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.
