"Aren't you a little short for a Storm Trooper?"
- Carrie Fisher, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
"Together we can show the world what we can do. You are next to me and I'm next to you. Push me on through until the battle's won."
- Pauline, Super Mario Odyssey
The industrial aquatic had become home to Kasumi. Her nose wiggled as a few strands of caramel brown lazily floated across her face. Her fingers twitched softly as her nails tapped against reinforced glass. Bright green bubbles rolled across her eyelids as she stirred in her naked gelatinous sleep.
She sighed in deep toxic inebriation. Another wave of cool petroleum phosphate syrup hit her every time her chest rippled and her body naturally took a breath. A year ago, the pungent industrial detergent's taste would have made her sick to her stomach. Now it was what she thrived in. She no longer worried herself over what was in this heavily processed concoction or what it could be doing to her as it constantly soaked through her nude skin, even when her alkaline bathings could last months at a time. Too much had gotten to her brain and dulled her senses. She spent her driftless emerald hours dreaming of becoming a mermaid while sort of already being one.
Kasumi heard muffled screams echoing through the eight inch thick steel shell that housed her tube and hid her existence the world. It was little more than a dull underwater vibration to her eardrums, and she barely flicked her eyelashes at the sensations.
Here she was, like a molecule of bacteria stripped of all its personal membranes and tossed into a pool of saline on a Petri dish. The simulated light bleeding through the circulation fans around her container made her systematically catalogued and purified features shine like pearls. She was resting with her arms limply floating at her pale hips. She felt the cold caress of rounded glass pressing against her shoulders and the wider parts of her lower back. Leaning this way wasn't the ideal arrangement for her, but it was probably the most comfortable she could make herself given the factory-approved lodgings. The tiny circular floor of the tube meant it was standing room only, and this was a thousand times nicer than distributing her weight to her other center of mass and having the glass squeezing against her chest.
She heard distant but distinct voices channeling through the dense chemical water. Now they were coming from within the heavily shielded confines of her cocoon.
"Status on the Fox Squadron. I want all of our packages accounted for."
"Vixen-1, Vixen-3, Vixen-4, Vixen-7, and Vixen-10 are in position. Vixens 13 through 28 have secured the perimeter. Vixens 32 through 53 are in Vitro Standby."
Kasumi yawned in her suspended semi-consciousness. The air escaped her lungs with a small liquid gluggle. Her body's naturally produced carbon dioxide was instantly displaced into a quasi-artificial formula that flooded its way back into her bloodstream, as it had been done a million times in the past. These days it just tickled her slightly.
"Where's Vixen-0?"
"Loaded and ready for escort. Awaiting launch clearance."
"Jiggle the laundry. She's got a demolition scheduled."
The harsh slam of gravity came rushing up from underneath Kasumi. The landing impact rattled her out of her slouched position and floated her several inches up into the empty liquid space at the center of tube. If she had been a larger slab of meat, she may have had trouble staying upright in the unisex research beaker without constantly brushing her shoulders against the glass, but nimble little Kasumi could hover in circles and provide a 360 degree full body inspection all day long without coming close to the jar's limited clearance. It was almost as if she were meant to live in this state of constant scientific immersion all along.
The automated climate system began to gently raise the fluid temperature. Light abruptly consumed her world as the protective metal casing around her tube split open and peeled back. Behind her, the towering transport wagon was revving its manipulators and getting ready to take her out of her clear cylindrical packaging. Peering out the front, her eyes were greeted by strange words in bright orange letters stamped across the glass.
PROC SDNUOPMOCOIB UGNET
SLAIRETAM SUODRAZAH
Beyond the letters, she saw chaos. She had been delivered to what looked like the ruins of a ninja village under total assault, with what looked like members of her old family cowering for their lives and hopelessly trying to retreat. Large glass cylinders identical to hers littered the wasteland. Their contents had already been emptied.
The village was oozing with fighters who looked and sounded like Kasumi. They were just the same as her, only with tiny mistakes printed to their genes that could only be detected in a centrifuge. It was the same way a Xerox copy would always come out with microscopic flaws. No matter how many times the company stole her template or spent countless days obsessively studying some obscure detail of her physiology, she would always be more valuable than a clone hastily aged in a jar.
They wore nothing but the black bands around their wrists and necks marked with a specimen number, the only way to tell them apart. A menagerie of pale pearl dolls lunging, leaping, and bouncing their way through a wave of destruction. Cherry blossoms appeared out of nothingness and swirled everywhere as they teleported between their coordinated attacks, a finishing touch Kasumi once used herself before her own chemically-mandated evolution made it obsolete. Their manufactured genetics made them inclined toward destruction the same way female worker bees stick to the hive.
More of the plumped and pickled Kasumis appeared by the second. Some were dispensed from transport crafts in single order. Others were rolled in on a giant carton and dumped out a dozen at a time. Each one was docile and easy to herd in her clear glass tube, but became a rabid assassin the moment she was introduced to fresh air. Each one went straight into battle bare handed, bare bodied, and still dripping with green industrial grade mammal preservatives, with no pause for mercy or modesty.
And now it was Kasumi's turn to be let out of the cage. The softer parts of her body vibrated pronouncedly as the water pressure suddenly sank to nothing. The floor of the tank unscrewed, there was a loud splash, and she was quickly standing on solid ground.
The first thing Kasumi felt upon being transplanted back into the organic world was the charred remains of a pagoda cooling under her bare feet. She blushed in a tinge of embarrassment toward her vulnerable and damp situation, her soaked brown hair only hiding part of her face. It was one of the few non-violent emotions that hadn't been wrung out of her system during the long months of intense research and controlled experiments, while her sisters showed none at all.
Levers moved on the automated craft behind her. Kasumi stood calmly facing away as she let it run its standard prep routines on her. First it blasted the artificial amniotic fluid off her body with a stereo arrangement of high-powered air dryers. It opened its hatches and ejected a long narrow tarp made of nitro blue plastic over her head. Smaller manipulators unraveled the disposable "robe" down the fronts and backs of her knees and adjusted the front window to settle properly around her cleavage. One set slid between the flaps of the "skirt" to meticulously tie the laces of an imitation loincloth around her hips, all she required in terms of undergarment. White insulation tubing meant to mimic silk was pulled up to her thighs while plastic wrist guards were strapped behind her hands. Her long brown hair was brushed back and tied into a winding ponytail. The ribbon was made of yellow fiber optic tape stamped with a serial number.
A narrow white plastic sash was tied around her waist to hold everything together long enough until it needed to be discarded when she returned to her stasis chamber. The sash carried Kasumi's personal weapon as well as her official trademarkings. The word "DOA" sat above her right hip and "TEC" sat above her left, printed in flat black with prominent mechanical lettering. The cheap but reliable fighting outfit was a small modesty only the queen deserved.
Rain pelted against plastic. The final stage of the process involved sprinkling the finished product with a heavily formulated muscle ointment/cooling gel. The clear mist loosened Kasumi's joints, softened the polymers in her tarp, and left her with a strong artificial herbal scent. Her sisters were rushed into battle soaked in green sludge. She was sent in with a damp coat of wax to keep her fresh.
The entire drip 'n zip process was neat, orderly, and lasted under 20 seconds from start to finish. Kasumi's all-synthetic wardrobe gave her the look of a postmodern kunoichi about to visit a techno club.
"That's the original Alpha Specimen?" one of the static voices broadcast from the machine behind her.
"Yeah, but her life signs say she's feeling a little Omega. We haven't let her out of the Fox Hole much since we acquired her at the first tournament, but Corporate insists we give her something to do every now and then. The sponsors want to know they're investing in a 'happy quality asset.'"
Kasumi reached to her back and withdrew the wakizashi fastened behind her sash. Naked afterimages of herself cartwheeled around her. The veins of plasma sewn into the short metal blade instantly grew hot and crackled with neon lightning, drawing mysterious energy from its wielder.
Kasumi's scheming brown eyes gleamed across the few members of the ninja clan who still lived. They stopped and focused on the Disgusting Purple-Haired One with a determined glare. She felt nothing for this bastard half-sister now that she had so many other, more perfect siblings to share her love.
Kasumi raised her sword and teleported into action in an electric streak.
Author's note: That pack is wack, Jack.
Author's note 2: The line "That pack is wack, Jack!" was originally meant for Zack in an older draft of this story that was being written from the perspective of the evil DOATEC employees watching everything happen on video. Helena (the boss), Marie Rose (the bodyguard), Lisa (the geek), and Zack (the weirdo) would have been in attendance. Zack would spend the entire fic announcing what he was seeing with random non-sequiturs like "Ooo they're gonna get jiggy tonight!" and "That one's got some bling bling!" This would culminate in Marie Rose looking confused and saying "Who is this strange American man wearing an Elmo costume?" and Lisa would go "Oh, that's just my research assistant." That version was kind of cool, but I lost focus and wrote the final draft as a POV story since I haven't done one of those in a while.