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
- Thread starter mp3.1415player
- Start date
- Crossover
Taylor is DOOMed (Worm very AU)
- Created
- Status
- Ongoing
- Watchers
- 3,259
- Recent readers
- 0
- Threadmarks
- 29
-
Statistics (15 threadmarks, 91k words)
User Total mp3.1415player 15 -
Loading…
-
Loading…
-
Loading…
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.
Last edited:
4. DOOMed: Interlude the first!
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
"Are you certain this will work?"
"Yes."
"...Probably."
"Oh, very helpful. So you might be putting that girl through all this for nothing?"
"Or perhaps creating a problem that's in the long run even greater than the one this is meant to solve..."
"She is going to be very, very angry by the end. Not that she's particularly pleased right now, of course."
"It is necessary for the plan. Unfortunately. And we'll just have to accept the long term effects."
"And if… he… finds out?"
"That would be bad. Really bad. Really, really bad. He wouldn't be happy. You know what's liable to happen then."
"By the time he finds out it will be too late, one way or another."
"So you keep saying, but..."
"I know what I'm doing."
"You always say that, but I can remember more than once where things went… odd."
"So can I."
"Both of you can shut up. We don't have much choice after all."
"I'm not happy either. I'm the one she's likely to take it out on, you know. I'm doing my best, but some of this is going to take a hell of a lot of experimentation to handle."
"Ironic, really."
"Very funny. You idiot."
"I do what I can."
"All I'm saying is that this is way outside my experience or abilities to immediately deal with. I can help her, but a lot of the necessary work is going to be up to her, and she's really not going to enjoy it. At all."
"She is smiling..."
"That is not a smile. Not one that you'd want aimed at you, at any rate."
"I wouldn't be too keen on having some of those weapons aimed at me either, not with her on the other end."
"Which is distinctly possible."
"Too late now. We're committed. She was the best candidate after all, especially considering her background. All we can do is wait, and give any help we can on the way. I have faith in her."
"So do I, but then I'm the one actually giving the help. You lot are basically just watching at this point."
"It's all we can do. I have faith in you too."
"Thanks very much. And I mean that in the most sarcastic manner possible."
"I know. And… I really am sorry. There was no other way."
"Yeah, well, eventually you're going to have to explain that to her. I'll be watching from way over there..."
"Stop laughing, will you?"
"Can't help it. I'm just picturing the girl chasing you around with that ridiculously big gun and screaming 'Get back here so I can kill you properly!' like she did with that… whatever the damned thing was."
"Maybe we should start stocking up on popcorn? We're going to need a lot of it."
"Go away, all of you, and let me work. Especially you."
"Fine. We'll be ready when she's ready."
"I hope you're ready for her when she comes for us..."
"If we succeed, that's hopefully something we can explain. If not, it won't matter."
"Still not convinced. Too late now though."
"Definitely."
"I said go away!"
"We're going, we're going. No need to get upset."
"Now you're just being deliberately obtuse. I'll let you know when I have more news."
"Good luck. See you later."
"Yeah, yeah, like that's going to help. Idiots. Sorry, Taylor, I know this sucks..."
"Yes."
"...Probably."
"Oh, very helpful. So you might be putting that girl through all this for nothing?"
"Or perhaps creating a problem that's in the long run even greater than the one this is meant to solve..."
"She is going to be very, very angry by the end. Not that she's particularly pleased right now, of course."
"It is necessary for the plan. Unfortunately. And we'll just have to accept the long term effects."
"And if… he… finds out?"
"That would be bad. Really bad. Really, really bad. He wouldn't be happy. You know what's liable to happen then."
"By the time he finds out it will be too late, one way or another."
"So you keep saying, but..."
"I know what I'm doing."
"You always say that, but I can remember more than once where things went… odd."
"So can I."
"Both of you can shut up. We don't have much choice after all."
"I'm not happy either. I'm the one she's likely to take it out on, you know. I'm doing my best, but some of this is going to take a hell of a lot of experimentation to handle."
"Ironic, really."
"Very funny. You idiot."
"I do what I can."
"All I'm saying is that this is way outside my experience or abilities to immediately deal with. I can help her, but a lot of the necessary work is going to be up to her, and she's really not going to enjoy it. At all."
"She is smiling..."
"That is not a smile. Not one that you'd want aimed at you, at any rate."
"I wouldn't be too keen on having some of those weapons aimed at me either, not with her on the other end."
"Which is distinctly possible."
"Too late now. We're committed. She was the best candidate after all, especially considering her background. All we can do is wait, and give any help we can on the way. I have faith in her."
"So do I, but then I'm the one actually giving the help. You lot are basically just watching at this point."
"It's all we can do. I have faith in you too."
"Thanks very much. And I mean that in the most sarcastic manner possible."
"I know. And… I really am sorry. There was no other way."
"Yeah, well, eventually you're going to have to explain that to her. I'll be watching from way over there..."
"Stop laughing, will you?"
"Can't help it. I'm just picturing the girl chasing you around with that ridiculously big gun and screaming 'Get back here so I can kill you properly!' like she did with that… whatever the damned thing was."
"Maybe we should start stocking up on popcorn? We're going to need a lot of it."
"Go away, all of you, and let me work. Especially you."
"Fine. We'll be ready when she's ready."
"I hope you're ready for her when she comes for us..."
"If we succeed, that's hopefully something we can explain. If not, it won't matter."
"Still not convinced. Too late now though."
"Definitely."
"I said go away!"
"We're going, we're going. No need to get upset."
"Now you're just being deliberately obtuse. I'll let you know when I have more news."
"Good luck. See you later."
"Yeah, yeah, like that's going to help. Idiots. Sorry, Taylor, I know this sucks..."
Last edited:
5. DOOMed IV: DOOMGirl Is Pissed
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
The second time she got killed by a floating red ball with a single eye and a massive toothy mouth that popped up at the far end of a long corridor right as she was reloading and hit her in the face with a ball of what looked like lightning. Six times in a row while she was trying to recover.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The third time it was a hellish combination of a spider and a machine that dropped out of a hatch in the ceiling along with four identical friends, and plasma'd her to death before she could kill more than three of them, two hand to hand.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The ninth time she killed herself when she got really annoyed and used the rocket launcher she'd found in an abandoned and mostly ransacked armory along with enough ammo for it that if she'd been carrying it normally she'd have needed about ten trips. Her bigger on the inside armor pockets, though, took it handily. Unfortunately it turned out that the damage radius was considerably greater than she'd really realized, not having had time to properly read the manual before being swarmed by about a hundred or so of the irritating red ape-like plasma imps, as she'd taken to calling them in her head. Sure, she got all of them, but she'd still woken up in that now all-too-familiar room. Very, very pissed off.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The thirty third time it was a whole troop of the things that had done for her the first time around. They'd needed close to ten minutes of pitched battle to finally kill her, and she'd got over eighty percent of them first, six through literally beating them to death with the dismembered leg of a seventh while swearing at the top of her voice.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The fifty fourth time it was because she ran around a corner firing back over her shoulder at something she still couldn't actually come up with a good description of and found that the end of that corridor was an open elevator shaft. One that seemed to go to the core of the planet, based on how long she was falling for. Of course, she'd discovered this by running right into it…
It gave her quite a long time to work on her vocabulary.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Each time she died she'd noticed that it seemed to take the enemy, which was basically everything that wasn't her, longer and longer not to mention more and more effort to kill her. Of course, this only seemed to encourage the fuckers, and they rallied magnificently, throwing vast hordes of things at her, which she almost happily mowed down in bulk, using the steadily growing collection of steadily more lethal weapons she'd picked up on the way. Her approach had turned into 'loot the installation to the ground and kill everything in it' which wasn't actually all that far off what she'd started as. Except there was increasing dark enjoyment in the killing part.
Those creatures and whatever was behind them were really beginning to piss her off…
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
By the one hundred and second time she'd found herself back in the original room, Taylor was an old hand at getting the armor and weapons set up. She was also so far beyond fury that she couldn't even think of a word for it, and had ended up in an almost zenlike state of eerie calm underlaid by a rage that would destroy a star.
She settled for destroying absolutely everything else, not having a star handy to take out her peevishness on.
Her ability to use the armor and weapons had grown by leaps and bounds too. She'd now read and somehow managed to memorize every manual she'd found both in the store room, which she'd completely dismantled the third time through in case there was something hidden in it that explained what the fuck was going on, and in her travels. Each time, she'd tried a slightly different route where possible, and each time she'd managed to get further, faster. Even so, she was still a long way from the lowest levels, which she somehow felt were the key to getting home.
And she was going to get home. Even if she had to kill everything in the universe that stood between her and her goal.
When she thought that, while muttering obscenities under her breath as she quickly ran through the now instinctive startup procedure necessary to initialize a UAC Mk.9 Mod. 16 WC/04/2147-92B power armor unit for the first time, she absently wondered why she could almost swear she felt something at the back of her mind smile in approval.
It was something she'd noticed more than once. At times she got the strangest sense she was being watched. Usually that was immediately followed by some horror jumping out at her and needing a damn good killing, but sometimes it just came out of nowhere. Often following her managing to work out another piece to the puzzle of staying alive long enough to get to the bottom, both literally and figuratively, of this massive installation.
A suspicion had been growing in her right from the start that someone was playing with her, and she wasn't pleased about it. Not even slightly.
As in, 'sufficiently furious so as to want to tie down the perpetrator and cut bits off them while they writhed in agony' not pleased about it.
Feeling a very faint, but not she was sure totally imaginary, sensation of worry come to her from somewhere, she said out loud, "You'd better be worried. When I get out of this, you're second on the list of people I'm coming for."
First, of course, was absolutely everyone even slightly responsible for her ending up in that locker to begin with. She was going to deal with them all at once if she had her way. Possibly from several miles away with one of the larger weapons she was pretty sure she could build from scratch at this point. If nothing else, reading everything in sight had taught her a hell of a lot about some very futuristic technology. At one point she'd wondered if she'd managed during all this to Trigger as a Tinker of some sort, but dismissed that in the end as she didn't seem to have any of the normal urges she'd read about that afflicted such people.
The main urge she suffered from was one of wanting to kill things, which under the circumstances seemed entirely reasonable. After all, things wanted to kill her. All the fucking time.
Even though she was still curious as to how she kept apparently resurrecting in the same goddamn place each time something ghastly happened to her, it had ceased to be of immediate importance. It was enough to know that it did happen, and that it was a pain in the ass at the same time as having saved her from real death one hundred and one times now.
She was completely certain that whatever was doing it wasn't something she was responsible for, and she was also sure that this wasn't some bizarre simulation or game of some sort. Around the eighth or ninth time through, she'd suddenly wondered if it was some fucked up thing Leet had come up with, as it seemed like something the inept Tinker villain would do if he could. A few cycles later she decided it wasn't really his style even with the almost computer-game-like approach. Leet, while a dick, wasn't anything like as messed up as this place would have required for him to come up with it.
And, of course, it seemed to be notably not blowing up, or melting, or disappearing into some wormhole to hell. Unlike every Leet invention she'd ever heard of which had a habit of doing one or more of those things sooner or later.
So, no, it wasn't something he was responsible for. Which saved him from a violent death at her hands when she got home. But someone was doing it and they were going to pay. Over and over if she had any say in it.
Screaming.
As her armor came online she nodded to herself, disconnected all the tools and wires, packed them away in the relevant kits, then donned the system with the instinctive ease of someone who's done the same thing more than a hundred times in a row.
And in all that time she hadn't actually slept. Partly because it was hard to sleep when things were dropping on you, or lunging at you, or flying out of the dark at you, or even shooting rockets at you while laughing manically like something from the pit of hell. And partly because she didn't really seem to need to sleep now.
Taylor suspected that the various drugs the armor pumped into her, along with all the nanotech it used to build the neural interfacing bits each time, were having a permanent effect that lasted between resets. She'd definitely bulked up a little, although not enough that she looked too different from before as far as she could tell, and her strength and stamina had gone through the roof. If nothing else this appeared to be one hell of an exercise regime although she could happily have exchanged it for swimming or something else that didn't require heavy weapons. But now she had hard muscle overlaid by a little feminine fat, had lost the slight belly she'd always obsessed over, and was pretty sure her reflexes had improved to the point it was probably something that would count as a Parahuman ability in some ways.
Not quite a Brute, as she understood it, but a lot more than a normal human. Probably much closer to what the armor was originally intended for by UAC, who she'd read enough about in the various sources she'd run across to have worked out were assholes, but also remarkably good at military technology and related fields.
If it wasn't for the constant dying and having to shoot who knew how many horrible things by now, she'd have quite enjoyed the learning she'd been forced into. There was no denying it was teaching her a lot she'd never have learned at home. That said, she'd rather have been at home. Her father was constantly at the back of her mind and she was totally determined, with an unshakable faith, that she would get back to him and not force him to wonder for the rest of his life what had happened to her.
She missed him a lot.
Quickly running through the now ingrained process of loading up everything in sight into her armor, she double-checked all her systems, equipped her basic plasma rifle, hit the door open switch, and stomped out into the corridor which was already full of screeching imp-things, firing steadily and with exacting precision. They died in droves, some with holes in them and some with her fist through their chests or heads. The entire time she had a faint grin on her face. This was the easy part. It would take a while before it became a challenge, and she was just pushing through to get to all the caches of loot she'd need before that stage.
Twenty minutes in she was singing under her breath as she mowed down everything that moved, had been moving, or looked like it was thinking that at some point in the future it would move.
"Oh girls just wanna have guns," she sang, holding the trigger down and hosing plasma at everything in sight.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
It took her two hundred and sixteen attempts before she finally made it down to the last level of the installation. Two hundred and sixteen passes through the gauntlet, collecting anything she could carry off, reading everything she found, learning how to crack the security on multiple computer systems and siphon them dry of any data available, and killing. Killing to the level that it was now barely noticeable when the little imps turned up, she just waded through them without breaking step. Twice she'd found herself ambushed in the starting room by several of the little horrors before she had an opportunity to get her armor ready. The first time she'd beaten two of them to death with a crate before collecting enough plasma hits to kill her, the second time she'd gone completely medieval on the little bastards being totally fucked off with the entire experience and actually chased the last one around the room four times before jumping it and pulling its head off with her bare hands while laughing like an idiot.
Then she took a bite out of it, just to get back at the one that had taken a bite out of her the last time.
It tasted like chicken.
Tired of the MREs she'd used the plasma rifle to cook an arm, eaten quite a lot of it, and then discovered that it tasted like toxic chicken.
That had been a rather unpleasant death, all in all, and when she woke up the next time she resolved not to eat demons any more. Or whatever they really were. Possibly aliens. Or demonic aliens.
Something like that.
The tingling sensation in her nerves took a couple of resets to go away, but it did in the end.
Taylor had collected enough security access tokens to let her get into anywhere in the base, but now she was faced with the biggest problem so far. The flooded, and let's not forget, radioactive, part of the place was in front of her. Her armor had been warning her of high ambient radiation levels for a while now, and she could feel the internal systems doing something inside her to fix the damage even as it accrued. She was fairly sure she was going to die at least a few more times before she worked out the quickest path through the next section, but was sufficiently inured to the process that it was merely part of the way her life worked at the moment.
Hearing a sound from behind her, she pulled out a handful of grenades, set the timers on them with a practiced prod of her armored thumb, and threw them back down the dark corridor she'd come along. A series of pinging sounds as the grenades bounced off the walls and floor was followed by a massive explosion as they all went off simultaneously, and a screech of rage and pain from the thing they'd detonated near. It didn't seem too happy about that.
Sighing, she shouted, "Shut up, I'm thinking!" and went back to studying the heavily armored door in front of her, while checking her map and scanning the surrounding area.
Another screech came from behind, accompanied by pounding footsteps, making her turn around, pull out the most recent acquisition in the weapons collections she'd amassed, flick the power switch, and wait. Moments later, even as the ready tone sounded in her helmet, a twelve foot high minotaurlike thing with big horns, hooves, and a bad attitude charged out of the dark at her, both hands full of green fire.
She calmly used the weapons interlink to her HUD to put the crosshairs on the middle of its chest, then fired. The railgun spat a large ball of blue super-heated metal at the thing, which screamed and staggered. Two more shots finished it off, the creature actually exploding into bloody chunks on the last one.
Satisfied, she put the enormous weapon away again, then returned to studying the main problem.
When she was jumped by a rather optimistic plasma imp about two minutes later she merely crushed its head with a fist without looking up from her attempt on the complex locking system that was denying access to the next section. No more monsters attacked, although she could hear them gargling and roaring somewhere in the distance, by the time she finally managed to open it. For some time now they'd been a lot more circumspect at how they attacked, apparently having finally learned that one on one they tended to come off worst.
She could almost swear she could feel them out there, watching her. All this combat had left her almost with a sixth sense as to the position of the enemy. At times she'd opened fire on them before she'd consciously even seen the attacking thing.
As the door crunched and ground open, a flood of somewhat worryingly tinted and slightly glowing water poured out, pooling around her feet. The radiation alarms in her armor took on a more urgent tone. Giving the mental command to both shut up and to deal with the problem, she walked grimly forwards, almost curious to know how far she'd get this time.
Only about two hundred yards, as it turned out.
What also became apparent was that the monsters infesting the place were immune to radiation, although it seemed to make them even more aggressive. And there were a lot of them. Almost every one of the couple of dozen variants she'd run into so far came swarming out of every possible opening, up from under the flooded catwalk she'd been moving along, dropping from far above on top of her, you name it. Even so, it took them a good half hour to finally overwhelm her, and she'd accounted well for herself, thinning the enormous herd by well over fifty percent.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The next time, she deliberately went out of her way to collect every scrap of ammunition, every single weapon she'd seen, to make sure she had enough hardware to deal with the problem.
It nearly worked.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
So did the next time.
Nearly.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
On the two hundred and nineteenth time, she made it all the way to the end, having reserved as much ammo as possible on the way down by merrily chainsawing her way through as many of the enemy as she could using the viciously combat-modified tool she'd found on the tenth level. She was now fast and strong enough to wield it one handed, and could take out most things with it. The roar it made was almost soothing in a weird way, she found.
Taylor was beginning to suspect that her outlook on some things was being affected by her time here.
Oh well. When she got home, and killed everyone involved in her holiday in hell, she could get therapy or something. And relax.
Kicking the last dismembered gibbet of meat off the walkway she was standing on into the polluted water beneath, she put the chain-gun away having reloaded it just in case, and turned to the final door between her and the last level of this bizarre place, which was labeled 'UAC Advanced Research Complex. Unauthorized entry will be met with lethal response.' It didn't take her long with the aid of her armor to get through it. By the time she climbed a set of stairs and found herself looking out over a large open area with rooms all around the edges, her armor was telling her she needed to stop and work on fixing the radiation damage right now, rather than pushing on.
With a mutter of irritation, she made sure the door she'd come through was firmly locked, welded it shut with her plasma rifle, then checked all around with the life detector. It didn't show anything close so she was safe enough for the moment. Rummaging around in one of her storage compartments she eventually found a pack of the stuff referred to in the documentation she'd found with it as 'UAC Mk. 16 Mod. 8 FT/314/XC Revitalization Nanites' which had also come with a dire warning that using more than two in a row was contraindicated except in extreme cases.
She'd used at least a dozen of them on this run through, and so far nothing seemed amiss. Seeing that this pack only had four left, she thought for a moment, shrugged, and stuck one after another into the intake port on her armor, wincing a little at the mildly agonizing sensation of burning alive they produced as they went to work.
The biosign display in her HUD stopped flashing an annoying and urgent red, slowly changing through amber to finally settle in the green, as all the aches and pains magically disappeared. "Good stuff," she sighed happily, tossing the empty pack to the side. Luckily she had many, many packs of the goop left, so that was handy.
"Right. Now, let's see what goodies I can find here," she added under her breath, while getting a distant impression of slight amusement and mild concern from her possibly imaginary watcher. "Shut up, you."
The sensation vanished.
She shook her head. Taylor really didn't know if she was actually feeling something real, or just making it up in her subconscious. Whatever it was, she'd spent quite a lot of time shouting at it, swearing at it, talking to it, and threatening it.
Mostly that last one.
Whatever, it wasn't important right now. What was important was finding a way home, and preferably some more weapons.
You couldn't go wrong with more weapons in her recent experience.
Looking around, her trusty plasma rifle held ready, she started exploring.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"That's the biggest fucking gun I've ever seen," she murmured, staring avariciously at the enormous energy weapon in the middle of a room that had taken her over three hours to get into. Someone had really wanted this place locked up tight.
The thing was huge, even bigger than the chain gun, and had a barrel that looked large enough to put a soda can into. Walking over to it, she reached out and carefully picked it up, the servos in her armor whining a little at the weight. Taylor examined it carefully, admiring the menacing look, and eventually found the power control. Flicking it she grinned as it lit up a rather pretty green color with an ominous sub-bass rumbling hum.
"Oh, yes… This will do nicely," she said under her breath, turning it off again and stashing it in her armor, then looking around for the documentation that she was sure would be somewhere nearby. UAC did seem to be very good on the manual front, and had a definite process for this sort of thing.
Sure enough, she found not one, but three thick manuals, all of which related to the huge weapon, in a locked cabinet at the rear of the room, having ripped the door off with one hand. Picking the first one up, she read the title to herself.
"UAC Mk. 1 Mod. 4 Experimental Plasma Cannon," she mumbled, flipping through the various warnings about how much trouble someone would be in for even looking at the thing without the right clearance. Reaching the main part of the documentation, she leaned against the pedestal the weapon had been on and absorbed herself in the manual, reading intently and quickly.
When she'd finished the operations documentation, her grin was massive and dangerous. "Oh, yes indeed," she chortled to herself. "Exactly what I wanted for Christmas."
Putting that manual away, she picked up the next one, finding it was a service manual, and the last turned out to be a thick set of schematics and theoretical work. She read both of them with interest.
Finally finishing, she nodded to herself as she stowed all the documentation, then began methodically ransacking the entire room, tearing open each storage compartment and coming up with large quantities of ammunition for the thing, along with a whole set of specialized tools. All of it went into her armor.
Leaving that room she moved on to the next. This place was enormous, full of toys, all of which she wanted, and hopefully held the key to getting home. So she was going to strip-mine it of everything it held and see what she could find.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Ooohhhh..."
The girl stared at the shiny pile of equipment, all of which looked very familiar although with some intriguing modifications. Picking up one piece she examined it, then looked down at her scorched and blackened armor. She held the new section of what was obviously an upgraded variant of the same system to her left arm, checking the fit, nodded, and went to find the manual and her tools.
When she left that room several hours later her armor was slightly different, much shinier, and vastly tougher.
"Bastard ARC guys keeping all the good stuff for themselves," she grumbled, looking down at her upgraded armor with approval. "Mine now."
She had a vague hope that if she got killed again, perhaps the new armor would follow her. If not, she knew where it was now.
Eventually she found the place she'd been heading for all along, having scooped up everything else that wasn't nailed to the floor. "Dimensional transport lab A4," she read out loud, staring at the massively heavy armored portal in front of her. "You'd better be the way home or there's going to be trouble," she warned it, stomping towards the flickering lock mechanism. Like so much of the stuff around here it was still rather remarkably working after all this time, but whatever the power source for the installation was it was clearly not well. Examining the control box, she pulled out a handful of access cards and shuffled through them, looking for the right one. Finding it, she slid it through the reader, typed in a long code, used her armor to access the computer to give yet another authorization, then smiled when it beeped twice and clicked, the display on it changing to OPEN.
Then frowned when there was a nasty grinding sound and the door moved about half an inch before stopping.
"Oh, come on," she sighed, putting her cards away, then digging her fingers into the crack and yanking as hard as both she and her armor could manage. The door resisted massively for twenty seconds before very reluctantly sliding sideways, something inside breaking with a sharp crack!
When it was finally open enough, she squeezed through, finding it was at least six feet thick, far more than any other door she'd run into up to this point. On the other side was a vast room, three stories high and at least two hundred feet across, surrounded by computer consoles and holographic displays, many of which were displaying incomprehensible graphics which steadily changed. Most of the rest were either blank or showed the UAC logo.
Right in the center of the room was a horrifically complex block of machinery which seemed to have a hazy pink glow coming from somewhere inside. There were massive power conduits coming from both the top and bottom of the thing, disappearing into the floor and ceiling, and it was clearly still active. She walked cautiously around it, keeping one eye on her monster detector, as she was becoming a little more paranoid than usual since none of the things seemed to be around right now and that was worrying. The more she studied the machinery the less she understood it, finding that parts of it seemed to not really be quite in the same version of reality that she was currently inhabiting.
It was pretty obviously what she was looking for. The question was, how did she use it to get home?
Looking back at the computers, she sighed. This was going to take a while.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Three weeks later, Taylor stepped back from the last console, looking around at all the displays which were now showing dozens of rapidly changing patterns and tables, while a subliminal thrumming sound came from all about her. She nodded to herself, turning to inspect the portal machine. It was glowing more brightly now, bits of it having energy discharges running up and down the sides emitting sparks and a crackling noise, while the center of it was even harder to look at. Your eyes wanted to peer around a corner that wasn't there to begin with, she thought.
It had taken a lot of reading, but she thought she had a handle on how the thing worked. If she'd managed to understand the research of the long dead scientists who'd build this thing, it led to a sort of different dimension when activated, and was almost certainly what had brought her here. Somehow. She still was no closer to working out who had done that, or for that matter why, but she was planning on asking them quite vigorously when she tracked them down.
But for now, if she'd got the calculations right, this should take her home, or at least get her on the right path. It looked like it went through that other dimension and all she had to do was cross it to find a way back to Brockton Bay, and assuming the thing was set right, 2011. As far as she could tell there was a large temporal offset between this version of reality and her home one, so the time travel aspect should take care of itself.
She hoped.
Worst case, she'd come back and try again, but with any luck she wouldn't need to. The only thing stopping her walking right into it was the thought that the other side of this was probably where all these monsters had come from in the first place and it was likely that there would be some over there too. She took the opportunity to make sure that all her many, many weapons were fully loaded, and eat and drink, then relax as much as possible for an hour or so. There was no point jumping into battle tired and hungry.
On the upside, hopefully there would be less of them running around in such tight confines wherever it was that this thing led to. It seemed possible that a lot of the bastards had been coming through for years, somehow, as the machine seemed to have been intermittently activating itself since the first incursion. That could well mean that this place had far more of them in it than was normal where they came from.
It didn't really matter. She'd deal with whatever was on the other side, as she had no choice in the matter. She was going home, that was the end of it, and anything that tried to stop her was going to end up in little pieces all over the place.
And then she was going to have words with whoever did this.
Idly wondering if when she made it home, dying would send her back here, which would result in her becoming very angry, she finished off the last of her drink, pulled out the plasma rifle which she'd heavily modified in one of the weapons labs a couple of days ago, and headed determinedly towards the portal and the trip home where she was going to strangle a bitch.
She disappeared into the distorted space in a flicker of oddly colored light, then the room was empty.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The third time it was a hellish combination of a spider and a machine that dropped out of a hatch in the ceiling along with four identical friends, and plasma'd her to death before she could kill more than three of them, two hand to hand.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The ninth time she killed herself when she got really annoyed and used the rocket launcher she'd found in an abandoned and mostly ransacked armory along with enough ammo for it that if she'd been carrying it normally she'd have needed about ten trips. Her bigger on the inside armor pockets, though, took it handily. Unfortunately it turned out that the damage radius was considerably greater than she'd really realized, not having had time to properly read the manual before being swarmed by about a hundred or so of the irritating red ape-like plasma imps, as she'd taken to calling them in her head. Sure, she got all of them, but she'd still woken up in that now all-too-familiar room. Very, very pissed off.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The thirty third time it was a whole troop of the things that had done for her the first time around. They'd needed close to ten minutes of pitched battle to finally kill her, and she'd got over eighty percent of them first, six through literally beating them to death with the dismembered leg of a seventh while swearing at the top of her voice.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The fifty fourth time it was because she ran around a corner firing back over her shoulder at something she still couldn't actually come up with a good description of and found that the end of that corridor was an open elevator shaft. One that seemed to go to the core of the planet, based on how long she was falling for. Of course, she'd discovered this by running right into it…
It gave her quite a long time to work on her vocabulary.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Each time she died she'd noticed that it seemed to take the enemy, which was basically everything that wasn't her, longer and longer not to mention more and more effort to kill her. Of course, this only seemed to encourage the fuckers, and they rallied magnificently, throwing vast hordes of things at her, which she almost happily mowed down in bulk, using the steadily growing collection of steadily more lethal weapons she'd picked up on the way. Her approach had turned into 'loot the installation to the ground and kill everything in it' which wasn't actually all that far off what she'd started as. Except there was increasing dark enjoyment in the killing part.
Those creatures and whatever was behind them were really beginning to piss her off…
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
By the one hundred and second time she'd found herself back in the original room, Taylor was an old hand at getting the armor and weapons set up. She was also so far beyond fury that she couldn't even think of a word for it, and had ended up in an almost zenlike state of eerie calm underlaid by a rage that would destroy a star.
She settled for destroying absolutely everything else, not having a star handy to take out her peevishness on.
Her ability to use the armor and weapons had grown by leaps and bounds too. She'd now read and somehow managed to memorize every manual she'd found both in the store room, which she'd completely dismantled the third time through in case there was something hidden in it that explained what the fuck was going on, and in her travels. Each time, she'd tried a slightly different route where possible, and each time she'd managed to get further, faster. Even so, she was still a long way from the lowest levels, which she somehow felt were the key to getting home.
And she was going to get home. Even if she had to kill everything in the universe that stood between her and her goal.
When she thought that, while muttering obscenities under her breath as she quickly ran through the now instinctive startup procedure necessary to initialize a UAC Mk.9 Mod. 16 WC/04/2147-92B power armor unit for the first time, she absently wondered why she could almost swear she felt something at the back of her mind smile in approval.
It was something she'd noticed more than once. At times she got the strangest sense she was being watched. Usually that was immediately followed by some horror jumping out at her and needing a damn good killing, but sometimes it just came out of nowhere. Often following her managing to work out another piece to the puzzle of staying alive long enough to get to the bottom, both literally and figuratively, of this massive installation.
A suspicion had been growing in her right from the start that someone was playing with her, and she wasn't pleased about it. Not even slightly.
As in, 'sufficiently furious so as to want to tie down the perpetrator and cut bits off them while they writhed in agony' not pleased about it.
Feeling a very faint, but not she was sure totally imaginary, sensation of worry come to her from somewhere, she said out loud, "You'd better be worried. When I get out of this, you're second on the list of people I'm coming for."
First, of course, was absolutely everyone even slightly responsible for her ending up in that locker to begin with. She was going to deal with them all at once if she had her way. Possibly from several miles away with one of the larger weapons she was pretty sure she could build from scratch at this point. If nothing else, reading everything in sight had taught her a hell of a lot about some very futuristic technology. At one point she'd wondered if she'd managed during all this to Trigger as a Tinker of some sort, but dismissed that in the end as she didn't seem to have any of the normal urges she'd read about that afflicted such people.
The main urge she suffered from was one of wanting to kill things, which under the circumstances seemed entirely reasonable. After all, things wanted to kill her. All the fucking time.
Even though she was still curious as to how she kept apparently resurrecting in the same goddamn place each time something ghastly happened to her, it had ceased to be of immediate importance. It was enough to know that it did happen, and that it was a pain in the ass at the same time as having saved her from real death one hundred and one times now.
She was completely certain that whatever was doing it wasn't something she was responsible for, and she was also sure that this wasn't some bizarre simulation or game of some sort. Around the eighth or ninth time through, she'd suddenly wondered if it was some fucked up thing Leet had come up with, as it seemed like something the inept Tinker villain would do if he could. A few cycles later she decided it wasn't really his style even with the almost computer-game-like approach. Leet, while a dick, wasn't anything like as messed up as this place would have required for him to come up with it.
And, of course, it seemed to be notably not blowing up, or melting, or disappearing into some wormhole to hell. Unlike every Leet invention she'd ever heard of which had a habit of doing one or more of those things sooner or later.
So, no, it wasn't something he was responsible for. Which saved him from a violent death at her hands when she got home. But someone was doing it and they were going to pay. Over and over if she had any say in it.
Screaming.
As her armor came online she nodded to herself, disconnected all the tools and wires, packed them away in the relevant kits, then donned the system with the instinctive ease of someone who's done the same thing more than a hundred times in a row.
And in all that time she hadn't actually slept. Partly because it was hard to sleep when things were dropping on you, or lunging at you, or flying out of the dark at you, or even shooting rockets at you while laughing manically like something from the pit of hell. And partly because she didn't really seem to need to sleep now.
Taylor suspected that the various drugs the armor pumped into her, along with all the nanotech it used to build the neural interfacing bits each time, were having a permanent effect that lasted between resets. She'd definitely bulked up a little, although not enough that she looked too different from before as far as she could tell, and her strength and stamina had gone through the roof. If nothing else this appeared to be one hell of an exercise regime although she could happily have exchanged it for swimming or something else that didn't require heavy weapons. But now she had hard muscle overlaid by a little feminine fat, had lost the slight belly she'd always obsessed over, and was pretty sure her reflexes had improved to the point it was probably something that would count as a Parahuman ability in some ways.
Not quite a Brute, as she understood it, but a lot more than a normal human. Probably much closer to what the armor was originally intended for by UAC, who she'd read enough about in the various sources she'd run across to have worked out were assholes, but also remarkably good at military technology and related fields.
If it wasn't for the constant dying and having to shoot who knew how many horrible things by now, she'd have quite enjoyed the learning she'd been forced into. There was no denying it was teaching her a lot she'd never have learned at home. That said, she'd rather have been at home. Her father was constantly at the back of her mind and she was totally determined, with an unshakable faith, that she would get back to him and not force him to wonder for the rest of his life what had happened to her.
She missed him a lot.
Quickly running through the now ingrained process of loading up everything in sight into her armor, she double-checked all her systems, equipped her basic plasma rifle, hit the door open switch, and stomped out into the corridor which was already full of screeching imp-things, firing steadily and with exacting precision. They died in droves, some with holes in them and some with her fist through their chests or heads. The entire time she had a faint grin on her face. This was the easy part. It would take a while before it became a challenge, and she was just pushing through to get to all the caches of loot she'd need before that stage.
Twenty minutes in she was singing under her breath as she mowed down everything that moved, had been moving, or looked like it was thinking that at some point in the future it would move.
"Oh girls just wanna have guns," she sang, holding the trigger down and hosing plasma at everything in sight.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
It took her two hundred and sixteen attempts before she finally made it down to the last level of the installation. Two hundred and sixteen passes through the gauntlet, collecting anything she could carry off, reading everything she found, learning how to crack the security on multiple computer systems and siphon them dry of any data available, and killing. Killing to the level that it was now barely noticeable when the little imps turned up, she just waded through them without breaking step. Twice she'd found herself ambushed in the starting room by several of the little horrors before she had an opportunity to get her armor ready. The first time she'd beaten two of them to death with a crate before collecting enough plasma hits to kill her, the second time she'd gone completely medieval on the little bastards being totally fucked off with the entire experience and actually chased the last one around the room four times before jumping it and pulling its head off with her bare hands while laughing like an idiot.
Then she took a bite out of it, just to get back at the one that had taken a bite out of her the last time.
It tasted like chicken.
Tired of the MREs she'd used the plasma rifle to cook an arm, eaten quite a lot of it, and then discovered that it tasted like toxic chicken.
That had been a rather unpleasant death, all in all, and when she woke up the next time she resolved not to eat demons any more. Or whatever they really were. Possibly aliens. Or demonic aliens.
Something like that.
The tingling sensation in her nerves took a couple of resets to go away, but it did in the end.
Taylor had collected enough security access tokens to let her get into anywhere in the base, but now she was faced with the biggest problem so far. The flooded, and let's not forget, radioactive, part of the place was in front of her. Her armor had been warning her of high ambient radiation levels for a while now, and she could feel the internal systems doing something inside her to fix the damage even as it accrued. She was fairly sure she was going to die at least a few more times before she worked out the quickest path through the next section, but was sufficiently inured to the process that it was merely part of the way her life worked at the moment.
Hearing a sound from behind her, she pulled out a handful of grenades, set the timers on them with a practiced prod of her armored thumb, and threw them back down the dark corridor she'd come along. A series of pinging sounds as the grenades bounced off the walls and floor was followed by a massive explosion as they all went off simultaneously, and a screech of rage and pain from the thing they'd detonated near. It didn't seem too happy about that.
Sighing, she shouted, "Shut up, I'm thinking!" and went back to studying the heavily armored door in front of her, while checking her map and scanning the surrounding area.
Another screech came from behind, accompanied by pounding footsteps, making her turn around, pull out the most recent acquisition in the weapons collections she'd amassed, flick the power switch, and wait. Moments later, even as the ready tone sounded in her helmet, a twelve foot high minotaurlike thing with big horns, hooves, and a bad attitude charged out of the dark at her, both hands full of green fire.
She calmly used the weapons interlink to her HUD to put the crosshairs on the middle of its chest, then fired. The railgun spat a large ball of blue super-heated metal at the thing, which screamed and staggered. Two more shots finished it off, the creature actually exploding into bloody chunks on the last one.
Satisfied, she put the enormous weapon away again, then returned to studying the main problem.
When she was jumped by a rather optimistic plasma imp about two minutes later she merely crushed its head with a fist without looking up from her attempt on the complex locking system that was denying access to the next section. No more monsters attacked, although she could hear them gargling and roaring somewhere in the distance, by the time she finally managed to open it. For some time now they'd been a lot more circumspect at how they attacked, apparently having finally learned that one on one they tended to come off worst.
She could almost swear she could feel them out there, watching her. All this combat had left her almost with a sixth sense as to the position of the enemy. At times she'd opened fire on them before she'd consciously even seen the attacking thing.
As the door crunched and ground open, a flood of somewhat worryingly tinted and slightly glowing water poured out, pooling around her feet. The radiation alarms in her armor took on a more urgent tone. Giving the mental command to both shut up and to deal with the problem, she walked grimly forwards, almost curious to know how far she'd get this time.
Only about two hundred yards, as it turned out.
What also became apparent was that the monsters infesting the place were immune to radiation, although it seemed to make them even more aggressive. And there were a lot of them. Almost every one of the couple of dozen variants she'd run into so far came swarming out of every possible opening, up from under the flooded catwalk she'd been moving along, dropping from far above on top of her, you name it. Even so, it took them a good half hour to finally overwhelm her, and she'd accounted well for herself, thinning the enormous herd by well over fifty percent.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The next time, she deliberately went out of her way to collect every scrap of ammunition, every single weapon she'd seen, to make sure she had enough hardware to deal with the problem.
It nearly worked.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
So did the next time.
Nearly.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
On the two hundred and nineteenth time, she made it all the way to the end, having reserved as much ammo as possible on the way down by merrily chainsawing her way through as many of the enemy as she could using the viciously combat-modified tool she'd found on the tenth level. She was now fast and strong enough to wield it one handed, and could take out most things with it. The roar it made was almost soothing in a weird way, she found.
Taylor was beginning to suspect that her outlook on some things was being affected by her time here.
Oh well. When she got home, and killed everyone involved in her holiday in hell, she could get therapy or something. And relax.
Kicking the last dismembered gibbet of meat off the walkway she was standing on into the polluted water beneath, she put the chain-gun away having reloaded it just in case, and turned to the final door between her and the last level of this bizarre place, which was labeled 'UAC Advanced Research Complex. Unauthorized entry will be met with lethal response.' It didn't take her long with the aid of her armor to get through it. By the time she climbed a set of stairs and found herself looking out over a large open area with rooms all around the edges, her armor was telling her she needed to stop and work on fixing the radiation damage right now, rather than pushing on.
With a mutter of irritation, she made sure the door she'd come through was firmly locked, welded it shut with her plasma rifle, then checked all around with the life detector. It didn't show anything close so she was safe enough for the moment. Rummaging around in one of her storage compartments she eventually found a pack of the stuff referred to in the documentation she'd found with it as 'UAC Mk. 16 Mod. 8 FT/314/XC Revitalization Nanites' which had also come with a dire warning that using more than two in a row was contraindicated except in extreme cases.
She'd used at least a dozen of them on this run through, and so far nothing seemed amiss. Seeing that this pack only had four left, she thought for a moment, shrugged, and stuck one after another into the intake port on her armor, wincing a little at the mildly agonizing sensation of burning alive they produced as they went to work.
The biosign display in her HUD stopped flashing an annoying and urgent red, slowly changing through amber to finally settle in the green, as all the aches and pains magically disappeared. "Good stuff," she sighed happily, tossing the empty pack to the side. Luckily she had many, many packs of the goop left, so that was handy.
"Right. Now, let's see what goodies I can find here," she added under her breath, while getting a distant impression of slight amusement and mild concern from her possibly imaginary watcher. "Shut up, you."
The sensation vanished.
She shook her head. Taylor really didn't know if she was actually feeling something real, or just making it up in her subconscious. Whatever it was, she'd spent quite a lot of time shouting at it, swearing at it, talking to it, and threatening it.
Mostly that last one.
Whatever, it wasn't important right now. What was important was finding a way home, and preferably some more weapons.
You couldn't go wrong with more weapons in her recent experience.
Looking around, her trusty plasma rifle held ready, she started exploring.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"That's the biggest fucking gun I've ever seen," she murmured, staring avariciously at the enormous energy weapon in the middle of a room that had taken her over three hours to get into. Someone had really wanted this place locked up tight.
The thing was huge, even bigger than the chain gun, and had a barrel that looked large enough to put a soda can into. Walking over to it, she reached out and carefully picked it up, the servos in her armor whining a little at the weight. Taylor examined it carefully, admiring the menacing look, and eventually found the power control. Flicking it she grinned as it lit up a rather pretty green color with an ominous sub-bass rumbling hum.
"Oh, yes… This will do nicely," she said under her breath, turning it off again and stashing it in her armor, then looking around for the documentation that she was sure would be somewhere nearby. UAC did seem to be very good on the manual front, and had a definite process for this sort of thing.
Sure enough, she found not one, but three thick manuals, all of which related to the huge weapon, in a locked cabinet at the rear of the room, having ripped the door off with one hand. Picking the first one up, she read the title to herself.
"UAC Mk. 1 Mod. 4 Experimental Plasma Cannon," she mumbled, flipping through the various warnings about how much trouble someone would be in for even looking at the thing without the right clearance. Reaching the main part of the documentation, she leaned against the pedestal the weapon had been on and absorbed herself in the manual, reading intently and quickly.
When she'd finished the operations documentation, her grin was massive and dangerous. "Oh, yes indeed," she chortled to herself. "Exactly what I wanted for Christmas."
Putting that manual away, she picked up the next one, finding it was a service manual, and the last turned out to be a thick set of schematics and theoretical work. She read both of them with interest.
Finally finishing, she nodded to herself as she stowed all the documentation, then began methodically ransacking the entire room, tearing open each storage compartment and coming up with large quantities of ammunition for the thing, along with a whole set of specialized tools. All of it went into her armor.
Leaving that room she moved on to the next. This place was enormous, full of toys, all of which she wanted, and hopefully held the key to getting home. So she was going to strip-mine it of everything it held and see what she could find.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Ooohhhh..."
The girl stared at the shiny pile of equipment, all of which looked very familiar although with some intriguing modifications. Picking up one piece she examined it, then looked down at her scorched and blackened armor. She held the new section of what was obviously an upgraded variant of the same system to her left arm, checking the fit, nodded, and went to find the manual and her tools.
When she left that room several hours later her armor was slightly different, much shinier, and vastly tougher.
"Bastard ARC guys keeping all the good stuff for themselves," she grumbled, looking down at her upgraded armor with approval. "Mine now."
She had a vague hope that if she got killed again, perhaps the new armor would follow her. If not, she knew where it was now.
Eventually she found the place she'd been heading for all along, having scooped up everything else that wasn't nailed to the floor. "Dimensional transport lab A4," she read out loud, staring at the massively heavy armored portal in front of her. "You'd better be the way home or there's going to be trouble," she warned it, stomping towards the flickering lock mechanism. Like so much of the stuff around here it was still rather remarkably working after all this time, but whatever the power source for the installation was it was clearly not well. Examining the control box, she pulled out a handful of access cards and shuffled through them, looking for the right one. Finding it, she slid it through the reader, typed in a long code, used her armor to access the computer to give yet another authorization, then smiled when it beeped twice and clicked, the display on it changing to OPEN.
Then frowned when there was a nasty grinding sound and the door moved about half an inch before stopping.
"Oh, come on," she sighed, putting her cards away, then digging her fingers into the crack and yanking as hard as both she and her armor could manage. The door resisted massively for twenty seconds before very reluctantly sliding sideways, something inside breaking with a sharp crack!
When it was finally open enough, she squeezed through, finding it was at least six feet thick, far more than any other door she'd run into up to this point. On the other side was a vast room, three stories high and at least two hundred feet across, surrounded by computer consoles and holographic displays, many of which were displaying incomprehensible graphics which steadily changed. Most of the rest were either blank or showed the UAC logo.
Right in the center of the room was a horrifically complex block of machinery which seemed to have a hazy pink glow coming from somewhere inside. There were massive power conduits coming from both the top and bottom of the thing, disappearing into the floor and ceiling, and it was clearly still active. She walked cautiously around it, keeping one eye on her monster detector, as she was becoming a little more paranoid than usual since none of the things seemed to be around right now and that was worrying. The more she studied the machinery the less she understood it, finding that parts of it seemed to not really be quite in the same version of reality that she was currently inhabiting.
It was pretty obviously what she was looking for. The question was, how did she use it to get home?
Looking back at the computers, she sighed. This was going to take a while.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Three weeks later, Taylor stepped back from the last console, looking around at all the displays which were now showing dozens of rapidly changing patterns and tables, while a subliminal thrumming sound came from all about her. She nodded to herself, turning to inspect the portal machine. It was glowing more brightly now, bits of it having energy discharges running up and down the sides emitting sparks and a crackling noise, while the center of it was even harder to look at. Your eyes wanted to peer around a corner that wasn't there to begin with, she thought.
It had taken a lot of reading, but she thought she had a handle on how the thing worked. If she'd managed to understand the research of the long dead scientists who'd build this thing, it led to a sort of different dimension when activated, and was almost certainly what had brought her here. Somehow. She still was no closer to working out who had done that, or for that matter why, but she was planning on asking them quite vigorously when she tracked them down.
But for now, if she'd got the calculations right, this should take her home, or at least get her on the right path. It looked like it went through that other dimension and all she had to do was cross it to find a way back to Brockton Bay, and assuming the thing was set right, 2011. As far as she could tell there was a large temporal offset between this version of reality and her home one, so the time travel aspect should take care of itself.
She hoped.
Worst case, she'd come back and try again, but with any luck she wouldn't need to. The only thing stopping her walking right into it was the thought that the other side of this was probably where all these monsters had come from in the first place and it was likely that there would be some over there too. She took the opportunity to make sure that all her many, many weapons were fully loaded, and eat and drink, then relax as much as possible for an hour or so. There was no point jumping into battle tired and hungry.
On the upside, hopefully there would be less of them running around in such tight confines wherever it was that this thing led to. It seemed possible that a lot of the bastards had been coming through for years, somehow, as the machine seemed to have been intermittently activating itself since the first incursion. That could well mean that this place had far more of them in it than was normal where they came from.
It didn't really matter. She'd deal with whatever was on the other side, as she had no choice in the matter. She was going home, that was the end of it, and anything that tried to stop her was going to end up in little pieces all over the place.
And then she was going to have words with whoever did this.
Idly wondering if when she made it home, dying would send her back here, which would result in her becoming very angry, she finished off the last of her drink, pulled out the plasma rifle which she'd heavily modified in one of the weapons labs a couple of days ago, and headed determinedly towards the portal and the trip home where she was going to strangle a bitch.
She disappeared into the distorted space in a flicker of oddly colored light, then the room was empty.
Last edited:
6. DOOMed V: The Voyage Home (Of DOOM)
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
Taylor stood still as the strangest sensation she'd ever felt ebbed away.
She thought it was remarkably similar to watching water spiral down the drain, as experienced from the point of view of the water…
Blinking a few times, she shook her head hard, with the feeling that something in the back of her mind was watching curiously yet apprehensively. The girl growled at it, making whatever it was flinch.
"Yeah, I'll be coming for you, trust me on that," she snarled. "Once I've finished off any of the fuckers between me and home."
There was another sensation, this one coming from what she was becoming convinced was some sort of sixth sense she'd developed for detecting the monsters. It had served her well so far, each run through her own personal hell having enhanced it. Now it was prodding her very urgently. Looking around she examined where she'd ended up after the bizarre dimensional shift caused by the UAC machine. Surrounding her were rough stone walls that almost looked like they'd been melted, as if this place had once been full of lava. The rock was dark, almost black, and seemed to have tiny pinpricks of deep red light glowing somehow inside it here and there. Turning on the spot she inspected the entire place.
She was in a cave, as far as she could tell, one possibly a hundred feet across and maybe half that high. The ground was pitted and scored, piles of rubble around the edges which seemed to have flaked off the walls, and the entire affair was a rough oval, the far end narrowing with the roof coming down to ultimately form a misshapen tunnel that curved away to the left. The dull glow illuminating the area rather insufficiently came from the other end, where the same misty pinkish energy that had been inside the transportation machine she'd got running on the martian base. Just as in that case, staring at it made one's eyes try to go around a corner that wasn't there, although she noted absently that the effect didn't seem so peculiar this time. Perhaps she was getting used to it.
Walking over to the portal she studied it for a few seconds. It seemed stable, so if necessary she could go back through it, but right now she saw no reason to do so. The UAC facility would keep, and she'd more than had her fill of the fucking place anyway.
Turning around she looked at the exit from this cavern, thought for a moment, then made sure her plasma rifle was ready and headed for it. All the modifications she'd made to the trusty weapon, some of them the result of documentation she'd read, and some from her own ideas, had made it not only her standard go-to boomstick, but one she really liked.
A lot.
It was so good at killing things.
She suspected it was going to get a chance to do more killing very soon if the feeling in her bones was right.
Oddly enough, Taylor was fine with that. And very, very calm while still being a boiling cauldron of suppressed fury.
As she passed the middle of the cavern her armor HUD made an odd sound and popped up a message she'd never encountered before.
Dimensional transit waypoint saved.
She stopped and looked at the message, while trying to work out what it was talking about. There was a mention in one of the manuals she'd read about the armor having some sort of transdimensional navigation ability, linked to the way it had pockets that were preposterously larger on the inside and presumably using much the same technology, but she couldn't remember that specific message being mentioned. Possibly it was something the armor's onboard processor network had independently come up with. She was aware that the computers in this thing were amazingly powerful, probably far more so than anything at home, and seemed to be learning from her as time went on. Considering how deeply it was linked into her mind with the neural interface, that didn't entirely surprise her.
After a couple of seconds she shrugged. Right now it wasn't important. When she got home, she could work out what was going on, but she certainly wasn't going to waste time and risk problems by fucking around with her armor right now. Running a quick diagnostic, which came back all in the green, she dismissed the notification and resumed heading towards the exit.
The next ten minutes passed uneventfully as she moved with caution, skill, and enormous amounts of heavily armed paranoia down the winding passageway that led away from the cavern she'd arrived in. She didn't know what was up ahead, but she could hear some strange sounds and her monster sense was tingling.
Plus that thing in the back of her mind was watching very carefully. That was guaranteed to make her even more cautious.
Eventually she rounded one final bend, finding that there was now light coming from up ahead somewhere. She'd long passed into near-absolute darkness once the dim glow from the cavern vanished behind her and had been using both the impressively good light amplification system in the armor, as well as the thermal imaging, millimetric radar, and even more esoteric sensory packages it had. Now, she turned most of that off with an almost instinctive mental command, only leaving the night vision, which she wound down a lot.
As she even more carefully approached the light, looking from side to side, upwards, and behind herself in case of ambush, she kept her rifle ready to fire with all the tracking assist functions fully active. Eventually she found herself a short distance from a ninety-degree turn which was illuminated quite brightly by the standards of this place, but in real terms still fairly dimly. The light was a flickering orange-yellow like from a fire. The odd sounds had become much louder, some she recognized as the calls of the monsters she was all too familiar with, apparently at some distance, but a lot new to her. It was all underlaid by a nearly subsonic rumble like a train in the distance, which waxed and waned irregularly.
Her HUD told her that the outside temperature was over forty degrees centigrade, which was pretty hot but not excessively so. Inside the armor she felt completely comfortable, of course, since it sneered at any heat below the melting point of iridium.
Unfortunately some of the monsters used plasma which was much, much hotter than that. She'd found that to her cost more than a few times. On the other hand, her plasma was even hotter than that...
Taking a breath and readying herself, she raised the weapon, stepped around the corner ready for anything, and stopped dead.
There was a long, long silence.
"I am going to fucking slaughter you," she said with fury to the thing that seemed to live in her imagination. "After I do the same thing to those fuckers."
She paused, then added reflectively, "Which might take a while."
It was only the truth.
There were a lot of monsters down there, below the eighty foot cliff her tunnel exited at the top of.
Like, all the monsters.
And every single one of the vast crowd of things was looking right at her. Waiting.
Very slowly, her teeth bared in the most vicious grin in the history of grins.
"Prepare to die, Mr Monster," she almost sang before flinging herself off the cliff, opening fire on the way down and filling the sky of what appeared to be a cave large enough to lose Brockton Bay inside with brilliant blue-white plasma shots. Thousands of green, red, and purple fireballs came back at her.
Somehow directing her fall through them, most missing with only a few hitting her massively upgraded armor, she landed directly on top of one of the things that she'd chain-gunned to death right back at the beginning of this entire horrific event, ripped its head off with her free hand, stuck the plasma rifle into the remains of its neck, and pulled the trigger.
The entire ten foot tall horror exploded in a shower of gore, which rained down around and on her. She dropped to the ground as the legs of the thing fell to either side and grinned again as every monster she could see froze for a second or two.
"Hi!" she chirped brightly. "Let's play a game."
She put the plasma rifle away and pulled out in one smooth move the fuck-off big energy gun she'd liberated from the ARC labs, activating it with a flick of a finger. The sub-bass hum was soothing to her ears, making her entire armor gently vibrate, as the HUD linked to the gun and showed the energy levels and current shot count.
"The game's called… I kill you."
She pulled the trigger. Repeatedly.
When the gun indicated it was empty, she pulled out the empty energy cartridge, replaced it with a full one, put the empty into her storage, and looked around with satisfaction. Then she patted the enormous weapon fondly.
"I shall call you Mr Death, I think," she told it, sloshing her way through acres of knee-deep remains. In the distance she could see a huge crowd of monsters that seemed to be running away as fast as possible.
"Hey, come back, I'm not finished yet!" she shouted at the top of her voice, dark enjoyment in it.
They ran faster.
She followed, whistling to herself.
For the moment she was actually having an experience that she might term fun if she was so disposed.
"I love a target rich environment," she chuckled.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"I fucking hate a target rich environment!" Taylor screamed as she ran like mad. Behind her a huge crowd of enormous things howled and gibbered as they followed, rockets roaring past all around her. She spun, running backwards for a moment as she fired back with the plasma rifle, then kept the motion going to resume facing the right direction and charged around the side of one of the huge rock outcroppings this current area had sticking up all over the place. Above her the glowing orange sky rippled with eldritch currents, and huge flying things circled in the distance.
She was pretty sure that sooner or later one of them was going to attack. She could feel them watching warily.
Diving into a crack in the rock that was too small for the things chasing her to enter, she waited as they ran past, while reloading her weapons. The enormous energy gun was cooling down from being used rather extensively, 'Mr Death' having done a sterling job on most of the vast collection of this current crop of horrors until it had overheated. She didn't blame the thing, it was an experimental weapon after all and had held up far better than she'd expected. If she found herself with some time where something wasn't trying to eat her face she was fairly sure she could make a few changes to it to improve that situation, having had a few ideas, but right now that seemed unlikely to happen.
This place had an apparently never ending supply of monsters that made most of the ones back on Mars seem like mildly irritated kittens by comparison. She was actually having to work at killing them, and was in her opinion getting quite good at it, but the problem was that they were a lot smarter than the ones she was used to and seemed to be adapting to her tactics just as quickly.
Luckily she was also good at adapting. And so far was staying ahead of the things.
As she finished loading the railgun and hefted it, the last of the crowd of monsters that had been in pursuit ran past the entrance to her hidey-hole, its talons making skittering sounds on the rock. She counted silently to herself, then eased out of the crevasse and took aim. Tracking the rear guard of the attacking force, which seemed to have realized she'd managed to slip past and was slowing in the distance, she held the trigger down while activating a modification she'd added in the ARC lab but not had a chance to try yet. The gun vibrated in her hands, heating up rapidly, and made a slightly unnerving whistle at a very high pitch that made the entire collection of tall skeletal things stop dead, then whip around to face her.
She smirked at them as they all raised their own weapons, and released the trigger.
"Boom," she whispered.
Then she put the fully depleted and very hot railgun away, pulled out her chainsaw, fired it up, and charged. Monster flesh flew as the tool screamed, and she howled her own song of fury to match.
When it was done, she straightened up, dropping the disembodied leg she'd been using as a cudgel, and looked around in satisfaction.
"Motherfuckers," she said under her breath. "Yeah, not so tough when you're in pieces, are you?"
Kicking a pile of remains to the side she stomped towards the path onwards. After a few feet, she slowed and looked around. "Why is it getting brighter..." she muttered, seeing that the entire area seemed to be glowing more and more visibly as if the light from above had…
Taylor stopped and looked up.
"Oh, Fu..." she managed before the bus-sized plasma ball hit, seeing one of the huge flying things descending to her in a dive, another shot already incoming.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Taylor opened her eyes.
"Now I'm really mad," she grated as she stood up and looked around. Then she looked down at herself and started laughing grimly. "On the other hand, I don't need to piss around with Mars any more, looks like."
She headed towards the exit from the cavern, pulling out the big fucking gun as she walked.
"Mr Death is hungry," she said in a happy little voice, "And I'm coming for you all."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
One hundred and forty two arrivals back in that fucking cavern took the shine off having somewhere different to wake up than the original storage room. By that point she was absolutely incandescent with fury to the point that she could feel it apparently making reality itself look worried. She'd long since found that the odd dimensional portal had stopped causing her any issues with looking at it, and if anything her own vision seemed to have adapted to the odd way space in wherever she really was sometimes did odd things. She stretched, rolled her head inside her armor, and cracked her knuckles.
Her armor was like a part of her own body by now. She didn't even have to think about using it, she'd been in it for so long. Taylor didn't even really know how long she'd been slaughtering her way through this fucking place, aside from a rough estimate of probably months at least in her personal timeline. It was far, far larger than the martian base had been, and each time she'd taken a different route, finding all manner of strange things. Sometimes when she went around a corner the scenery abruptly changed as if she'd gone through another portal like the one back to Mars, the sensation of just for a moment falling down a hole in the universe getting less and less annoying each time. She'd fight her way through whatever the new place held, sometimes finding herself back in the place she'd started in, sometimes waking up back here when she ran into something she couldn't handle. Each time that happened, she gritted her teeth and went back there until she could end whatever had killed her.
She wasn't going to let a little thing like a gruesome death put her off her revenge.
The little boring monsters like the plasma imps were by now about as much trouble as cockroaches. She just stepped on them and kept going. It seemed like they were finally somehow getting the message, though, and the last four runs through they'd taken one look at her and run for their lives. A few of them simply froze in place and stared at her in apparent awe as she passed.
Those ones she let live. Most of the time.
Everything else died, eventually. Even the huge flying things.
She'd had to modify Mr Death quite a lot, using parts from some of the spare weapons she'd picked up, but in the end she'd managed to one-shot one of the enormous warped dragon-like creatures with the largest ball of virulently swirling green energy she'd ever seen. Of course, the fringe effects of the incredibly violent shot had killed her too, but she'd lived long enough to see the thing explode into tiny fragments crackling with energy. She'd died with a smirk of pleasure and the thought that perhaps extra shielding would be a good idea the next time.
Pulling out the huge weapon and her toolkit, along with a large pile of other confiscated tech, she set to work, humming to herself. This time she was going to bag herself a draconic demon -thing and live to kick its corpse in the head, if it had one left.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
By the two hundred and fifth time, she seemed to be on a roll, and hadn't died for weeks. This was good, but it was also a pain in the ass since it showed how fucking large this place was.
"Now where the hell am I?" Taylor grumbled, looking quickly around. Yet another one of those sudden dimensional shifts had popped up as she was chasing the last of the giant flying things, which had been retreating rapidly and roaring in agony and anger while trailing glowing ichor from the stump of one wing. She'd almost missed with her shot, but not quite.
Most of the other monsters were now definitely avoiding her, some of them looking downright terrified as much as she could tell from the utterly inhuman faces. Two hundred and five passes seemed to have given her an aura of instant death that even these things could pick up on, and they did not like it. She herself was eerily calm, the ever-present fury powering her onwards like a relentless machine, while simmering way down in the depths of her mind.
Of course, all this meant was that the things that did have the balls to attack her were getting steadily larger and more difficult to take out. This place seemed to have no end to the amount of horrors it could pull out of its ass and throw at her. And these dimensional jumps were getting more frequent too.
She'd seen some bizarre things even by her own standards. Floating islands the size of Massachusetts hanging in a sky that went on apparently forever, nothing visibly holding them up. Even larger caverns than the first one, covered in odd symbols, and entirely full of terrible creatures bent on destroying her. Until they met her, of course. They tended to change their minds fairly quickly at that point, at least the more intelligent ones did.
The stupid ones she just killed.
Sometimes she found herself among gigantic ruins made of blocks of some dark stone the size of houses, that seemed to form angles that shouldn't really be allowed to exist. She thought they were oddly pretty, but more than a little annoying since they gave the things she was dealing with strange places to hide. One of these areas was also full of some very aggressive tentacled things with too many eyes which were talking to each other in deep voices in some language she almost thought she recognized. As soon as they spotted her they attacked. Of course. She was expecting that.
Apparently they weren't expecting her. By the time she finished very little of the bizarre architecture was still intact, and all the things were dead or dying. She'd quite enjoyed that experience because of the way they'd looked so surprised when she started killing them. It had made her giggle a little.
Sometimes she passed through areas that looked similar to, but weirdly different from, the UAC base, as if they'd been patterned on it somehow but whoever did it hadn't read the instructions. Those places tended to be full of monsters that had some strange cybernetic modifications, all rusty metal and glowing electronics. She spend some time scavenging anything that looked interesting in such areas when she finished killing anything in them that looked funny at her. Some of that tech had found its way into her weapons and had definitely added to their lethality.
Sometimes she passed through places that were almost organic in nature, as if the very walls were alive, and not with the sound of music. Odd sounds even compared to what she was used to would come from somewhere, and strange crystalline growths sprouted all over the place. She'd found that she could blast her way right through the walls in that sort of area, using the tracker system to locate whatever she was pursuing or that was pursuing her. Who was chasing who tended to ebb and flow but on the whole she thought she was coming out ahead.
Once or twice she'd even found herself back in an area that seemed almost like the Mars base, with lower gravity and everything, but where the damage was even worse than her first experience. Open courtyards would give way to peculiarly old-appearing buildings, all of it decaying and falling to pieces. By the time she left those areas they were usually past the point of falling to pieces and more in the category of in pieces. Sometimes with large craters added.
She'd figured out how to use the energy cells for Mr Death to make a really good explosion a couple of dozen resets ago.
The mushroom cloud was very pretty…
Right now she was going through another of the strangely organic areas, and the tracks of the wounded giant flying creature were outlined in blue-glowing blood-equivalent. Cautiously walking along she pushed her way through twitching pseudo-flesh, occasionally ripping an obstructing piece away with her gauntleted hand and tossing it to the side. Everything looked slightly rotted as if it was barely holding onto whatever form of life it had, the tiny glowing lights she sometimes spotted deep inside barely visible and giving the impression of being on their last legs.
Grumbling to herself about stupid dragon-things that didn't have the decency to stop moving when she shot them, she pressed on, her omnipresent rage an almost comforting sensation in the depths of her mind. The unknown observer seemed to be back too, a feeling of slight amusement mixed with impressed awe coming from it. Taylor was by now entirely certain it was real, and wasn't happy about that. "You do realize I haven't forgotten about you, I hope," she told it absently as she peered around a mass of soft and gooey fleshlike stuff. The light changed up ahead somewhere and she scanned the area again with various sensors. Her quarry showed as being about half a mile ahead, and behind her a couple more of the things seemed to be trying to sneak up on her having apparently followed through whatever hole in space had led her here.
Pulling out one of her modified power cells she thought for a moment, running some calculations in her head with the ease of practice, then thumbed the keypad she'd added to the device with the right data. When it was set she carefully put it down and nudged it under an overhanging mass of fleshy whatever the hell it was, before walking away. A hundred yards further she send the command that armed the improvised bomb and watched the HUD report the status with a grim smile. "Trip over that, see what happens," she muttered to the pair of blips that she could see slowly closing on her position, and could feel in the distance.
Forgetting about them for now, she resumed following the original one. Several miles later there was an enormous flash of light that came from behind, transmitted through the translucent surroundings, and she grinned to herself. The shockwave came some time later, making the ground heave underfoot.
Both blips and her own mysterious sense of the monsters showed that there was now only the one ahead.
"Right. Let's finish this. I've got a dad waiting for me," she said, moving faster.
Some considerable time later, after pausing to eat an MRE and drink, she emerged from the strange underground area into what seemed to be the surface of wherever she really was. Looking up she could see what looked like stars, although the night sky didn't match anything like she could remember from home at all. Some of the stars were much too bright, and there was a rather impressive galaxy low on the horizon that was clearly visible to the naked eye.
After staring at it with a certain degree of impressed awe for a couple of minutes, she shook her head and resumed dealing with her main priority. Looking around she saw that she'd exited a vast cliff formed of that strange almost organic rock stuff which stretched off in both directions out of sight, and rose to at least a couple of hundred feet above her. The little traces of illumination in it seemed to have died off completely, and thinking back she realized that this probably coincided with her little present to the monsters that had been following her.
She shrugged. It wasn't important.
In front of her she could see the glowing trail ascending a slope covered in rubble, so she followed. She had a policy; Never let one of them get away.
At the top of the rise, she looked around again, seeing that the slope she'd climbed seemed to go both ways in a huge arc completely out of sight. In front of her in the far distance were more old buildings, another set of ruins most likely, as she'd encountered more than once. And in the middle distance the damaged but still kicking flying monster was crawling along, making it apparent it wasn't pleased at all but wasn't anywhere near dead yet.
Well, that was easy enough to fix.
Putting her plasma rifle away, the weapon now even more modified and fiddled with than before, she pulled out Mr Death and armed it. Flicking added switches with confidence and assurance she lifted the gun to her shoulder and took aim.
"Bye bye!" she said happily, firing the thing.
The vast ball of crackling energy roared across the plain towards the monster, tendrils of death reaching out for anything in range. She watched as it approached the hellish creature, then swore violently as the thing spotted the incoming shot and frantically dived out of the way with a flap of its remaining wing. Her energy ball flew past, a few of the energy beams from it striking the monster and causing it to convulse, but not powerful enough to kill it.
"Fuck!" she growled, lining up another shot. As she fired a second time the first one hit the distant ruins and made them much more ruined in a huge flash of green light, shrapnel rising high into the air in ballistic arcs. She ignored that in favor of watching the next round head towards the monster, which again avoided it.
"Fucking hell!" she shouted. "Hold fucking still so I can kill you properly, will you, you bastard?"
She fired again, and again, while running towards it. Each time the damned monster managed to barely escape certain death. She had no idea how it was doing that, since it was so badly fucked up, but maybe it just wanted to live more than they usually did.
By the time she was a hundred yards from it, the buildings on the horizon were mostly not there any more, there was a rising column of boiling green energy coming from somewhere in that direction, and she was extremely miffed. Stomping towards her quarry, she put the now-overheated gun away for the moment and pulled out her trusty chainsaw. Smiling like a serial killer she fired it up.
The monster looked at her, then screeched and attacked. She laughed and met it half way.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Quite a long time later, after a number of other visits to strange places including several more of those semi-living ones that twitched when you blew holes in the walls, Taylor finally found what she was looking for.
She stared at the absolutely enormous monster at the far end of the cavern.
It stared back.
The thing was at least sixty feet tall, had hooves, claws, wings, a tail, fur, scales, and god alone knew what else, and looked pissed. It was like someone had taken every mythological creature ever mentioned in literature and created a mashup of all of them. Bits of it seemed to extend into other dimensions, looking out of focus as if it was actually even larger than it should have been. She studied it closely, seeing the telltale signs of the same sort of odd energy that seemed to be all throughout this strange place. She was very familiar with it after all this time, and was pretty sure she could literally feel it inside her as well as around her. At first that had worried her a little, but nothing seemed to happen as a result so she'd stopped caring.
"YOU ARE BECOMING AN IRRITATION, INSIGNIFICANT PEST," the thing suddenly said in an enormously loud voice full of anger.
She blinked. That was new.
None of them had ever spoken in anything she could understand before, although she was fairly certain that a number of the types of monster were actually not far off human intelligence.
This one was glaring at her with glowing eyes full of hate, and radiating a sensation of death and destruction.
She returned the glare, doing a pretty good job of radiating right back at it.
"You are standing between me and the way home," she replied. "You can move or you can die."
Taylor was certain that the glowing portal she could see some distance past it was indeed the way to where she intended to go. It looked almost exactly like the one generated by the UAC machine and if it wasn't the exit from this place, she was going to be seriously upset.
She might even go back and kill all the rest of the monsters that had run away, even if she had to follow them all across the universe, merely to get across quite how peeved she really was.
"DIE?" It chuckled in a basso profundo voice. Somehow what passed for a face distorted into what might have been a smile. "YOU THINK YOU CAN POSSIBLY HURT ME YOU POINTLESS CREATURE?"
"I'm willing to give it a shot," she snarled, hefting the rail gun menacingly. "And I don't give up. At all."
"OTHERS HAVE TRIED. NONE HAVE SUCCEEDED," the thing chuckled nastily. All around her, she could feel and hear other monsters of all types closing in, but didn't bother looking. "ONLY ONE HAS EVER COME CLOSE AND HE IS GONE. YOU ARE NOT HIM."
Taylor smiled horribly.
"I'm Taylor Hebert, you bastard, and you never fuck with a Hebert," she roared, firing the rail gun as fast as she could pull the trigger. As soon as it was empty she pulled out the chain gun and opened up on the huge creature, the cavern strobing brightly from the muzzle flashes. When the barrels spun down, she looked at the result.
The thing grinned back at her.
"PITIFUL," it laughed.
Her eyes narrowed.
"I've killed dragons, and demons, and aliens, and floated in space, and swum through lava, all to get home to my dad. I've put up with more shit than I can even talk about and I have had enough!" The fury was rising and she was literally seeing red. Something about the creature changed, making it almost look wary.
"YOU CANNOT OVERCOME ME," it said, although there was an odd little note of… possibly worry, she noticed with the back of her mind, while the front of it was consumed with the white hot rage that abruptly swelled like a nuclear fireball.
"I haven't even started yet," she said evenly, her iron control holding her in place. Around her everything had gone silent as if the monsters she knew were out there were watching.
It raised a hand, energy forming around it. With an incredible shout of rage it let fly.
She was already moving, her mind awash with total all consuming fury that seemed to make everything slow down and become perfectly, beautifully focused.
Dismissing everything else about herself, Taylor let the rage take her as she attacked. She was laughing like an idiot when they met in the middle of the huge cavern.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Panting for breath, Taylor leaned against the wall, her eyes closed. She was dripping with sweat, aching all over, and her right arm was snapped in at least two places according to her armor's diagnostics.
After a long moment, she opened her eyes again and looked at the creature in front of her. It was in much worse condition than she was. One huge leg was lying on the floor some distance away, scorched and distorted, both wings were ruined, and all of its teeth were missing. The beast was staring at her in what looked like horrified terror from it's position on the floor, surrounded by bits of it that should by rights have been inside it.
"IMPOSSIBLE," it muttered. "WHAT ARE YOU?"
"Very, very pissed off," she told it, while digging out some of the repair nanites and sticking them into the injection port on the side of her heavily scorched armor. The pain of the things working was irrelevant and went unnoticed. Straightening up she dropped the empty cartridge on the floor on top of the other eleven, then slowly smiled at it. "And now I'm going to end this and go home."
She pulled out Mr Death and very slowly pushed an energy cell into it, before activating the weapon.
The vast creature looked at her, visibly recoiling. "I YIELD," it said, in angry but scared tones.
Taylor looked at it for several seconds. "Tough," she said, then aimed and fired until the gun beeped empty.
As the echoes died away, she heard vast numbers of monsters chittering and rumbling in the dark outside the cavern, feeling them realizing what had happened and apparently being shocked and scared. The sounds gradually died away to leave complete silence. She walked over to the vast creature and looked into the slowly dimming eyes set in a ruined face. "I told you to move. You chose not to. I always finish what I start." Putting the gun away she cocked her fist, then hit it directly between the eyes as hard as she could.
The huge skull literally exploded, showering her and the entire area with glowing blood. She was entirely covered in it and watched as it seemed to sink into the armor a little as it the glow gradually faded, leaving the original greenish-black metallic surface a sort of matte purplish color. Various error codes flashed up then went away again as the system appeared to dislike the contact for a moment. She shivered as a wave of tiredness went through her, before deciding to indulge in one last nanite pack. Flicking gore from the injection port she stuck the thing in and activated it, the burn almost pleasant this time after the last six solid hours of fighting. Closing her eyes again she waited until the sensation died away, leaving her feeling, if not fully rested, at least back to something approaching normal. And her arm was now fine, which was good.
Opening her eyes again she looked around. Nothing was moving, not even a plasma imp, so she shrugged, reloaded all her weapons just in case, put them away except for the plasma rifle, and headed for the portal that she hoped was the way home.
"I've killed more things than I can possibly count, died over four hundred times, learned more about tech than any ten Tinkers, seen other worlds, destroyed other worlds, and now I just want go home to my dad," she idly said as she reached the thing. "So I will be very, very, very angry if this doesn't lead me back." The girl looked meaningfully around at the enormous pools of dimming blood, internal organs, and total devastation. "You wouldn't like me when I'm angry. Don't fuck with me."
The little presence in the back of her mind that had been there through the entire fight abruptly vanished.
She smiled a little, and walked into the portal.
After everything she'd been through, home was going to be a nice change. And when she'd relaxed for a while, she could work out just who needed to be killed and how long this should take.
But before that, she needed her dad and a pizza.
She thought it was remarkably similar to watching water spiral down the drain, as experienced from the point of view of the water…
Blinking a few times, she shook her head hard, with the feeling that something in the back of her mind was watching curiously yet apprehensively. The girl growled at it, making whatever it was flinch.
"Yeah, I'll be coming for you, trust me on that," she snarled. "Once I've finished off any of the fuckers between me and home."
There was another sensation, this one coming from what she was becoming convinced was some sort of sixth sense she'd developed for detecting the monsters. It had served her well so far, each run through her own personal hell having enhanced it. Now it was prodding her very urgently. Looking around she examined where she'd ended up after the bizarre dimensional shift caused by the UAC machine. Surrounding her were rough stone walls that almost looked like they'd been melted, as if this place had once been full of lava. The rock was dark, almost black, and seemed to have tiny pinpricks of deep red light glowing somehow inside it here and there. Turning on the spot she inspected the entire place.
She was in a cave, as far as she could tell, one possibly a hundred feet across and maybe half that high. The ground was pitted and scored, piles of rubble around the edges which seemed to have flaked off the walls, and the entire affair was a rough oval, the far end narrowing with the roof coming down to ultimately form a misshapen tunnel that curved away to the left. The dull glow illuminating the area rather insufficiently came from the other end, where the same misty pinkish energy that had been inside the transportation machine she'd got running on the martian base. Just as in that case, staring at it made one's eyes try to go around a corner that wasn't there, although she noted absently that the effect didn't seem so peculiar this time. Perhaps she was getting used to it.
Walking over to the portal she studied it for a few seconds. It seemed stable, so if necessary she could go back through it, but right now she saw no reason to do so. The UAC facility would keep, and she'd more than had her fill of the fucking place anyway.
Turning around she looked at the exit from this cavern, thought for a moment, then made sure her plasma rifle was ready and headed for it. All the modifications she'd made to the trusty weapon, some of them the result of documentation she'd read, and some from her own ideas, had made it not only her standard go-to boomstick, but one she really liked.
A lot.
It was so good at killing things.
She suspected it was going to get a chance to do more killing very soon if the feeling in her bones was right.
Oddly enough, Taylor was fine with that. And very, very calm while still being a boiling cauldron of suppressed fury.
As she passed the middle of the cavern her armor HUD made an odd sound and popped up a message she'd never encountered before.
Dimensional transit waypoint saved.
She stopped and looked at the message, while trying to work out what it was talking about. There was a mention in one of the manuals she'd read about the armor having some sort of transdimensional navigation ability, linked to the way it had pockets that were preposterously larger on the inside and presumably using much the same technology, but she couldn't remember that specific message being mentioned. Possibly it was something the armor's onboard processor network had independently come up with. She was aware that the computers in this thing were amazingly powerful, probably far more so than anything at home, and seemed to be learning from her as time went on. Considering how deeply it was linked into her mind with the neural interface, that didn't entirely surprise her.
After a couple of seconds she shrugged. Right now it wasn't important. When she got home, she could work out what was going on, but she certainly wasn't going to waste time and risk problems by fucking around with her armor right now. Running a quick diagnostic, which came back all in the green, she dismissed the notification and resumed heading towards the exit.
The next ten minutes passed uneventfully as she moved with caution, skill, and enormous amounts of heavily armed paranoia down the winding passageway that led away from the cavern she'd arrived in. She didn't know what was up ahead, but she could hear some strange sounds and her monster sense was tingling.
Plus that thing in the back of her mind was watching very carefully. That was guaranteed to make her even more cautious.
Eventually she rounded one final bend, finding that there was now light coming from up ahead somewhere. She'd long passed into near-absolute darkness once the dim glow from the cavern vanished behind her and had been using both the impressively good light amplification system in the armor, as well as the thermal imaging, millimetric radar, and even more esoteric sensory packages it had. Now, she turned most of that off with an almost instinctive mental command, only leaving the night vision, which she wound down a lot.
As she even more carefully approached the light, looking from side to side, upwards, and behind herself in case of ambush, she kept her rifle ready to fire with all the tracking assist functions fully active. Eventually she found herself a short distance from a ninety-degree turn which was illuminated quite brightly by the standards of this place, but in real terms still fairly dimly. The light was a flickering orange-yellow like from a fire. The odd sounds had become much louder, some she recognized as the calls of the monsters she was all too familiar with, apparently at some distance, but a lot new to her. It was all underlaid by a nearly subsonic rumble like a train in the distance, which waxed and waned irregularly.
Her HUD told her that the outside temperature was over forty degrees centigrade, which was pretty hot but not excessively so. Inside the armor she felt completely comfortable, of course, since it sneered at any heat below the melting point of iridium.
Unfortunately some of the monsters used plasma which was much, much hotter than that. She'd found that to her cost more than a few times. On the other hand, her plasma was even hotter than that...
Taking a breath and readying herself, she raised the weapon, stepped around the corner ready for anything, and stopped dead.
There was a long, long silence.
"I am going to fucking slaughter you," she said with fury to the thing that seemed to live in her imagination. "After I do the same thing to those fuckers."
She paused, then added reflectively, "Which might take a while."
It was only the truth.
There were a lot of monsters down there, below the eighty foot cliff her tunnel exited at the top of.
Like, all the monsters.
And every single one of the vast crowd of things was looking right at her. Waiting.
Very slowly, her teeth bared in the most vicious grin in the history of grins.
"Prepare to die, Mr Monster," she almost sang before flinging herself off the cliff, opening fire on the way down and filling the sky of what appeared to be a cave large enough to lose Brockton Bay inside with brilliant blue-white plasma shots. Thousands of green, red, and purple fireballs came back at her.
Somehow directing her fall through them, most missing with only a few hitting her massively upgraded armor, she landed directly on top of one of the things that she'd chain-gunned to death right back at the beginning of this entire horrific event, ripped its head off with her free hand, stuck the plasma rifle into the remains of its neck, and pulled the trigger.
The entire ten foot tall horror exploded in a shower of gore, which rained down around and on her. She dropped to the ground as the legs of the thing fell to either side and grinned again as every monster she could see froze for a second or two.
"Hi!" she chirped brightly. "Let's play a game."
She put the plasma rifle away and pulled out in one smooth move the fuck-off big energy gun she'd liberated from the ARC labs, activating it with a flick of a finger. The sub-bass hum was soothing to her ears, making her entire armor gently vibrate, as the HUD linked to the gun and showed the energy levels and current shot count.
"The game's called… I kill you."
She pulled the trigger. Repeatedly.
When the gun indicated it was empty, she pulled out the empty energy cartridge, replaced it with a full one, put the empty into her storage, and looked around with satisfaction. Then she patted the enormous weapon fondly.
"I shall call you Mr Death, I think," she told it, sloshing her way through acres of knee-deep remains. In the distance she could see a huge crowd of monsters that seemed to be running away as fast as possible.
"Hey, come back, I'm not finished yet!" she shouted at the top of her voice, dark enjoyment in it.
They ran faster.
She followed, whistling to herself.
For the moment she was actually having an experience that she might term fun if she was so disposed.
"I love a target rich environment," she chuckled.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"I fucking hate a target rich environment!" Taylor screamed as she ran like mad. Behind her a huge crowd of enormous things howled and gibbered as they followed, rockets roaring past all around her. She spun, running backwards for a moment as she fired back with the plasma rifle, then kept the motion going to resume facing the right direction and charged around the side of one of the huge rock outcroppings this current area had sticking up all over the place. Above her the glowing orange sky rippled with eldritch currents, and huge flying things circled in the distance.
She was pretty sure that sooner or later one of them was going to attack. She could feel them watching warily.
Diving into a crack in the rock that was too small for the things chasing her to enter, she waited as they ran past, while reloading her weapons. The enormous energy gun was cooling down from being used rather extensively, 'Mr Death' having done a sterling job on most of the vast collection of this current crop of horrors until it had overheated. She didn't blame the thing, it was an experimental weapon after all and had held up far better than she'd expected. If she found herself with some time where something wasn't trying to eat her face she was fairly sure she could make a few changes to it to improve that situation, having had a few ideas, but right now that seemed unlikely to happen.
This place had an apparently never ending supply of monsters that made most of the ones back on Mars seem like mildly irritated kittens by comparison. She was actually having to work at killing them, and was in her opinion getting quite good at it, but the problem was that they were a lot smarter than the ones she was used to and seemed to be adapting to her tactics just as quickly.
Luckily she was also good at adapting. And so far was staying ahead of the things.
As she finished loading the railgun and hefted it, the last of the crowd of monsters that had been in pursuit ran past the entrance to her hidey-hole, its talons making skittering sounds on the rock. She counted silently to herself, then eased out of the crevasse and took aim. Tracking the rear guard of the attacking force, which seemed to have realized she'd managed to slip past and was slowing in the distance, she held the trigger down while activating a modification she'd added in the ARC lab but not had a chance to try yet. The gun vibrated in her hands, heating up rapidly, and made a slightly unnerving whistle at a very high pitch that made the entire collection of tall skeletal things stop dead, then whip around to face her.
She smirked at them as they all raised their own weapons, and released the trigger.
"Boom," she whispered.
Then she put the fully depleted and very hot railgun away, pulled out her chainsaw, fired it up, and charged. Monster flesh flew as the tool screamed, and she howled her own song of fury to match.
When it was done, she straightened up, dropping the disembodied leg she'd been using as a cudgel, and looked around in satisfaction.
"Motherfuckers," she said under her breath. "Yeah, not so tough when you're in pieces, are you?"
Kicking a pile of remains to the side she stomped towards the path onwards. After a few feet, she slowed and looked around. "Why is it getting brighter..." she muttered, seeing that the entire area seemed to be glowing more and more visibly as if the light from above had…
Taylor stopped and looked up.
"Oh, Fu..." she managed before the bus-sized plasma ball hit, seeing one of the huge flying things descending to her in a dive, another shot already incoming.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Taylor opened her eyes.
"Now I'm really mad," she grated as she stood up and looked around. Then she looked down at herself and started laughing grimly. "On the other hand, I don't need to piss around with Mars any more, looks like."
She headed towards the exit from the cavern, pulling out the big fucking gun as she walked.
"Mr Death is hungry," she said in a happy little voice, "And I'm coming for you all."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
One hundred and forty two arrivals back in that fucking cavern took the shine off having somewhere different to wake up than the original storage room. By that point she was absolutely incandescent with fury to the point that she could feel it apparently making reality itself look worried. She'd long since found that the odd dimensional portal had stopped causing her any issues with looking at it, and if anything her own vision seemed to have adapted to the odd way space in wherever she really was sometimes did odd things. She stretched, rolled her head inside her armor, and cracked her knuckles.
Her armor was like a part of her own body by now. She didn't even have to think about using it, she'd been in it for so long. Taylor didn't even really know how long she'd been slaughtering her way through this fucking place, aside from a rough estimate of probably months at least in her personal timeline. It was far, far larger than the martian base had been, and each time she'd taken a different route, finding all manner of strange things. Sometimes when she went around a corner the scenery abruptly changed as if she'd gone through another portal like the one back to Mars, the sensation of just for a moment falling down a hole in the universe getting less and less annoying each time. She'd fight her way through whatever the new place held, sometimes finding herself back in the place she'd started in, sometimes waking up back here when she ran into something she couldn't handle. Each time that happened, she gritted her teeth and went back there until she could end whatever had killed her.
She wasn't going to let a little thing like a gruesome death put her off her revenge.
The little boring monsters like the plasma imps were by now about as much trouble as cockroaches. She just stepped on them and kept going. It seemed like they were finally somehow getting the message, though, and the last four runs through they'd taken one look at her and run for their lives. A few of them simply froze in place and stared at her in apparent awe as she passed.
Those ones she let live. Most of the time.
Everything else died, eventually. Even the huge flying things.
She'd had to modify Mr Death quite a lot, using parts from some of the spare weapons she'd picked up, but in the end she'd managed to one-shot one of the enormous warped dragon-like creatures with the largest ball of virulently swirling green energy she'd ever seen. Of course, the fringe effects of the incredibly violent shot had killed her too, but she'd lived long enough to see the thing explode into tiny fragments crackling with energy. She'd died with a smirk of pleasure and the thought that perhaps extra shielding would be a good idea the next time.
Pulling out the huge weapon and her toolkit, along with a large pile of other confiscated tech, she set to work, humming to herself. This time she was going to bag herself a draconic demon -thing and live to kick its corpse in the head, if it had one left.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
By the two hundred and fifth time, she seemed to be on a roll, and hadn't died for weeks. This was good, but it was also a pain in the ass since it showed how fucking large this place was.
"Now where the hell am I?" Taylor grumbled, looking quickly around. Yet another one of those sudden dimensional shifts had popped up as she was chasing the last of the giant flying things, which had been retreating rapidly and roaring in agony and anger while trailing glowing ichor from the stump of one wing. She'd almost missed with her shot, but not quite.
Most of the other monsters were now definitely avoiding her, some of them looking downright terrified as much as she could tell from the utterly inhuman faces. Two hundred and five passes seemed to have given her an aura of instant death that even these things could pick up on, and they did not like it. She herself was eerily calm, the ever-present fury powering her onwards like a relentless machine, while simmering way down in the depths of her mind.
Of course, all this meant was that the things that did have the balls to attack her were getting steadily larger and more difficult to take out. This place seemed to have no end to the amount of horrors it could pull out of its ass and throw at her. And these dimensional jumps were getting more frequent too.
She'd seen some bizarre things even by her own standards. Floating islands the size of Massachusetts hanging in a sky that went on apparently forever, nothing visibly holding them up. Even larger caverns than the first one, covered in odd symbols, and entirely full of terrible creatures bent on destroying her. Until they met her, of course. They tended to change their minds fairly quickly at that point, at least the more intelligent ones did.
The stupid ones she just killed.
Sometimes she found herself among gigantic ruins made of blocks of some dark stone the size of houses, that seemed to form angles that shouldn't really be allowed to exist. She thought they were oddly pretty, but more than a little annoying since they gave the things she was dealing with strange places to hide. One of these areas was also full of some very aggressive tentacled things with too many eyes which were talking to each other in deep voices in some language she almost thought she recognized. As soon as they spotted her they attacked. Of course. She was expecting that.
Apparently they weren't expecting her. By the time she finished very little of the bizarre architecture was still intact, and all the things were dead or dying. She'd quite enjoyed that experience because of the way they'd looked so surprised when she started killing them. It had made her giggle a little.
Sometimes she passed through areas that looked similar to, but weirdly different from, the UAC base, as if they'd been patterned on it somehow but whoever did it hadn't read the instructions. Those places tended to be full of monsters that had some strange cybernetic modifications, all rusty metal and glowing electronics. She spend some time scavenging anything that looked interesting in such areas when she finished killing anything in them that looked funny at her. Some of that tech had found its way into her weapons and had definitely added to their lethality.
Sometimes she passed through places that were almost organic in nature, as if the very walls were alive, and not with the sound of music. Odd sounds even compared to what she was used to would come from somewhere, and strange crystalline growths sprouted all over the place. She'd found that she could blast her way right through the walls in that sort of area, using the tracker system to locate whatever she was pursuing or that was pursuing her. Who was chasing who tended to ebb and flow but on the whole she thought she was coming out ahead.
Once or twice she'd even found herself back in an area that seemed almost like the Mars base, with lower gravity and everything, but where the damage was even worse than her first experience. Open courtyards would give way to peculiarly old-appearing buildings, all of it decaying and falling to pieces. By the time she left those areas they were usually past the point of falling to pieces and more in the category of in pieces. Sometimes with large craters added.
She'd figured out how to use the energy cells for Mr Death to make a really good explosion a couple of dozen resets ago.
The mushroom cloud was very pretty…
Right now she was going through another of the strangely organic areas, and the tracks of the wounded giant flying creature were outlined in blue-glowing blood-equivalent. Cautiously walking along she pushed her way through twitching pseudo-flesh, occasionally ripping an obstructing piece away with her gauntleted hand and tossing it to the side. Everything looked slightly rotted as if it was barely holding onto whatever form of life it had, the tiny glowing lights she sometimes spotted deep inside barely visible and giving the impression of being on their last legs.
Grumbling to herself about stupid dragon-things that didn't have the decency to stop moving when she shot them, she pressed on, her omnipresent rage an almost comforting sensation in the depths of her mind. The unknown observer seemed to be back too, a feeling of slight amusement mixed with impressed awe coming from it. Taylor was by now entirely certain it was real, and wasn't happy about that. "You do realize I haven't forgotten about you, I hope," she told it absently as she peered around a mass of soft and gooey fleshlike stuff. The light changed up ahead somewhere and she scanned the area again with various sensors. Her quarry showed as being about half a mile ahead, and behind her a couple more of the things seemed to be trying to sneak up on her having apparently followed through whatever hole in space had led her here.
Pulling out one of her modified power cells she thought for a moment, running some calculations in her head with the ease of practice, then thumbed the keypad she'd added to the device with the right data. When it was set she carefully put it down and nudged it under an overhanging mass of fleshy whatever the hell it was, before walking away. A hundred yards further she send the command that armed the improvised bomb and watched the HUD report the status with a grim smile. "Trip over that, see what happens," she muttered to the pair of blips that she could see slowly closing on her position, and could feel in the distance.
Forgetting about them for now, she resumed following the original one. Several miles later there was an enormous flash of light that came from behind, transmitted through the translucent surroundings, and she grinned to herself. The shockwave came some time later, making the ground heave underfoot.
Both blips and her own mysterious sense of the monsters showed that there was now only the one ahead.
"Right. Let's finish this. I've got a dad waiting for me," she said, moving faster.
Some considerable time later, after pausing to eat an MRE and drink, she emerged from the strange underground area into what seemed to be the surface of wherever she really was. Looking up she could see what looked like stars, although the night sky didn't match anything like she could remember from home at all. Some of the stars were much too bright, and there was a rather impressive galaxy low on the horizon that was clearly visible to the naked eye.
After staring at it with a certain degree of impressed awe for a couple of minutes, she shook her head and resumed dealing with her main priority. Looking around she saw that she'd exited a vast cliff formed of that strange almost organic rock stuff which stretched off in both directions out of sight, and rose to at least a couple of hundred feet above her. The little traces of illumination in it seemed to have died off completely, and thinking back she realized that this probably coincided with her little present to the monsters that had been following her.
She shrugged. It wasn't important.
In front of her she could see the glowing trail ascending a slope covered in rubble, so she followed. She had a policy; Never let one of them get away.
At the top of the rise, she looked around again, seeing that the slope she'd climbed seemed to go both ways in a huge arc completely out of sight. In front of her in the far distance were more old buildings, another set of ruins most likely, as she'd encountered more than once. And in the middle distance the damaged but still kicking flying monster was crawling along, making it apparent it wasn't pleased at all but wasn't anywhere near dead yet.
Well, that was easy enough to fix.
Putting her plasma rifle away, the weapon now even more modified and fiddled with than before, she pulled out Mr Death and armed it. Flicking added switches with confidence and assurance she lifted the gun to her shoulder and took aim.
"Bye bye!" she said happily, firing the thing.
The vast ball of crackling energy roared across the plain towards the monster, tendrils of death reaching out for anything in range. She watched as it approached the hellish creature, then swore violently as the thing spotted the incoming shot and frantically dived out of the way with a flap of its remaining wing. Her energy ball flew past, a few of the energy beams from it striking the monster and causing it to convulse, but not powerful enough to kill it.
"Fuck!" she growled, lining up another shot. As she fired a second time the first one hit the distant ruins and made them much more ruined in a huge flash of green light, shrapnel rising high into the air in ballistic arcs. She ignored that in favor of watching the next round head towards the monster, which again avoided it.
"Fucking hell!" she shouted. "Hold fucking still so I can kill you properly, will you, you bastard?"
She fired again, and again, while running towards it. Each time the damned monster managed to barely escape certain death. She had no idea how it was doing that, since it was so badly fucked up, but maybe it just wanted to live more than they usually did.
By the time she was a hundred yards from it, the buildings on the horizon were mostly not there any more, there was a rising column of boiling green energy coming from somewhere in that direction, and she was extremely miffed. Stomping towards her quarry, she put the now-overheated gun away for the moment and pulled out her trusty chainsaw. Smiling like a serial killer she fired it up.
The monster looked at her, then screeched and attacked. She laughed and met it half way.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Quite a long time later, after a number of other visits to strange places including several more of those semi-living ones that twitched when you blew holes in the walls, Taylor finally found what she was looking for.
She stared at the absolutely enormous monster at the far end of the cavern.
It stared back.
The thing was at least sixty feet tall, had hooves, claws, wings, a tail, fur, scales, and god alone knew what else, and looked pissed. It was like someone had taken every mythological creature ever mentioned in literature and created a mashup of all of them. Bits of it seemed to extend into other dimensions, looking out of focus as if it was actually even larger than it should have been. She studied it closely, seeing the telltale signs of the same sort of odd energy that seemed to be all throughout this strange place. She was very familiar with it after all this time, and was pretty sure she could literally feel it inside her as well as around her. At first that had worried her a little, but nothing seemed to happen as a result so she'd stopped caring.
"YOU ARE BECOMING AN IRRITATION, INSIGNIFICANT PEST," the thing suddenly said in an enormously loud voice full of anger.
She blinked. That was new.
None of them had ever spoken in anything she could understand before, although she was fairly certain that a number of the types of monster were actually not far off human intelligence.
This one was glaring at her with glowing eyes full of hate, and radiating a sensation of death and destruction.
She returned the glare, doing a pretty good job of radiating right back at it.
"You are standing between me and the way home," she replied. "You can move or you can die."
Taylor was certain that the glowing portal she could see some distance past it was indeed the way to where she intended to go. It looked almost exactly like the one generated by the UAC machine and if it wasn't the exit from this place, she was going to be seriously upset.
She might even go back and kill all the rest of the monsters that had run away, even if she had to follow them all across the universe, merely to get across quite how peeved she really was.
"DIE?" It chuckled in a basso profundo voice. Somehow what passed for a face distorted into what might have been a smile. "YOU THINK YOU CAN POSSIBLY HURT ME YOU POINTLESS CREATURE?"
"I'm willing to give it a shot," she snarled, hefting the rail gun menacingly. "And I don't give up. At all."
"OTHERS HAVE TRIED. NONE HAVE SUCCEEDED," the thing chuckled nastily. All around her, she could feel and hear other monsters of all types closing in, but didn't bother looking. "ONLY ONE HAS EVER COME CLOSE AND HE IS GONE. YOU ARE NOT HIM."
Taylor smiled horribly.
"I'm Taylor Hebert, you bastard, and you never fuck with a Hebert," she roared, firing the rail gun as fast as she could pull the trigger. As soon as it was empty she pulled out the chain gun and opened up on the huge creature, the cavern strobing brightly from the muzzle flashes. When the barrels spun down, she looked at the result.
The thing grinned back at her.
"PITIFUL," it laughed.
Her eyes narrowed.
"I've killed dragons, and demons, and aliens, and floated in space, and swum through lava, all to get home to my dad. I've put up with more shit than I can even talk about and I have had enough!" The fury was rising and she was literally seeing red. Something about the creature changed, making it almost look wary.
"YOU CANNOT OVERCOME ME," it said, although there was an odd little note of… possibly worry, she noticed with the back of her mind, while the front of it was consumed with the white hot rage that abruptly swelled like a nuclear fireball.
"I haven't even started yet," she said evenly, her iron control holding her in place. Around her everything had gone silent as if the monsters she knew were out there were watching.
It raised a hand, energy forming around it. With an incredible shout of rage it let fly.
She was already moving, her mind awash with total all consuming fury that seemed to make everything slow down and become perfectly, beautifully focused.
Dismissing everything else about herself, Taylor let the rage take her as she attacked. She was laughing like an idiot when they met in the middle of the huge cavern.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Panting for breath, Taylor leaned against the wall, her eyes closed. She was dripping with sweat, aching all over, and her right arm was snapped in at least two places according to her armor's diagnostics.
After a long moment, she opened her eyes again and looked at the creature in front of her. It was in much worse condition than she was. One huge leg was lying on the floor some distance away, scorched and distorted, both wings were ruined, and all of its teeth were missing. The beast was staring at her in what looked like horrified terror from it's position on the floor, surrounded by bits of it that should by rights have been inside it.
"IMPOSSIBLE," it muttered. "WHAT ARE YOU?"
"Very, very pissed off," she told it, while digging out some of the repair nanites and sticking them into the injection port on the side of her heavily scorched armor. The pain of the things working was irrelevant and went unnoticed. Straightening up she dropped the empty cartridge on the floor on top of the other eleven, then slowly smiled at it. "And now I'm going to end this and go home."
She pulled out Mr Death and very slowly pushed an energy cell into it, before activating the weapon.
The vast creature looked at her, visibly recoiling. "I YIELD," it said, in angry but scared tones.
Taylor looked at it for several seconds. "Tough," she said, then aimed and fired until the gun beeped empty.
As the echoes died away, she heard vast numbers of monsters chittering and rumbling in the dark outside the cavern, feeling them realizing what had happened and apparently being shocked and scared. The sounds gradually died away to leave complete silence. She walked over to the vast creature and looked into the slowly dimming eyes set in a ruined face. "I told you to move. You chose not to. I always finish what I start." Putting the gun away she cocked her fist, then hit it directly between the eyes as hard as she could.
The huge skull literally exploded, showering her and the entire area with glowing blood. She was entirely covered in it and watched as it seemed to sink into the armor a little as it the glow gradually faded, leaving the original greenish-black metallic surface a sort of matte purplish color. Various error codes flashed up then went away again as the system appeared to dislike the contact for a moment. She shivered as a wave of tiredness went through her, before deciding to indulge in one last nanite pack. Flicking gore from the injection port she stuck the thing in and activated it, the burn almost pleasant this time after the last six solid hours of fighting. Closing her eyes again she waited until the sensation died away, leaving her feeling, if not fully rested, at least back to something approaching normal. And her arm was now fine, which was good.
Opening her eyes again she looked around. Nothing was moving, not even a plasma imp, so she shrugged, reloaded all her weapons just in case, put them away except for the plasma rifle, and headed for the portal that she hoped was the way home.
"I've killed more things than I can possibly count, died over four hundred times, learned more about tech than any ten Tinkers, seen other worlds, destroyed other worlds, and now I just want go home to my dad," she idly said as she reached the thing. "So I will be very, very, very angry if this doesn't lead me back." The girl looked meaningfully around at the enormous pools of dimming blood, internal organs, and total devastation. "You wouldn't like me when I'm angry. Don't fuck with me."
The little presence in the back of her mind that had been there through the entire fight abruptly vanished.
She smiled a little, and walked into the portal.
After everything she'd been through, home was going to be a nice change. And when she'd relaxed for a while, she could work out just who needed to be killed and how long this should take.
But before that, she needed her dad and a pizza.
Last edited:
1. Guest Omake - We need to talk...
Lisa strolled towards her favorite pizza place; Brian was at his apartment, and if she sent Regent for pizza, she knew exactly what he'd get. None of that for her, thank you.
There was a crowd already a block away, as she approached the corner she had to turn.
Gawking at new cape.
Well, wasn't that interesting.
She glanced as she turned the corner, catching just a glimpse of a figure in some kind of power armor next to a tall middle-aged man.
ANGRY
With an eye-tearing, migrane-inducing twisting of space the figure suddenly had a huge energy gun in her hands, and in just a flicker the figure was RIGHT THERE, flipping a few switches on the side with her thumb while pressing the warm, glowing muzzle against Lisa's head.
VERY ANGRY. Speed is natural speed; not from armor. Switches turned down power on weapon. Now will only vaporize you, the car behind you, and the pawn shop behind that.
Shit. Wait, she was speaking.
"I thought slaughtering every one of your kind I could find in Hell and killing your boss would be enough, demon, but no, you followed me home. Where's your portal, demon?" asked Taylor, voice full of mostly-suppressed rage.
She's looking at me... came a very small insight from her power... which was using me in the first person.
"Not a demon!" squeaked Tattletale.
The gun thumped against her forehead, just slightly offcenter, as Taylor asked, "Then what the hell is this?"
Sees my link to your Corona. Can kill me...
"It's my power! I'm just a cape! Please don't vaporize me!"
The terrifying young woman stared at her for another second, then reset and stowed her weapon in that same migrane-inducing way and was suddenly back next to the middle-aged man.
Lisa turned and left without a backwards glance. She was going to start a diet.
Without any delay.
No more pizza.
Ever.
Through her migrane, she thought, "Power, you and me... we're going to have a little talk."
There was a crowd already a block away, as she approached the corner she had to turn.
Gawking at new cape.
Well, wasn't that interesting.
She glanced as she turned the corner, catching just a glimpse of a figure in some kind of power armor next to a tall middle-aged man.
ANGRY
With an eye-tearing, migrane-inducing twisting of space the figure suddenly had a huge energy gun in her hands, and in just a flicker the figure was RIGHT THERE, flipping a few switches on the side with her thumb while pressing the warm, glowing muzzle against Lisa's head.
VERY ANGRY. Speed is natural speed; not from armor. Switches turned down power on weapon. Now will only vaporize you, the car behind you, and the pawn shop behind that.
Shit. Wait, she was speaking.
"I thought slaughtering every one of your kind I could find in Hell and killing your boss would be enough, demon, but no, you followed me home. Where's your portal, demon?" asked Taylor, voice full of mostly-suppressed rage.
She's looking at me... came a very small insight from her power... which was using me in the first person.
"Not a demon!" squeaked Tattletale.
The gun thumped against her forehead, just slightly offcenter, as Taylor asked, "Then what the hell is this?"
Sees my link to your Corona. Can kill me...
"It's my power! I'm just a cape! Please don't vaporize me!"
The terrifying young woman stared at her for another second, then reset and stowed her weapon in that same migrane-inducing way and was suddenly back next to the middle-aged man.
Lisa turned and left without a backwards glance. She was going to start a diet.
Without any delay.
No more pizza.
Ever.
Through her migrane, she thought, "Power, you and me... we're going to have a little talk."
7. DOOMed VI: DOOM comes to Brockton Bay. Eventually.
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
A ripple in the air expanded into a pink mist, out of which a massively armored power-suit stepped, the figure hefting a huge gently humming energy gun like it was a toy. The matte purple helmet turned from side to side, reflections of the scenery showing in the golden faceplate.
There was a long pause.
Then there was a lot of vicious swearing.
Really, one hell of a lot. For some minutes. To the level that small birds fell from the sky, trailing smoke.
Then the armored figure stomped off through undergrowth, still swearing under its breath, leaving deep footprints behind it. It pushed through everything in the way with a sort of remorseless negligence, only diverting its path when it came across a large pile of enormous boulders, at which point it turned and walked around them.
As the figure disappeared into the distance trailing obscenities in its wake, some of them in a language that no living thing on the planet had ever heard, silence fell once more.
A few minutes later, the pink mist left behind rippled again and a smaller figure came out of it. The humanoid creature, some five feet tall and strongly built, looking like a more upright version of some form of ape, but with horns and claws that would scare a rampaging tiger into hiding under the bed, also looked around. It seemed tense and worried but when it saw the footprints relaxed a little.
A sound from behind it made it whip around in a blur of motion and raise a hand, a ball of fire leaving it with a loud whoosh then impacting on the large bird that had incautiously squawked from its perch on an old tree some fifty yards away. Most of the tree vanished in the ensuing blast, with only a small cloud of feathers falling gently from the sky, burning and smoking on the way down.
The creature stared at the results, then carefully looked around, before going back into the mist. Not long after, it re-emerged, at the head of a column of bizarre figures that walked, slithered, flew, and floated across the ground, following the line of footprints. All of them were silent and seemed intent.
A massive green flash in the distance caused them all to stop and stare at the mushroom cloud of fire and smoke that rose over the horizon, a shock wave rolling over them several seconds later.
The creatures made a strange sound, then started moving again a little faster. They gave the impression that anything that got in the way was going to have a very bad, and most likely very short, day…
Once the last of them had vanished, the normal sounds of the area slowly resumed as wildlife came out of the horrified stupor it had fallen into, then very quickly went in the opposite direction. Not long after that, the entire area was as bare of any life smart enough to know when to get the fuck out of Dodge as any desert on the planet.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
With an eye-wrenching distortion, space tore open again. The pink mist followed, and through it came the figure in armor. It looked around once more, then stared at the overcast sky and shouted a very rude word that made the entire area briefly shudder, before striding forth into the ruins of what appeared to have once been a small city. Smoke rose from a few places but other than that it was quiet and nothing moved.
Half a mile later, it stopped and watched as three humanoid things came out of a half-wrecked concrete and stone building a hundred yards away. They looked pale, more or less female, and nearly but not quite human in a disturbing manner that would make a normal person very worried before running for his or her life.
The armored figure didn't look impressed. It lifted the energy gun and aimed it. "Move or die," it said. "I'm not in the mood and I'm going home."
The middle figure raised a hand, its long pale hair blowing in the breeze. Without the slightest hesitation the armored person fired. The figure was blown backwards in an explosion of plasma, the other two watching with what appeared to be shocked surprise, before they turned back, giving off a very dangerous air.
It wasn't even close to the radiating fury coming from the person in armor who was almost literally glowing with anger, reality itself wavering around it as it stalked forward. "I warned you," it said with eerie calm, totally out of keeping with the aura of terror it was producing. Small animals hiding in nearby buildings that had frozen in instinctive terror fell over and twitched, before going still. The member of the trio who had been blown sixty yards into a building got to its feet, shuddered a little, then started running back, while the remaining two attacked.
An unnerving laugh came before the entire area lit up with weapons fire, screams, a lot of swearing, and ultimately several absolutely enormous blasts that accompanied a sound like the universe crying out in agony, something that carried for many miles. Then all was silent again.
When, a quarter of an hour later, the procession of strange creatures came through, they all stopped and looked at the quarter mile glass lined crater where a small city had once been. Many glances were exchanged. A ripple of sound went through the huge group, one that almost sounded… awe-struck.
Then the entire collection carefully rounded the crater, which glowed deep at the bottom with eldritch energies, and resumed following the footprints, which ultimately vanished into another cloud of pink mist.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
A forest far in the northern lands, snow on the ground and the pine trees, the light of an aurora far above the only illumination, bore witness to a pink mist. Out of it came the armored figure, a different but no less lethal weapon ready for action. Again, it looked around. Again, it swore.
"This is beginning to annoy me," it said evenly. "I am definitely not seeing the funny side. Do not push your luck." It moved off into the dark forest, the trees almost seeming to bend out of the way of the aura of dark rage it was emitting.
Many miles away, in a small log cabin half buried in snow, a man suddenly woke and stared into the dark. He didn't move a muscle but lay there rigid and lightly sweating for nearly half an hour. Dimly in the distance he could hear a couple of odd-sounding explosions, then all was quiet. He relaxed a little, but tensed again shortly after. His head lifted and seemed to follow something in the distance for a while, then finally he relaxed properly, sagging into his bed and letting out a breath.
Wiping the sweat from his forehead with a hand he looked at it in the dim rippling light coming through the window, shook his head, then rolled over and went back to sleep.
"Not getting involved in that," he muttered in Russian, rather vehemently.
Soon the cabin echoed to even breathing with the occasional snore, while the forest surrounding him gradually came back to life and the dark shadows that seemed much deeper than they should have been turned into merely a lack of relative illumination instead of… something else. Something… terrifying.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Oh, come on!" the person in armor shouted in apocalyptic fury as it peered from side to side. "You think this is funny? Really? Do you want me to come looking for you right now?"
A sound from one of the apparently abandoned buildings to the side made it snap around and inspect it suspiciously, moving almost too fast to see the movement, the effect almost being like stop motion animation. A different weapon than the one it had been holding was suddenly in its hands. It peered carefully at the building, which emitted another strange sound.
Tilting its head, it chuckled unnervingly. "Oh, I see you in there," it said menacingly. "Yeah, you'd better hide. Not that it's going to help you much. I'm really not in the right frame of mind to play games."
A different building made a different noise, which echoed throughout the otherwise weirdly silent city. With a mechanical grinding sound, something deep inside the darkened interior stirred.
Without looking back the armored person pointed the weapon it was holding to the side and fired twice. Blue balls of violently hot metallic plasma disappeared into the building which immediately erupted in tiny fragments, rising almost gracefully high into the air. A small device was tossed after the shots, moments later the remains of the building shuddering heavily as a strange sound accompanied a purple glow, before the entire thing imploded into a smoking hole.
Then the figure stalked into the first building. Moments later the shooting began once more.
Some time later, the procession of strange creatures appeared. The ones in front stopped, causing the entire crowd to do likewise, before with almost military precision the bulk of them fanned out into the remains of the city while the core group followed the trail of craters and wreckage. Peculiar sounds came from all around, along with whooshing fireballs, roaring rockets, constant blasts from many sources, and the occasional earth shattering kaboom. The flying creatures that produced these screamed in triumph before following the rest.
All was quiet after that, only the clinking sounds of super-heated metal slowly cooling from a molten state breaking the silence in what had once been a city long evacuated by the original owners, and now a wasteland that couldn't even properly be called ruins.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Right! That fucking does it! I'm going to absolutely fucking wreck these fuckers, then if I'm not home I will find you and I will end you and I will fucking dance on your ashes, DO YOU HEAR ME?"
The scream of unalloyed rage rang out over the entire area, causing thousands of demonic things to stop what they were doing instantly, then turn and as one stare towards where it came from. Deep underground their leader and god looked up, a worried expression crossing his distorted face, although he had no idea why a wave of terror had gone through him.
He never had time to find out.
By the time the trailing creatures came out of the pink mist, all that was left was an enormous hole that radiated heat and otherworldly energies, where nothing at all was left alive, not even microbes. It had been sterilized as efficiently as if the sun itself had touched down.
They looked around, then followed the trail. Soon the area was back to being a glass crater with nothing moving in it, surrounded by the remains of walls.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
PRT ENE Director Emily Piggot looked at the somewhat unassuming, thin, and slightly balding man on the other side of her desk. She was doing everything in her power to stay calm.
He, strangely, was doing a better job of that than she was, but in a way that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. For some reason she was feeling like she was locked in a room with something that would quite readily eat her liver and smile while it did, which was something she simply couldn't understand and didn't like one little bit. Behind her unwelcome visitor she could see Armsmaster and Miss Militia who both also looked oddly worried.
"Mr Hebert," she said in tones of command, "I still don't quite know why we're having this meeting. We've already told you that there's nothing we can help you with in this case. It's a matter for the police, not the PRT."
Danny Hebert, who was standing in the middle of the room with his arms by his sides, looking on the face of it entirely harmless, the civilian dock worker that the data they had on him said he was, still somehow managed to make her lean back slightly when he met her eyes.
"I will ask the question one more time, Director Piggot," he said completely calmly. "Where. Is. My. Daughter?"
"I have no idea," she replied, her voice betraying her unease and anger. "As I said, this is a police matter, not something we can help you with."
There was a pause, then he nodded once. "I see." He turned away. "I shall have to make further investigations myself, then, as you're unwilling to help." Moving towards the door, he almost absently added, "I'll track down Sophia Hess first, I think."
Director Piggot and the other two people present all froze.
"After all, as a Ward in Winslow, one who has been torturing my daughter for close to two years, and who was the last one to see her before she vanished, I'm sure she could shed some light on this matter," he added as he reached for the door handle. He looked back at her, the overhead lights reflecting from his glasses. "I doubt she wants to talk about it but I can be persuasive." The man smiled slightly. "Comes from years of negotiating contracts and suchlike, you see. You learn what to say to people to make them agree to your… requirements."
Emily opened her mouth, feeling a sensation in the pit of her stomach she didn't much like.
"Sometimes it's how you say it rather than what you say," he continued with what looked almost like a serene cheerfulness, which was making her skin crawl. "I'm very good at this sort of thing."
Armsmaster put his hand on the door. "How did you know about Sophia Hess?" he grated.
Hebert didn't take his eyes off Emily's, but he replied calmly and quietly, "It doesn't take a genius to work out from the clues left in the journal Taylor wrote that many of the things she described would best be explained as the effects of a Parahuman ability. She replaced the lock on her locker several times, but those girls always got into it. Even when she brought in a much better one than the school issued locks, one from our basement, it didn't stop them. Either she was being attacked by a professional locksmith, which seemed unlikely, or someone with the ability to open her locker without a trace then close it again, or possibly access the inside of it without opening it, was involved. I did a little research, asked some people I know, and wouldn't you know it, one of the Wards here in Brockton is a Parahuman who can walk through walls."
He smiled somewhat grimly and adjusted his glasses with one hand. Emily couldn't look away. "Lots of rumors that a Ward attended Winslow are going around too, of course. Shadow Stalker is known to be… shall we say, somewhat antisocial at best? It's unlikely that someone of that… attitude… would do well in Arcadia where it's known that most of the Wards attend. I made a few inquiries, asked a few people I know who have kids in Arcadia, and no one could think of someone who appeared to have the rather distinctive personality traits that Shadow Stalker was said to show. On the other hand, there were several people who mentioned that Sophia Hess was… Well, not to put too fine a point on it, a violent bitch as someone told me. Emma Barnes is too short to be Shadow Stalker, Madison Clements is much too short, but Sophia Hess matches the body type your own promotional literature shows perfectly."
He stared at her as she looked back, aghast. Armsmaster still had his hand on the door but was listening intently, while Miss Militia's eyes were closed in what looked like pain.
"A little more investigating brought up the interesting point that Shadow Stalker had apparently come very close to killing several criminals over the last year or two, using those crossbows she carries. Oddly enough you might like to know that at least two of those cases were after she joined the Wards."
Emily winced.
"So, yes, I know that Shadow Stalker is Sophia Hess, or at least I was ninety percent sure of it, until Armsmaster here confirmed it for me. Thanks for that, by the way."
Armsmaster winced.
"I'll be having words with Alan Barnes and Emma too, of course, and the Clements family, but right now I think I should talk to Sophia. It's been two weeks since Taylor disappeared from that locker your pet psychopath and her associates pushed her into. The school doesn't want to help for some reason, which I can guess is a mix of incompetence and corruption although I'm not sure of the percentages yet, the cops aren't doing anything useful, and from what I've been told off the record by a couple of contacts, this is due to PRT interference. Again, yet more evidence that a Parahuman was involved." His voice was still completely controlled but there was a level of danger under it that made all three of the others listen whether they wanted to or not.
"I'd be the first person to admit I haven't been a very good father to my daughter for a lot longer than it should have been for reasons that we don't need to go into, but I'm fucked if I'm going to just sit and wait for someone to finally get around to doing what they're paid to do. It looks like that will never happen in any case. So, unless you can tell me right now where Taylor is and what happened to her, I will arrange to look for her with my own resources, regardless of your wishes or interference. And god help all of you if you get in my way, because I can guarantee you won't like what happens if you do."
"Are you threatening us, Mr Hebert?" Armsmaster said grimly.
Danny Hebert turned his head to meet the Tinker's eyes through his visor.
"Yes. Although I think of it more as a promise."
This time, Miss Militia was the one who winced. Armsmaster glowered.
"Everything you've said is covered by an NDA which you will have to sign before you can be allowed to leave, and if you mention anything at all about this you will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law," Armsmaster growled.
"An NDA signed under duress is not valid, and neither can one be used to cover up an illegal act," the horrible man said without raising his voice. "Basic contract law even in this day and age. If you attempt to stop me, I will use every resource I have available to make totally certain that everyone involved in this from the Chief Director down to the PRT janitors has their careers ruined and with any luck ends up in jail. I've already got more than enough evidence to give the press the scoop of a lifetime." He leaned a little closer. "Just fucking try me, Armsmaster."
"We can arrest you," the Tinker snarled.
"You can, yes. I'm willing to go to jail for my daughter. And if I do that, in about… twelve hours, give or take, every news organization in the world will get everything I've gathered about how unbelievably incompetently this entire situation has been handled, along with the names of every single person involved, how, and why." He smiled in a rather bloodthirsty manner as Emily felt her heart sink into her boots. "I'm not an idiot, I took precautions before coming in here. And I very much doubt you can find all the copies of the data I have in time. I sent it off days ago. I also made certain to take precautions in case someone got the bright idea to… encourage me… to talk. So, either you do your goddamn jobs and find my daughter, or get out of the way and let me do it. Your choice."
"And if we call your bluff?" Armsmaster said, sounding furious.
Hebert adjusted his glasses again. "Oh, trust me, it's not a bluff. You really don't want to push me on this. I have nothing to lose right now and you people have everything to lose. And I'd hate to have to really get serious..." He trailed off, then shrugged a little. "Hopefully it won't come to that."
As Emily was about to try to say something to get the situation back under what little control it had started with, since she could see Armsmaster was at the point of doing something more idiotic than usual, there was a brilliant greenish flash outside the window. The dark of the late winter evening gave way to virtual daylight for a second or two, making her violently twitch and spin in her chair to look out across the city. Far off towards the docks a weirdly colored fireball was rising into the sky, dimming as it slowly faded. Alarms went off all over the place, then several seconds later an enormous detonation shook the entire building.
"What the fuck was that?" she shouted, struggling to her feet and moving to the window in an attempt to work out where the blast had come from. She could see glass falling to the street from some of the other buildings in view from the shockwave although the PRT building was hardened against such damage.
Armsmaster and Miss Militia joined her at the window, all three of them watching as the fireball ascended into the night sky and faded from view. The effect was that of a very small nuclear weapon, she thought in horrified awe. Left behind past the buildings she could see a glowing area that was rather more slowly dimming away.
"That was Winslow school," Miss Militia said in horror.
A moment later, Emily turned quickly around as she remembered the final person in the room.
Danny Hebert was gone.
"Oh, Jesus Christ," she mumbled, "I have a really bad feeling about this..."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Taylor inspected where the school had been with grim approval. It was a good start, but there were a lot of other things she needed to do quite soon. In the distance sirens were going mad but she ignored them as irrelevant.
The sound of tires crunching through the rubble scattered all over the roads for a couple of blocks in every direction, on the other hand, made her turn, weapon ready, until she recognized the car. The vehicle stopped a few yards away and a familiar figure got out, silhouetted against the burning building on the other side of the road.
She smiled inside her armor, put her gun away, and walked over.
"I'm back, Dad," she said as she reached out and hugged him.
"Looks like you had an interesting time," he said, almost calmly, although she could see tears in his eyes under his glasses.
"You could put it like that, yeah," she said with a laugh as she let go and reached up to take her helmet off for the first time in what seemed like months. Fresh air, a sensation she'd nearly forgotten, caressed her face, bringing with it the smell of smoke and plasma discharges. She noticed that she was eye to eye with her father which was a little odd since he was about six foot five, but she ignored that for the moment.
"Sorry I took so long, you wouldn't believe the trouble I've had finding my way back," she added, with a slightly uneven smile. He looked her up and down, then nodded.
"You came back. That's all that matters."
She hugged him again.
When she let go once more, she looked around, then rather dubiously at the car, which she doubted was up to the weight of her power armor. He followed her eyes, then looked at her again in an evaluating manner. "I think you'll have to follow me."
"Can we get a pizza on the way?" she asked hopefully. "You have no idea how much I'm looking forward to one."
He laughed. "Of course. You can have all the pizza you want. Sergio's?"
Taylor grinned. "You read my mind."
With a smile, he got back into the car, and as she jogged alongside it, drove off into the night.
By the time the sirens, complete with an enormous number of emergency vehicles from everyone from the fire department to the PRT had arrived some minutes later, the area was still once more, only the crackling of burning wood audible.
A last few strange shadows disappeared into the dark but no one noticed as they were much more concerned with where Winslow wasn't.
There was a long pause.
Then there was a lot of vicious swearing.
Really, one hell of a lot. For some minutes. To the level that small birds fell from the sky, trailing smoke.
Then the armored figure stomped off through undergrowth, still swearing under its breath, leaving deep footprints behind it. It pushed through everything in the way with a sort of remorseless negligence, only diverting its path when it came across a large pile of enormous boulders, at which point it turned and walked around them.
As the figure disappeared into the distance trailing obscenities in its wake, some of them in a language that no living thing on the planet had ever heard, silence fell once more.
A few minutes later, the pink mist left behind rippled again and a smaller figure came out of it. The humanoid creature, some five feet tall and strongly built, looking like a more upright version of some form of ape, but with horns and claws that would scare a rampaging tiger into hiding under the bed, also looked around. It seemed tense and worried but when it saw the footprints relaxed a little.
A sound from behind it made it whip around in a blur of motion and raise a hand, a ball of fire leaving it with a loud whoosh then impacting on the large bird that had incautiously squawked from its perch on an old tree some fifty yards away. Most of the tree vanished in the ensuing blast, with only a small cloud of feathers falling gently from the sky, burning and smoking on the way down.
The creature stared at the results, then carefully looked around, before going back into the mist. Not long after, it re-emerged, at the head of a column of bizarre figures that walked, slithered, flew, and floated across the ground, following the line of footprints. All of them were silent and seemed intent.
A massive green flash in the distance caused them all to stop and stare at the mushroom cloud of fire and smoke that rose over the horizon, a shock wave rolling over them several seconds later.
The creatures made a strange sound, then started moving again a little faster. They gave the impression that anything that got in the way was going to have a very bad, and most likely very short, day…
Once the last of them had vanished, the normal sounds of the area slowly resumed as wildlife came out of the horrified stupor it had fallen into, then very quickly went in the opposite direction. Not long after that, the entire area was as bare of any life smart enough to know when to get the fuck out of Dodge as any desert on the planet.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
With an eye-wrenching distortion, space tore open again. The pink mist followed, and through it came the figure in armor. It looked around once more, then stared at the overcast sky and shouted a very rude word that made the entire area briefly shudder, before striding forth into the ruins of what appeared to have once been a small city. Smoke rose from a few places but other than that it was quiet and nothing moved.
Half a mile later, it stopped and watched as three humanoid things came out of a half-wrecked concrete and stone building a hundred yards away. They looked pale, more or less female, and nearly but not quite human in a disturbing manner that would make a normal person very worried before running for his or her life.
The armored figure didn't look impressed. It lifted the energy gun and aimed it. "Move or die," it said. "I'm not in the mood and I'm going home."
The middle figure raised a hand, its long pale hair blowing in the breeze. Without the slightest hesitation the armored person fired. The figure was blown backwards in an explosion of plasma, the other two watching with what appeared to be shocked surprise, before they turned back, giving off a very dangerous air.
It wasn't even close to the radiating fury coming from the person in armor who was almost literally glowing with anger, reality itself wavering around it as it stalked forward. "I warned you," it said with eerie calm, totally out of keeping with the aura of terror it was producing. Small animals hiding in nearby buildings that had frozen in instinctive terror fell over and twitched, before going still. The member of the trio who had been blown sixty yards into a building got to its feet, shuddered a little, then started running back, while the remaining two attacked.
An unnerving laugh came before the entire area lit up with weapons fire, screams, a lot of swearing, and ultimately several absolutely enormous blasts that accompanied a sound like the universe crying out in agony, something that carried for many miles. Then all was silent again.
When, a quarter of an hour later, the procession of strange creatures came through, they all stopped and looked at the quarter mile glass lined crater where a small city had once been. Many glances were exchanged. A ripple of sound went through the huge group, one that almost sounded… awe-struck.
Then the entire collection carefully rounded the crater, which glowed deep at the bottom with eldritch energies, and resumed following the footprints, which ultimately vanished into another cloud of pink mist.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
A forest far in the northern lands, snow on the ground and the pine trees, the light of an aurora far above the only illumination, bore witness to a pink mist. Out of it came the armored figure, a different but no less lethal weapon ready for action. Again, it looked around. Again, it swore.
"This is beginning to annoy me," it said evenly. "I am definitely not seeing the funny side. Do not push your luck." It moved off into the dark forest, the trees almost seeming to bend out of the way of the aura of dark rage it was emitting.
Many miles away, in a small log cabin half buried in snow, a man suddenly woke and stared into the dark. He didn't move a muscle but lay there rigid and lightly sweating for nearly half an hour. Dimly in the distance he could hear a couple of odd-sounding explosions, then all was quiet. He relaxed a little, but tensed again shortly after. His head lifted and seemed to follow something in the distance for a while, then finally he relaxed properly, sagging into his bed and letting out a breath.
Wiping the sweat from his forehead with a hand he looked at it in the dim rippling light coming through the window, shook his head, then rolled over and went back to sleep.
"Not getting involved in that," he muttered in Russian, rather vehemently.
Soon the cabin echoed to even breathing with the occasional snore, while the forest surrounding him gradually came back to life and the dark shadows that seemed much deeper than they should have been turned into merely a lack of relative illumination instead of… something else. Something… terrifying.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Oh, come on!" the person in armor shouted in apocalyptic fury as it peered from side to side. "You think this is funny? Really? Do you want me to come looking for you right now?"
A sound from one of the apparently abandoned buildings to the side made it snap around and inspect it suspiciously, moving almost too fast to see the movement, the effect almost being like stop motion animation. A different weapon than the one it had been holding was suddenly in its hands. It peered carefully at the building, which emitted another strange sound.
Tilting its head, it chuckled unnervingly. "Oh, I see you in there," it said menacingly. "Yeah, you'd better hide. Not that it's going to help you much. I'm really not in the right frame of mind to play games."
A different building made a different noise, which echoed throughout the otherwise weirdly silent city. With a mechanical grinding sound, something deep inside the darkened interior stirred.
Without looking back the armored person pointed the weapon it was holding to the side and fired twice. Blue balls of violently hot metallic plasma disappeared into the building which immediately erupted in tiny fragments, rising almost gracefully high into the air. A small device was tossed after the shots, moments later the remains of the building shuddering heavily as a strange sound accompanied a purple glow, before the entire thing imploded into a smoking hole.
Then the figure stalked into the first building. Moments later the shooting began once more.
Some time later, the procession of strange creatures appeared. The ones in front stopped, causing the entire crowd to do likewise, before with almost military precision the bulk of them fanned out into the remains of the city while the core group followed the trail of craters and wreckage. Peculiar sounds came from all around, along with whooshing fireballs, roaring rockets, constant blasts from many sources, and the occasional earth shattering kaboom. The flying creatures that produced these screamed in triumph before following the rest.
All was quiet after that, only the clinking sounds of super-heated metal slowly cooling from a molten state breaking the silence in what had once been a city long evacuated by the original owners, and now a wasteland that couldn't even properly be called ruins.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Right! That fucking does it! I'm going to absolutely fucking wreck these fuckers, then if I'm not home I will find you and I will end you and I will fucking dance on your ashes, DO YOU HEAR ME?"
The scream of unalloyed rage rang out over the entire area, causing thousands of demonic things to stop what they were doing instantly, then turn and as one stare towards where it came from. Deep underground their leader and god looked up, a worried expression crossing his distorted face, although he had no idea why a wave of terror had gone through him.
He never had time to find out.
By the time the trailing creatures came out of the pink mist, all that was left was an enormous hole that radiated heat and otherworldly energies, where nothing at all was left alive, not even microbes. It had been sterilized as efficiently as if the sun itself had touched down.
They looked around, then followed the trail. Soon the area was back to being a glass crater with nothing moving in it, surrounded by the remains of walls.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
PRT ENE Director Emily Piggot looked at the somewhat unassuming, thin, and slightly balding man on the other side of her desk. She was doing everything in her power to stay calm.
He, strangely, was doing a better job of that than she was, but in a way that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. For some reason she was feeling like she was locked in a room with something that would quite readily eat her liver and smile while it did, which was something she simply couldn't understand and didn't like one little bit. Behind her unwelcome visitor she could see Armsmaster and Miss Militia who both also looked oddly worried.
"Mr Hebert," she said in tones of command, "I still don't quite know why we're having this meeting. We've already told you that there's nothing we can help you with in this case. It's a matter for the police, not the PRT."
Danny Hebert, who was standing in the middle of the room with his arms by his sides, looking on the face of it entirely harmless, the civilian dock worker that the data they had on him said he was, still somehow managed to make her lean back slightly when he met her eyes.
"I will ask the question one more time, Director Piggot," he said completely calmly. "Where. Is. My. Daughter?"
"I have no idea," she replied, her voice betraying her unease and anger. "As I said, this is a police matter, not something we can help you with."
There was a pause, then he nodded once. "I see." He turned away. "I shall have to make further investigations myself, then, as you're unwilling to help." Moving towards the door, he almost absently added, "I'll track down Sophia Hess first, I think."
Director Piggot and the other two people present all froze.
"After all, as a Ward in Winslow, one who has been torturing my daughter for close to two years, and who was the last one to see her before she vanished, I'm sure she could shed some light on this matter," he added as he reached for the door handle. He looked back at her, the overhead lights reflecting from his glasses. "I doubt she wants to talk about it but I can be persuasive." The man smiled slightly. "Comes from years of negotiating contracts and suchlike, you see. You learn what to say to people to make them agree to your… requirements."
Emily opened her mouth, feeling a sensation in the pit of her stomach she didn't much like.
"Sometimes it's how you say it rather than what you say," he continued with what looked almost like a serene cheerfulness, which was making her skin crawl. "I'm very good at this sort of thing."
Armsmaster put his hand on the door. "How did you know about Sophia Hess?" he grated.
Hebert didn't take his eyes off Emily's, but he replied calmly and quietly, "It doesn't take a genius to work out from the clues left in the journal Taylor wrote that many of the things she described would best be explained as the effects of a Parahuman ability. She replaced the lock on her locker several times, but those girls always got into it. Even when she brought in a much better one than the school issued locks, one from our basement, it didn't stop them. Either she was being attacked by a professional locksmith, which seemed unlikely, or someone with the ability to open her locker without a trace then close it again, or possibly access the inside of it without opening it, was involved. I did a little research, asked some people I know, and wouldn't you know it, one of the Wards here in Brockton is a Parahuman who can walk through walls."
He smiled somewhat grimly and adjusted his glasses with one hand. Emily couldn't look away. "Lots of rumors that a Ward attended Winslow are going around too, of course. Shadow Stalker is known to be… shall we say, somewhat antisocial at best? It's unlikely that someone of that… attitude… would do well in Arcadia where it's known that most of the Wards attend. I made a few inquiries, asked a few people I know who have kids in Arcadia, and no one could think of someone who appeared to have the rather distinctive personality traits that Shadow Stalker was said to show. On the other hand, there were several people who mentioned that Sophia Hess was… Well, not to put too fine a point on it, a violent bitch as someone told me. Emma Barnes is too short to be Shadow Stalker, Madison Clements is much too short, but Sophia Hess matches the body type your own promotional literature shows perfectly."
He stared at her as she looked back, aghast. Armsmaster still had his hand on the door but was listening intently, while Miss Militia's eyes were closed in what looked like pain.
"A little more investigating brought up the interesting point that Shadow Stalker had apparently come very close to killing several criminals over the last year or two, using those crossbows she carries. Oddly enough you might like to know that at least two of those cases were after she joined the Wards."
Emily winced.
"So, yes, I know that Shadow Stalker is Sophia Hess, or at least I was ninety percent sure of it, until Armsmaster here confirmed it for me. Thanks for that, by the way."
Armsmaster winced.
"I'll be having words with Alan Barnes and Emma too, of course, and the Clements family, but right now I think I should talk to Sophia. It's been two weeks since Taylor disappeared from that locker your pet psychopath and her associates pushed her into. The school doesn't want to help for some reason, which I can guess is a mix of incompetence and corruption although I'm not sure of the percentages yet, the cops aren't doing anything useful, and from what I've been told off the record by a couple of contacts, this is due to PRT interference. Again, yet more evidence that a Parahuman was involved." His voice was still completely controlled but there was a level of danger under it that made all three of the others listen whether they wanted to or not.
"I'd be the first person to admit I haven't been a very good father to my daughter for a lot longer than it should have been for reasons that we don't need to go into, but I'm fucked if I'm going to just sit and wait for someone to finally get around to doing what they're paid to do. It looks like that will never happen in any case. So, unless you can tell me right now where Taylor is and what happened to her, I will arrange to look for her with my own resources, regardless of your wishes or interference. And god help all of you if you get in my way, because I can guarantee you won't like what happens if you do."
"Are you threatening us, Mr Hebert?" Armsmaster said grimly.
Danny Hebert turned his head to meet the Tinker's eyes through his visor.
"Yes. Although I think of it more as a promise."
This time, Miss Militia was the one who winced. Armsmaster glowered.
"Everything you've said is covered by an NDA which you will have to sign before you can be allowed to leave, and if you mention anything at all about this you will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law," Armsmaster growled.
"An NDA signed under duress is not valid, and neither can one be used to cover up an illegal act," the horrible man said without raising his voice. "Basic contract law even in this day and age. If you attempt to stop me, I will use every resource I have available to make totally certain that everyone involved in this from the Chief Director down to the PRT janitors has their careers ruined and with any luck ends up in jail. I've already got more than enough evidence to give the press the scoop of a lifetime." He leaned a little closer. "Just fucking try me, Armsmaster."
"We can arrest you," the Tinker snarled.
"You can, yes. I'm willing to go to jail for my daughter. And if I do that, in about… twelve hours, give or take, every news organization in the world will get everything I've gathered about how unbelievably incompetently this entire situation has been handled, along with the names of every single person involved, how, and why." He smiled in a rather bloodthirsty manner as Emily felt her heart sink into her boots. "I'm not an idiot, I took precautions before coming in here. And I very much doubt you can find all the copies of the data I have in time. I sent it off days ago. I also made certain to take precautions in case someone got the bright idea to… encourage me… to talk. So, either you do your goddamn jobs and find my daughter, or get out of the way and let me do it. Your choice."
"And if we call your bluff?" Armsmaster said, sounding furious.
Hebert adjusted his glasses again. "Oh, trust me, it's not a bluff. You really don't want to push me on this. I have nothing to lose right now and you people have everything to lose. And I'd hate to have to really get serious..." He trailed off, then shrugged a little. "Hopefully it won't come to that."
As Emily was about to try to say something to get the situation back under what little control it had started with, since she could see Armsmaster was at the point of doing something more idiotic than usual, there was a brilliant greenish flash outside the window. The dark of the late winter evening gave way to virtual daylight for a second or two, making her violently twitch and spin in her chair to look out across the city. Far off towards the docks a weirdly colored fireball was rising into the sky, dimming as it slowly faded. Alarms went off all over the place, then several seconds later an enormous detonation shook the entire building.
"What the fuck was that?" she shouted, struggling to her feet and moving to the window in an attempt to work out where the blast had come from. She could see glass falling to the street from some of the other buildings in view from the shockwave although the PRT building was hardened against such damage.
Armsmaster and Miss Militia joined her at the window, all three of them watching as the fireball ascended into the night sky and faded from view. The effect was that of a very small nuclear weapon, she thought in horrified awe. Left behind past the buildings she could see a glowing area that was rather more slowly dimming away.
"That was Winslow school," Miss Militia said in horror.
A moment later, Emily turned quickly around as she remembered the final person in the room.
Danny Hebert was gone.
"Oh, Jesus Christ," she mumbled, "I have a really bad feeling about this..."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Taylor inspected where the school had been with grim approval. It was a good start, but there were a lot of other things she needed to do quite soon. In the distance sirens were going mad but she ignored them as irrelevant.
The sound of tires crunching through the rubble scattered all over the roads for a couple of blocks in every direction, on the other hand, made her turn, weapon ready, until she recognized the car. The vehicle stopped a few yards away and a familiar figure got out, silhouetted against the burning building on the other side of the road.
She smiled inside her armor, put her gun away, and walked over.
"I'm back, Dad," she said as she reached out and hugged him.
"Looks like you had an interesting time," he said, almost calmly, although she could see tears in his eyes under his glasses.
"You could put it like that, yeah," she said with a laugh as she let go and reached up to take her helmet off for the first time in what seemed like months. Fresh air, a sensation she'd nearly forgotten, caressed her face, bringing with it the smell of smoke and plasma discharges. She noticed that she was eye to eye with her father which was a little odd since he was about six foot five, but she ignored that for the moment.
"Sorry I took so long, you wouldn't believe the trouble I've had finding my way back," she added, with a slightly uneven smile. He looked her up and down, then nodded.
"You came back. That's all that matters."
She hugged him again.
When she let go once more, she looked around, then rather dubiously at the car, which she doubted was up to the weight of her power armor. He followed her eyes, then looked at her again in an evaluating manner. "I think you'll have to follow me."
"Can we get a pizza on the way?" she asked hopefully. "You have no idea how much I'm looking forward to one."
He laughed. "Of course. You can have all the pizza you want. Sergio's?"
Taylor grinned. "You read my mind."
With a smile, he got back into the car, and as she jogged alongside it, drove off into the night.
By the time the sirens, complete with an enormous number of emergency vehicles from everyone from the fire department to the PRT had arrived some minutes later, the area was still once more, only the crackling of burning wood audible.
A last few strange shadows disappeared into the dark but no one noticed as they were much more concerned with where Winslow wasn't.
Last edited:
8. DOOMed VII: The Coming of the Who?
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
Three days before The Winslow Event
Three teenagers looked around as the fourth one of their group shambled into the shared living area, looking like she'd been punched in the brain. Her face was slack yet somehow also contorted into a rictus of horror and fear. All her friends stared as she leaned against the wall and just looked into space.
"Jesus, are you all right?" the larger of the two young men asked with a worried note in his voice, putting his game controller down and standing up, then walking towards her.
"SHE COMES," the blonde girl said absently in a way that made him, and the other two, freeze. Downstairs three dogs yipped like they'd been kicked then went silent again.
Then the girl very gently fell over, face forward, as unconsciousness took her. By the expression she was wearing it was something of a blessed relief. Her friend only just caught her before her nose met the floor with no doubt unfortunate consequences.
Easing her to the ground, he examined her, then looked at the other two, who were watching with very confused faces.
"Who comes?" the younger man asked plaintively. "Why does she come? When does she come? What the fuck was that?"
The first one looked down at the girl he was kneeling next to and shrugged helplessly.
None of them got much sleep that night.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
A twelve year old girl sat bolt upright in bed, her eyes wide in the dark of her room. "100% CHANCE SHE COMES," the girl said without meaning to, then slapped her hands over her mouth. She winced in anticipation before looking puzzled about something.
Then she got a very curious look, muttered to herself for a while, before grinning in a completely diabolical manner and lying down again. When she fell asleep she was still wearing a distinct smirk, which was present the next morning at breakfast, but she wouldn't be drawn by her parents as to why she looked like that.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Deep under the middle of the city, a skeletal man shrieked in horror, screamed "SHE COMES," at the top of his voice, fell off his chair, then cowered under his desk for the rest of the night until he eventually passed out from terror. When he woke up he couldn't remember why he'd apparently slept under his desk, and was not happy about having apparently had something of an accident in the urination department.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
In San Francisco, in a government building that from the outside looked like nothing other than a fairly boring office, nearly a dozen people in an equivalent number of rooms stiffened, sweated, and simultaneously said "SHE COMES."
Then two of them passed out, one had a mild stroke and was quickly surrounded by a very worried EMT team, another one hid in a closet, and the last two clocked out, went home, and got very, very drunk. Their superiors spent the rest of the night in emergency meetings but found no answers that anyone liked. They did, however, classify the incident at the highest level and go out of their way not to let anyone else know about it except for a select few people in government, none of whom were particularly happy about the situation.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Inside the highest security prison on the planet, a number of the prisoners all said, screamed, or shouted "SHE COMES." Most of them fell unconscious immediately, one or two even before they spoke, although that didn't stop them.
One, by appearance a young teen girl, stared off into space while gently rocking back and forth holding her knees whispering "SHE COMES," under her breath for the next few hours, before finally climbing into her bed and very deliberately falling asleep.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Similar scenes occurred all over the world, at what would eventually be found to be the exact same moment, but since many of the people involved were either criminals, or members of government organizations that spent considerable effort not to mention their activities to anyone especially other such organizations, no one would work this out for some time. When they did, of course, it didn't really help.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Two days before The Winslow Event
In her room, a blonde teenager of about seventeen or so moaned, while her friends watched her with sympathy, even the two that were pretty bad with people. "She looks horrible," the younger male pointed out.
"Yeah, you don't have to keep saying that, you know," the older one said.
The other girl shoved the younger man and muttered, "Shut up, you're annoying."
"I know," he replied, smirking, which got him another shove.
The blonde suddenly sat up, taking all of them by surprise, especially as her eyes were still closed.
"SHE IS CLOSER NOW!" the girl said in a loud and eerie voice, before going boneless and falling back into her bed. "SHE COMES."
The other three remained pressed against the wall as far away as possible from their friend for several minutes, watching her closely with wide eyes, until she began to snore gently.
"I don't know that I really want to meet her," the youngest of them said, his voice wavering.
His friends nodded soberly. They weren't keen on it either.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Miles away, a tall young man with an unusual ability suddenly woke in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat. His ability was for some reason giving him the distinct impression that it was very, very worried about something. What that was he had no idea aside from being totally sure that it was very angry. And getting closer.
The worst part was that he didn't have a clue why he felt that way. Which worried him nearly as much as his own special ability appeared to be.
He lay there for hours, his heart racing, until he finally got up, went into the living room at about four AM, dug out a bottle of his father's best bourbon, cracked the seal on it, drank about half a cup of the stuff without hesitation, put it back, then returned to bed. He was snoring minutes later and woke up to the most vicious headache he'd ever experienced and a very annoyed father who was completely unsympathetic and spent quite a long time explaining how much it cost and how he was going to be replacing it.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The skeletally thin man finished locking the last door between him and the outside world, making sure that all the newly installed traps and other precautions he'd hastily arranged were armed. Unusually for him he was so worried that he hadn't used his own special skill to ensure he had a backup outside his current location, because when he'd tried that he'd spent nearly an hour screaming in horror. And he couldn't remember why.
Sure he was under attack, he put himself into the deepest hole he could arrange on short notice and basically pulled it in after him. Outside, on the other side of six separate blast doors, the codes for which he was the only one that knew, several dozen armed and somewhat puzzled men patrolled, on heightened alert and ready for anything.
"SHE IS CLOSER NOW!"
He blinked, looking around quizzically. He could have sworn someone had said something. But he was absolutely certain he was alone…
Picking up the machine gun at his elbow, he suspiciously prowled his secure apartment, the weapon leading the way, until in the end he satisfied himself that he really was alone. Putting the gun down again he poured himself another coffee and went back to obsessively watching dozens of screens on which camera views of every possible approach to his secure bunker were displayed.
Every now and then, he looked around, subconsciously reacting to a sensation that something was getting closer without even realizing it.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Smiling a little, in a dark way that would have made her parents exchange glances then start very carefully asking leading questions, a twelve-year-old brunette girl lay in bed and thought.
"SHE IS CLOSER NOW!" the girl whispered under her breath, then giggled somewhat oddly.
She dreamed of strange things and impossible places.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Governments around the world became even more alert to…something.
The problem was that they had no idea what, which made life considerably more difficult than ideal, which in turn made them very grumpy.
Grumpy governments seldom end up helping.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
One day before The Winslow Event
"SHE IS NEARLY HERE!"
The blonde looked earnestly at her by now more than a little scared friends. The other girl was surrounded by dogs, all of whom were trying to sit on her lap at the same time and all of whom were whimpering.
"You know, that doesn't actually fill me with confidence," the younger of the two men said, in a somewhat higher pitch than he liked.
Neither of his friends could honestly dispute this. And the remaining one seemed to be lost inside her own head, which by the look on her face wasn't a particularly comfortable place to be right now.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Putting his helmet on, the last part of his power armor, the tall young man shivered.
"Problem?" one of his friends and co-workers asked, apparently noticing.
"No," he replied, lying through his teeth, which he could get away with since none of the others had the same ability he was currently wishing he didn't have. Mostly because it was somehow staring off in a direction that didn't exist and trembling, which was the most unnerving thing he'd ever experienced and something he deeply wished he wasn't experiencing now.
"Just a little cold," he added. "It snowed again last night and I guess I'm feeling it."
"Yeah, it's pretty chilly out there tonight," his friend nodded as he put his own mask on. "Glad we're only doing a short patrol, this isn't the warmest clothing I've ever worn." The Hispanic teenager slapped his friend on the back in a comradely manner. "Come on, sooner we get out there the sooner we get back inside where it's warm."
The armored teen nodded, not really listening. He was trying to work out why he had the urge to hide under something very heavy with his eyes shut…
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The twelve year old girl produced a faint snigger as she wrote in a small notebook under the illumination of her bedside lamp which she'd sneakily turned on in defiance of her bedtime.
"SHE IS NEARLY HERE!" she said very quietly under her breath. In a more normal, although still somewhat disturbing voice, she added "100% chance of a fucker getting fucked."
Giggling a little, she closed the book, put it under her pillow, and turned the light out.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Around the world, people prepared. They had no idea for what, as none of the usual or predicted problems appeared to be active. Every asset available was tasked to investigate even the most outlandish concepts, none of which came up with any real explanation to what was going on, although almost accidentally a surprisingly large number of nefarious plots were foiled in the process.
This didn't really make them as pleased as it usually would have done, sadly.
Some people are never satisfied.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Five hours before The Winslow Event
"What do you mean, Moord Nag is dead? How?"
"No one is sure but the thermal bloom on the satellite was off the scale, sir."
"Get a team out there right now."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Four hours before The Winslow Event
"Großer Gott, wo ist die Stadt hin? Ist der Krater radioaktiv?"
"Anscheinend nicht, aber der Durchmesser beträgt fast einen halben Kilometer, und noch weiß niemand genau wie tief er ist."
"Wir brauchen sofort eine Einsatztruppe vor Ort, volle Schutzausrüstung."
"Jawohl."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Three hours before The Winslow Event
"Что происходит? ОН проснулся?"
"Не хотелось бы. Из зоны ни слуху ни духу не было уже много лет."
"Так что? Досматривать зону будем или как?"
"А толку? Если это всё-таки ОН, что мы можем сделать? А если не он, какой нам резон его злить ещё больше?"
"Куда не кинь - всюду клин..."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Two hours before The Winslow Event
"Fuck me, what the hell was that?! Who authorized heavy weapons?"
"Unknown, sir. We have no record of any Blaster or Tinker on site. In fact, there isn't anyone on site at the moment."
"Get a bird in the air, I want full surveillance of the entire area immediately. Call Washington and get backup out here as soon as possible."
"On it, sir."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
One hour before The Winslow Event
"Perimeter breach, unknown method, intruder on site!"
"Is it one of ours?"
"No, we don't know who it is. Or how they got inside."
"Teleporter?"
"Possibly, but nothing like anything we've… FUCK!"
"WHAT IN GOD'S NAME?"
"Oh dear lord, what's that?!"
"I have no fucking idea but it's the angriest thing I've ever seen in my life."
"It's looking right at us!"
"EVACUATE! EVACUATE! THIS IS NOT A DRILL! ALL PERSONNEL EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY! DO NOT STOP TO COLLECT ANYTHING! FALL BACK TO SECONDARY POSITIONS!"
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Two minutes before The Winslow Event
"SHE HAS COME!"
The three conscious members of the group looked at each other, then at their blonde friend, who was sitting on her bed staring at the ceiling with wide eyes.
All of them, very slowly, followed her gaze.
There was a very long pause.
"You see anything?"
"No."
"Me either."
"Does that make you feel less worried?"
"No."
"Me either."
An enormously bright white-green flash soundlessly illuminated the entire building, the glare building over half a second or so to a painful intensity even through the mostly boarded up windows and making them all flinch violently. The detonation that followed five seconds later shook the entire place like a small earthquake, causing all them to hit the floor with their hands over their heads. When the rumble died away, the blonde girl blinked a couple of times, apparently back in the room for the first time in several days.
"Why are you guys in my bedroom?" she asked quizzically. "And on the floor?"
She tilted her head. "And why are there so many sirens going off out there?"
The other three slowly stood up, exchanged glances, then the two young men grabbed her arms and over her protestations carried her down the stairs while their remaining friend hastily packed everything important. In a surprisingly short period of time they were in a slightly-stolen van heading away from the direction the blast, which had been upsettingly close, had come from.
The blonde was still bitching as they drove but that didn't stop them.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
In his underground room, the thin man fell over as the entire place shook, then lay on the ground staring at the roof with trepidation in his eyes. That wasn't good, whatever it was.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The tall young man froze, making his girlfriend look at him then appear worried, before slowly tipping to the side, his face locked in a look of horror.
Calling for her sister the blonde caught him and lowered him to the carpet, very worried indeed. When the other girl came running into the living room she was gently slapping her boyfriend's face and trying to get him to wake up, without success.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Smiling to herself the twelve year old girl watched out her bedroom window as a fading green glow many miles away in the city showed where something unusual had happened, rather loudly. She could see what looked like every emergency vehicle in the city heading in that direction from her position up on the hill overlooking the city center. It had taken them some time to get going, she'd noted, presumably having been waiting for more information, but now it was getting very busy out there.
As her parents came into the room to check on her, she let the curtain fall back into place and turned to them. "That was really loud," she said mildly. "I wonder what it was?"
Her mother knelt down and hugged her, but the girl wasn't sure if it was to comfort her or the older woman…
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Twenty minutes after The Winslow Event
Sergio Ricardelli watched as the young woman wearing the most lethal looking power armor he'd ever seen even on TV peered at the menu. "Anchovies?" she muttered. "Yuck."
They were an acquired taste, he agreed silently, although he quite liked them.
"Quiet tonight, Sergio?" Danny Hebert, someone he knew quite well, said from beside his daughter as he looked up from his own menu.
Sergio shrugged a little. "Comes and goes. It's not too bad, considering what the weather's been like recently."
"Ah, yes, that would certainly put people off," Danny agreed with a nod. He glanced at the menu again, then added, "I'll have the house special with extra jalapenos, thanks. And a coke."
"Sure." Sergio wrote it down.
The girl moved her helmet to the side on the table and turned the menu over. "Two chicken, bacon, and pepperoni with barbecue sauce, please," she said. "And I'll have extra jalapenos as well. And…" She turned to the back of the menu for a moment. "A large sprite."
"OK. Hungry, then?"
She smiled at him. "I've had a very long day, and worked up an appetite," she replied.
He nodded. Writing her order down as well, he smiled back. "Won't be long. Help yourself to water if you want, and the bread sticks are fresh."
"Thanks." She took one and nibbled on it as he walked off. "Hey, Dad, you won't believe some of the stuff I picked up," he heard her say as he went into the kitchen.
Shaking his head, he nudged one of his cooks, who was staring out through the small window in the door. "It's Brockton Bay, you get used to it," he said to his cousin.
Gino shook his head. "Mom said this place was weird but I always thought she was pulling my leg," he replied as he moved to the oven and opened it to check the progress of the current order.
Sergio shrugged. "Like I said, you get used to it. I've seen stranger things come through that door."
"Huh."
They got to work, ignoring the noise as half a dozen emergency vehicles went past. Again, it wasn't exactly unusual around these parts and they had customers to deal with.
Three teenagers looked around as the fourth one of their group shambled into the shared living area, looking like she'd been punched in the brain. Her face was slack yet somehow also contorted into a rictus of horror and fear. All her friends stared as she leaned against the wall and just looked into space.
"Jesus, are you all right?" the larger of the two young men asked with a worried note in his voice, putting his game controller down and standing up, then walking towards her.
"SHE COMES," the blonde girl said absently in a way that made him, and the other two, freeze. Downstairs three dogs yipped like they'd been kicked then went silent again.
Then the girl very gently fell over, face forward, as unconsciousness took her. By the expression she was wearing it was something of a blessed relief. Her friend only just caught her before her nose met the floor with no doubt unfortunate consequences.
Easing her to the ground, he examined her, then looked at the other two, who were watching with very confused faces.
"Who comes?" the younger man asked plaintively. "Why does she come? When does she come? What the fuck was that?"
The first one looked down at the girl he was kneeling next to and shrugged helplessly.
None of them got much sleep that night.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
A twelve year old girl sat bolt upright in bed, her eyes wide in the dark of her room. "100% CHANCE SHE COMES," the girl said without meaning to, then slapped her hands over her mouth. She winced in anticipation before looking puzzled about something.
Then she got a very curious look, muttered to herself for a while, before grinning in a completely diabolical manner and lying down again. When she fell asleep she was still wearing a distinct smirk, which was present the next morning at breakfast, but she wouldn't be drawn by her parents as to why she looked like that.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Deep under the middle of the city, a skeletal man shrieked in horror, screamed "SHE COMES," at the top of his voice, fell off his chair, then cowered under his desk for the rest of the night until he eventually passed out from terror. When he woke up he couldn't remember why he'd apparently slept under his desk, and was not happy about having apparently had something of an accident in the urination department.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
In San Francisco, in a government building that from the outside looked like nothing other than a fairly boring office, nearly a dozen people in an equivalent number of rooms stiffened, sweated, and simultaneously said "SHE COMES."
Then two of them passed out, one had a mild stroke and was quickly surrounded by a very worried EMT team, another one hid in a closet, and the last two clocked out, went home, and got very, very drunk. Their superiors spent the rest of the night in emergency meetings but found no answers that anyone liked. They did, however, classify the incident at the highest level and go out of their way not to let anyone else know about it except for a select few people in government, none of whom were particularly happy about the situation.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Inside the highest security prison on the planet, a number of the prisoners all said, screamed, or shouted "SHE COMES." Most of them fell unconscious immediately, one or two even before they spoke, although that didn't stop them.
One, by appearance a young teen girl, stared off into space while gently rocking back and forth holding her knees whispering "SHE COMES," under her breath for the next few hours, before finally climbing into her bed and very deliberately falling asleep.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Similar scenes occurred all over the world, at what would eventually be found to be the exact same moment, but since many of the people involved were either criminals, or members of government organizations that spent considerable effort not to mention their activities to anyone especially other such organizations, no one would work this out for some time. When they did, of course, it didn't really help.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Two days before The Winslow Event
In her room, a blonde teenager of about seventeen or so moaned, while her friends watched her with sympathy, even the two that were pretty bad with people. "She looks horrible," the younger male pointed out.
"Yeah, you don't have to keep saying that, you know," the older one said.
The other girl shoved the younger man and muttered, "Shut up, you're annoying."
"I know," he replied, smirking, which got him another shove.
The blonde suddenly sat up, taking all of them by surprise, especially as her eyes were still closed.
"SHE IS CLOSER NOW!" the girl said in a loud and eerie voice, before going boneless and falling back into her bed. "SHE COMES."
The other three remained pressed against the wall as far away as possible from their friend for several minutes, watching her closely with wide eyes, until she began to snore gently.
"I don't know that I really want to meet her," the youngest of them said, his voice wavering.
His friends nodded soberly. They weren't keen on it either.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Miles away, a tall young man with an unusual ability suddenly woke in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat. His ability was for some reason giving him the distinct impression that it was very, very worried about something. What that was he had no idea aside from being totally sure that it was very angry. And getting closer.
The worst part was that he didn't have a clue why he felt that way. Which worried him nearly as much as his own special ability appeared to be.
He lay there for hours, his heart racing, until he finally got up, went into the living room at about four AM, dug out a bottle of his father's best bourbon, cracked the seal on it, drank about half a cup of the stuff without hesitation, put it back, then returned to bed. He was snoring minutes later and woke up to the most vicious headache he'd ever experienced and a very annoyed father who was completely unsympathetic and spent quite a long time explaining how much it cost and how he was going to be replacing it.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The skeletally thin man finished locking the last door between him and the outside world, making sure that all the newly installed traps and other precautions he'd hastily arranged were armed. Unusually for him he was so worried that he hadn't used his own special skill to ensure he had a backup outside his current location, because when he'd tried that he'd spent nearly an hour screaming in horror. And he couldn't remember why.
Sure he was under attack, he put himself into the deepest hole he could arrange on short notice and basically pulled it in after him. Outside, on the other side of six separate blast doors, the codes for which he was the only one that knew, several dozen armed and somewhat puzzled men patrolled, on heightened alert and ready for anything.
"SHE IS CLOSER NOW!"
He blinked, looking around quizzically. He could have sworn someone had said something. But he was absolutely certain he was alone…
Picking up the machine gun at his elbow, he suspiciously prowled his secure apartment, the weapon leading the way, until in the end he satisfied himself that he really was alone. Putting the gun down again he poured himself another coffee and went back to obsessively watching dozens of screens on which camera views of every possible approach to his secure bunker were displayed.
Every now and then, he looked around, subconsciously reacting to a sensation that something was getting closer without even realizing it.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Smiling a little, in a dark way that would have made her parents exchange glances then start very carefully asking leading questions, a twelve-year-old brunette girl lay in bed and thought.
"SHE IS CLOSER NOW!" the girl whispered under her breath, then giggled somewhat oddly.
She dreamed of strange things and impossible places.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Governments around the world became even more alert to…something.
The problem was that they had no idea what, which made life considerably more difficult than ideal, which in turn made them very grumpy.
Grumpy governments seldom end up helping.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
One day before The Winslow Event
"SHE IS NEARLY HERE!"
The blonde looked earnestly at her by now more than a little scared friends. The other girl was surrounded by dogs, all of whom were trying to sit on her lap at the same time and all of whom were whimpering.
"You know, that doesn't actually fill me with confidence," the younger of the two men said, in a somewhat higher pitch than he liked.
Neither of his friends could honestly dispute this. And the remaining one seemed to be lost inside her own head, which by the look on her face wasn't a particularly comfortable place to be right now.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Putting his helmet on, the last part of his power armor, the tall young man shivered.
"Problem?" one of his friends and co-workers asked, apparently noticing.
"No," he replied, lying through his teeth, which he could get away with since none of the others had the same ability he was currently wishing he didn't have. Mostly because it was somehow staring off in a direction that didn't exist and trembling, which was the most unnerving thing he'd ever experienced and something he deeply wished he wasn't experiencing now.
"Just a little cold," he added. "It snowed again last night and I guess I'm feeling it."
"Yeah, it's pretty chilly out there tonight," his friend nodded as he put his own mask on. "Glad we're only doing a short patrol, this isn't the warmest clothing I've ever worn." The Hispanic teenager slapped his friend on the back in a comradely manner. "Come on, sooner we get out there the sooner we get back inside where it's warm."
The armored teen nodded, not really listening. He was trying to work out why he had the urge to hide under something very heavy with his eyes shut…
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The twelve year old girl produced a faint snigger as she wrote in a small notebook under the illumination of her bedside lamp which she'd sneakily turned on in defiance of her bedtime.
"SHE IS NEARLY HERE!" she said very quietly under her breath. In a more normal, although still somewhat disturbing voice, she added "100% chance of a fucker getting fucked."
Giggling a little, she closed the book, put it under her pillow, and turned the light out.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Around the world, people prepared. They had no idea for what, as none of the usual or predicted problems appeared to be active. Every asset available was tasked to investigate even the most outlandish concepts, none of which came up with any real explanation to what was going on, although almost accidentally a surprisingly large number of nefarious plots were foiled in the process.
This didn't really make them as pleased as it usually would have done, sadly.
Some people are never satisfied.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Five hours before The Winslow Event
"What do you mean, Moord Nag is dead? How?"
"No one is sure but the thermal bloom on the satellite was off the scale, sir."
"Get a team out there right now."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Four hours before The Winslow Event
"Großer Gott, wo ist die Stadt hin? Ist der Krater radioaktiv?"
"Anscheinend nicht, aber der Durchmesser beträgt fast einen halben Kilometer, und noch weiß niemand genau wie tief er ist."
"Wir brauchen sofort eine Einsatztruppe vor Ort, volle Schutzausrüstung."
"Jawohl."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Three hours before The Winslow Event
"Что происходит? ОН проснулся?"
"Не хотелось бы. Из зоны ни слуху ни духу не было уже много лет."
"Так что? Досматривать зону будем или как?"
"А толку? Если это всё-таки ОН, что мы можем сделать? А если не он, какой нам резон его злить ещё больше?"
"Куда не кинь - всюду клин..."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Two hours before The Winslow Event
"Fuck me, what the hell was that?! Who authorized heavy weapons?"
"Unknown, sir. We have no record of any Blaster or Tinker on site. In fact, there isn't anyone on site at the moment."
"Get a bird in the air, I want full surveillance of the entire area immediately. Call Washington and get backup out here as soon as possible."
"On it, sir."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
One hour before The Winslow Event
"Perimeter breach, unknown method, intruder on site!"
"Is it one of ours?"
"No, we don't know who it is. Or how they got inside."
"Teleporter?"
"Possibly, but nothing like anything we've… FUCK!"
"WHAT IN GOD'S NAME?"
"Oh dear lord, what's that?!"
"I have no fucking idea but it's the angriest thing I've ever seen in my life."
"It's looking right at us!"
"EVACUATE! EVACUATE! THIS IS NOT A DRILL! ALL PERSONNEL EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY! DO NOT STOP TO COLLECT ANYTHING! FALL BACK TO SECONDARY POSITIONS!"
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Two minutes before The Winslow Event
"SHE HAS COME!"
The three conscious members of the group looked at each other, then at their blonde friend, who was sitting on her bed staring at the ceiling with wide eyes.
All of them, very slowly, followed her gaze.
There was a very long pause.
"You see anything?"
"No."
"Me either."
"Does that make you feel less worried?"
"No."
"Me either."
An enormously bright white-green flash soundlessly illuminated the entire building, the glare building over half a second or so to a painful intensity even through the mostly boarded up windows and making them all flinch violently. The detonation that followed five seconds later shook the entire place like a small earthquake, causing all them to hit the floor with their hands over their heads. When the rumble died away, the blonde girl blinked a couple of times, apparently back in the room for the first time in several days.
"Why are you guys in my bedroom?" she asked quizzically. "And on the floor?"
She tilted her head. "And why are there so many sirens going off out there?"
The other three slowly stood up, exchanged glances, then the two young men grabbed her arms and over her protestations carried her down the stairs while their remaining friend hastily packed everything important. In a surprisingly short period of time they were in a slightly-stolen van heading away from the direction the blast, which had been upsettingly close, had come from.
The blonde was still bitching as they drove but that didn't stop them.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
In his underground room, the thin man fell over as the entire place shook, then lay on the ground staring at the roof with trepidation in his eyes. That wasn't good, whatever it was.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The tall young man froze, making his girlfriend look at him then appear worried, before slowly tipping to the side, his face locked in a look of horror.
Calling for her sister the blonde caught him and lowered him to the carpet, very worried indeed. When the other girl came running into the living room she was gently slapping her boyfriend's face and trying to get him to wake up, without success.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Smiling to herself the twelve year old girl watched out her bedroom window as a fading green glow many miles away in the city showed where something unusual had happened, rather loudly. She could see what looked like every emergency vehicle in the city heading in that direction from her position up on the hill overlooking the city center. It had taken them some time to get going, she'd noted, presumably having been waiting for more information, but now it was getting very busy out there.
As her parents came into the room to check on her, she let the curtain fall back into place and turned to them. "That was really loud," she said mildly. "I wonder what it was?"
Her mother knelt down and hugged her, but the girl wasn't sure if it was to comfort her or the older woman…
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Twenty minutes after The Winslow Event
Sergio Ricardelli watched as the young woman wearing the most lethal looking power armor he'd ever seen even on TV peered at the menu. "Anchovies?" she muttered. "Yuck."
They were an acquired taste, he agreed silently, although he quite liked them.
"Quiet tonight, Sergio?" Danny Hebert, someone he knew quite well, said from beside his daughter as he looked up from his own menu.
Sergio shrugged a little. "Comes and goes. It's not too bad, considering what the weather's been like recently."
"Ah, yes, that would certainly put people off," Danny agreed with a nod. He glanced at the menu again, then added, "I'll have the house special with extra jalapenos, thanks. And a coke."
"Sure." Sergio wrote it down.
The girl moved her helmet to the side on the table and turned the menu over. "Two chicken, bacon, and pepperoni with barbecue sauce, please," she said. "And I'll have extra jalapenos as well. And…" She turned to the back of the menu for a moment. "A large sprite."
"OK. Hungry, then?"
She smiled at him. "I've had a very long day, and worked up an appetite," she replied.
He nodded. Writing her order down as well, he smiled back. "Won't be long. Help yourself to water if you want, and the bread sticks are fresh."
"Thanks." She took one and nibbled on it as he walked off. "Hey, Dad, you won't believe some of the stuff I picked up," he heard her say as he went into the kitchen.
Shaking his head, he nudged one of his cooks, who was staring out through the small window in the door. "It's Brockton Bay, you get used to it," he said to his cousin.
Gino shook his head. "Mom said this place was weird but I always thought she was pulling my leg," he replied as he moved to the oven and opened it to check the progress of the current order.
Sergio shrugged. "Like I said, you get used to it. I've seen stranger things come through that door."
"Huh."
They got to work, ignoring the noise as half a dozen emergency vehicles went past. Again, it wasn't exactly unusual around these parts and they had customers to deal with.
Last edited: