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| Scene Title | Learn To Survive, Part III |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | In the aftermath of Structure's collapse, some awaken into death's embrace. |
| Date | July 11, 2021 |
Metallic feet plot heavy down a steel catwalk, moving a wheeled bed containing the unconscious body of a person shrouded by medical machinery. Abigail Caliban is unrecognizable with her head encased in a visored helmet of plastic and metal bristling with thick, braided cables. Her mouth is covered by a respirator mask and feeding hose combination that is still pumping away, connected to life support systems inside the wheeled bed she lays on.
The white-bodied machine pushing the wheeled bed down the catwalk moves with a too-smooth gait. Its white plastic and steel body matches the sterile aesthetics of the bed it pushes, but not the grimy concrete surroundings, nor the medical waste lingering in the corners of the corridor beyond the raised catwalk.
Abigail’s vitals are replicated on the touchpad at the robot’s midsection, showing a lowered heart rate and flatlined encephalogram readings. Which may explain why the robot is taking her to the medical incinerator.
Versatile Shipping Czechia
Secure Facility Level
Prague
Czechia
Two waste disposal technicians haul the body of a teenage girl off of the medical bed she was attached to. A glossy string of mucus hangs from her mouth, drawn up by the feeding tube pulled out of her body. The waste-worker looks at the body of Brynn Ferguson and frowns visibly, surprised by how light she is.
“The fuck happened down there?” The other waste technician has to shout to be heard through his respirator, squinting at Brynn’s body. She’s laid down unceremoniously in her damp body-suit, still wet with salinated water from the bed’s suspension-bath.
The other waste technician shakes his head, watching a fourth body brought into the room by a Crito medical robot. He sighs, nodding to an already moving conveyor leading down to a roaring crematorium. “Here,” he enunciates for the dull-witted machine, which reaches down into the salinated bath and lifts Abby out, allowing the technician to remove the wired helmet from her head and slide out her feeding tube.
“Fuck if I know,” the other waste technician finally replies, laying Abby down on the conveyor. She is motionless as it begins to feed her toward the fire. “And fuck if you know either. Unless you want to wind up in there.” He says with a gesture to the fire. “The less we know the b—”
Brynn jolts up, feeling an intense heat over her body juxtaposed against a faintly slimy wetness. Her throat is raw, stomach churning, world swimming and—
silent.
A pair of men in a gray jumpsuit with goggles and respirator masks back away from the unmoving conveyor belt that Brynn lays on. They’re gesturing wildly at each other as they watch her roll onto her side, retching over the side of the conveyor. It’s there, through blurry eyes, that Brynn sees Abby laying motionless on an adjacent conveyor, slowly being fed into an incinerator.
And then disappears into the flames.
Desperately heaving her guts out over the side of the belt, Brynn fights to get her bearings. Everything is distorted in her vision, and she's brutally confused after this very Matrix-esque awakening. The doorway of light led here – but where is here?? Coughing and choking on bile as she tries to spit the taste out of her mouth, she is horrified to see the Detect– no, that's Aunt Abby going into the fire.
The rasping sound out of her throat is harsh and has no real voice to it. Just a grating sound of despair while Brynn tries to roll off the side of her own conveyor belt and scrabble under it to get her bearings. Abby is dea– wait. Aunt Abby's power is living fire, isn't it? Not in the where she just was, but here … is that true? Which things are part of here, which part of there??
She can't figure out which way to go, her wits are scrambled and she feels sluggish, like she's not entirely awake yet.
“Fuck!” The pragmatic waste-worker shouts, springing away from Brynn. “Holy fuck is she alive!?”
The other waste-worker steps back with eyes wide behind his protective goggles. He looks to the furnace where Abby’s body vanished into the fire and shakes his head in disbelief. He looks back at Brynn, holding his hands up slowly. “H-hey we’re—be cool. Be cool.”
He’s afraid of her. But the one he should really be afraid of is—
Isabelle jerks awake in her medical bed, thrashing in the protoplasmic soup she is suspended in. The horror of waking up to intubation and darkness causes her to scream and gag behind the muffle of her respirator, pulling the device off of her face and choke-yanking the tube out of her throat. She retches reflexively, stomach heaving and back thrashing, which throws her helmet off onto the floor.
The world is too bright. Her vision blurs, head throbs with a migraine, and the intense heat of the furnaces prickles her skin in ways she isn’t used to feeling. There’s people here, men in jumpsuits and goggles, furnaces, bodies—
And Shaw is nowhere to be seen.
She breathes.
She feels heat, vision slowly yo-yoing into focus. Were they free? A question Isa would have asked her partner if he was here but he was not. The lack of her ability and Shaw hit her at two different times but rather close together.
Welcome back… Isabelle closes her eyes, head tipped back, relishing in the heat even if she felt it in an abnormal way for her. Slowly hazel eyes open to a spinning world that's way too bright.
Fingers curl into a light fist as her eyes begin to adjust though the migraine has her flinching from the light still. There's Brynn, the girl from inside, she looks horrified. Isabelle's hand pulls at the tube that was just buried inside of her and throws one leg over the bed, the "soup" drips onto the floor rapidly. If there's one thing Isa feels in this moment are the embers of her rage and she bares her teeth, standing on both legs shakily. Tube dangling in her hand, dragging on the floor and leaving a trail. Kill them… KILL THEM!
Wincing, Isa steps towards Brynn and the worker.
Gray eyes flit wildly from one place to another, terror evident in Brynn's expression. As she blinks her eyes trying to clear them, she keeps seeing in her mind's eye someone's hands signing urgently, Get low. Keep moving. The men in the suits are a threat. Aunt Abby just went into the fire…
The silence in her world is familiar but it's also a significant danger in and of itself right now – she can't detect threats coming from anywhere but in front of her. Has no way to know if she's about to be grabbed again from behind. She can't see Isabelle sitting up in her medical bed from this angle. Not until the woman starts to climb out. Get low. Keep moving. Find cover with your back to a solid surface, the hands flash in her mind's eye again.
Brynn, on her hands and knees on the floor where she fell, starts fast-crawling under her conveyer belt away from the two men toward … she has no idea toward what. Away. That's her sole goal in this. Away from the men, out of reach so they can't throw her into the fire too. Instinct and more than a decade of training at Brian's hands have her frantically seeking anything she can grab and use as a weapon as she crawls.
The disposal crew’s reactions are much the same as Brynn’s. The two men backpedal away from Brynn and Isa, hands raised. “Whoa, whoa, whoa—it’s cool—we’re cool it’s fine we—we didn’t know—we didn’t know—” the only one who can find words stumbles through the ones he does.
They both eye an open door that leads across a catwalk into a concrete-walled corridor out of the incinerator chamber. Neither want to be trapped in the room with whatever this situation is. “Look I—just calm down okay?” The other disposal tech finally finds the courage to say. “We just—we should call someone to sort this out.”
Brynn can’t hear any of their words. But she can see the fear in their eyes.
His coworker looks at him like he has three heads. Call someone? He mouths in disbelief. But before he can vocalize his displeasure, the horror show continues as another one of the “dead” experiments comes thrashing to life. Gillian Childs kicks her legs, arches her back, and churns in her suspension. The robot that was pushing her medical bed does not react, save that the heart-rate monitor on its chest suddenly spikes with Gillian’s vitals, then flatlines as she tears electrodes off of her body in her thrashing.
Gillian surfaces from the suspension fluid, yanking the tube from her throat much as Isa had. She is forcibly birthed back into a world she does not recognize, but the presence of man in utility jumpsuits and open furnaces with conveyor belts brings back stories Claire told her about Vanguard corpse disposal sites in Madagascar all those years ago. For a moment it feels like waking from one nightmare into another. It may yet be still.
There’s a moment where Gillian exhales a sharp breath, where her hands shake, her wide eyes take in the blurry room around her. Then her eyes flare with violet light.
A knot of tension held in place for months unwinds in the back of Gillian’s mind. It unleashes an invisible field of energy that manifests as a shimmering purple glow around her hands, like a violet aurora. Gillian screams and the aura explodes outward from her like a rapidly-expanding soap bubble.
The violet light brushes across Isabelle and Brynn and feels like a surge of adrenaline, sending waves of smoke up Isabelle’s arms as her body temperature rises and she burns away the sleeves of her bodysuit a moment before both of her arms become engulfed in flames. All the color around Brynn begins to shift as uncontrollable chromatic patterns bleed out from wherever she touches a solid object.
Then, out from the incinerator, a shape ripples into being. A molten form of living fire with white hot eyes. Her body burning clear and hot, not consumed by the incinerator flames, but reborn in them once again.
As Abby emerges in her incendiary form the disposal crew panic and turn to run. Gillian watches them pass by the lidless tank she’s seated in and lurches forward, trying to climb out of the wheeled bed, only for her eyes to roll back in her head and for her to collapse, floating to the top of the murky brine with blood running from her nose and ears.
Well… now all of you are really gonna get it. Cuz Aunt Abby and… she thinks the other woman's name is Isabelle although her mind is a little jumbled, but her too! They are both on fire. And she's pretty sure neither one of them is playing any kind of reindeer games today.
Crouched beneath the conveyor belt against a wall so no one can come at her from behind, her vision flashing with colors that she's pulling to her and shoving away again almost as fast as they come, Brynn is struggling to get hold of herself. Most of it, thank god, is just metallic gray. Which is good when one wants to make oneself as small a target as possible in this particular room, because she makes herself that color in chameleon-like camouflage at first.
But that adrenaline surge peters away a little bit and she realizes what happened – Aunt Gilly! Scrabbling under the conveyor belt toward the bed where Aunt Gilly lays, Brynn checks to make sure the woman is okay before turning to the two pyrokinetics. That might be handy… just burn the whole place down. Hesitantly, more toward Abigail than Isabelle because her two-lived-lives-brain doesn't remember if Isabelle is someone she knows here and if she knows ASL, she signs, Is this real? How do we get out?? She can't hear any alarms, if there are any. She will readily take her cues from them.
She’s never woken up in her coronal form before. Never come to in a medical waste incinerator either. But there's a first time for everything even in these days of rampant firsts. Abigail follows up the chute, moving swiftly and hesitates as she’s partway out in her incandescent form to take quick stock of who is in the room, get her bearings, make sense of the noises around her. She recognizes, or at least recognizes that feel of power, Gillian and the surge that stokes the flames to lean white-ish. When the woman collapses she banks down to hot instead of outrageously hot. Isa and her arms are taken in and finally Brynn.
One step at a time B, the movements swift but discernible even as her own heart - in whatever form it takes at the moment- hammers in her chest. There's fleeing forms. “Isa, light em up” Her voice sounds like she’s under water but audible. She’ll pray for forgiveness later at Ascension if they make it out of here. Maybe even forgive herself. There's a robot as well. That gets a wary look as if waiting for it to make a movement and ready to smelt it if needed.
Once Gillian gasps and the purple aura washes over Isa she mirrors the augmentor's reaction with hazel eyes slightly widen. The returning heat feels like home and the dark haired woman's back arches as the power floods through her and eyes flutter shut. Snapping open a moment later and reflecting the flames that manifested on her arms.
With her power reawakening the voice within screams with a primal rage coiled with decades of trauma: KILL THEM ALL.
The flames rippling along Isa's arms flicker from a deep orange to electric blue and she snarls, eyeing the retreating workers. Before Abby's words can finish her gaze narrows in anger and she reaches forward with her mind, reaches within the retreating men. The heat in the room turns up several notches but that scorching comes from within the men from their very core. The flames rise on her arms as she draws her lips together and emits a hiss. "Burn." She whispers, spittle flying from her mouth. "BURN!" Stalking forward as she screams.
It takes no effort to end the lives of the workers, they aren’t armed, don’t—can’t—put up a fight. All they do is beg and scream as they collapse to their knees, but soon those screams are swallowed as the oxygen in their lungs is consumed by the fires burning them from the inside out. They do not die immediately, though. The process is slow and agonizing—
“You murdered everyone. And you THINK,” a knife in Isabelle’s hand serves as an anchoring point for the flames to gather. “I CARE ABOUT A FEW FUCKING KIDS!”
—causing them to writhe and twist in on themselves as they feel their bodies cooking alive from within. One reaches out to another, desperate to help, desperate for help. But there is none. There is just an agonizing, nightmarish death.
Hunched beside the hole in the wall where they’d breached the compound, Kain Zarek is slack-jawed and frozen in place. As the violent glow of fire rises into the room, carrying smoke aloft on thermal wind and the screams of children burning alive, he can do nothing but stare. The fire reflects in his eyes, lights his face and highlights the horror in his expression.
Isabelle’s burning arms tremble as Gillian’s amplification fades with her consciousness, fades with the memories of a dark world she fled. As the flames die down, all that remains of the sanitation workers are blackened husks of charcoal in the shape of human bodies, cracked on the outside with tongues of flame lapping from within.
Brynn nodnodnods to Abby, wrapping her arms around the unconscious form of Gillian to start getting her out of the goo… and then she stares in abject horror at Isabelle's targets as they burn. If she thought burning the building down might be an option a half a second ago, her mind is absolutely rejecting that thought – along with any fluids left in her body – right this very minute.
She has shot at people, she has had to live through firefights. She has never seen a person burn. Brynn is bent double, heaving hard enough to eject her stomach right out with its contents it feels like. She is unlikely to ever forget the stench or the image, but it might just be the sheer deliberate nature of the action that hits hardest. And the whisper of the question… if she could do the same, would she?
And still, the young woman manages somehow to pull herself together after a minute or two of hanging head-down over her own knees. The back of her hand comes up shakily to wipe her mouth. They're covered in so many disgusting substances, it doesn't even matter.
You promise you won't leave Jac, Aunt Gilly._
I won’t. And I’m not leaving you again, either. Let’s go find your sister.
And grimly, crying tears that now will not stop, Brynn pushes upright to wrap her arms around Gillian again and maneuvers her aunt out of that bed. They are going home. They are going to find the others and get the hell out of this madness.
People burn and Abigail keeps her distance for now. Proximity will bring harm to allies. Gaze switches between the combusting bodies, the robot that never moves and Brynn who has heaved her guts. She makes a step forward as if wanting to comfort the young woman but stops two steps in.
Instead she gives Brynn space to center herself and opts to move forward toward the door. “I’ll look out the door” She’s intangible after all. “Isa, help Brynn. If we need to, we can move Gillian in the… cask” She doesn't know what to call it. “For as far as we can. See who we can meet up with.” If they manage to get out? They can figure out that part of the plan later. She moves then at that swift walking pace that she manages in her mimic's form. Scout ahead.
Once the flames die down the dark haired woman's eyebrows raise and she whips around, spotting the augmentor knocked out and ready to slap her back awake before she gets ahold of herself, hand raised high into the air with a crazed expression on her face. It's like she glitches in real time.
Release me! Again? "Not." Isa grunts and clutches her head, swaying in place. "A good idea. Right now."
Memories flash through the pyrokinetic's mind as disjointed blurry messes and she bares her teeth. Isa staggers towards the door and looks back at Brynn, fire still burning in her eyes, "Help, Gillian. Let's. Move." Something was happening, in the deep recesses of her mind. All of the pain she had inflicted, all the screams. She doesn't look at the charred corpses, it's as if she doesn't register them even being there.
But something else does.
Releasereleasereleasereleasereleasereleaserelease.
The smallest of flames sparks to life at her fingertips.
"We need to go. NOW." Where was Shahid? She had to find him before…
Abigail is as ephemeral as the holy ghost, slipping below the door to the incinerator in thin sheets of flame. She reforms on the other side in a long, concrete hall that reminds her of so many places she’s suffered in. The basement of the Happy Dagger, any number of Company installations, even the halls of the Institute. They could be anywhere, but the lingering memory of her other life in the simulation with Robert reminds her of the truth. They’re in a scientific research facility in Europe.
The hallway is silent, safe enough for her to call back through the door for the others. Isabelle is the first out the door, stepping around Abby’s conflagration and into the fluorescent-lit corridor. Gillian is barely able to stand, but using Brynn to lean on she staggers her way out the door. They’re only going to be able to move as fast as she can.
Isabelle notices the reflective black dome of security cameras just a little ways down the hall. As her back stiffens with momentary tension all the lights in the corridor go out. Abby is a bonfire and a torch, illuminating them with an incendiary glow, until everywhere is cast in the same orange light as emergency lights come on. It feels like a power outage, but without an obvious cause.
Continuing down the hallway there’s two open doors on either side of the hall, one leading into an unoccupied break room, the other into a small office with wall-mounted cabinets and a cheap standing desk. There’s a middle-aged man in business-casual attire standing behind the desk looking confused at his cell phone. He mumbles something in Czech, glancing up at the door in fretful panic, only to make eye contact with Isabelle.
He sputters something else in Czech, slowly raising his hands and shaking his head.
For all that she's a petite thing, barely clearing 5'2 or so in her bare feet, Brynn isn't weak. With Gillian's arm around her neck and her arm around her aunt's waist, she is moving them along at best speed. She is unwilling to stay here one moment longer than they have to. Something in the back of her head is telling her they're on borrowed time and they need to get out before alarms start going off. But the power going out makes her hope that the man and woman in the simulation, the programs or the technopaths or whatever they are, are doing their jobs. And that somewhere in this mess of an evacuation they're going to meet up with the others who have to have woken up somewhere else …. Jac, Mo– Aunt Kaylee, Nova, Asi…. Please let them all be okay.
Abby’s keeping herself tamped low as possible, doing her best not to trigger any potential fire alarms or smoke alarms. Who knows what might still be active despite whatever is casting things in the dark. Not that it bothers Abigail. Night or day makes no difference in this form, but varying shades of heat. Like the man in his office, the phone in his hand. The hands going up. Abby makes no move, leaving him to Isa to do with as she wants and keeps moving forward as if she were still in SCOUT only minus weapons and armor. A gesture to indicate she’s looking into the break room, ASL to Brynn to remind her to keep an eye behind them. Stepping back out if she finds nothing so she can continue forward. She does lift a hand, lift the whole of her up just a little upon thermals and to bust the camera with a finger touching it, to melt that dome and it’s contents inside. Cut off any vision from outside parties.
Isabelle calmly lifts her hand as it becomes wreathed in fire though not as strong as when Gillian augmented her. The man is surrendering, he means no harm. Still the angry woman stalks towards him and a flash of a hallway filled with smoke takes her over. The screams of her parents behind the door at the far end echo down to her childhood self.
In the real world Isa clutches the side of her head and cries out.
Something else steps forward into her mind's eye, Shahid. The fan to her flame but equally someone that knew how to dull her edges. She couldn't do this.
Shaking her head to dispel the voice compelling her to consume everything in her path with fire, "Do you speak, any English?" She basically barks it out, trembling from the effort. "Where are your bosses!"
The man in the suit nods rapidly. “Yes—Yes.” He glances past Isabelle to the others in the corridor, mostly Abby in her blazing form, then locks eyes on Isabelle again. “T-Three floors up.” He points up to emphasize. “There’s a—a freight elevator down the hall and to the right.” He realizes something, sputtering to add more detail. “It might be—the power, I don’t—the stairs are just past it.”
Trembling, the man in the suit gingerly motions to a badge clipped to his lapel:
Boris Kopecky
Waste Facilities Manager
“S-security runs on backup power. I know the passcode.” Boris stammers. I’m useful, it implies. He’d much rather be useful than dead.
"It's your lucky day Boris," Jutting her head towards the door, "Lead the way." Inside Isabelle's mind she firmly asserts herself as the one that's in control. Not her murderous impulses and shudders as she lets loose a ragged breath.
She wouldn't try to control shit when she came across the people who did this to her, Shahid, to all of them.
Only three floors up, "If you lie to us in any way, you will end up barbecue."
There’s a glance back toward Isa and the manager, and if you could see eyebrows on Abigail, they’d be furrowed and confused. “Isa… we need to find the others. Not…” Go kill upper management.
She glances to Brynn managing Gillian then back to Isa. “We can use him for the security clearance to get into areas that I can’t-” She can slither in gaps, the benefits to the form. “But we need to find the others. They’ll be here, somewhere and they’ll be sending security” A gesture to the now dead camera. “We need to keep moving.”
Brynn hesitates when Isabelle pauses. She can see the pyrokinetic talking to the man, but she has no idea what's being said. She swallows hard, hoping against hope that the woman is not going to burn everyone they come across. When he points and seems to be being helpful, the tiny brunette risks a small breath. Her gray eyes skip to Aunt Abby but …. The brain fog is keeping her from being certain about whether Abigail knows Cant. Oh! She remembers Cant! Well, that will be useful, if anyone else knows it…
She pulls in a breath and starts walking Aunt Gilly toward the freight elevator that was pointed to. A memory flickers at the edge of her thoughts, and for a few moments she's confused about where she is. Fingers flying one-handed. Run! Dark tunnels with flashlights bouncing. Her siblings, Joe taking up the rear while Lance leads the charge. Wet. The feel of water pounding behind them, the rush of it catching them and flushing them… where?
Are we back in the tunnels? Oh heck, there are rats in the tunnels, right??! But that's not right – these are too clean to be the tunnels around the Safe Zone.
Brynn shakes off disjointed memories of dirty places where people are chasing them. Those were problems from … another place and time. Her two lives are a little bit discombobulating right now, but she's damn sure that getting out of here is the priority.
Boris does precisely as told, walking ahead of the group with his hands folded behind his head, leading them down a concrete corridor under the dim security lighting toward a dimly lit lobby. It’s a stark, utilitarian thing of concrete and brushed metal with signage on the wall in German and English indicating proper safety protocols for waste disposal, illustrated diagrams of men in clean suits with respirators. Boris approaches the two elevators in the lobby, punching in a code into a number pad beside the doors. Nothing happens. He mumbles an apology and tries again.
“It’s—I—” He tries the code again. By this point everyone has seen it entered enough times to be sure it’s 373535. But nothing happens. The pad isn’t even lit up. “The—the electricity—it’s—it should work with main power off.” He enters the code again. His hands are shaking then freeze at a sound.
Brynn is the only one who can’t hear it. Footsteps. Thundering. Multiple footsteps running down stairs. It echoes from a nearby steel door marked EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY that has a matching keypad lock next to it.
Someone is coming.
"Agreed." Isa needed to find Shahid, she knew he would be okay though and protect the others. It wasn't just her revenge to take, it was all of theirs and they should be taking it together.
The elevator being down isn't to be unexpected but it's an annoyance nonetheless.
They can't even consider many options because the sound of many footfalls assaults them before a physical person can. "Those three need to hide." Is said to Abby, at least Brynn can get Gilly and Boris out of the way. Isa can guess how trying to hold Boris as leverage will go. "You understand these people don't give a damn about your life, yes?" She doesn't wait for an answer, "They will not stop shooting just because you are here. Hide now, protect these two."
Flexing her fingers, Isa digs as deep as she can into what she considers her furnace inside, coaxing the flames out, breathing life into their existence.
"Hey Nun," using Abby's old nickname from Old Lucy's. "Can I throw you like a fireball?"
This Isabelle is no less deranged.
Can I throw you like a fireball? The coronal woman looks back at Isa with a look akin to abject horror. Throw her. Like a fireball. She’s experienced that before. In a situation perhaps just a shade less perilous. Bodily autonomy is something that this woman has long been a stickler about. She didn’t like it then, it doesn’t look like she likes the idea even right now.
But Isa’s asking. With a nickname that Abigail hasn’t heard in a long time. There’s a nod and there’s a glance to Brynn, Gillian, their captive. “Hide.” She cautions, fingers making the movements for Brynn before Abigails balling herself up, to control her own center of gravity to a degree. Like a cannonball of flame, about to jump into a pool but instead of water, maybe people instead.
Surprise?
Hide? Brynn's jaw sets and she pivots on her bare feet to hustle Gillian back into the corridor that they just came from. She doesn't care what happens to the man they've abducted, not really. She has one task – help Aunt Gilly get to safety. If Boris sticks with her, she'll hide him too.
There are few places in the concrete corridor to hide, but she pushes Gillian against the wall in a small alcove of a doorway and presses her body against her to shield her as much as she can. She motions the older man to join them, press in close to Gillian's side. Her back to Gilly's front, Brynn pulls in a breath and does what she does best – hide. A hand on each of her companions, she focuses and pushes her power out to camouflage the three of them in that doorway so they look at a glance like nothing is here. The same color as the wall with small variations even that would appear natural from a distance as long as they all stand still. She peers out from there, carefully, and waits for all hell to break loose.
The thundering footsteps stop at the door, followed by a soft beep and then a thunderous clang from the maglock disengaging. For Abigail, this is a thousand moments repeating on an infinite loop. How many concrete corridors has she suffered, how many doors bursting with assailants has it been? How many of these fucking instillations will rob her of her dignity until this is over?
When the door opens, the masked figures emerging from the stairwell might as well be the Vanguard, might as well be DHS, might as well be FRONTLINE, or any of the other faceless government agencies that have deprived them of their rights. Matte black body armor, helmets, gas masks, assault rifles. The story is so old as to be expected at this point.
When the liquidation team sees the incandescent glow of fire they do not initially clock it as a person. Yet training is instantaneous, automatic gunfire rips harmlessly through Abigail and pockmarks the concrete wall behind her. It’s only then that they see Isabelle’s dark silhouette beginning to smoke and crackle with flame.
«Hostil—» is as far as the liquidation team leader gets.
While there’s definitely a bang, things for Gillian are still a whimper. Gillian is only half aware of what’s happening still, as she’s shoved against the wall and shifts under Brynn’s hold. The whimpers are soft words. Words that the girl closest can’t hear, whispered through cracked lips. Hazel eyes blink open, tears forming against the heat and light. It will take some time for her eyes to fully adjust, especially with the brightness that tries to burn afterimages into newly awakened vision.
But Brynn’s presence is comforting. And recognized faster than she might have suspected. A hand comes in to sign. Fingers don’t form the right way, movement is not there. If a sign could stutter this is a stutter.
But at least she’s becoming more and more aware. Though odds seem good she’ll still need help walking from the way she clutches Brynn with her non-attempting-to-sign hand.
A purple glow starts to build in her eyes, channeling toward perhaps one of the safest places it could go right now. Brynn herself.
Brynn can't tell what Aunt Gilly is trying to sign, but she sees how her hand comes up. Glancing at the older woman sideways as she gently brings Gilly's hand back in – she can't hide movement using her abilities – to place it against her own cheek in silent reassurance, she starts to whisper a response that has no sound to accompany it. Two worlds, two lives, somewhere in there she knew how to talk, how to push air across her vocal cords and make herself heard, but… right now, both worlds are real and neither world is real. It will take some time to try to sort herself out, but at the moment the instinct is simply dismissed.
The amplification of her ability has Brynn struggling to control the spread of her camouflage… but it looks so photorealistic that even when Aunt Abby and the other detective are done doing things that Brynn doesn't want to see, doesn't want to remember the sight or smell of, they will be hard-pressed to actually locate the three people hiding in the doorway.
Seeing the team has Isabelle cocking her head to the side, hazel eyes burning with flames within as she lifts her hand almost as if she's in a trance, feeling her power again is like a drug. Having Abby here to boost her capabilities is a godsend.
The room grows hot, unbearably so and fast. Abby feels herself being pulled and prodded at as Isa's mind molds her into a large sphere of bright flames.
The fire from Isa's arms dances feverishly up her shoulders, reaching out to connect to the former nun's form. The pyrokinetic bares her teeth and pushes. Her body engulfed in flames, feeding more to Abby as they rapidly change from bright orange to deep blue. The blue flames mix with Abby's. Feeding her even hotter flames before she hurls the woman in flame form at the team with a scream that echoes down the hall. Bounding off the walls like a ghost's wail of anger and pain.
There's a shudder in Abby's form when the woman relinquishes control of herself to Isa. Having curled up as best she can, the bullets whizzing through her more annoyance than anything, she lets herself be guided. No little bit of her is her, just an extension of Isa’s will and there's a faint flicker of remorse that Death’s coming for the people in front of her. But that flicker doesn’t stay. It's gone as fast as it came, pushed deep down to some remote part of her as she cycles to that horrifically hot blue.
Those warnings called out end when Abby's flames meet flesh and she watches as those thermal shaded limbs, torsos, equipment, all of them come into sustained contact with her.
Eleven Years Earlier
Bannerman’s Castle
Pollepel Island
It’s hard to breathe. It’s been hard to breathe for days. Cold stone walls do little to help this, no matter how many blankets are piled on, no matter how many kerosene space heaters help warm the room. The repurposed ruin always feels damp, always feels like the walls are closing in.
Sweat beads on twelve year old Brynn Ferguson’s brow. Her skin is cold and clammy to the touch. Each breath that comes with a shallow rise and fall of her chest is accompanied by a wet wheeze. She is dying.
But she is not alone. Someone sits beside Brynn’s cot, larger fingers laced with hers. A man with light hair and pale eyes, gently cradles Brynn’s hand in his own. Praying, softly, he does for all the sick children here. Prayers that fall on deaf ears.
He’s risking infection himself, but he knows what it’s like to be young, afraid, and alone. So he sits, and he prays. A prayer for the hard times. When life feels short. When trembling hands need another to hold. A prayer Brynn never was able to hear, but felt in the firm hand holding hers.
Present Day
The calming, resolute presence of Brian Fulk lingers in her thoughts in this moment of true horror. She can’t tell if the screaming has stopped, but thankfully she didn’t have to hear it. The smell is something she can’t block out, not with her hand, not with a song. But still it lilts in the back of her mind, soothing and gentle. It helps detach her from the split open skin, exposed bone, charred black flesh, and the way some of the security officers still subtly move. She isn’t sure if they’re still—horrifyingly—alive, or if their tendons are just contracting from the heat.
Boris is repeating something in another language over and over again, unable to look away from the burned bodies of the security team. He only stops when a gurgle interrupts his words, followed by a forward lurch and vomiting on the floor near Gillian and Brynn.
The door to the stairwell remains ajar, blocked from closing by the blackened leg of one of the security officers. Concrete stairs under a harsh orange light go up and down, and the stairwell wall is marked with a red stencil reading B5 - Waste Disposal.
Brynn's eyes close for long moments while the indescribable smell of burning human fills the hallway. She has a kaleidoscope of flashes – gunfire and explosions, people burned in those explosions emanating the same horrific scent. It takes everything she has not to join Boris in heaving her guts out. She swallows convulsively, over and over, trying not to see what's in front of her. She's going to have nightmares.
But Brian, the only father she's ever known in either life, taught her how to prioritize and make sure she and her people are as safe as they can be on a battlefield – Get low. Move on a tangent. Keep your head on a swivel. And don't stop moving. It's not ASL.
Brynn shakes her head hard, trying to dislodge the memory of instructions that make perfect sense in this life. Some part of her hates this world she's come back to. The other one was so much less horrible for her. But the part of her that lives in this world can absolutely stand on her own two feet and do what needs to be done right here and now. And right now, Aunt Gilly can't fend for herself. That's Brynn's priority. She'll vomit and have screaming nightmares later. God, she wishes her brothers were here—
"You have so many brothers and sisters— including Sqea— Jac. Including Jac. And so many aunts and uncles. And you have me." Tears well up in her gray eyes. If her brothers were here, the escapees would be better off. Lance and Joe are experts in combat. But they're not and if this group doesn't get out of here, it won't matter how much family Brynn has out there. She nudges Aunt Gilly toward the stairs that the two detec— no, that Aunt Abby and Detective Isabelle just cleared. Time to go.
They have people waiting for them.
Gillian also has to keep telling herself that, whispering it to herself. It was the only way she could leave that world behind. Part of her had hoped she would never wake up, that she’d stay in that place forever and find out it was all actually real. It was the idea that maybe Peter was alive there that kept her going, that— that all of the kids would be there.
”They are waiting for us.” she manages to sign, as she avoids throwing up or looking too closely at the burning bodies. Some long lost memory tells her that’s not the worst thing she’s ever seen or smelled. Not by a longshot. Stronger, she puts more of her weight under her own strength and is able to move more quickly, to follow the instructions.
The ash is kicked aside as Isa moves towards the exit, no time to think on much outside of Shahid. Of making it back to him. The monster inside of the woman is quiet, seething, waiting for her next move. "We have to go." The others would look after the man puking duress sure.
A charred hand cracks into ash as Isa steps through the threshold.
Abby unfolds from the balled up humanesque shape she had taken and moves through the door with little visible regard for the bodies that are now on the ground. There’s a glance back to Brynn, Gillian and Boris and a nod, a gesture for them to join them as she moves through the door, tamping down her flames to make proximity to her possible. She moves around Isa though and takes the lead. Better that the incorporeal being can draw fire and so that Isa can once again use her as needed to clear their way.
“We go up” Comes from her verbally. “Till we can’t anymore”
And up she starts.
Boris mutters something unintelligible but clearly a swear as he rises from a couch, hands still slightly raised as to indicate his compliance. Isa is the first to force the door to the stairwell open the rest of the way, using the charred remains of one of the armed men to prop it open. This must be the liquidation team that Colin warned them about. Crito Corporate’s kill squad come to clean up InVerse’s mess.
The stairs only go up from here, and Abby’s proclamation to ascend is swiftly followed. Isabelle and Abby lead the way, taking two steps at a time. The stairwell is lit by the same bright orange emergency lighting that throws everything into high contrast, Details are muddier, but movement and basic shapes more clearly defined. The stairwell is noisy, people are moving far above—heavy boots falling, shouts, gunfire.
Boris follows along beside Brynn and Gillian, watching them with both fear and uncertainty. He’s mindful never to stray out of sight, never to make a sudden move toward either of them. Up ahead, after a forty foot ascent, Abby and Isa hit another landing with a security door. The stencil on the wall reads: B4 - Morgue.
“U—up, yes?” Boris asks, glancing at the door, then the stairwell continuing to wind upwards.
Brynn's gray eyes are watchful on Boris. He's being careful to move with her and Gillian, but she doesn't trust him. Can't trust him – he works for These People. And none of this is okay. Up, she signs to Boris, gesturing for him to keep moving behind Abby and Isa. She keeps her arm around Gillian's waist, bringing up the rear of their ragtag little group. Colin told them Out is up.
And yet she pauses for a moment, her brow furrowing. Should they be checking the morgue for anything? After all, they all were, in theory, in the morgue before disposal.
Brynn holds up and waves a hand at Abigail, speed-signing, Aunt Abby, should we look in there? Did they hold us in there before taking us downstairs?? She cannot hear the sounds of combat above, but she can feel the vibrations through her bare feet. She knows things are happening ahead and up those stairs.
"Up." Isa answers coldly and she pushes forward, as she moves flames crawl over her left arm, poised and ready to be unleashed on any that would do her or the people's she's with harm. "I would make sure you duck down in case any of their bullets find you." Said to Boris before charging upwards, murder in her eyes.
Morgue. They were in a waste disposal. There were some sort of tanks that seemed like what they had come out of or at least Abigail presumed them to have. She looks momentarily torn between going in or going up. But where there was one extermination team, there’s bound to be more and if they have their abilities back others surely do as well.
She’s torn on where to go but up is life. Up is out. She shifts her head to look upward, searching out temperature differences where the others can’t see due to muddy light in the center of the stairwell. Light has little impact on her senses in this form. Try to get some idea of what’s ahead of them.
“Up” She states quietly, and with ASL for Brynn’s sake. She’s moving up, sticking to the inside to provide some light in their immediate area and for Isa to utilize her, manipulate her if she needs to for their safety.
“Hopefully there’s someone waiting for us”
Heading up past the morgue level, there’s distant sounds of gunfire getting closer. Boris hugs the wall, eyes wide, watching Isabelle’s back as She leads the charge up the stairs. Halfway up the stairs there’s a sudden and violent explosion muffled by the concrete walls. As Isa arrives at the landing to the next floor, she’s certain the sound came from the other side of the door to this floor. But it’s silent after the explosion. No gunfire, no screams.
The wall opposite the landing indicates B3 - Medical & Detention.
Boris, assuming the group will continue their ascent, watches the stairs that continue to wind up. Even from here the group can hear more gunfire, distant, echoing from somewhere far above.
“Looks like we got out just in time,” Gillian mutters gruffly, voice even raspier than usual and she doesn’t sign this part other than giving an indication that she’s along for the ride this time.
The idea that they might have been about to be disposed off completely now that she’s more aware of their location does at least satiate guilt for having left behind a son that wasn’t real—
A little bit.
She tries to focus her senses a little more now, reaching out to see if she can feel anything besides them.
It might find others in their group. Others like them. As long as they weren’t already disposed of.
"We…should check it out." Isabelle surprises herself by saying it but she's already making for the door. "Could avoid another fight," eyes flick upwards to indicate where the fight she's talking about would more than likely occur.
The pyrokinetic doesn't say she would rather not have to further traumatize the people with her by burning people to death but she had a reputation to uphold even now.
“I’d lay good odds there’s some of our group in there” While they should be heading straight up, Abigail also knew that the more people, the better chance of getting out. It seems that she’s in agreement with Isa but doesn’t wait for the woman to open a door. Where there’s a crack, a gap, there’s a way for the fiery woman to slip on through and she does just that with the intention to be the one who can scout more safely out of the small group.
At the pause of the leaders of their little band of escapees from the medical waste furnace below, Brynn too pauses. She remains close to Gillian, making sure the woman stays with the group and keeping Boris trapped right in the middle of the group. She can feel subtle vibrations through the soles of her feet and her fingertips on the wall, but nothing has appeared in their way as yet. Her gray eyes flicker briefly upward and then behind them – if one is going to bring up the rear of the group, then one also has to take the role of rear guard. The fact that they've passed plenty of doors that, had there been anyone in those rooms, would have opened but didn't doesn't negate the lifetime of lessons learned at Brian's knee.
She doesn't even find it strange to be accessing both lives' memories without a struggle – they are not fighting in her mind, they are just all there, all hers. It's actually more of a struggle right now to even try to sort them out, so instead she simply lets herself be guided by the knowledge she has.
And waits to see what Isabelle and Aunt Abby find.
Meanwhile
{CLASSIFIED}
London, England
It is raining in London and a bank of fog has rolled in to shroud much of the city. From high above, Georgia Mayes looks down at the bloom of city lights swallowed by fog, as seen through the rain-streaked glass of a highrise penthouse.
Mayes pulls the collar of her plush robe up over a bare, speckled shoulder. Her jaw clenches, gaze narrows to crease crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. “Where are you?” She is at the end of her patience.
A telepresence robot whirrs alongside Mayes, its face a removable tablet that bears a video feed of Morgan Atkins trying to dodge the question. «Ah, well—my flight was re-routed back to Moscow, you seen.»
“Re-routed.” Mayes repeats, flat and dry like the desert her flesh and blood body died in. “And when should I expect you here in London to update me on what has happened at your facility?”
«Ah, well, you—you know how these things are.> Atkins mumbles. «It could be—you know with air-traffic the way it is right now. What with the, ah, incident in Iraq. It—»
Mayes gestures at the robot and the screen goes dark. Her attention remains focused on the fog and the vague shapes of a city beyond it. Mayes shrugs her shoulders, letting her robe drape down past them, then unfastens the cloth belt keeping it closed. London’s charm has worn off, and so Georgia Mayes casts it off much as she does her robe. Much as she does her face.
Skin shimmers in chromatic quality, reflecting the room from a thousand-thousand angles like a hall of mirrors. As Mayes turns from the window, her face reconfigures its shape, skin pulls taut and takes on the appearance of youth, and she steps away from the gloom at her back…
…and into the darkness.