Trial X6

Chimera With An Extra Digit

[Shadow's theme: In Chains by Shaman's Harvest]

A/N: This is a story I did years ago that I never published and found it again in my files, so I thought I'd redo it and post the bitch. The story starts out following Max but eventually changes to the real MC of this story (▀̿Ĺ̯▀̿ ̿)

  A brunette woman walked into the bustling building made of concrete and brick while having her hands on the handlebars of her bike to guide it through the crowd. This woman seemed normal enough, nothing special to her besides her unmatched beauty, but if one looked deeper, one would see she was far from normal. The barcode she hid on the back of her neck would prove it.

  A man with a headset held a package out to her and told her to deliver it to an address in the fourth sector. The brunette took it just as another woman was coming up to her. She had brown hair, eyes, and skin, a happy smile, was of average height, and greeted the first with her pearly whites showing. Her name was Cindy, but she preferred to be called Original Cindy.

  They talked back and forth for a minute before the man with the headset, called Normal, gave them a look and spoke.

  "Come on, we've got other packages to deliver. Bip, bip, bip!" He waved them away from the front counter. The woman holding the bike rolled her eyes and sent a look to Original Cindy. She waved over her shoulder before leaving Jam Pony. Hopping on her bike once outside, she pedaled down the busy street.

  Among her peers, she was known as Max. To anyone else outside, she was just another Jam Pony messenger. Yet, without even being given the choice, she was much, much more. She was an escapee, one among twelve, trying to hide from the people of her childhood prison.

  Max was a result of a DNA cocktail from various species of animals, and she was created by a top-secret facility that went by the name of Manticore. They had succeeded in making her look human despite her mixed DNA, but it had taken many mistakes for them to finally create their first human-looking creation.

  Max was strong, fast, smart, and highly trained in combat like the other chimeras Manticore whipped up in their lab. Their goal was to create the perfect soldiers with the use of DNA from other species. Manticore had trained the transgenic children like attack dogs from the time they could lift their heads as infants, possibly even sooner, with the use of brainwashing technology.

  But now, Max was living a mostly normal life working as a messenger for Jam Pony to make a living. Well, with the exception of the occasional robbery she committed and hiding from Manticore while they were hunting her and the other escapees down. Since she got out of Manticore, she'd been looking for the other eleven escaped chimeras. So far, she'd only found a handful, but with the assistance of a man named Logan, she may just find them all.

~

  "A body showed up at the morgue, a barcode on the back of the neck." Logan opened a file to show a photo from the autopsy. He spoke gently as he explained how the body was discovered, knowing how Max felt about her brothers and sisters that she had been searching for. She went somber the longer she looked at the barcode. She recognized it almost immediately.

  "It's Ben." Max stated. She then told Logan she would go to the morgue and do what she had to in respect to her fallen brother. But when she arrived, she didn't see the face she was expecting- Someone had tattooed Ben's barcode on a stranger's neck.

  Not long after, another body showed up in the same manner, same barcode, and still the wrong face.

  And this....this is where a new life begins to intertwine and mesh with Max. A life that started out not so different from hers, but not quite the same either.