by Mia Archer
I blinked and I was looking up at this woman still nattering on, and I had no idea where I’d just been. Only that I wasn’t sure if I was even me, and there was an unsettling thought.
“I can assure you, though, that you won’t be able to actually do anything so you might as well settle in and get used to your time here.”
A scream rose from the other side of the room. I turned and saw a group of people in white lab coats hovering around one of the mes that wasn’t me and digging into her with something as she screamed. They definitely weren’t using anesthetic as they cut into her.
“What the fuck kind of torture chamber is this?”
“We have to figure out what gives you your powers, of course,” the woman said with another giggle. “I like to be here when each of you arrive. It’s unfortunate that you woke up in the middle of a procedure, but I can promise you that you won’t remember any of it when you go back to sleep.”
She reached up to touch a dial on the light hovering above me. The pink light got more and more intense, and that tingling feeling running over me got more intense right along with it.
Not a pleasant sensation, but at least she’d been right on one score. I felt darkness closing in around me as my eyelids grew heavy even as I tried to fight it, and I figured that meant she hadn’t been lying when she said I was going to take a nice little nap. I was still too weak to fight.
It sure as hell beat the chamber of horrors I found myself in, though as I fell asleep staring into those eyes I thought about how much fun it would be to squeeze her head until those twinkling eyes popped out, and this time I didn’t stop to think about how out of character that was for me.
14
Experimental Game
Screaming all around me pulled me out of the darkness. When I opened my eyes it took me a couple of moments to get a feel for where the hell I was.
I turned. The woman in the lab coat and mask had turned away, but she was still there. I almost thought I’d been out long enough for her to leave and return, but screams from the other side of the room and a quick glance showed that poor girl was still being vivisected.
No, I hadn’t been out long, and I felt a hell of a lot better than before even though that light had been turned up. Like I was fighting it off.
I tried to fly up. It was my instinct when I heard the shit hitting the fan. If there was someone out there who was in trouble then it was up to Fialux to save their asses, and from the screams that girl wasn’t the only one getting worked over.
Only when I tried to fly up to do some day saving I found myself trapped. I pulled and tugged at my arms and legs, but there was something holding me down.
“What the fuck?” I asked.
I looked up. There was that pink glow pulsing ever so slightly from the dentist light. Almost like the pulsing of a portal that seemed to come out of the mists of my memory and tell me that everything was going to be okay if I could just get to that portal even as cylinders exploded around me and bodies flew.
I reached for the portal as it started to crackle with an impossible energy, like it was about to collapse or explode, and…
I blinked. There wasn’t a portal over me. There was nothing but that light that looked like it belonged at a dentist’s office, only it was pulsing with that strange pink glow that reminded me of fighting off giant monsters for some reason.
Which made no fucking sense considering the last time I knew of anyone trying to fight of giant monsters it’d been Natalie doing the heavy lifting while I played the part of the damsel in distress.
Not exactly the most shining moment of my heroic career, that was for sure.
“Who the fuck has me locked down?” I shouted.
I squeezed my eyes shut when no answer came. Not that I’d expected an answer. I forced myself to look at the vivisection taking place not that far from me. That team in lab coats and blue scrubs were going to town on that poor woman who looked an awful lot like me using scalpels and other sharp implements that looked unpleasant and shone with the same pink glow as the light overhead.
I would’ve given a pretty penny to figure out how the hell they managed to get that stuff infused in scalpels and other sharp implements, but the more I thought about it the more I thought I really didn’t want to know.
What I did know was I needed to get the fuck out of here before those assholes got a chance to use some of that stuff on me. Something red spurted up in the air followed by another scream, and I knew that was going to be me if I stuck around.
I pulled at the restraints, and it felt like they gave just a little. A wave of nausea washed over me as the light pulsed overhead, and there was that strange tingling that I got when Natalie used that strange ray thing on me earlier along with the different tingling when I’d resisted her teleporter.
Someone appeared over me. A person in the same blue scrubs and white lab coat as the people who were doing the torturing a few beds down, but not the same woman who’d been taunting me moments ago. I didn’t want to see someone in scrubs standing over me. I glanced down to see if she had any scalpels with glowing pink tips or edges, but there was nothing but her hands.
“What the fuck do you want with me?” I asked.
I figured I could’ve been a bit more polite, but then again I figured this bitch could’ve chosen to do something other than work in some sort of fucked up research facility where they were dissecting my clones that’d mysteriously appeared around the city.
“Just sit back and relax,” the woman said. “You shouldn’t be awake like this, but Dr. Lennox might’ve given you the wrong dose. She does that thinking about her research and not the clinical stuff.”
The woman’s eyes twinkled and she seemed almost happy to be standing there looking down at me. Like she was anticipating her turn at the vivisection table coming up and enjoying the idea.
“I can promise you that I will try to make this happen as quickly as possible when we get to your time, but in the meantime there’s no point stressing yourself out. We wouldn’t want to ruin our results!”
I think the thing that was the most disconcerting about this woman hovering over me staring down with a twinkle in her eyes was how happy she sounded about the idea of getting to do whatever it was she was about to do.
“Go fuck yourself,” I growled. “You and the military and Dr. Lennox and this whole torture chamber.”
“Well how else are we going to figure out what makes you tick young woman?” she asked. “This whole clone thing is actually a blessing if you think about it. There was no way we were ever going to get to the original Fialux as powerful as she was, but now we have endless copies like you, and none of them are nearly as powerful. Which I suppose isn’t good for you, but it’s very good for the research we’re doing!”
I glared at her. I wanted to communicate just how much I hated everything she was doing, but it didn’t seem to be working. She still had that relentlessly cheerful gleam to her eyes. A gleam that made me push against that glow even harder. I could fight this, damn it.
She’d said it herself. They couldn’t take out the original. I was the original. I had to be the original. Otherwise I was as good as dead.
“Look,” I said through gritted teeth, though that was mostly from the effort of fighting off the light. “I don’t know who the fuck you are or what the fuck you think you’re doing here, but I can guarantee you that what the fuck you’re actually doing here is making a huge mistake. I’m giving you this one last chance to make it better before things get bad.”
The woman rolled her eyes and pulled down the surgical mask that’d been covering her mouth and nose. Revealing a pretty face I wouldn’t mind buying a drink if we were here under different circumstances, but unfortunately for both of us the circumstances were what they were, and at the end of the day it was going to wind up with one of us having a serious case of the deads while the other was going to be getting out of here and going home.
Not that I had much of a home
to go to.
“Oh please,” the woman said, rolling her eyes again to let me know what she thought of my posturing, though I sincerely hoped it wasn’t posturing.
I flexed my wrist. I couldn’t be entirely certain, but I was pretty sure they wouldn’t put me in restraints that I could make my way out of, and yet that’s exactly what was happening as I pulled on whatever the fuck it was. The strange feeling was running up and down my body. Like every part of me was fighting the light, and it was working as my strength returned.
I glanced down. They’d locked me in some sort of metal. That same tingling was running all over my body. The same as when Natalie had turned that ray gun on me. Only as with Natalie’s example, it was just putting parts of my body to sleep and making me feel all tired rather than hitting my body with an impossible pain like the other version of me I’d seen.
Something was working very differently with my body, and I could work with that. As long as I kept this bitch distracted long enough that she didn’t notice what I was doing here and try to hit me with a stronger and more concentrated dose of the power stealing bullshit they were tossing around.
The tingling vanished. I was me again. It took everything in me not to smile. This woman was as good as dead, and she didn’t know it yet.
“Those are brave words, Fialux,” she said. “You don’t mind if I call you Fialux, do you? I mean I know you’re not the real one, but it’s so difficult coming up with an actual name for all of you, you know?”
“Shut the fuck up,” I growled.
“Right. Where was I? Brave words. Spoken by…”
“Oh please,” I said, and this time it was my turn to roll my eyes. “Do you really think you’re going to pull one over on me by giving me the Borg queen speech from First Contact?”
The weird thing was I had no idea what the hell First Contact was. I had visions of a bald dude who looked a lot like the guy from those X-Men movies that shamelessly ripped off all the real world stuff going down in Starlight City on the regular.
“Huh,” she said. “You’re the first one to catch a reference like that. Most of them can’t stand it when we start quoting sci-fi at them.”
“Yeah?” I said, pulling up with all the strength I could muster.
The woman’s eyes went wide. There was no hiding the groaning and creaking from the metal. She touched the light and the pink glow turned to a blinding light. It bathed me, and I pushed back.
The light did nothing. I was still me. I was as powerful as I’d ever been. I hit my restraints with everything I had as the part of my mind doing whatever it was that kept me from being teleported or getting drained by this strange glow became background noise. Something I did as easily and unconsciously as breathing.
The metal flew up and slammed into that glowing pink dental cleaning light causing it to disappear in a shower of sparks that fell down over me. The woman stared in astonishment.
“I told you that was your last chance,” I said, ripping my other hand up and sending the other bit of metal flying.
I did the old Dracula thing and pulled myself up at the waist. I looked down at the metal clamps over my legs.
“You guys really are thorough, aren’t you?” I asked.
“How the…”
I slammed my fist into the woman’s windpipe. It was a move calculated to cause terminal damage while also leaving my target alive long enough to seriously contemplate the error of her ways.
Fuck that bitch and her plans to vivisect me.
It was quick work to rip off the two metal straps holding my ankles in place. I fired one and then the other off at the group of people who were busy vivisecting another version of me down the way. I figured getting a chunk of metal lodged in the back of their skulls was the least they deserved for the pain they were visiting on that poor clone version of me.
Each of them let out a slight cry of surprise as the metal caved in the back of their skulls, then they crumpled to the ground. I wasn’t sure if I’d hit the ones doing the actual vivisecting, and my question was answered a moment later when another one turned to look at me in surprise.
They were also holding up a scalpel with that weird pink glow to the tip. I grinned as they turned to run. They were too late.
I realized I was totally nude as I finally managed to get up and get a good look at myself, but honestly I didn’t give a flying fuck about my clothing situation at the moment.
No, I was far more concerned with all the pricks working for the US government and doing their best to find out what made me tick by cutting me into tiny pieces.
Or cutting clones of me into tiny pieces. Semantics. The point was I had the power, to borrow a term of art from a prolonged ‘80s toy commercial, and these pricks were going to be in tiny pieces by the time I got done with them.
I grinned and flew after the one with the scalpel, but I made sure to move just slow enough that he might think he had a chance. He couldn’t run faster than the speed of a very pissed off Fialux, after all, and letting him think he had a chance would make it that much better when he realized he didn’t. I was starting to realize that letting people think they had a chance might not be the only reason Natalie did this.
It was sadistic, and I was in a mood for sadistic right now. It was time to give these assholes a taste of what they’d been dealing out.
15
Distractions
Oddly enough, none of the other people around the place seemed all that concerned that I’d escaped my bonds. I stared in disbelief. Assholes in white lab coats were doing things with the other cloned versions of me that I could’ve gone my whole life without seeing.
They didn’t seem to care that the clones they were digging those scalpels into were living beings screaming at the top of their lungs in agonizing pain. Screaming so loudly that it echoed in my head and filled me with a white-hot rage.
That rage bothered me just a little. I wasn't used to it. No, I’d always been a live and let live kind of girl.
Even when I was working. Which was saying something considering some of the bullshit I'd had to put up with since starting the whole hero thing. Only now I was furious, and that was new. It was like there was a completely different person inside my mind. Though I figured if ever there was a situation that called for a little bit of rage, it was this one. I stared at all these assholes vivisecting various versions of me now that I was up and could look at more than my immediate surroundings.
Sure they were cloned versions of me, but still. They didn't deserve that. No one deserved that, and I was going to rescue them, damn it.
Only before I could do any of that rescuing, or even catch up to the prick who’d been running from me, a bunch of jackbooted military types wearing body armor of the variety you usually only saw in a war zone, we’re not talking civilian SWAT stuff here, appeared in front of me holding up guns with laser sights.
I rolled my eyes. "Can you get any more clichéd?"
They hesitated. They looked at one another, then back to me. Then the asshole who was clearly in charge lifted his fist up in something that looked like it’d been lifted straight out of the movies.
"Fire!"
I didn’t even bother to duck out of the way. For one it was sort of impossible to duck out of the way in close quarters like this. There were beds with clones of me in various states of unconsciousness or death to either side, and knocking one of them over might be enough to push them over that edge into death. For another I didn’t think they could hurt me with whatever they were shooting.
They were firing darts. Darts with glowing pink liquid in them that had glowing pink tips that were no doubt custom designed to prick Fialux flesh.
I floated there, naked as the day I was born, and looked down at where those darts had impacted. Huh. So this was how they were dealing with copies of me. I snatched one of the darts out of the air as it dropped and gave it a closer inspection.
Sure enough it was filled with some sort of bright pink liquid. It p
ulsed with the same light as everything else around here they were using to control me. Well, using to control versions of me, that is. And it hadn't come close to penetrating my naked flesh.
Which was more confirmation that I was the real thing, baby, and not some cheap clone like they kept insisting.
I looked back up to the military assholes who'd just fired on me. I grinned a little half smile that was more than a little reminiscent of a certain interstellar smuggler or archaeologist. Meanwhile all the military types wore looks that said they knew they were deep in the shit, and didn't care for it.
"My turn," I said.
They were blasted to the ground as I slammed into them. A couple of them pulled out strange knives that also had little vials of the same glowing pink stuff attached to them, but as they tried to stab me with those knives, knives that had some sort of strange syringe thing at the base that was clearly designed to poke into me and take care of business once the knife had rammed home, once again nothing happened. The blades slid off me as though my skin was made of armor.
Which was about par for the course. At least when I had my powers.
I grabbed the first one and smashed the vial attached to his knife. The liquid dripped all over me and it occurred to me, a moment too late, that it might not be a good idea to get that liquid on me if it was charged with whatever they were using to try and rob me of my powers. Only it caused a little tingle, and that was it.
I leaned down and wiped it off on the body armor of one of the jerks who’d been coming up behind me in a vain attempt to get me with a knife. The problem with his plan being that it would only work if the knives worked on me, which they didn’t.
I snapped his neck for good measure once I was done cleaning my hands, and turned to the rest of them. They stared at me for a long moment, then turned and ran.
