The Accident

Vira stared at the remains of the poor… thingthat was lying on the table. She looked at her boss, disgusted by what he had done. Grimacing, she jotted notes on the reactions it was having to the drugs in her notebook and suppressed a shudder. She hated this job, but it was the only thing that could pay her way into college. Her parents were gone; it was up to her to take care of herself.

Deep down, she knew that what they were doing was illegal, and that if they were caught she could kiss college-and perhaps even graduating from high school-goodbye, but nonetheless, it paid the bills on the table, and let her occasionally catch a movie with her friends. Besides her job, her life was pretty average for a Houstonian. She went to 'one of the best schools in the nation' and, naturally, hated it, had a best friend she occasionally had to live with, and dreamed of something better.

Sadly, Vira had overlooked something. She knew howto get a happy ending; she just forgot that to get one, things had to get worse before they got better.

Ifthey got better.

The poor animal that lay half-dead on the table had once been a cat. A pretty tabby she'd dubbed 'Minerva'. Her boss spat instructions at her, and she obeyed them, injecting the cat with different chemicals. Each time, she would gently pet the cat's head, whispering soothingly. To her knowledge, the cat liked her. Well, she liked her much more than she'd liked Vira's boss. One last injection went into the cat before she lost the battle with whatever it was they were doing to her. Vira stopped; taking the syringe out of the creature, she began to clean up, but her boss stopped her.

He looked excited, and this worried the fifteen-year-old. "Pick it up," He said, gesturing to the cat's corpse. Warily, she did so, holding the cat gingerly. Taking the last syringe, her boss-a brown haired man by the name of Edward Nigma-approached the cat and injected the fluid into her forehead.

The feline's eyes opened slowly, and Vira stared at it, terrified. She looked up Nigma, fear creeping into her eyes, but a cruel grin spread across his face. Vira set the un-dead cat onto the table, knocking over a beaker filled with light orange fluid in the process. She knelt, picking up the shards of glass, and cut her finger on one of them.

She disregarded this, and continued cleaning up the spilled liquid and glass. Nigma paid her no attention, he set about to get the cat ready for dissection. The cat meowed, as if confused, and something clicked in Vira's mind. Nigma, for some reason, was testing the prospect of cats having nine lives. She looked up at him slowly, and was suddenly very scared. She threw away the remains of the mess and looked to her boss again. To her surprise, he was staring at her with a thoughtful expression.

"What happened to your finger?"

Vira looked down at a long, deep cut. She blinked, confused. She couldn't feel it, though she should be in a large amount of pain. She blinked, and walked toward the table, wrapping her finger in a paper napkin. "Nothing."

Nigma nodded, and handed her a pair of gloves, a mask, and a scalpel. The dissection was quick, and the cat, while asleep, remained alive. As Vira was stitching the cat back up, something happened. Something clicked. And that something exploded, sending the teenager flying backwards.

Vira awoke in the hospital, her best friend Claire sitting at the foot of her bed. She sighed, and tried to sit up. She had a massive headache, and she was sore all over. There was a doctor staring at her, jotting things down in his notebook. Vira watched him silently, trying to figure out what was going on. "What-?"

Claire shushed her. "Try not to say anything stupid."

A man dressed in a black suit entered and ushered Claire and the doctor out.

"Your name is Pennovira?"

"Just Vira, actually."

"Well, Ms. Vira, I am here about your job."

Uh-oh. "What about it?"

"You are aware that what you were doing was dangerous and illegal, correct?"

"I actually didn't know what we were doing, sir."

He frowned at her. "I can see that."

"What do you mean?"

"Haven't looked into a mirror lately have you?"

"Huh?"