2013.09.07 - I'm Not Done

True to his word, once Monet was unconscious, Sinister set the inhibitor down to low, letting the pain recede so she could sleep in peace -- or at least relative peace. The base itself was commanded to watch her, but otherwise, Sinister had departed earlier in the day to attend to matters elsewhere, leaving his guest in capable hands.

The poison seeps slowly into the room. Monet is given time to think before she goes under. It is time with the inhibitor still fully activated, but pain is not such a compelling punishment anymore.

It was the same poison as last time. It would be in a different mixture, Monet reasons. It had to be strong enough to overwhelm her reduced healing factor, but not strong enough to kill her. Perhaps she would receive one dose. Perhaps she would receive several while she was intended to be out. If the pale man was truly testing her, it would likely be several. He was still exploring her limits.

Monet sticks her tongue out, placing it between her incisors. She closes her eyes, turns her head to the side, clenches her fists, curls her toes, and then bites as hard as she can. The pain is sharp and intimate. It's not the worst she's felt. Her teeth do not penetrate her tongue fully. They rest in the wound she has created.

The poison begins to do its work. Monet nuzzles her chin into her shoulder, trying to keep her jaw set exactly where it is. The pain in her mouth fades away, just like everything else. She is put to sleep. Blood oozes from her lips and onto the table. At least it's not down her throat.

Healing factors are a strange phenomenon. Though they are essentially mutations, most behave in certain uniform ways. They are outgrowths of natural human healing. The human body is clever. Monet's healing factor bathes her wounds and tends to her pains. It patiently washes the poison from her system, only to be foiled by another dose. It cannot wake her. It cleanses the lactic acid from her muscles and injects serotonin into her anxious mind.

Then it gets to the bite wound in her tongue. Tut, tut. It can't do a thing about that. There's still teeth in there. It wouldn't do to heal around those.

Monet is awoken by a throbbing pain in her mouth. She always was a light sleeper. There is still static in her mind, but it is a cloud of bees and not a hurricane. You can make peace with a cloud of bees. A few will sting you, but you can also convince most to leave you alone. She releases her tongue.

There is too much to work through right now. So many sounds and sights and smells in her mind to consider--she just needs to remember the important things. The pale man is telepathic. This room is organic. It either obeyed him on instinct, was controlled by an unseen person, or obeyed direct commands. He did not say anything, so it may be telepathic.

Monet reaches out. Her mind is tentative and reaching. She recoils when she makes contact with the alien thing surrounding her, but only for a moment. Monet has a weapon. It is a paperclip against a bank vault: she touched the pale man's mind ever so slightly. She has one piece of a trillion-part puzzle, but there is also a clearly labeled slot before her.

It's just a matter of running likely passwords, so to speak. One, two, three, four...

Thirty seven minutes later, the tentacles holding Monet to the bed slither away. She slides gingerly from the operating table onto numb feet. She stumbles, but telekinetically catches herself. The bees sting. Monet lands without grace near the door. Her mind touches the organic room again and then there is no door.

When the door recedes back into the rest of the organic wall, like an eyelid being opened to reveal an empty socket, a long, dimly lit hallway opens up, one that disappears far into the distance. Along the way, more 'doors' dot either side of the hallway, some as 'easy' to get through as Monet's cell, and some so secure as to be next to impossible to get through.

Occasionally, small half domes, black and moist like an eye consumed entirely by the pupil emerge with a slight sound from the ceiling and walls, observing any and all movement, before sliding back into the surface, disappearing deep within. Finally, the only noise beyond the sound created by the 'eyes' when the come forth from the wall, is a constant and dull hum of energy, so very faint, but clearly coming from further down the hall.

Monet stares into the dimness before her. It is not all that dim for her, actually. Some measure of her mutant senses have returned.

She retreats into the testing room, back against the wall next to the door. The circlet on her head feels heavier. Monet slides her fingertips across its smooth surface and then, with a moment of hesitation, attempts to lift it up.

The circlet tightens. The bees sting. Don't touch the nest.

Monet lowers her hands and considers what she saw: domes in the hallway, much like the dome in this room. The dome in this room was an eye, she knew. It is not always open. They make a peculiar sound. While she was picking the telepathic lock, her returning senses heard that sound in the hallway.

Monet counts her thoughts, marking when the sound occurred in the hall. It has a schedule. She telepathically commands the door to shut just before the hallway eye opens. It scans, retreats. Monet closes the door behind her when she leaves.

She creeps down the hall with all the care of a willful child slipping past her bodyguards. With no further plan to escape, Monet seeks the source of the humming. She halts every few steps to listen.

As Monet travels down the hall, skirting the eyes and their not-so-ever-present gaze, the humming gets louder and louder. The closer she gets, the more it sounds like the hum of surging electricity, a curious sound in a base such as this. A base that needs no power. A living base. However it's there all the same. Suddenly the sound kicks up in intensity, a faint vibration can be felt from several doors down, and then a massive crackling noise that fades back into the steady hum of before.

"Damnit, I'm never going to get used to that."

"Yeah, I know what you mean. This base is freaky enough without the sudden kicks from the teleporter."

"Is that what that is?"

"Of course you numbnuts, what did you think it was, the fridge? ... Hey, speakin' of which, go grab me a beer."

"Why can't you get it yourse- Ow! Damnit, alright, alright, I'm going."

The voices come from behind the door directly next to Monet, followed by a grunt and barking laugh. Someone's definitely coming...

The depths of this place become more readily apparent. What does it look like, from the outside? A tumor growing in some mountainside? A leviathan curled up in the depths? A cyst suspended in another dimension? Perhaps she would find out.

Monet freezes when the the hum is punctuated by a crackle. She does not immediately move. Know what you are doing before you do it. People talk and come closer. Monet braves the bees and floats into the air, pressing herself flat against the tall ceiling. Her dress gets dirty.

The door slides open and out steps a tall, four-armed, muscle-bound man, who'd clearly look more at home in a gym than here in this living building. He glances left and right, then turns to wander causally down the hall towards the humming, stepping into a room only three doors down from Monet's perch. Again, the teleporter kicks into overdrive and just as the crackle fades, the distant sound of shattering glass and a muffled curse comes from the room the man only recently stepped into.

"The hell was that?" Comes the call from the room next to Monet.

"Teleporter made me jump, dropped the beer."

"Idiot, clean it up. Then go check on that thing. Shouldn't be makin' that much noise unless the boss is hoppin' from pole to pole every few seconds."

"Fine."

Monet watches. She sees this second man and hears his voice. She won't forget, though she will remember him alongside the incessant pain of the inhibitor. Small price.

The young woman cannot exercise patience. The eye in this hallway will soon wake and it will undoubtedly see her. There is also the matter of the eye in the lab room she was kept in. It did not wake while she was there, so she had no way of telling what its schedule was. At any moment, she could be discovered. The inhibitor circlet likely has a remote control.

She descends from the ceiling, sliding through the doorway into the teleporter room as if she were crawling over a fence. Her assumption is fortunately correct: the ceiling in here is also very high up. Monet surveys the room with confident quickness, hidden through height.

The teleporter room contains... Well the teleporter. It's a giant machine, clearly the source of all the humming, and sitting directly in the middle of the room. At it's side is a control panel filled with various dials and buttons, readouts and displays, some of which are labeled, and some were apparently so obvious to their creator that they lack anything to indicate their purpose.

Resting directly in front, however, is a clear teleportation pad. It even looks like what you might expect a teleportation pad to look like. Arrayed around the edge of the room are a series of tables, shelves, and display cases filled with an assortment of vials and devices, surgical instruments, displays, a viewscreen, and even what appears to be a slowly throbbing heart.

There's another door, an open door that leads into a massive chamber filled with murky tubes, each large enough to contain a man, stretching well out of sight, perhaps for miles.

And each one contains a person.

Monet studies the teleporter pad from afar. She divines most of its meaning from sight alone, augmented by telltale sounds picked up by her inhuman hearing. If this does that, and this does that, and the machine likely has a circuit here, and she can hear a mechanism there...

She is confident that she can work the teleporter. Monet turns her attention to the rest of the lab. There may be something here to help her, or something here that can hurt her. Always read the entire question before answering.

The open door catches her eye. The sight of the tubes speaks volumes to Monet. She can imagine what this pale man is capable of, aside from what he tipped to her already. The mutant floats toward the room as if drawn in. She has to see what--who--is in there.

As Monet slips into the 'tube room,' she'll notice row after row of the exact same person. Clones, obviously. Who they are? Unknown. A plaque on each one reads, 'Harpoon #32'

'Harpoon #98'

'#154'

'#623'

On and on it goes, until finally the next row of people begins, and it continues. The tubes aren't just on the floor either, once she enters, she can see above her stretching another mile or two into the air, tubes suspended above the ground, more people. More clones. Occasionally an individual will stand out, usually cloned, but 'The Pale Man' apparently still holds the original, as the numbers start at zero. Off to the side, another door is firmly shut, locked, barred, sealed with the tightest security yet. It looks like it would take a bunker buster to get through the defenses, or a team of the top telepaths to trick the base into accepting them.

"Hey! What the hell are you doing in here?!"

The four-armed man is back, he stands at the entrance to the teleporter room, hands curled into fists, and after a moment of staring in surprise, he snarls and charges.

Two miles. The shape of the place begins to form in Monet's head. She can imagine certain ways it could look from the outside. Of course, it might look like nothing. Marius certainly broke enough of reality's rules. It's something.

Monet does not stray from the door. She hovers above the walkway, focusing her telescoping vision and gradually sweeping the room with her gaze. The faces are important, but so are the names and numbers. One can never have too much information.

"--hnf." Her breath catches in her throat. It's not the pale man's voice. Four arms. Monet spins midair, leveling herself horizontally. When she telekinetically pushes off, the young woman is fired as if by a gun.

She remembers a scalpel on a tray. It will be on her right, eighteen feet from the door. It did not look constructed from normal materials. Without so much as a glance, Monet seizes the instrument as she passes. The bees swarm angrily as she picks up speed. In a moment of weakness, spurred on by the growing headache, she screams--angry and accusatory.

She crashes into four arms shoulder first, a slender spear in a thousand dollar dress.

Four Arms laughs as Monet hurtles through the air, never stopping his charge. "Hah, you think you can take me down? Look at you, you're like a friggin' twi-" Suddenly they meet, and the scalpel hits Four Arms in the shoulder, interrupting his insult mid-sentence.

"Sonuva-" All four arms instantly wrap around Monet and keep her pinned against him, an incredible amount of strength suddenly directed into trying to crush her. "You're gonna' pay for that."

The rest of Monet's body crumples on impact. The inhibitor does its work. The scalpel, however, pierced his skin. Good to know.

Monet squirms and writhes, kicking and pushing as her attacker tries to get a grip on her. His advantage is that he has four arms. Her advantage is that she is okay with being grabbed, as long as her right arm is free to move in a certain way. She took the initiative. Four arms makes a hasty decision.

He squeezes. Something inside her torso pops. A sick feeling begins to spread outward from her stomach.

"I'm not done!" she hisses.

Monet twists with all of her strength and telekinetic might, wrenching her arm free and positioning her body just right. She puts her thumb on the dull back of the scalpel blade and presses it firmly into four arms' left carotid artery. She drags downward, tracing its path from jawline to collarbone.

"I think you are, Girly," Four Arms laughs back, glaring down at her with a truly cruel smile. At least until that blade is pressed to his neck.

"Wha-" It's an odd thing to cut someone's neck, even in the vertical manner that Monet has managed. The death is far from instant, the shock comes moments after the slash, but the realization is usually immediate. Four Arm's eyes go wide, and he slowly, almost calmly releases her as he lifts an inquisitive hand to his neck. When he pulls it away to see blood, he blinks, as if shocked to discover there. "Wha-" He repeats, still dumbfounded.

Then shock sets in, and his knees go weak. He collapses to the floor in front of her, one hand propping him up, another weakly grabbing at her wrist, with a third pressed to his throat to try and stop the bleeding.

"You bitch..."

And then he hits the ground.

The blood comes immediately. It pumps down the large man's front. Monet can feel it on her. It soothes the inhibitor's stings in an almost physical way.

When she is released, Monet does not float gracefully. She lands on her feet and sways ungracefully, taking two cautious steps backward. Four arms inspects his bloody hand, struggles to come to terms with what has happened, and then collapses.

Judging from his size, Monet gives him just over two minutes before he dies. She steps forward. When she bends down to grab his head, something inside her shifts the wrong way. Monet immediately straightens, gritting her teeth and suppressing a whine. He can wait two minutes.

Stiffly, the young woman rises once more into the air and floats to the teleporter. She activates the controls with one hand, unwilling to drop the scalpel. There is no way of telling what targeting system it is using, but she can guess as a coordinate sequence based on the allowable inputs.

Four Arms weakly acknowledges Monet's departure, grasping pathetically at the air she was in only a second ago. When she inputs her coordinates and activates the teleporter, the hum kicks up a notch just as it had before. Another annoyed shout can barely be heard from the other room, but it's soon drowned out by the rushing wind that no doubt fills Monet's ears. Like before, the world turns upside down and fades into nothingness, forces beyond her control plucking at her as if steering her through the inky void to her destination. A moment later it ends and suddenly the world returns, the sun high in the sky as Monet's chosen co-ordinates prove accurate, and the inhibitor on her head abruptly releases it's hold on her and falls inert to the ground.

Monet floats to the teleportation pad and sets herself down. The machine comes to life and spits her out elsewhere.

She is standing in the woods. The sun filters down in scenic beams. The circlet loosens, drooping on her brow. Parts of it begin to disintegrate. It spills ash on her shoulders as it crumbles. Monet looks dully down at the husk of the inhibitor.

There are cars nearby. She can hear them. Not that she needs one, now.

Monet looks to the north. Civilization should be in that direction. She begins walking, at least until her headache goes away.