HP-Gen13: Chapter Two Activation
They were out on the tarmac, the 'training yard' of sorts, when it happened. All the teams were brought together in a loose circle and then two were chosen at a time and made to fight in the middle of the circle. They'd started doing this kind of thing more and more often, often pitting teams against one another, but now... This was the first time that they'd pitted team members against themselves.
"Rahh!" Fairchild roared as she went at Rainmaker with the padded gladiator staff.
"Hyah!" Rainmaker countered the redhead's lunge with a straightforward and simple maneuver, sending the girl crashing to the ground.
"Again!" the instructor ordered. "Stay on your feet this time, Fairchild!"
Harry frowned. This sort of behavior reminded him a little too much of Snape for his liking. If this went on for much longer, he would intervene, instructors be damned. It didn't matter at the moment though as Caitlin was already getting to her feet and holding her staff at the ready. This time it was Sarah who went on the offensive. Striking high, low, from the side and straight jabs, she made sure to vary her attacks as much as possible while still putting all her strength behind every blow. It was all Kat could do to raise her staff to block each successive attack, steadily being forced back.
Unfortunately she couldn't block every one and she was hit on the head multiple times, and despite them both wearing helmets as part of their training gear, the repeated hits were making the redhead's headache much worse. Finally, the Native American warrior finished it with a combo that disarmed her opponent and knocked her flat on her butt all over again. She stepped back, breathing heavy and wishing she could wipe the sweat from her brown. Quite frankly it amazed her that Fairchild had yet to break more than a mild glow after all this.
"Again!" the instructor barked.
Harry turned and glared at the bare chested blond, two seconds from charging straight at him. Fortunately for his temper, Roxy and Grunge spoke up first.
"Aw c'mon, can't you see she's had enough!" Roxy screamed from her place in the circle.
"Yeah!" Grunge agreed, and it was clear from the muttering he wasn't the only one to agree.
"The world doesn't care to give out breaks or second chances, so get up off your ass Miss Fairchild. If this were real, you'd be dead. Again!" he yelled.
Where before there had been catcalls and words of shouted encouragement for one or the other, now there was an uncomfortable silence, and nothing to cover up the swish of Sarah's staff, or the sound of its impacts on Caitlin's body, or the screams of pain that followed said impacts. After a minute of this, Kat seemed to reach a breaking point and during a very brief lull in her beating, she strengthened her grip on her staff, let out a savage war cry and charged the sweaty and tired Native American woman, and in three moves disoriented, disabled and knocked the girl back. In fact, from the near-center of the circle, Kat knocked Rainmaker so far back that she collided with one of the other waiting students, and then skidded another ten feet past where he'd been knocked over as well. Immediately after, however, she started holding her head and moaning in pain. Tearing her helmet off, she grabbed her head and fell to her knees, clearly in real pain. Roxy ran to help her.
"That's more like it," the blond guy smirked and then turned and walked away. It was only after he'd left that Harry realized whoever that had been was not their usual instructor! Harry tried to follow where the bastard went, but his attention was drawn elsewhere before he could.
"Next pair!" their usual instructor, Helga, had shown back up and was giving the instructions once again. "Potter and Lane! Grab your gear and get started! Fairchild, Rainmaker, hit the showers!"
Harry stepped out from the circle, his face etched in a mask of equal parts rage and control. Bobby seemed to feel the same by the look on his own face, but Harry felt it was as much a mask as his own expression was. What they really wanted to do was go after that blond bastard and fight him! Until that happened though, they both knew they had to maintain appearances, so he subtly signaled his teammate.
Two bouts, one win each? He 'asked' him.
Bobby just as subtly shook his head.
Harry frowned and tilted his head, basically saying, I'm not losing just so you'll look good.
Bobby just smirked and shrugged before signaling for three bouts, one win each, third a tie.
Harry sighed and spun his padded staff once before giving a single nod of his head. Bobby smiled.
Meanwhile, as Harry and Bobby were kicking each other butts, and trying not to get caught fixing their fight, the girls were in the showers. For once they seemed to have it to themselves, although that could be due to the fact that they'd been sent in half an hour early, Roxy sneaking out right behind them. It wasn't the first time they'd showered together, but by the same token it was the first time it was just the three of them. Usually there were all the girls from the other teams in here as well and aside from idle gossip and random chitchat, people, Caitlin especially, were in and out as soon as humanly possible. For young women that is.
Caitlin was the first in the shower, and was taking the time to enjoy the rare opportunity for solitude, turning the hot on as much as she could bear it and letting steam fill the room as she luxuriated in the jet streams cascade down her sore and aching body. After all, she normally was in and out as quickly as she could go, keeping her robe and towel on hand so she could cover up fast. With her teammates, she trusted them, even Rainmaker, too much to care if they saw her naked. And so she was taking her time and enjoying the hot water and letting it wash her aches and pains away.
"Hey," Roxy called as she walked in and casually dropped her towel on the bench outside the open shower area before walking over to the shower head next over.
"Hey," she returned. "How'd you do?"
"It's cool. I won. But Grunge, or Jackie Chan, is getting his ass kicked. But you," she switched her accent to make fun of their instructor 'Helga', "you were an animal out there today."
"I, uh, I guess I got kind of mad," she admitted shyly, turning her body to the wall, shoulder's hunched.
"Hah! Well that's for sure!" Roxy agreed. "How's your head?"
"Fine now, the headache went away pretty fast," she answered, lathering soap to actually get clean.
"So I made you mad, huh?" another voice echoed from the entrance.
Both girls turned to see who it was, but only Caitlin blushed and partly turned away. True, she could hardly see any detail without her glasses, but she just couldn't get over Sarah's... attitude towards nudity. It wasn't the first instance she'd noticed her teammate coming to the showers sans robe or towel, but when it was just them, somehow it made it seem so much more... intimate.
"Yeah, guess you did, better watch yourself from now on Rainmaker," Roxy chided, lighting up the cigarette she'd brought in with her.
"What are you doing?" Caitlin exclaimed at Roxy's lighting up.
"Duh, I'm having a smoke," she shrugged in reply. "Its the only place they didn't stick a smoke detector."
"Hm, I guess I will," Sarah remarked to Roxy's comment, walking to the shower head on the other side of the petite redhead from the smoking dye-job. As she passed, she couldn't stop herself from looking. Not that she would ever actually do anything, they were her teammates and friends after all, but she couldn't deny her nature and it was still OK to look so long as nobody was hurt by it, right?
Roxy was the youngest of their squad, though thankfully not the youngest member of Project Genesis, but she was still just seventeen, eighteen in just a couple of months according to her. She certainly showed it with her youthful appearance, and aside from the dye-job and a small tattoo on her hip, she had nearly flawless skin. A bit more tan in certain areas since they had first started, and the exercise was doing her wonders for her ass and stomach to say nothing of her arms and legs. She was a healthy B-Cup in the breast department, her nipples brown and circular with pencil-eraser nips. Overall, she'd rate her in at a solid six, a seven and a half if she got rid of the dye-job and filthy smoking habit.
Caitlin, on the other hand, well, she looked anyway, but she'd looked before and still didn't see anything worth stopping over. She was the very definition of petite honestly speaking. She was only a couple inches taller than Grunge as far as height, and the rest of her was little more than bones and the minimum amount of muscles needed to move her body. She was the kind of A-Cup commonly referred to as 'washboard' and her nipples were pale coral pink, almost invisible if you aren't looking for them. She has no ass, her feminine curve figure came mostly from the fact that her stomach was as skinny as the rest of her. If she didn't know better, and she did, she'd almost worry that the nice girl was anorexic or something. As it was, she was just a Plain Jane average girl, nothing special, but nothing ugly about her either. Which on Sarah's scale put her down as a three. Girls didn't get above a five with her unless they were at least somewhat attractive, and even most Supermodels and TV and Movie actresses ranked an eight or a nine with her. Sarah had only met a handful of tens in her life and perhaps only two elevens.
Take herself for instance. She was 5'11", with gravity-defying C-Cup breasts, was in peak physical conditioning, took excellent care of her native brown skin and was only twenty years old. She was also a lesbian, and had been around the block a time or two, so she knew she was hot, she knew exactly what made her hot and exactly how to make herself even more attractive in order to attract potential bed partners. But she wasn't arrogant about it. On an average day, or a particularly bad day like today, she knew she was no better than an eight, and there had been days she was actually a five. Being a ten was more a state of mind than the actual condition of her body, showing confidence in yourself and your body and displaying it for the world to see and appreciate.
She turned her attention back to her shower and turning the hot all the way up with no cold at all. It stung at first, but she ignored it and instead let her... 'gift' keep the water from actually hurting her. Rubbing her hands down from her crown, to her neck, across her chest (pausing to rub and squeeze her breasts), down her toned abs, around her hips, grabbing her own ass before running down her taut thighs along the outside before making their way up the inside and slowly all the way back up to her neck, Sarah smiled to herself. Yeah, she was hot. Ow! And sore, she thought as she felt the bruises and contusions forming all over her body, especially right in her center where she'd taken that hit that sent her flying. Caitlin wasn't the only one sore from the days workout. Especially given that last hit, Sarah needed the soak time as much as the pale, petite redhead. Curious, Sarah shot another look at Fairchild out of the corner of her eye. Then she blinked and did a double take while the girls distracted themselves with gossip about their mystery instructor. She couldn't be seeing right, the steam must be hiding it or something, but...
No, there was no mistake about it. She remembered every blow she landed on Fairchild in their spar, exactly where she hit and how much strength she'd put behind each and every one of them. She expected Kat to be black and blue all over by now, especially with the heat letting her muscles relax, the bruising and injuries she'd suffered should be showing up before their eyes.
There was not a bruise on Caitlin Fairchild's entire body.
No bruising whatsoever, not even red marks to indicate where some might form! Sarah didn't know how she'd done it, but somehow the small girl had either avoided injury in a situation where injury was unavoidable, or she'd already healed from the injuries inflicted. Considering that Sarah was even now feeling the aches from that one hit she'd taken, she wondered.
After showering, everybody continued with their daily routine of studying and testing and not necessarily in that order, before finally being allowed to eat dinner and then it was rack time. IE, they were locked in their rooms and left alone for the rest of the night.
All except for Harry that is. He'd been exploring the compound one level at a time, finding the Restricted Sections and getting past them with disturbing ease. He knew before hand that none of these people knew about magic, but after all the trouble he had growing up and getting into 'restricted' places over the years, he'd come to expect a similar amount of trouble here. Instead all it took was his Invisibility Cloak, silencing charms and a Notice-Me-Not charm and he may as well have had full access. For locked doors, where Alohomora didn't work, he just Disapparated to the other side of the door with lots of silencing charms in place.
What he'd discovered so far was... disturbing at best, and criminal on average. Muggle or magical, what these people were doing, not just to those on Project Genesis, but just in general to all the test subjects they had in this place for all sorts of reasons, criminal was criminal, whether the letter of the law dictated it or not.
Starting with the least worst, aside from mass-kidnapping them all, there were other... "hostages" being held throughout the complex. The "Children's Wing" of this place wasn't exactly where the nursery for single parents working here stayed, but rather decorated prison cells where children under age eleven were kept and experimented upon. The experiments, as far as he could tell, were varied from just studying them the same way a child psychologist would (minus the parental supervision), to inhumane mutilations and torture. That was the least worst of what went on here.
As a comparison, the worst of the worst that he'd discovered, so far, could be found in the lowest levels of the base. The base was built inside of a mesa plateau in the Nevada desert, so it already was rather extensive, containing well over fifty levels above ground. Below ground, however, the base descended much further totaling in over two hundred levels, albeit honeycombed throughout the area rather than standard symmetrical like some kind of sunk skyscraper. In those below ground lowest levels he'd found, for lack of a better term, dungeons. Dungeons in the literal sense of the word, where prisoners were held, tortured, and killed on the say so of the keepers of the 'castle', in this case the same people that were responsible for Project Genesis and training everyone here. The last time he was down there, he discovered forty dead bodies amongst the hundreds of prisoners being held there. Each and every one of them look like they'd been there for a while to with no sign to indicate they'd even been found by anyone before him.
Take into account the two extremes, then compare them and everything in between was covered. Harry didn't need to use his imagination, he'd seen it with his own eyes. As bad as the Death Eaters, as bad as Voldemort ever was, none of it could touch on how much he'd had to grow since joining this Project. Whether he'd been sheltered, or just hadn't been there to see the worst of the atrocities, or maybe he'd cut the head off the snake before it could get as imaginative as these people had become, he couldn't begin to say. What he could say was that these people needed to be stopped. And if no one else would or could, then he would.
First step, which he was undertaking tonight after seeing Caitlin's little tantrum during PT that day, was gathering information. If nothing else, something he'd learned during his years by Hermione's side was that the more information you have, the more you can do and the better off you'll be in the end. Even random, seemingly useless facts can turn into gold nuggets of intel at the right moment. And so he was coming back to the Command Center, the first Restricted Area he'd visited when he had started these midnight strolls months ago, and where he'd learned all they knew about the Evans side of his family. He'd since deleted key pieces of information from their database, only a little at a time, filling it with random, useless bits of fiction when he found the time, and leaving the rest of it blank.
The benefits of their training was that every single student of Project Genesis was now a fully certified computer programmer and – technically speaking – world class hacker of moderate to good skill. Harry wasn't quite as good as Fairchild in that regard, but that was like saying Shaquille O'Neill wasn't as good as Michael Jordan at Basketball. Fairchild was an artist and given the broad range of subjects she was versed in, possibly smarter than Hermione, where Hermione's focus of study was in magic, Caitlin's was in everything else academic, and she could get a computer to do practically anything with just a few keystrokes. Harry was more of a brute force sort hacker, but very very very good at covering his tracks after he was done. So while they would know they'd been hacked if they went looking for it, they could never find out who or what was done.
He'd even managed to go back and make the same changes to the backup files, off site included thanks to a 'scheduled backup' that uploaded a Trojan, which made the changes with no one noticing a thing. Considering it was a program that he'd written up on the fly even as he was uploading it to the backup servers, the anti-virus software couldn't recognize it to catch it.
Tonight though, he was making a different sort of backup. The kind that gets unencrypted and put on a disk that eventually makes its way into the hands of the press and authority figures willing and able to shut a place like this down before the press could even warm up their printers.
He quickly accessed his backdoor into the system and did a quick security check to make sure nobody had caught onto him yet. He also set the cameras in the entire section to a ten second loop, focusing on nothing, and if any movement was detected, then those cameras would show a single freeze-frame filled with static. It didn't matter that much, since he was wearing his invisibility cloak, but the glitch with the cameras would buy him some time and a bit of warning as the troops would be sent to investigate the cameras first and the control room here after. Once that was taken care of, he quickly loaded unencrypted disks and ran a program that would make sure everything he was putting onto them would be freely accessible and also wouldn't alert these people when someone was viewing the information on a connected terminal.
The computer classes here were very thorough.
While the program was running and the disks were filling, Harry took another quick look through the system and came across another familiar name; Fairchild.
Before he could take a closer look though, there was a noise from the hall just outside the open door. Wait... damnit, he knew he'd forgotten something! Checking the backup progress, he frowned when he saw that it was only at eighty-seven percent!
Getting up from the chair, he minimized the backup and then stepped away from the computer as quietly as he could, going to stand in the back corner that gave the most coverage of the room. Luckily, maybe, it turned out he didn't have to worry about being found out too soon, as the person that had just found and walked in the open door was Caitlin!
"Uh oh," she said as she stepped inside, looking rather sick. "This is definitely not the infirmary. Wow! They've got one of the new Stark supercomputers! I've read about'em but never got to see one up close. Till now of course."
'Stark?' Harry thought, rather surprised. 'They must have changed the software then, because it was way too easy to get into them for Stark Tech!'
Caitlin approached the same terminal that Harry had been at, saying to herself as she sat down, "The system's still online." She typed in a few key commands and stopped as the results scrolled across the screen. "Fairchild? Al...Alex Fairchild? That... that was my father's name." She became so engrossed in what she was reading that she never noticed the air duct hatch right above her drop open. Not until Grunge popped out, upside down, and said, "Hey Fairchild! Whatcha doin?"
"YEEAAGH!" Caitlin screamed as she fell back out of the chair, her elbow accidentally hitting the alarm button on her way to the floor. Nobody noticed it, not even Harry, too focused on the screaming girl on the floor to acknowledge it.
"Shhh!" Grunge hissed in a whisper. "No! Don't scream! It's... it's just me, Grunge!"
Quickly, their teammate dropped down to the floor and helped her back to her feet. Roxy poked her head out, a lit cigarette between her lips.
"Oh man! I'm really sorry, Fairchild," Grunge apologized. "I didn't mean to scare ya. I was just glad it was you and not one of the guards!"
"Wha... what are you doing here?" Caitlin demanded of both of them.
"Cool. It's you, Kat," Roxy said as she levered herself out of the crawlspace. "Grunge and I come here once in a while to get some privacy. It's a Restricted Area and all, but the rest of this joint is loaded with surveillance cameras. Wait a second, how'd you get in here?"
Well, that certainly answered the question if he was the only one sneaking out at night. Apparently though, he was the only one that had gotten as far in uncovering this place's secrets. He would guess Roxy's reason for sneaking out would be to smoke, while he couldn't begin to say what reason Grunge might have.
"Cameras?" Caitlin repeated. "You mean they've been watching—?"
"All of you freeze!" the guard ordered as he came up behind the redhead and grabbed her by the shoulder, spinning her around, his weapon already drawn. Harry silently cursed himself for not paying closer attention, but resolved it by drawing his wand now and keeping it trained on the threat.
"Central!" the guard spoke into his radio, "This is Gates down in CompCore One. I've got at least three unauthorized intruders." There was a moment of static and then they all clearly heard the response over the radio. "Roger. Gates detain them until back-up arrives."
Caitlin stepped out of his grip and then approached him, a familiar expression of worry on her face. Harry had seen it before on Hermione's face every time they did something that could have gotten them in trouble and potentially detention or expulsion. It was kinda freaky how similar the two were really.
"Wait!" she begged, latching onto his free arm, "You've got it all wrong. I was just looking for the infirma—HUUUUNGH!"
"I told you to stay still, girl!" the guard snapped as he physically flung Caitlin off of him, sending her flying back until she hit the wall, hard. He then pulled his weapon and put it flush against her head as he continued interrogating her, "What are you doing here?! Why were you accessing the computer system?"
"Hey! Back off, security-dude!" Grunge tried to step in between them. "This ain't no seven eleven, you know? We're the talented youths of the Gen 13 Proj—!"
"Shut up!" the guard punched the shorter boy with his free hand, knocking him to the ground.
"You stormtrooper creep! You hurt him!" Roxy cried, rushing to pick Grunge off the ground.
"I'm gonna do a whole lot worse if I don't get some damn answers, honey! And soon, or else!" he snarled back at her.
"Please, if you'd just listen for a second—!" Caitlin tried to reason with him again. "UUUNGH!"
"I told you not to move!" he yelled, backhanding her with his rifle this time. "For a bunch of whiz kids, you're being real stupid!"
Harry had seen about enough. He was ready to drop the armored thug with a stun spell, when three things happened simultaneously and gave him pause. Number one, the disks ejected from the computer terminal, indicating that the backup had completed successfully. It drew the guard's attention away from Caitlin briefly, and raised the tension in the room another few notches by order of magnitude. Number two, the wards he'd placed around his room had just been tripped, which meant they now knew he wasn't there and he couldn't go back any time soon without significant risk. And number three, that which actually stayed his hand for the moment, Caitlin began to... change.
"AAARGH!" she screamed. "I was just... looking for... the Infirmary. The pain! It's... back! But now... my whole body... feels like... it's on fire! What's happening... to me?!"
"Play it smart, girl," the guard snarled again. "Just stay down!" The disks ejected. "Huh? What was that? You are trying to—whu?"
"You... shouldn't have hit me! That was a big mistake, buster! And the last one you're going to make!" Caitlin snarled right back as the change began in earnest and to Harry's eyes she was covered in sparks of raw power, erupting from her every pour with an audible sound of electricity. She then stood up and punched him.
There was a sound of something very hard and sturdy snapping like a twig, and whether it was his faceplate or his neck was overshadowed by the fact that he went flying and slammed into the far wall and impacted so heavily against it that the metal warped around him, leaving him stuck there.
"AARRGH!" Caitlin screamed, grabbing her head suddenly. "The pain... it just keeps... getting... worse! AAARRRGGHH!"
Caitlin then underwent a most startling transformation. She grew a foot in height, her muscle mass went from nonexistent to professional athlete, and the curves that apparently passed her by in early puberty appeared with a lethal vengeance, all within the span of a few seconds. Of course the immediate consequence of this, other than how painful it was based on her screams, was that her nightshirt and underclothes were ripped off her body in an almost explosive fashion.
After it was over, or at least she had stopped screaming and was breathing somewhat normally again, Roxy dared to ask, "Oh geez! Are... are you all right, Caitlin?"
Openly staring, Grunge couldn't help commenting, "Whoa! Outta sight! She looks pretty good to me."
"Wha... what's going on here?" Caitlin gasped, looking down at her nearly-naked body. "What's happening to me?!"
END (2 of 5)