided that the base was spread across at least forty levels based on the numbers, assuming the first digits were a level, which seemed likely based on the way the images were cycling. Taylor spotted several monsters on the images, two of which were one she'd not so far encountered, and both of these being on lower levels.
It agreed with her own impressions that the things got more vicious and dangerous the deeper she went.
The other projection was showing a display that appeared to be a map of the base, in three dimensions and different colors. It was much larger than she'd expected and far more complicated, she saw with some annoyance. Whatever computer was running this system seemed to still be updating the map over time, as she saw that a large percentage of the rooms and corridors on the map were marked as hazardous, damaged, in a couple of cases as flooded, and in one particular area near the bottom, radioactive and flooded.
She wondered what the fuck had happened there?
Whatever, it didn't matter right now. Leaning closer she studied the display intently. After a couple of minutes, she looked at the console the image was floating above, searching for the correct interface port. Spotting it, she lifted her right hand and did the relevant mental action that told the suit to deploy what the manual called the 'high bandwidth data interface connection probe' which was actually something like looked like a six inch long metal spike covered in tiny gleaming dots of light. It slid out from her wrist, and she poked it into the matching aperture on the console.
When she'd read the manual for the power armor, she hadn't really quite absorbed the fact that the 'subcutaneous neural induction tap' it talked about was actually some sort of mind reading computer interface that the fucking thing would stick into the wearer the first time it was worn. That had been the pain she'd felt in her neck when she initially put the armor on, she'd realized a while later. It had taken her an embarrassingly long time to work out that quite a lot of the HUD displays she was seeing seemed to be responding to her wishes and needs, not just randomly popping up useful information by coincidence. At the first point she'd been able to take a half hour break in a small storage room that was monster-free, she'd reread that part of the manual, felt her neck and found a small flat lump apparently bonded to the bone, grumbled to herself, and put her helmet back on. It wasn't like she had any way to remove the thing and it was helping keep her alive, so she'd just live with it.
By now she was getting pretty good at using it, and could operate a lot of really cool features the armor provided merely by thinking at it. She wondered if Armsmaster's equipment had been able to do the same thing.
Issuing a few commands she downloaded the map data into her armor's systems, watching as her own display updated to incorporate the new information. It filled in a lot of the holes although there were still missing bits. The room she was in was marked as the level four central command center, and from what she could see there were at least five more similar installations throughout the enormous base. Right down at the bottom was a section that was described as the high security research area, with a part off to one side labeled 'experimental dimensional transport lab.' That sounded like it might, possibly, be something she could find a clue to how she'd got here in.
Several of the locations were shown as requiring a physical high security access pass, and a few of them had 'Top Secret' designators too, with no other information given. That made her decide that one way or another she was going to get inside them and look around. Anything that was top secret was something she wanted a look at.
Possibly one of those labs had a time machine or something like that in it. If so, she wanted it.
Going through the rest of the data she found several storage areas that looked like they could have useful supplies in, and four armories, which she was definitely going to visit. The more weapons the better, and she was running low on energy cells. Perhaps she should switch to one of the other weapons she'd acquired on the way? She'd found several slightly lower tech but still fucking impressive guns, including one monster rotary cannon thing that was so huge only the power armor let her pick it up at all. She'd been astounded that the apparently bottomless storage pockets the armor contained had accepted it, but hadn't questioned her good fortune, merely stored it away along with as many cases of ammo for it as she could locate.
While she was flipping through the various screens of data, both in her HUD and on the holo display, she heard a massive THUD! against the door, causing her to check the mapping unit. It was showing movement outside, which meant the monsters that had been chasing her had tracked her down. The ululating roar of rage backed that up, it was all too familiar and far, far too close.
Disconnecting from the base computer, she spun around to stare suspiciously at the door, her weapon aimed and ready. A moment later she consciously realized what she'd seen on the projected screen as she'd logged off and turned back to stare at the thing.
09:45 2236-07-16
It took Taylor a moment to come to terms with what was clearly a time and date. The projection seemed to have reverted to a default display once she'd closed the session, and the glowing blue figures floated under a slowly spinning UAC logo. Assuming the thing was right, she'd been pretty close in her estimate of how long ago this place had been overrun by monsters.
The screech from outside made her dismiss the time from her mind, since it wasn't important in the long run. The things trying to batter the door down and kill her were much more of an immediate problem. She watched the door vibrate as they attacked it, then heard several loud explosions from their plasma balls hitting the surface. The inside face of the metal portal began to glow a very dull red, and when she switched her view to the thermal imaging the suit provided, she could see it was heating up fast. Another internal command selected some sort of technology that let her see a short distance through solid objects, this vision mode showing a ghostly image of one of the big monsters pacing up and down outside, occasionally firing at the door again.
She wondered uneasily where the other one had got to now, and began to look carefully around, switching between light amplification, thermal, and whatever the seeing-through-walls mode was. There was still no sign of any hostile creature in the large room with her, but she clearly couldn't stay here much longer. The damn monster was bound to get in eventually if it kept up the attack, and she knew how persistent this type was.
Still, the door wasn't going to fail immediately, and seemed to have settled down to a slight glow, well below the point of melting, but probably far past the point the lock would still work. She could smell burning electronics and hot metal and assumed the mechanism that drove it was undoubtedly completely cooked by now. That meant she really needed to find another way out, so she turned back to the computer and plugged in again, then spent the next fifteen minutes poking around in the file-system looking for more useful information and downloading everything she could gain access to. The armor appeared to have a fairly comprehensive set of access credentials and could get through most security, although there were still sections that basically told her to fuck off.
"Aha," she mumbled, finally finding a more detailed set of plans of this entire section, which showed a lot of maintenance corridors and access hatches the original map hadn't. "OK, let's see… power conduit AN-12/W looks about big enough to get through. Now where the hell is… There. Access panel J3N/64. Which is…" She looked around. "Over there upstairs. Bet it's full of monsters."
That seemed likely. The little ones ended up everywhere. Like roaches, only a lot more dangerous.
She unplugged again and headed for the stairs to the second level, clomping up them and making the old metal vibrate under her boots, then moved along the catwalk to the access panel which looked like a part of the wall aside from a small notation on one corner. Inspecting it, she tried the special vision mode, which didn't show any movement on the other side, but did point out the presence of an empty space there. So it was definitely a hidden door. Feeling it, she eventually located a catch that was similar to the ones that had held the crate her armor had been shipped in closed, the thing nearly invisible to the eye but moving slightly when she passed her metal-clad fingers over it. Pressing hard in the right way, she was rewarded with a click and the latch popping out. Bending down she found the other one she'd guess would be there, popped it as well, then turned both of them and pulled.
Nothing happened, so after a moment, she pushed instead, finding this time that the panel sunk inwards about four inches, then slid a little to the side. She urged it further with a grating sound, to reveal a six foot square corridor lined with pipes and cables. When she cautiously stuck her head inside and looked both ways, she found there were small red emergency-style lights about every fifty feet along the ceiling, casting just enough illumination that normal eyesight would be able to navigate reasonably well. Several of them were out, but the remaining ones in conjunction with the low light mode of her armor would let her handle it fine.
The very low ceiling was more of an issue. The armor was close to seven feet tall, so she'd have to bend to get through, which would be a nuisance, but was something she'd just have to live with.
Pulling her head out she straightened up, then looked down at the main door. It was glowing more brightly as the huge monster on the other side kept firing at it. "Fucker doesn't give up easily," she grumbled, almost impressed. "Neither do I."
Checking her map, she examined the path the power conduit took, then slowly started to smile, in a way that if anyone had seen it would have made them start to back away. It looked very much to her like the access corridor went right over the main route on the other side of the door, and the plan showed another access panel that seemed to be immediately above where the monster was…
That gave her an idea.
About to turn back to enter the access route, she stopped when she spotted something on the other side of the room, only visible due to her elevated position. One of the consoles seemed to have several items sitting on it, including what appeared to be something bright yellow and about the size of a credit card, which looked an awful lot like the security pass she'd seen an image of in the computer records. The sort of pass that was needed to gain access to the high security areas somewhere far below her.
Quickly retracing her steps, she glanced at the by-now orange door as she headed to that console. Sure enough the yellow thing was indeed a security pass, one that had a code on that matched the record she'd seen. Quickly grabbing it and the other odds and ends next to it, she shoved the entire lot into her storage then hastily went back to the access panel and climbed through it, before closing it behind her. There was a fairly simple lever mechanism to lock it from this side, which she used out of sense of caution and not wanting something to come in after her, then she awkwardly but as rapidly as possible consistent with being quiet made her way through the conduit.
Moments later she passed over the main corridor, looking down with the penetrating vision to see the monster still apparently firing at the door to the control room. A few more cautious steps brought her to an area where the corridor gave way to a larger area that wasn't really a room so much as a place where a number of main power cables and a lot of control equipment gathered together. It was tall enough that she could straighten up properly, which she immediately did, before locating the access panel that led into the ceiling of the corridor below her. This took the form of a sort of sliding trap door, which had a winch mounted to the ceiling above it, and was presumably how all the equipment in here had been brought in.
Checking it Taylor could see it was simple to open, being again just a lever mechanism. Nodding to herself, she turned the plasma rifle off. It hadn't done the job so far, the thing battering at the door under her was apparently resistant to the shots from it as she'd already discovered, so perhaps it was now time for something else.
Very soon afterwards she was inspecting the fuck-off big gun she'd found earlier. It looked like something from a movie, even more than the plasma rifle, and probably weighed about a hundred pounds. There were a number of large barrels in a rotating mechanism, and a huge magazine underneath, along with two hand-grips, one on the top and one at the rear. Remembering something she'd read in the manual for the armor, she put it down very carefully, then dug out the documentation, flipping through it until she found the right section.
Sure enough, it showed an image of the weapon, which was apparently a 'UAC Armaments Division 0.50 caliber hypervelocity chain gun.' That sounded suitably dangerous, she thought with a grin. There was a documentation number on the page which referred to another manual, one she had a memory of packing away, so she dug around for that too, eventually finding it.
Quickly reading the thing while ignoring the roaring and explosions still coming from under her, she nodded every now and then, glancing between the gun and the page, until she was sure she understood how it worked. Putting the manuals away, she retrieved one of the very big ammo containers that had seemed to go with the weapon, fiddled with it until she worked out how to fit it, did exactly that, then picked the gun up again. Flicking the switch that armed it, she watched as her HUD came up with another weapon icon, along with a counter of how much ammo it had in it, which was 300 rounds.
Carefully maneuvering the enormous chain gun, she moved to the spot she felt was about right, prepared herself, then nudged the lever on the floor with one foot. The trap door groaned and moved to the side more rapidly than she'd expected, revealing the enormous monster below, caught in the middle of firing yet another of the virulent green fireballs at a now pitted and sagging door, molten metal running sluggishly down the surface. The thing whipped around at the sound above it, moving far faster that something that size should be able to, just as she pulled the trigger.
In under half a second the barrel assembly spun up with a whine, then the weapon roared even more loudly than the monster as a positive stream of glowing rounds ripped out of it, the strobing of the muzzle flash nearly a constant light. She was shocked at how fast the fucking thing chewed through ammo, the counter spinning down almost too fast to read, but not as shocked as the monster was at how fast the ammo chewed through it.
Chunks of gray flesh flew everywhere as the thing was hammered back against the door, hitting it with a sizzling sound and a cloud of steam. It let out a completely different scream and jerked, then sagged to the ground as she released the trigger, the counter reading zero. The gun spun down, until relative silence fell, broken by a continuous hiss of cooking monster and the clicking of the door slowly cooling.
"Fuck..." she whispered in awe, before looking at the chain gun with a very pleased and impressed smile. "This thing is amazing."
After a moment, she frowned. "Bit heavy on ammo, though. I don't have that much..." Deciding to reserve it for the serious problems, she dropped the now empty magazine, tossed it to the side, and stored the gun away again, retrieving her plasma rifle instead. She had a lot more energy cells than chain gun magazines after all.
Once she'd checked the movement scanner and assured herself that nothing was going to jump her, she dropped out of the trap door, landing on the floor without trouble, then studied the deceased giant she'd blown away. Smiling grimly, she turned and resumed walking, now with a clear destination in mind, many levels below.
When she rounded a corner a hundred yards further on, she was more than slightly surprised to come face to face with the other monster, which was standing motionless in the middle of the corridor apparently waiting for her, a fireball ready in each hand.
"Oh, fu…!" she managed to say, whipping her gun up, but all she saw was a green flash before everything went dark.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Taylor opened her eyes, very wide indeed, then sat up so fast she nearly gave herself whiplash, while frantically looking around. What the hell had happened?
A second later a familiar and appalling stench hit her nose, making her gag. She looked down, before freezing, staring at the mess surrounding her.
After some time, she swore at length, creatively and viciously, before getting up and stalking across the room to stand staring at a horribly familiar door. Then she turned around and inspected the crates on the other side of the room.
Then she glared at the ceiling in total fury.
"So it's like that, is it!?" she shouted. "Well, fuck you to hell! Fuck you, fuck this place, fuck everything!" She spun, punched the door, screamed in pain and rage, and stomped towards the crate she knew contained a set of UAC Mk. 9 Mod. 16 WC/04/2147-92B power armor.
It didn't matter how many times she had to do this. She'd fucking well do it, and when she did, whoever or whatever was behind her situation was going to die.
Slowly, painfully, and screaming her name.
She was looking forward to that part.
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- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
There we go. All safe and sound in its own thread. That's all there is for now but more will be along sooner or later. Taylor will get even more miffed. Many things will die horribly. And one day, one glorious day... she'll find her way home.
Probably.
Mind you, she won't be in the best of moods when she does so everyone better keep their heads down
Probably.
Mind you, she won't be in the best of moods when she does so everyone better keep their heads down
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- Location
- Belfast
Welp... there's another MP-Pi thread to follow.
Still, definitely an interesting premise... if only in the Chinese sense. Earth Bet is not ready for a DOOM!Taylor... it may never be.
"Oooh! Maybe I'll finally have enough Daemons to run that program with if I cache that one here!"
"...Taylor? You do know that's not how computers work?"
"What? Since when were you the expert on powering your computer off of the digital suffering of literal Demons? It's so much more useful than simply killing the things after all! "
Still, definitely an interesting premise... if only in the Chinese sense. Earth Bet is not ready for a DOOM!Taylor... it may never be.
Is Taylor starting some sort of tally on the windows command line?
"Oooh! Maybe I'll finally have enough Daemons to run that program with if I cache that one here!"
"...Taylor? You do know that's not how computers work?"
"What? Since when were you the expert on powering your computer off of the digital suffering of literal Demons? It's so much more useful than simply killing the things after all! "
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M. H. Fuzzball
Aperture Science-certified Horrible Person
- Location
- Sector 2814
At which point, Taylor will probably have a lengthy prioritized list of even more things that will die horribly. By the time she gets back, the only member of the Nine that might offer her a bit of a challenge is the Siberian, and that's if she doesn't accidentally blow Manton up while fighting her.
Armsmaster is going to gnaw his own liver in envy of Taylor's armor. Miss Militia will be surprised when she can duplicate all Taylor's weapons. Lung and Kaiser will excrete masonry (after fighting literal Lords of Hell, neither Lung nor the twins are going to stand much of a chance against her). Skidmark will likely not be coherent enough to realize he should do the same. Coil will rapidly pull up stakes and move to Australia upon realizing there is no safe timeline for him if he remains in the Bay. Vista will want to examine Taylor's storage compartments. Clockblocker will declare that Taylor being able to pull a chaingun nearly as big as she is out of her armor is bullshit. Emily will get six digits into dialing New Wave's number before realizing what she's doing. A certain mysterious unnaturally competent woman with a fedora will get a headache.
It reads more like the part of the Doom Slayer is being played by Taylor here.
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- Location
- Upstate NY, USA
- Pronouns
- Fjf
Gideon020
Really in the mood for ribs.
Doom Guy maybe, certainly not Doom Slayer. Well, she just needs a pistol she'll never use and a shotgun now.
- Location
- Sol;Terra;EU;D;NRW
The Taylor is out to prowl. Angrily.
Hide your imp summons folks.
Hide your imp summons folks.
- Location
- Ruralcratic Dominion of Nebraska, Dumbfuckistan
Found the BFG room.
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
"We're all DOOMed! DOOMed!"
(Yes, I know this is a bit obscure...))
Somehow I knew that more TV wasn't the next things to arrive... But, I'd not predicted this, or it getting it's own thread...
(Yes, I know this is a bit obscure...))
Somehow I knew that more TV wasn't the next things to arrive... But, I'd not predicted this, or it getting it's own thread...
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Errrr....
What happens to her respawn ability if and when she does? That could be... kind of terrifying, really, depending on temporal details.
I'm kind of hoping any 'game over' at home - death, Gray Boy loop, Heartbreaker - results in her vanishing (unlootable) and her 'next game' self immediately popping through a different portal in a random place after the maddening mandatory run through... AGAIN.
Conservation of DOOM Taylor, so to speak.
Also, thank you for the story!
- Location
- On the sofa. (Probably)
Each respawn also causing her RAGE to grow and her strength and skills to increase. She'll become the bogey (wo)man in short order for anyone thinking of misbehaving. She might also start being followed by her greatest fan(girl), Shadow Stalker as she becomes that which preys on predators.
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
I suppose DOOMed Taylor arriving early in NGE might have some entertainment value... Particularly if she detects as an Angel... The Angel of Escalation?
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M. H. Fuzzball
Aperture Science-certified Horrible Person
- Location
- Sector 2814
Right up until she starts going on about this 'stupid prey Hebert' and what she did to her, causing Taylor to give her a Serious Punch to the face.
- Location
- Wisconsin
I can see it now.
"Whats your power? Tinker? Its very nice power armor."
"Nope. Every time I die or are permanently taken out I have to fight my way through and out of Hell. Then I respawn ten seconds after I get shoved into the locker for my trigger event, except in full power armor, a full load of weaponry and all the ammo I can carry. I'll never get tired of the look on Hess's stupid face as I burst right back out of that locker in a shower of demon chunks and gore."
LostArchivist
Sane, unfortunately.
- Location
- The State of Confusion
Honestly, that's the scariest potential part. Especially if she keeps her whatever-Doom-has-for-levels and they increase each time. I could see her trying to do a speedrun while conserving ammo (the better to DAKKA you with when I get home
), and it has scarily competent results. But it does not the most stable person make.At least she'd get to see Coil's "ohshit" face over and over as a highlight.
And, of course, the required:
PtV: Step One: No, you can't in fact take her.
Rage on Taylor, RAGE ON!!! Seriously, seeing this be a real fic is putting a big smile on my face, and I'm now in my happy place.
- Location
- The ETERNAL battlefields of the apocalypse
Derp de der. Welp everything is doomed
- Location
- Home
Run #85: Only headshot kills when possible.
Run #1378: All voice logs shall be imputed in limerick.
Run #1829: Trained a Baron of Hell to dance.
Run #2233: Killed End Boss with a Rube Goldberg Machine
- Location
- California
DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!
This is going to be gloriously horrifying...
Taylor starts fighting Lung and then pauses..."Will you please ramp up to your maximum, this is boring."
This is going to be gloriously horrifying...
Taylor starts fighting Lung and then pauses..."Will you please ramp up to your maximum, this is boring."
M. H. Fuzzball
Aperture Science-certified Horrible Person
- Location
- Sector 2814
All of a sudden, I had a flash of Lung running from Taylor, yelling, "Bad day, bad day, bad day!"