Generator Rex - Season 4

Distraction

Some minutes ago,

Corridor 3, Cell Block 7 

Six walked silently through the empty halls, absent-mindedly putting one foot in front of the other. Maybe I should have stayed behind and talked with her? What if she thinks I hate her company now? What if she stops talking to me? Six’s rational mind told him that there was no earthly way such a small thing could ruin their relationship. Still, he worried.

He walked past Caesar’s lab. Normally Six wasn’t the prying type, but he really needed a distraction before his own brain killed any chance of him working in the same room as Dr. Holiday while remaining sane. Realizing Dr Caesar was the best distraction in Providence, he stopped, retraced his steps back and opened the door. Unfortunately, the scene inside Caesar’s lab was not exactly conducive to peace of mind either. Six realized this only when a jar filled with some unidentifiable clear liquid flew straight at his head. Six easily dodged it and watched it smoke and turn the wall behind him black, then swiveled and looked inside the room.

Caesar had recently decided that he needed a collaborator to help him with his crazy experiments. Peter Meechum was perfectly willing, but he wanted to spend time with his daughter and also patently refused to be Caesar’s guinea pig. Caesar had naturally looked to Holiday then, but due to her already gargantuan task of watching Rex all the time, she had declined (Six personally thought that she also had a healthy regard for her own mental health). She had, however, given Caesar a list of her contacts in the upper echelons of the scientific community.

Caesar had originally wanted to hire Pete Volkov, but he politely declined, saying that he had almost died in orbit too many times for him to want to flirt with death again, and was now happily disassembling protons with his wife. Caesar then was forced to call the last person on Holiday’s list – Rhodes, a close friend of Holiday’s who was known for her willingness to put life and limb on the line, as evidenced by the time she spent floating around in outer space when fighting ZAG-RS.

All this was in the back of Six’s mind as he watched the chaos playing out before him. There appeared to be a gigantic multi-limbed contraption in the center of the room, with at least a hundred appendages wildly flailing about. Each metallic arm gripped a jar containing various substances, ranging from bouncing creatures to bubbling red liquids. Caesar was at a computer screen to the side frantically keying in commands and shouting unhelpful things like, “Make sure the Sample Collector doesn’t drop everything”, and “Watch out for that jar of hydrochloric acid” to Doctor Rhodes, who was grimly hanging on to one of the arms. Six caught a glimpse of Peter Meechum poking his nose above an upturned desk on the far end of the room, right before a large jar of black slop hit his nose straight on.

Six stood in the doorway for a moment, mentally blinking as he took the bizarre scene in. When a greenish tentacle arose out of the goo splattered at his feet and made a grab for his face, he decided to move. Nimbly dodging the pseudopod that had attacked him, Six leapt onto the nearest table and threw one of his swords like a spear towards the heart of the machine, a tactic that had yet to fail him. Unfortunately, the machine executed another contorted twist just then, deflecting the blade with a reinforced glass jar and sending it spinning to the back of the room, where it impaled itself inches from Peter Meechum’s face. Meechum’s shocked eyes took in his filthy reflection on the polished blade, before rolling into the back of his sludge-covered head as he collapsed into a dead faint.

“Six!” Caesar called, finally noticing the ninja crouched on one of the desks. “No es buen momento!”

“Yeah, and try to keep the blades away from the faculty, hmm?” Doctor Rhodes bit out while trying to crawl up the arm she was hanging onto.

Six quirked an eyebrow at this, and pulled out his second blade. Jumping onto a thrashing limb that nearly took his feet out from under him, he ran up the metal arm towards the heart of the machine. The limb changed direction contortedly, and he sprang off of it into the air, landing neatly on top of the machine’s center while driving his katana through the heart of the writhing mass.

The device’s appendages contorted once, violently, dislodging Doctor Rhodes from her perch and sending her careening into Caesar, who barely had time to look up before getting a mouthful of Providence standard issue size-8 leather boot heel. A huge cloud of smoke billowed from the depths of the control box, which sparked uncontrollably for a few moments before finally falling silent.

“Is everything all right in here?” Six asked, perhaps a tad unnecessarily, as he pulled his blade from the panel it was embedded in.

“No, everything is most certainly not ‘all right’ in here, you idiotic – get off me, you hog!” Doctor Rhodes snapped, as she unceremoniously flipped Caesar off of her. As she stood up and dusted herself off, she said, “The Sample Collector has gone berserk, and we now have this mess to clean up because some total idiot thought it would be a good idea to recalibrate the device before removing all the containers!”

Caesar chipped in, “How was I to know what would happen if I tried to realign all the joints while attempting a cold reboot of the system? Although, I did see a fascinating reaction when the methyl mercapatan solution collided with the oxidized titanium powder…”

Six tuned out here, and went to collect his second blade from Peter Meechum’s side of the room. The scientist was lying face-up in a rather large puddle of black fluid that was shifting and roiling ominously. His eyes were closed, and Six might have thought that he was sleeping were it not for the putrid liquid coating his face and the disheveled and torn state of his clothes.

Six heaved the man’s prone body onto a nearby gurney (accidents were so common in Caesar’s lab, the man practically had a mini-hospital right there) and wheeled the stretcher to the center of the room. Glancing back at the bickering pair who were still freely trading insults, Six left the room. Just another day at Providence labs, once the world’s last hope.

Six checked his wristwatch. If he hurried, he might be back in time for the “Grand Finale”, as BoBo had put it. Six had no clue what the “Grand Finale” was, but he was certain that it was highly dangerous and quite probably illegal, so he had to be there to make sure nothing got out of control. This thought propelled him faster through the prison cells, his feet making absolutely no noise whatsoever on the reinforced steel floors. He was a few feet from the door and reached his hand out to the keypad it when suddenly, the alloyed pane slid open…

A/N– Nothing to say really. If you think of a name for the character, let me know, but I think I’ve got it down. Remember, he’s Russian, educated and his name suits him…somehow. I haven’t quite figured out how that’s going to work. Stealing a page from Star Trek, Live long and Prosper.

xxXxx