There was a flash of pale blue light, and Mari fell to the floor. Her skates clattering against the cold hard metal ground. She took a quiet deep breath, and swiveled her dull rounded ears, searching the space for any sound. Once confirming she was alone, her brown eyes opened, and glanced around. Finding herself in some sort of laboratory.
Shadows saturated the room, dark and silent. The only light was coming from her own body; the usually snowy white markings on her limbs, chest, and eye lid, glowing a pale blue as they did at night. They did little to illuminate the space, but she didn't really need it as her Black Arm genetics gave her decent enough night vision.
The air felt still and stagnant, like an ocean without current. Yet, there was no trace of dust in the air. She ran a clawed hand over a nearby counter, confirming that all of the equipment was in a similar state. The test tubes, counter tops, and metal dissection tables, were all perfectly clean, almost sterile even. Despite the empty nature of her environment, this place was not abandoned, or if it was, it hadn't been long since and they weren't in a hurry when they did.
Mari continued through the facility, exiting the first lab (through a sliding glass door surrounded by windows) into a hallway. The corridor was tiled, and she was pretty sure that the walls were painted a pale ivory; though colors lost their meaning in the dark. Her skates, clacked on the hard stone tiles, loudly. Mari's dull ears frizzed at the sound. While her skates were very fast, the metal soles, and wheels were not all that stealthy on certain surfaces. Not to mention the sound was annoying.
It would be another few moments before the ivory walls, ended and the suffocating atmosphere of the corridor, opened up into a large underground warehouse. The corridor opened to the ware house, nearer to the ceiling rather than the floor. Meaning the path Mari had been on now lead to a spider's web of metal bridges.
The warehouse was large, clearly the gaping stomach of the facility. The dark shadows made the far walls almost invisible, making the space seem only more immense. An eerie, yet familiar, green glow, welled up from the lower level. Curious, Mari walked forward, and she leaned over the bridge's railing. On the ground level, was a collection of large vats, filled with green liquid. There was something about those vats. She didn't know what, but there was something wrong with them, and it wasn't their pungent smell that made her black button nose crinkle.
Vaguely she worried about radiation, but she would have felt waves if it was. Though, she did feel something flowing out of the vats. Something she hoped wasn't what she thought it was. Slipping under the railing, and quietly landing on the stone floor. She got closer to the vats, finding that there was something inside of them. She squinted, through a vat's glass wall, resting a clawed hand on it.
Floating lifeless inside of the vat, it was hard to make out at first, was a what looked like black blob. Then the black blob, grew more distinct, with stubby misshapen limbs, liquidly rippling transparent skin (if it could be called that) that showed bright crimson pulsing veins, and finally, a pair of blood red unseeing eyes. This wasn't a vat; this was a gestation chamber.
Whispers began to build in the back of her head, and Mari quickly pulled her hand away from the glass, as if it burned at the touch. Her brown eyes gazed at the creature in the tube, almost fearfully. She swallowed thickly, though the action barely drowned out her pounding heart, and panting breaths.
She turned her gaze towards her hand, flexing it once or twice. A tingling, yet excited, sensation filled the limb, it made her body feel powerful, but also, churned her stomach. Chaos energy. Unstable chaos energy. That's what she was sensing, and not just from the tube, but from this whole room. It reeked, and dripped with the unstable energy.
She opened up her wrist communicator, "Angie, you need to get down here."
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A Second Wind: Book One, A Legacy Found
FanfictionIt had been twenty years since the events of the Phantom Ruby and almost fifteen since the Equinox War. The team of heroes known as the Chaos League are missing. Now, a dark cloud rests over the land, as the tyranny of King Scourge rules. It's up to...
