She remembered being in a big city, she forgot just which one, being downtown and being able to cross blocks and blocks of the city without ever going back up, blocks of underground stores tucked away in their little cubes, all of it somehow interacting with an underground transport system and all the sewage, power, and whatever else that was needed to keep a city running. Astonishing. If you could build that under a city, it wasn't much of a surprise what you could build out in the country, provided you had something to provide you with enough power.
Like say, a cold fusion engine. Maddie was going to flip out over that, and probably not in a good way. She loved science, but she didn't like science that could let you turn average items into a gigantic bomb. Sometimes, some knowledge was best left repressed.
Especially considering what this lab had been built to do.
And what the large amount of black-geared and armored men assembling in the room in front of the main door had been hired to protect, as they armed and cocked weapons and some took kneeling stances, all aiming at the door, some covering the ceiling and other angles. Behind them, a door sealed shut, mechanisms clicking within to indicate further locking, the mechanical beats echoing in semi-tune to the arming of the guns.
They probably could have snuck their way in. Security was good, but not THAT good compared to what they could bring to bear. It was a tradeoff. Sneaking in meant potentially avoiding the loss of data, but also meant every corner possibly containing a nasty surprise, the guards and whatnot all scattered around liable to bump into them. Going in the front door and setting off all the alarms meant people might dump and purge data...
If you didn't have a shapeshifter who could just head in and back it all up in advance. And after eighteen months healing from the mess that had happened at the end of the first year on Porphyrion, Melanie was itching to get back into the field. So, front door it was. It clustered the soldiers. Then there was just the problem of them all aiming at the lone entrance into the room.
A problem, if you didn't have a teleporter, Penelope popped in like she was invited, leaning back on the door she had just phased through.
"Sup?"
The bullets tore into the steel wall, the metal picked out to blunt impacts rather than cause ricochets. Penelope made like the bad penny she was named after and warped in behind the guards, and then off to the side, the men panicking and sweeping the room, the projects in the outer lab exploding in a hail of gunfire. Penelope took it all in stride, popping across the room once, twice, three times, always ahead of the shooters, before she returned to the front door and stuck the skeleton key device Maddie had given her into its controls, undoing the locks and sliding the door open.
"Don't you hate me?" Penelope said, and vanished. The roar of a fearsome beast echoed from the open door, the looming shadow of a monstrous....THING seeking to gain egress.
Whatever bullets the men had, they rapidly expended them. It didn't seem to slow the beast. Instead, it stopped on its own.
Aurora bounded into the room instead, an old line from her training echoing into her head.
Why just have knife stuff, pointy stuff? Shouldn't you not bring a knife to a gun fight?
Because guns breed overconfidence. All they have are bullets, and the certanity that once they're all gone, so you will be too. Because if you're not, and you won't be, you will then make sure they are no longer a problem before they have a chance to reload.
No slaughter please, Miss Klenn. The voice broke into her reminiscing. Tormon, giving orders.
"Roger roger SLICE AND DICE!" Aurora yelled back, her arms splitting open, one arm unfolding into a whirring buzzsaw and the other into a pulsing jackhammer blade. She could have carved up the guards like Christmas turkeys with these tools, but she had orders. And skills. And a considerably overhauled cybernetic body ever since Phineas' crap had been removed from the table.
The buzzsaw was great at slicing guns and armor. The jackhammer blade was great for breaking elbows and knees without cutting important blood vessels. Despite that, there was blood, and screaming, and even a few gunshots from sidearms. But the outcome was never in doubt, and by the time Cezary, in full 'war-brute' form (he really didn't like being called a werewolf, though that was more or less what he was when one got down to brass tacks, hence 'war-brute'), got in, he had to move quickly to get one soldier for himself to smack down, trying to avoid slipping in the blood. Surrounded by groans and screams, Aurora stopped, blood flicking through the air as her bladed weapons folded back into arms, the girl pausing to kick a gun away before kicking another man in the face.
"...was this really necessary?" Cezary said.
"They were Mops anyway."
"...What? We need a mop?"
"There's two kinds of mercenaries. Mops and Brooms." Penelope said as she strolled in. armed with a needle gun that anyone who played team based shooters would make a double-take at which she began applying to the downed guards to ensure they wouldn't bleed to death. "Mops are the scum. Good for cleaning 'messes'. By messes, we mean 'great at punching down'."
"The kind of men who wouldn't think twice of shooting up whatever they were told to shoot as long as they were getting paid. Great against unarmed women and children, but often not as good against someone who can actually fight back with superior force."
"And Brooms can?"
"Yep. They have actual skill, actual danger, sometimes severe. They can sweep the field, get it?"
"Guess so."
"Such an unrefined process. Ack, yuck! Wasted work." Came the third female voice, as Madeline Sorren entered the room. "Why would they set up in a place of science! Whoever built this place, they will not be getting my business!"
"Door's locked." Penelope said, pointing at the door the mercenaries had been guarding.
Cezary, wanting to do something, tore it off its frame like it was a cheap tin can and hurled it aside.
"Unlocked."
"Okay then. Time to see if julienne fries are needed." Aurora said, heading through the door.
"I never got that. What the heck are Julie Ann fries?" Cezary said.
"Normal french fries! Long and thin! The phrase is from a machine called the Veg-O-Matic, which was basically a french fry cutter that could have a second blade attached to make slices! Hence, a meme that will long outlive the product..."
"GUYS." Aurora's voice was not frantic, but hardly calm either. "GET YOUR BUTTS IN HERE."
---
It turned out the people that had actually been doing the science stuff in the labs definitely had the brains of the facility: they'd cleared out via a back elevator when it became very clear that their mercenaries might as well have all called in sick that day. Penelope, Cezary, and Aurora had managed to only catch two, which they'd locked up with the lone guard they'd discovered hadn't joined all his peers. Mainly because Melanie had knocked him out so she could contribute to the scientist-catching efforts, which hadn't amounted to much, in the end. Interrogation later. First the centerpiece of the main lab.
"...Is she human?" Cezary said, peering close at the naked young woman floating in the tube. Penelope gave his arm a smack. "Ow! What was that for?"
"Pervert."
"I'm looking! Not staring!"
"Stow it, you two. Cezary's no dog, powers aside." Aurora said, the animal-man giving the cyborg a sour look as she looked at the test subject herself. "He has a fair point. Maddie?"
"Human? Yes and no! Interesting, interesting..." Maddie said, pouring over the computer data she was calling up via her rapid typing.
"Is she one of the new ones? Made like us by morons?" Melanie said. The woman was about five nine, had hair so blonde it was almost white, and had a body rippling with tightly formed muscle, a supreme athelete rather than a bodybuilder. Hair also dotted her underarms and legs, and perhaps most strangely, she did not have a single scar. Her skin was flawless, beautiful skin on a beautiful girl.
"...No! She's like Dominique! She's a natural Augment, awakened by whatever weird brain chemistry chance he got...and what you got, Cezary! And I don't know if I'm reading this right...but I don't think she's from this world."
"So an alien."
"No, this world, but not! Another earth!"
"Oh, right right..." Cezary said, lost. He'd just been a miner before he'd woken up one day able to turn into a giant beast man, and most of the time he was still completely lost.
"She has...ha ha. Wholly beneficial regeneration capabilities!"
"So she heals?" Aurora said. That would explain the skin.
"Yes yes, in every way! She draws energy from the Quintessence to maximize her physical attributes! She seems to have been raised in very harsh circumstances...her powers helped ensure her survival and make her strong! Very, very strong! It would be impossible for a normal human to achieve this, even with the same circumstances...there would be long term damage...oh. Oh those wicked assholes."
"What?"
"They took advantage of her ability to heal...meddled with her arms! Stuck a rig through them...aha, claws. A classic."
"What, so she's Wolverine?" Melanie said.
"...Somewhat, yes! No metal bound to her bones though...just metal in her arms that open up her fingers and made metal claws pop out! Might be useful if she'd given consent, which I don't think she did..."
"Where did they get her from?"
"Looking, looking...blah blah travel in red space, that sounds like Miss Cosine's Bleed...jungle world, most of the planet covered in rainforest...subject retrieved from forest, evidence suggests she was raised there..."
"So she's from Tarzan?" Cezary said.
"In simple terms, yes! It's not simple!"
"So someone went to another world, found a girl who lived in a jungle and got really strong and tough because she can heal, and then dragged her back here and stuck metal claws in her hands." Cezary said.
"Yes, yes, yes!" Maddie said, sounding impatient.
"Cezary, if you're so full of questions, maybe it's time we go back and..."
THUD.
"Huh?"
THUD. THUD. WHAM.
"Oh crap." Aurora said. She knew that sound well. That was the sound of sudden rampaging done by something that could damn well rampage.
"The hell is that?" Cezary said.
"Cezary, where did you lock up our prisoners?" Maddie said.
"Uh, another lab, small one..."
"Did you check what was IN IT?"
"Yeah, a bunch of vials and shit, I smashed them all."
"Did you check and see if there was any more material..."
Another roar. This one even louder than the one Cezary had made, and throatier. Agonized.
"I assume there was." Maddie said. She was right. Uncertain of their fate, the two scientists had tried to use their studies to whip up a brief 'power fix', granting them something to get through the door.
The reasons why you didn't McGuyver a super serum ripped through one of the lab's doors moments later.
There would be no interrogation done today. The scientist who had imbibed their makeshift 'escape potion' had freed his two fellows of their lives before ripping free of the room and heading straight for where he knew fresh prey was. Still mutating, in a pain few people could comprehend, he was not long for the world, but he meant to take as many people as he could with him before he kicked the bucket.
"Sigh, where's the ex to snipe when you need him." Aurora said, and her arms erupted into massive, jagged claws. She and her fellows would have to do this the hard way.
---
It was over, several minutes later.
In just about every sense. The room was in ruins. Aurora was soaked with mess. Maddie would have to get into the guts of the computers to retrieve her data, with the main terminal now more resembling an art project done by an angry gorilla on PCP. At least she and her fellow Augments were just banged up and bruised. The mutant thing was...considerably worse off.
...the girl was gone.
Of course the tube had been smashed. That was more or less expected. But Aurora had not expected the girl to wake up and steal away like a damn cat. At least, she'd expected to detect on SOME level the girl was running, but nope. Tube broken, girl gone. And she was in no mood to give chase.
Status report, Aurora?
"It's all gone to crap, sir." Aurora said. The hard way, indeed. And she wasn't even in Vegas.
I'm sending in backup and cleanup.
"There was a girl...some cave woman mutant alien thing....you might run into her...watch out, she has claws."
...Noted.
Aurora leaned back. This had started as a quest to track down her biological father and half-brother. But in doing the research, red flags had come up. Somehow, the problem was linked to another the Foundry had discovered.
I don't know how much you know about this mess, CollinsCorp...but I'll get some answers if I have to cut them out of your hide.
----
"Of the five we've encountered, two
joined us, two preferred a normal life using their abilities quietly..."
So Conall had told Ariel, and there was a reason Raw and co had tracked a lab down to this city. It was in the same vicinity of one of those two turn-downers.
In truth, Walt Rod was starting to regret it a bit. But...what could he do? He could mix chemicals really, really damn well. He had an almost divine ability to get what he wanted out of basic elements, let alone fancy ones. He was pretty sure he could turn lead into gold, if he had access to the right stuff. That didn't fit in with a group of superhumans who could lift cement trucks with their brains and shoot beams out of their eyes. He'd be overshadowed, a load, probably resented. It would be school all over again, and at seventeen, Walt was already pretty tired of being low man on the totem pole there. Maybe better to just get a normal job, be a big fish in a small pond.
Life, however, sometimes had other plans. The same plans that had tweaked his brain to be just a little more than genius within a specific field, the same plans that had made Aurora and co check in on Walt in secret before they went to the lab, the same one that had caused Penelope to knock over a load of long-overdue to be done laundry, leaving a lingering scent Cezary had complained of a few times...
A scent trail followed out of fear and desperation, of someone so terribly lost and afraid.
He was sitting on his house's porch steps fiddling on his smart phone when he heard the thud on the fence. When he looked up, he spotted the motion just before she landed next to him like a monkey.
Where she'd gotten the furs, who knew. Maybe she'd been wearing them when she'd been kidnapped. Not that they really preserved her modesty, but better than nothing.
Walt stared, frozen in surprise.
The girl stared back, eyes wide and a strange tinted light purple.
Life...it was strange.
