Unreasonable
Chapter 1: Experimentation
By Yumegari and LRH
((Author's note: LRH here. This is the first installment of the Unreasonable Addiction, a work by myself and a very talented writer and artist, Yumegari, who I met on DeviantArt and approached as a fangirl when her Otto-centric fanfiction, Inalienable Rights, impressed me (See the link to her page in my profile). In subsequent conversation, the topic of role playing came up, and since it was something we both enjoyed and neither of us got enough of, we decided to start a Doctor Octopus rp, with her as Octavius in his wonderfully deranged incarnation as depicted by H. Ramos, and me as my perpetual original character, Clair Watson (It's a common name, people, there is no relation to Mary Jane.).
Within a few posts, I knew that I had found someone who truly understood that the core of role-playing is story-telling. And so here, then, is the story.))
Clair sighed, resetting her experiment for the fourth time. No matter what, she just couldn't keep the culture of brain tissue uncontaminated long enough to judge regrowth of the neurons. She was going to fail again if she couldn't get it right. Rinsing out the dishes at the sink and putting them into the autoclave, she looked out the window over the grounds of the university. It was a dull day, fitting for this close to the end of Fall quarter, and any students who were unfortunate enough to be outside were warmly bundled up, rushing from building to building. She turned away from the view and went to get a new sample from storage.
Promising. Not the building itself, that was nothing more than a standard-issue college laboratory complex, filled with secondhand equipment and pedestrian activities. And yet.... there was little to no security. Whatever there was to steal could be stolen easily and put to at least temporary use before a more permanent solution could be found.
Outside the building, a dark shape couched and thought these things, peering inside a window. One student. She could be easily silenced. A three-pronged metal claw came up slowly, cocking so that it could shatter the glass.
Clair chose the sample with the most recent date, hoping that would make a difference, and turned back towards her workstation. Something, a movement, a shadow, made her look up, straight into the tri-fingered claw that hovered outside the window. She stared at it curiously, too shocked by its sudden appearance here, four floors up, to try and figure out what it was. This lasted all of two seconds.
The claw drew back and punched forward, shattering the glass. Amid the shards, it snaked downward on a length of segmented tentacle, the nested segments gleaming a bluish chromium silver in the room's fluorescent light. Another joined it and a dark shape rose through the window, flowing, large and powerful, The shape set down, the light glinting off inky black hair, midnight leather and inscrutable black goggles.
More glass shattered as Clair dropped the dish in her hands and scrambled backwards, falling over in her haste to get away from the inhuman intruder. Glass cut her palms as she scrabbled backwards, hitting the wall and still trying to move farther away. She tried to scream, couldn't. There was no air in her lungs. She looked around, frantically. Her teacher had been in here just a minute ago, hadn't he? Where was he? A distant part of her mind, the part not locked up by terror, reminded her that he had left after her second failure. She was alone in here. Well, not anymore.
A neural sample on the floor. A cowering student. One door. Humming machinery. A collection of samples. The chemicals present told him experimental work was being done, here. Actual experimental work, not the simple repetition of established fact necessary in a class environment. His gaze whipped to the student again as a searing, monofilament of curiosity sliced through his thought pattern. An actuator claw reached out and grabbed her around the torso, lifting her from the floor and bringing her toward him.
"Gahahaha..." was as articulate as Clair got as the arm grabbed her, bruising her around the ribs. She strained backwards, clawing at the tentacle and trying to kick its bearer. When this proved fruitless and she stared at him, only her own reflection in his goggles stared back. "What.." she finally worked out. "What do you want?"
The stranger answered in a deep, growling voice, not with a statement of intent but with a question of his own. "What are you doing in here? What sort of tests are being conducted?" He barely moved at all, three more clawed tentacles flowing restlessly about his shadowy form as though all the energy that would translate into the normal myriad of human motion was transferred to them. The stranger remained as still as a stone as he spoke.
"I, I, I'm testing a serum to revitalize damaged neural tissue," she stuttered, swallowing convulsively. "It d- d- doesn't work yet. I've been having troubles with cont-ta-tamination." She gripped the tentacle around her ribs so tightly that her knuckles popped, trying to pry it off.
There was a long pause of breathless stillness speaking of the calm before a storm. He seemed to gaze through her. "Hnnn...." he growled. The actuators reached out, gracefully picking up more samples and vials of chemicals. They hung before her, holding said objects.
Trying to guess what he wanted, she pointed at one, a sealed vial full of a clear liquid, labeled "Zombie Juice!" in green sharpie with a drooling smiley face. "It's th-that one. That's the serum. Take it, if, if it's what you want. Please, don't hurt me."
A creasing of the skin around the goggles inexplicably told her he'd narrowed his eyes. "They always say that, don't they?" he asked, staring through her again. The other vial was put back in a bizarrely painstaking fashion, more neural samples were taken, and everything was handed to her. The claw nudged these objects against her hands as their owner turned and headed back for the window.
She took them automatically, without paying attention to what they were. "Where are you, no! Put me down!" She kicked futilely, struggling, but somehow not dropping the samples. After all, they represented too much work to be destroyed like that. "Let me go!"
"I can't do that. Time is short, far too short for me to concoct the necessary compounds on my own. You will have to suffice, if for no other reason than your familiarity with the development of these compounds," he told her. On anyone else it would almost sound like rambling, but his rumbling voice was too hard, too purposeful. The tentacles lifted him out the window and, their claws embedding in the brickwork of the building, with stony chink sounds, carried him and his quarry up the side of the building toward the roof.
"No!" she shrieked, hoping to attract any attention, but class was in session now, and the grounds were deserted. "Let go!" She swung her free hand at him, but he was out of reach. "Let me go!" An irrelevant thought popped into her head: At least she had an excuse for not finishing the experiment today.
"If you don't stop that squawking, I will silence you myself," he stated coldly. The journey to the roof became a journey across many such rooftops, the tentacles smoothly and effortlessly carrying them from one to the next, ceaselessly moving, as though anticipating and calculating the heights of the buildings, the distances between them, all the while slipping them in and out of shadows.
She shut up promptly, going so far as to clamp her free hand over her mouth. She'd heard of the man, who hadn't? And she'd been screaming at him. She clenched her eyes shut, both out of a fear of the vertiginous heights that they were crossing and a desire to avoid seeing her own death coming.
The actuators continued carrying them across the rooftops, and their owner remained silent, his features expressionless. At this point, it took an inordinate amount of concentration to keep them on course, to keep them moving. Keep moving.... The world narrowed to the buildings and the actuators and their destination. Keep moving.... A wayward thought, prompted by the sight of one of the buildings, almost made its way to the fore of his concentration, but he clenched his teeth and turned his concentration entirely upon the movement of the actuators, almost feeling their progress, the twist and pull of thousands of servos, the claws gripping brick or stone or metal. Heavy concentration of that kind pulled and scraped at every neuron, but it was preferable to the chaos. It was either that or he start talking again and he did not want to do that. Things were at a precipice. One wrong move would send him plummeting. He could not allow that when he was so close to a solution.
As time passed and no further violence threatened, beyond the bruising grip of the actuator, Clair re-opened one eye, then the other, and watched her captor nervously. This silence from him was frightening, although perhaps not more frightening than threats or ranting might have been. "Where, er, where are you taking me?" she asked tentatively.
Grating. Even the sound of the girl's voice was grating, though she'd pitched it quietly, hesitantly, its soft sound almost lost in the wind that blew past them at this height. Nevertheless, it served to puncture his concentration. His head whipped back to look at her, his hair swinging in long, inky strands about his face, the wind taking them where it would. The actuators wavered, slowed, one missed its next destinations and they both lurched under the sudden movement.
She screamed involuntarily at the lurch, clutching the tentacle as a safety line even though, intellectually, she knew that if she was falling, so was he. "Gah, so high," she breathed, looking down on accident.
Don't remind me, you stupid girl! He growled in his throat, a low rumbling sound, as the actuator scrabbled for purchase and their movement continued, though not quite as smoothly as before. The danger of falling had scrambled his concentration again, and he struggled to put one claw in front of the other. Their destination neared, and he began what looked like a tricky descent to a window one claw had snaked out and opened.
She began to shake as they entered the building. His lair, a melodramatic part of her mind murmured. She had read far too many gothic novels. The kidnapped heroine never, ever got out of the villain's lair in one piece with her sanity intact. It was against the rules. But this is real life, insisted a saner part of her mind. Isn't it?
It was strangely steadying to feel the floor beneath his feet. He very nearly dropped both the girl and her samples, but managed to instead push her against a wall and release her, one hand almost unconsciously stealing to his head, fingers twitching against his hairline, his gaze blank. He tried to gather his thoughts, tried to order them, to come up with a plan. Everything needed a plan. Everything needed direction, and with a hostage, that need was even greater. Think! It used to come so easily! Stop wheezing like an emphysemic and think!
She shrank against the wall, clutching her handful of samples to herself like a defense, and watched him. He looked... confused, which in turn confused her. She shot glances at the window they had come in, and at the room's door, judging if, maybe, just maybe, she could make it to one or the other. But at the moment, her legs were too unsteady to try such a thing. She sank to the floor. Think, Clair. This is bad. Really really bad. And this train of thought isn't helping.
Eventually Octavius looked up, his gaze finding the girl and staring at her as though he'd never seen her before in his life and was wondering why she was in his home. There was a pause. All around him, screens glowed dully with static and all manner of scientific equipment crowded for space on tables and shelves. His gaze flicked down to the vials she clutched in her hands. Slowly, he reached back with one actuator and closed the window. "You. Girl. Prepare one of the neural samples. I want to examine this serum of yours and then we shall test it, as many times as is necessary until it works. The price of failure is high." With that, he turned slightly, his fingers coming to rest at the top button of the longcoat's high collar, unfastening it with quick, hard movements.
Still shaking, she jumped to obey, spreading out the samples on a clear space on the nearest table. Her hands steadied as she slipped into the more focused frame of mind that always seemed to accompany experimentation. Pulling a (miraculously) unbroken syringe out of her lab coat pocket, she pulled the cap off with her teeth and drew out a tiny quantity of the serum from the sealed vial. Holding that, she opened the cover of one of the samples of donated neural tissues and injected the serum into the growth tissue, and then turned to him. "Do you have a culture incubator?"
One actuator claw waved in the direction of the device in question, almost hidden in the jumble of machines and tools that covered a nearby table. He'd unbuttoned the longcoat completely and had peeled it off, revealing an almost absurdly ordinary black button-down shirt and trousers. His hair, no longer hidden by the coat's high collar, hung around his shoulders and neck in long, starkly black strings. Almost immediately, he began to attack the buttons of the shirt, as well, brows furrowed over the edges of his dark goggles.
She put the sample in the incubator and stepped back, wishing she had her notes. It was somewhere in the stage she had just completed that contamination always happened. For all she knew, the serum could be a complete success, but if it required such absolutely controlled conditions, it wouldn't be viable for human testing. You can't sterilize a human brain. But now she'd have to wait and see if this time, this time was different. And if it wasn't, the price of failure is high. She looked over at the doctor, who seemed only slightly less imposing without the billowing coat. "How did you find out," she asked quietly. "About my experiments?"
He looked at her, his eyes, as always, unreadable behind the black goggles he wore like a bizarre pair of bulbous pince nez. He'd half unbuttoned the shirt, revealing a grey harness that resembled nothing so much as a scuba-diver's BCD, that the tentacles must have been attached to. In the half-light of the monitors, she could see the silhouette of wavy strands of long hair curling ever so slightly against the smooth line of a sleek neck. "Nothing's difficult to find if you know where to look," he stated gruffly. "I simply looked for work being done as regards neural integrity." His head turned slightly, indicating that his gaze had switched to the culture incubator. "Watch that more closely." One actuator snaked toward her, its sharp, gleaming claws closing around the vial of serum as he continued to unbutton the shirt.
She looked away as he continued to disrobe, watching through the incubator's small window. The change she was looking for was minute, whether for good or bad. And after a further fifteen minutes, she knew it. "No!" she shouted, slamming her fist on the table. The sample in the incubator had turned its all-too-familiar shade of grey, rather than the living pink she was hoping for. Forgetting where she was, she yanked open the incubator and pulled out the sample, examining it closely under a microscope nearby. "It's a different contamination," she concluded. "It's not the sample being contaminated, it's the serum. I just don't have the precision to keep it isolated." She reached out for her notes, and, not finding them, remembered where she was. She paled, looking at the doctor in trepidation.
The first thing she noticed upon having looked up was that he'd moved closer, presumably to see this sample for himself, The second thing she noticed was that he was completely bare-chested. Completely. Somewhere along the line, the actuators and their complex harness had been removed. He clutched the serum bottle in one hand. He drew closer, and bent to peer into the viewfinder himself, hair slipping down over his shoulders to hang, almost obscuring the device from view. A second passed. Then another. He moved slightly, looking between the serum and the microscope. One could almost hear the gears, a multitude of them, spinning in his head.
She edged backwards, glancing to see where he'd left the actuators. The experiment forgotten, she spied the door and took another step away from him, then another, and then she bolted for it.
There was a loud THUNK and, a split second later, something closed round her ankle, hard and sharp and cold. Metal.
She stumbled over the suddenly-immobilized foot and feel, barely catching herself with her hands before her chin hit the floor. She twisted, trying to get away, and only succeeded in hurting herself.
He'd been leaning against the table for a moment, head turned to look over his shoulder at her. Now he approached, footsteps heavy against the floor until he stopped before her, bending and grabbing the front of her shirt, catching the lapels of her labcoat as well, and dragged her upwards to meet his hidden gaze. "Imbecile!" he snarled, his grip twisting the fabric in his fists. "You won't escape that easily! Or at all, for that matter!" One hand gripped her neck, fingers hot against her skin, gripping almost hard enough to hide the fact that they shook, though with rage or something less easily explained, it wasn't clear.
She choked, struggling desperately to get free, get a breath, anything. Her hands reached instinctively, one clawing at his, the other reaching for his eyes to hurt him, distract him, make him drop her. Blackness threatened the center of her vision, and all she could see where his blackly hidden eyes.
One of his hands had immediately gone to remove her clawing fingernails from his wrist and wasn't there to intercept the other hand as it lashed toward his face, tangling in swinging black hair, beating against his head and, after an instant, yanking free of his hair and smacking against his face, her wildly scrabbling fingers pulling free the goggles that covered his eyes.
He jerked backward, both hands flying to his face as he hissed with pain. Immediately he lunged forward, searching the floor for them.
She fell to her knees, gasping gratefully and holding her bruised throat. When she saw his goggles on the ground by her foot, she snatched them up, clutching them while he searched.
Desperately, he searched across the floor, hair swinging as he moved, his breath loud, now. He stopped, turning toward where he figured she still was, his eyes squeezed shut. "Fool! I don't have time for this! You have them, don't you! Hand them over!" He lunged forward and missed, hands out, searching for her.
She scrambled back, knocking against something. She looked up to see that it was a floor lamp. Thinking quickly, she turned it on and scooted behind it, trusting in any defense at all. "Stay away from me," she warned him, voice cracked and shaking.
He hissed with pain again and growled, turning his head away from the light, hands clenching into fists as he crouched on all fours on the floor. A moment passed, then he stood slowly, one hand still balled up in a fist, the other coming up slowly toward his face. It shook visibly as his fingers covered his eyes and he seemed a little unsteady on his feet. He appeared to listen for her location. "Give them to me, girl, and I might let you live."
She held perfectly still, weighing her options, and then held the goggles out towards him, finally tossing them so they landed against his feet. "Let me go," she pleaded softly, her throat feeling like gravel.
He bent to retrieve them, paused, and sank forward, ending up on his knees on the floor. He'd managed to grasp the eyewear, but his hands refused to move and when they did, they moved clumsily, wavering almost drunkenly. He leaned forward, his hair almost obscuring his face from view as his hands finally came up, pressing the goggles against his face. The world swayed dizzily around him for a moment, righted itself, and became distant. Again. That maddeningly disconnected distance, as though he were no longer actually in his body but rather viewing and hearing his surroundings with a screen and speakers, feeling things in much the same way as he usually felt things with his actuators. Fingers stretched before his eyes and it took him a moment to realize they were his. He stopped again.
She watched him fumble with the goggles, her brows knit. He looked drunk, or exhausted. She looked at the door again, and the actuator still around her ankle, and back at him. Hesitantly, not believing that she was actually asking this of this man, she said "Are you alright?"
His head came up. He looked at her from behind those shadowed eyepieces, his breath heavy. His hand came up almost numbly to his head again. "Time..." he said, his voice dry but still growling, "...is of the essence." He hauled himself to his feet, swayed, and stepped toward her. "I obviously cannot do this on my own," he ground out after a moment. His head came up and he looked directly at her and took a breath. Almost as though forcing into gear a conceptual machine that had lain dormant for years, he continued. "If you do this.... your experiment, your findings, will finally be correct."
She stood up, though it didn't put her at any less of a disadvantage. He still towered over her. She stayed behind the lamp, as if it posed any barrier. "Why is time so important?" she asked carefully.
There was a pause. His face had returned to its normal expressionless state. "You noticed, haven't you? Signs of neurotransmitter imbalance." He moved his gaze to the culture incubator and the microscope, seeming to stare through them instead of at them. "Neural integrity is decreasing, for whatever reason."
She cocked her head. "You want me to help you? Help you fix whatever's going wrong in your head. The serum'll do that, yeah. If it works." She looked past at the microscope as well. "But I can't get it to work." She looked at her hands, which were shaking. "Delivery has to be more precise than I can manage by hand. I need a micro-surgery set-up, or something like that."
She skirted around him to the microscope, looking through it. "I think the problem is the myelin sheath, on the axon of the neuron. I think the serum degrades it too quickly. Maybe I need to deliver it directly to the soma, but I don't know of any way to do that with the tools I have available."
He looked back at the actuators, one of which still had her foot in its grasp. It released her ankle and coiled inward on itself slightly. He looked at them for a few beats, as though coming to a decision, then walked a few paces toward them. They rose up on their claws and came to meet him, picking their way along the floor until they hung over him, then dropped slowly toward him and he reaches out to grasp the body of the harness, the arms stepping round him as he shrugged it onto his torso, fastening it. He was facing away from her, and she could see his hair fall over either side of his neck and face as his head bent forward. There was a strange metallic puncturing sound. He shuddered visibly.
She cringed at the sound, and looked back at the samples that she had left. Two more. "I think I've got the problem now," she said, half-confidently. "The serum is degrading the myelin sheath of the neuron, letting in immediate infection. Unlike blood, neurons have no defense other than their sheath. If we can apply the serum to the soma and only the soma, no chance for infection." She looked up again. "All I need is one successful sample population of regenerated neurons from the patient, and they can be reintroduced into the patient, where they will replicate, spreading the serum like a virus. It's all sound," she said defensively, reliving old arguments. "I just need the tools."
Throughout all this, he stood, still facing away from her, his head tilted back, arms dangling at his sides and actuators curled slightly around him. He appeared to be concentrating, though on what it was difficult to tell. Eventually his head dropped forward again, and he turned to look at her, the actuators snaking slowly around him as he moved. "Then this is the only way," he said, walking slowly toward her and the equipment. He stopped, looking down at the vial of serum and the samples and the microscope.
This time, she stood her ground, instead of backing away from him. "What, you're going to do it? Do you know what to look for?" She may have feared him, but she'd rather have the experiment a success.
"You will show me what to look for," was his reply. A reply that brooked no argument, no dissension. One actuator picked up the vial, another the tissue sample, while the other two cleared away more cluttered machinery and tools and equipment to reveal a second microscope array, one with a monitor screen.
Nodding and biting her lip, Clair turned on the second array, with its monitor, and prepared the second sample before sliding it to Octavius. "Your microscopes are better than the ones the lab has," she commented, trying to maintain her confidence. "Here, put this under there, and look for a good neuron. It looks like a barbell with fur on. Find one as intact as you can." She pulled out a slim black case from her lab-coat and opened it, drawing out a hair-fine pipette with a large, bead-like grip. "Have you got one yet?"
He'd produced a wheeled stool from somewhere and was now seated on it, the slide in the microscope and his gaze riveted to the monitor. The display moved slowly, stopped. A reasonably healthy example of a neuron dominated the screen, its dendrites pale, delicate tendrils that extended across the lower right hand corner of the screen.
"Perfect," she said happily, and handed him the micro-pipette. "Draw some serum into that, carefully. It's very delicate, and then touch the tip to the soma, that's the big end with the nucleus, you can see it." She pointed the screen, where the nucleus showed murkily inside the bulb-like head. "The pipette has a cellular tip, so move slowly with it. I only have one with me." Unconsciously, she rested a hand on his shoulder as she watched him work, her attention trained on the screen.
One actuator (a right-hand one, she noticed) carefully took the micro-pipette and, bracing its length against the table, dipped the claw toward the vial, drawing the serum from it with painstaking slowness. It moved carefully to the microscope, and closed in on the slide with almost agonizing slow deliberateness. Millimetre by millimetre, it poked the end of the micropipette into the field of the microscope. Beads of sweat stood out on Octavius' forehead. His brow furrowed. His hands gripped the table and still the pipette inched its way ever closer to the soma, the actuator still, nothing moving but its claw tips, infinitesimal bit by infinitesimal bit. The beads of sweat became tiny rivulets. His gaze remained fixed on the screen as he leaned forward, hair slipping over his neck, his hands still gripping the table.
"Relax," she breathed reflexively, as much to herself as to him. "It's easier to hold it steady if you're relaxed. Steady, steady." She forgot everything about the situation. She was back in the University lab, Octavius was nothing more than an undergrad genetics major, and the cells in question were the only things important here.
The tip of the micropipette touched against the soma, its tiny dose of serum flowing into it. It retracted smoothly, the actuator retracting its claw into is housing and resting on the table. Octavius, however didn't move as he stared up at the screen.
Clair grinned as the neuron shifted against the background of dead cells, grew slightly, rejuvenating before their eyes. "Yes," she hissed triumphantly. "We did it!" She let go of his shoulder and did a momentary victory dance in the tiny space of clear floor before coming back to stare at the screen. Near the treated neuron, another was beginning to revive, and then another. The revitalization spread across the screen. "It works, it works!" She turned to hug Octavius in her jubilations, and froze.
If he even noticed her activity he made no comment on it, still staring at the screen. "We need a sample of neural tissue from myself, next?" was all he said, his gaze not moving. Perhaps it was the lighting, but the black of his hair seemed to stand out against the pale colour of his skin even more.
She swallowed. "Yeah. That's done under full anesthetic. I can do it, I've observed the procedure, but I've never actually..." She shrugged. "I'm only a student." She looked around. He may have had enough tools in her to make the lab researcher in her drool, but he certainly didn't have the equipment she needed for this. "There's stuff I need, that you probably don't have."
He finally tore his gaze away from the screen where the miraculous cellular revitalization continued unheeded and turned to look at her. "What exactly do you need?"
She rolled her eyes back in her head, thinking. "I'd need an anaesthesiologist, a sub-cerebral drill, and a macro-syringe." She shook her head. "This is ridiculous. I can't perform this type of procedure. I'm not a licensed doctor. I'm just a med student. I don't graduate until spring. I don't even have a hospital internship yet, because I've been working for Dr. Mitchells ever since I came up with this."
While she said this, he stood, approaching until he towered over her, looking down at her. He remained still and, while he didn't seem quite as blatantly imposing while clad only in his trousers and his actuators, the sight was still enough to make most people lose whatever they were thinking about.
Which is exactly the effect it had on her. She shut her mouth absently, staring at him, wide-eyed. She backed up a step, almost tripping over stuff on the floor.
"And what do you suggest I do?" he asked, the tiniest hint of sarcasm lacing his tone. "Check myself into the nearest hospital? Barring that, would you be capable of coercing the necessary experts into doing this?"
"N-no," she said, stuttering once again. "I don't know what you should do. I don't have enough hands to do this surgery by myself." All the confidence from the successful experiment had fled in the time it took him to stand up, leaving her weak-kneed and trembling once again. It didn't help matters that she was barely even eye-level with his chest, forcing her to look up uncomfortably far too see his face. She felt like a child.
There was a long pause in which he appeared to be thinking, coming to a decision. It was obviously a decision he didn't like, as his expression grew darker and darker. A barely audible growl could be heard, rumbling in his throat.
Eventually he turned his head to one side, looking off into the distance, and sighed. "There's nothing for it," he growled quietly. "Under any other circumstance, I wouldn't even entertain such an idea. But there is no other way." He looked down at her. "You will have to use these. I'm sure you'll have enough hands, then." A humourless smirk flickered across his features.
She looked at him, and then at the arms. "Them? I, I can't use them. They're not... I don't know how." Feeble excuse, she knew, but they terrified her. And besides. Would she end up like him, insane and dangerous?
One claw came up and grabbed her shirt front again, pulling her forward. "No excuses! There is no time for excuses and hesitation!" He took a deep breath, apparently forcing himself into a calmer state. "I will ... teach you," he finally ground out.
She stared at him, willing herself to stay as calm as she could. "Alright," she said, seeing no other choice. She seized pride in the fact that she kept her voice from shaking, but she remembered that nasty little puncture sound the arms had made when he put them back on. "Tell me what I need to do."
He made a short huffing sound that almost sounded amused. "The first thing you're going to have to do is take off your shirt." He stepped back to afford her more space, and stood by the microscope array.
She blinked at him. "No," she said bluntly, wrapping her arms around her chest.
This brought him up short. Had his eyes been visible, one would have seen him blinking heavily. Then his brows met in a heavy scowl over the rims of his goggles. He growled again, baring his teeth before snarling an answer: "The connectivity points require a direct connection to the wearer, which means no clothing can be worn under the harness, so TAKE OFF YOUR SHIRT!"
Nodding hesitantly, she slipped out of her lab coat, then looked down while she pulled her sweater up and over her head. Turning bright red, she struggled with her bra for a moment before it, too, was discarded. Not looking at him, she covered herself with her hands. "Now what?"
During this disrobing, he'd glanced in her direction, almost unconsciously, and one eyebrow had flickered upward appreciatively before he realized what he was doing and looked away quickly. Once she'd covered herself up, he looked back at her. He unfastened the harness again, a clicking sound causing him to shudder as the connective needles retracted. He regarded the harness, then her, noting the fact that he was possibly three times her size.
"That's not going to fit me," she said judiciously, looking at the harness and not him, trying to fight away the blush that wasn't staying confined to her face. She had to be mature about this. Just her luck that the first man to see her. . . . She banished that train of thought. "Can it be . . . adjusted, somehow?"
He fixed her with a stare that could be felt through the goggles. "I don't usually loan them out, you know," he stated heavily. He looked about the place until one tentacle reached out and snagged a length of pliable cord. "This will have to do," he said.
"How, how do they work?" she asked, staring at the harness, and at the tiny bleeding points on Octavius's skin.
He walked toward her again, holding the actuator harness in one hand and the cord in the other. "They work through a direct physical connection to the spinal cord," he replied, lifting the harness to fit it around her. "Which, I'm certain you realize is the most efficient way to do it with present technology."
She put her arms through the harness, touching it as little as necessary. "Oh," she said. "Okay." The information was hardly helpful; she still didn't know what to expect.
He tied the cord round her torso and shoulders, fastened the harness, and tightened the cord so that it was more or less brought almost completely in contact with her skin. A warm vibrating sensation like an electrical current made itself felt. An instant later, a series of white-hot punctures speared into the skin of her back.
Unprepared, she screamed and arched her back in response, trying to throw the pain-causing harness off. She fell to her hands and knees, biting her tongue to keep from crying out again as she tried to adjust to the sensation.
He stood silently, watching her, an unreadable expression on his face. He made no move to help her, yet he said nothing to mock or insult her, gave no orders. He simply waited.
She stayed there, gasping, until the pain receded to a steady burn up and down her spine, then pushed herself up. The arms were heavy, not helping, but then one touched the floor, supporting the weight of the other three and keeping them from dragging at her raw back. She stared at it. "Did I do that?" Another rose when she moved her hand to brush hair away from her face.
He watched as she acclimated herself to them, one hand almost unconsciously reaching back to find the stool and pulling it toward him. He sat, still watching her intently as she acclimated herself to the actuators.
She closed her eyes, feeling out the new sensations. She could feel them there, like four more arms. She opened her eyes and brought the upper two up in front of her, extending the claws and examining them. She put her own hands down at her sides, reached out, and picked up various things from the tables, just picking them up and setting them down. Her first few tries were clumsy, but her actuator-to-eye co-ordination improved until she could pick up even the small micropipette and slide it back into its case. "Incredible," she breathed.
His head cocked slightly to one side, he continued watching her, his expression strangely intent. He'd never seen this from an outside perspective, after all. So that's what it looks like... He blinked and shook his head as if to clear it. This wasn't the time for introspection. He stood and crossed the room to a cabinet of what she recognized as a miscellany of medical supplies. Stopping, he looked over his shoulder at her, seeing she still knelt on the floor, testing her co-ordination with them. "You'd best make sure you can stand with those on," he said gruffly.
She nodded, and got her feet under her, but she could only stand erect with one of the actuators planted on the floor. The four of them together probably weighed about as much as she did. She stepped forward, accustomizing herself to the three-beat step required to move. First the actuator, then her feet. The other lower actuator joined in, making it even easier. She went over and joined Octavius at the medical cabinet, noting with some surprise just how comprehensive an assortment he had. She picked a few items out. "This is the tissue syringe I need, and the anesthetic drugs. No drill..." She looked around the cluttered room, hoping the item in question might appear from somewhere.
That humourless smirk reappeared on his features and he walked away a little unsteadily, though whether that was from his apparent condition or from the bizarre case of something resembling "sea legs" that she now noticed one had to have while wearing these things, was unclear. He stopped at another table crowded with what looked like computer parts and retrieved something that looked like the world's smallest power drill. "This will have to suffice," he said.
She took it from him and examined it critically. The bit was hair-fine, which was a little larger than she would have liked, but it couldn't be helped, and it was long enough. "Right," she said, only a little nervous. She spotted an autoclave in a corner, and put the drill bit and the syringe into it, then looked around. "Am I supposed to do this here?"
"There is nowhere else," he said. Then he looked as though a thought hit him. "This way," he said, leaving the room and walking into what looked like a kitchen. A disused and somewhat bare yet disorderly kitchen, but a kitchen nonetheless. It didn't look as though food was cooked in it very often, if at all. He walked up to the table and moved the books and papers and whatnot from it, relocating them mostly to the floor.
Clair followed him, looking around the room. It was clean enough, if not sterile. This surgery had to be precise, but it wasn't difficult or prolonged. Human error, rather than infection, was the likely road to failure. "We should wipe down the table with a disinfectant. Alcohol, if nothing else." She looked at the two actuators now hovering on either side of her head. "I could sterilize them with it too, since they're going to help me."
"I doubt I have enough," he said and left again, returning a few moments later with a bottle of rubbing alcohol, handing it over. He pulled the chair across the room and returned to the table, leaning on it briefly before looking up at her again, watching the actuators as they snaked slowly around her as she moved.
The bottle was mostly full, so she was able, just barely, to both clean the table and two of the actuators with it, as well as her own hands, with some left over. Holding them up where they wouldn't touch anything, she went back into the lair and got the anesthetic and its paraphernalia. Coming back, she nodded to Octavius and gestured at the table. "On your stomach, with your head to the side. Face me."
He favoured her with an unreadable yet slightly affronted look before climbing onto the table and lying down prone, his head nearest her and turned to the side so that he could see her. He shifted, made himself a little more comfortable, and shivered slightly at the cold table against his bare skin. His hair draped onto the table around his head, curling slightly at the ends. The tiny red punctures on his back had already stopped bleeding. He shifted again, putting an arm under his head and then lay still, waiting.
With her own hands and one actuator, she set up the anesthetic in its pump, checked the concentration, and slipped the mask over his face. "It shouldn't take too long," she said, her mind running on overdrive. This had to be the strangest kidnapping situation ever. "Count backwards from ten, slowly."
She thought she could almost see his eyes blinking, a fluttering of black eyelashes behind the goggles. A tiny patch of steam had formed on the inside of the mask as he breathed. "Hnnn...." He took an almost involuntary sighing breath. "Ten..." he mumbled. "Nine... eight... seven... six...." He twitched and his eyes flew open. "Why am I even trusting you?" he suddenly asked, and moved to get up, but the anesthetic was already taking hold and he flopped back down onto the table, his breathing now heavy. One hand shot out and grabbed hold of her wrist. "There's nothing that'll guarantee you won't kill me while I lie here helpless .... Take this thing off, we'll find... another.... another way.... won't ... helpless.... " his hand slipped slowly from her wrist and fell, his arm dangling over the edge of the table. "Can't ... no ... control...." His voice trailed off into mumbling and then a sighing whisper before he fell silent, his breathing slow and regular, his eyes closed.
She put his hand back up on the table, checking his pulse to see that she had got the dosage right. Steady and strong, if a little faster than she might have liked. Stepping away from his side, she reached back into the lair and fetched the drill and the things from the autoclave, reassembling the former with a sterile actuator. With her own hand and an alcohol-soaked swab, she brushed back the dark hair from his temple, and an actuator brought the drill to bear on the thin bone there. She took a deep breath to steady herself, though the actuators didn't seem to need it, and turned on the drill. A tiny scent of scorched flesh rose up as it bit through skin, then bone. She made infinitely slow progress, and pulled back the instant that the resistance of bone was overcome, meaning she was through. Slowly, she eased the drill bit back out, set it aside, and picked up the syringe. The lower actuator that wasn't helping her stand snaked over to check that the anesthetic pump was still doing its job, and to adjust the level.
With as much slowness as before, the actuator slid the needle into the drilled hole and took the minuscule sample that was the entire point of this half of the procedure. Injecting it immediately into an empty sample dish, she turned down the flow of sleep gas. A band-aid covered the tiny puncture on Octavius's temple. He would wake quite soon.