Three hours in and I'm already going crazy. I can't use my powers, I can't do but sit or lay in this small cell and the reflections the Chromium walls left had started to affect my way of understanding what was right, left up and down. I've spent the last hour pacing around. I've got nothing to do and I'm sure it's been more than three hours since I've been here. I hear faint footsteps from behind the entrance wall. I place my eyes against the cool surface of the wall and try as hard to listen in.
"…Nemesis… Lehm's condition…" the voice came too blurred but I know it was Augustine's. I feel the wall rumble and shake, I back away as it slides open upward revealing the natural light of the setting sun behind Brooke Augustine. A woman with reddish-brown hair, and a nasty frowned mouth to go along her icy brown eyes that seems to pierce anyone's soul like knife through melting butter. "Ah, good to see you've not fallen asleep. I've reconsidered your thirty day isolation and moved it for next month" she says with a lighter tone to her voice, like she was actually happy.
"What do you want in return?" I ask her. "You always want something in return"
"No, no. Not this time, I just hope you've learnt your lesson about normal people and the things they go through see others being burnt to ash or disintegrated" she walked in front of me, her hands behind her. She liked to walk like that since I met her, trying to be big and powerful. I could easily kill her if I wanted to but… where do I go after that? Hunter and Blair, what about them? They're the only family I've had since I was abandoned long ago by some rich people that once called themselves my parents. I've lived with the D.U.P since I was fifteen and it's been six years since then. I've got nowhere to run to, I can always fight, but... what would I become by then?
I clear my head of thoughts and continue walking until we reached the main doors of the D.U.P HQ. It's a large spire, towered with six other forming a hexagon around its concrete body. It sat on the river beside Seattle and all of the city… if you look in the right angle, could be in the palm of your hands. She leads me into a large room, lights hanging high above us, a glass window running against one of the wall and a large ominous looking pod sitting on the middle of the room where spotlights seems to be pointed towards it. Another locking experiment.
"It's not what you think, Lehm" she says. "We're not here to lock you up, we've done that before and we failed… many times"
"So what's that in the middle of the room?" I ask. I look around and see people on the other side of the windowed wall. They're talking to each other, sitting on chairs facing us, Augustine walks towards a metal door next to the window. I get the feeling I'm not supposed to follow her. I stay put and try to make sense of my surroundings. It's big, spaciously larger than any indoor buildings I've ever been in. Lights hang above us, large crates of metal and wood are strewn all over the place, I have a feeling this is a training room. I turn just in time to see Augustine behind the sliding metal door. She appears a moment later on the other side of the window. She leans over, what I guess, is a control panel and presses a button. The speakers flare up with her icy cold voice.
"We tried to lock you up before, Lehm. But now, after several failed tests and experiments, we've come to believe that the only way to stop you completely is to kill you" her voice doesn't falter, she continued. "Hunter and Blair aren't here because they didn't want to see you die, so put that in your mind, that at least two people don't want you to die" the speakers, the soft crackles they created was left. She had shut off the speakers and I stood in silence trying not to laugh at the thought, they really think they could kill me?
"You're— you're joking, right?" I say laughing. "Alright, for the sake of training a bunch of newbie soldiers, I'll lessen the impacts of my punches"
I'm still laughing when the pod released steam as it popped open to reveal a young woman. She's fairly my age, light-toned and long glossy gray hair. A bandana wrapped around her eyes. She wore a long flowing night gown, she's beautiful to look at but the instant she moved I suddenly felt a rush of fear. Something's wrong with her. I back away.
"Lehm, I want you to meet Nemesis" her voice returned. I turn to see that the glass window was gone and was replaced by metal much like the other walls. They don't seem to be made of Chromium, which is something to lessen my worries. "She's the very first android produced by the D.U.P to stop Conduits like you. Another is in production for Lee Schneider but I'm afraid you won't see the day that his Nemesis captures him. For you…" she stops. I hear faint shouting in the back, Blair's voice boomed into the large room.
"Lehm! I'm sorry, I shouldn't have gone with this! Nemesis—No, get away from me— she's— you need to run, don't fight it!" there was a long screech of the mike being dragged, a scream, shouting and gunfire. Something's happening but I'm too preoccupied by what she had said. An android with the power to adapt like me? Impossible… and yet her fist hitting me in the gut felt real. I slam against the metal wall, my entire body already aching from the pain of one single punch. Fuck.
- 0 – 0 – 0 -
Seymour was waiting when we came back with Jet Black, who introduced himself as Edgar James, still in his sphere cage. Seymour happily greeted back, he says a few things to Mariela and she nods before leaving us four to be alone in his room.
"I had another premonition" he says. His voice was as grim as ever. "The future is changing"
"Isn't that what the future always does?" Emily says as she takes a seat on one of the couches.
Seymour shook his head. "The future is at a constant change but not like this." He takes a seat in front of us, in one of his single seated couches that becomes a recliner. "This... future is dark. I can't see anything at all"
"What do you mean?"
"Hey! Get me down from here!" Edgar tries to kick the air again and I let him fall on the ground. Thankfully the soft carpet broke his fall.
"If you so try to turn to water, I'll put you in a smaller space than that one" I threat. He looks at me, grumbles then takes a corner of the room where he stood and leaned against the wall.
"I haven't told you the full extent of my power" he says. "I… I can only see what my future self can. That's why I didn't join you in fighting Edgar and his companion because I saw myself getting in your way and in turn, making you lose the fight" he says. I just noticed how he would rub the back side of his hand when he was nervous about something. "Normally, I see the world in different realities, sort of… alternate futures that depends on the outcome of variables in the present time"
"I don't get it, Seymour, you said you didn't saw anything" I said. The heaviness of the words settled after I had said them. Did he die? "Did you… you know?"
He shook his head. "No, I did not die but instead, I literally saw only darkness. We, the Conduits were captured and thrown into large windowless cells by… other Conduits. More powerful Conduits" he says. I hear Edgar shuffle and I turn to see him walk towards us with a grin.
"The D.U.P will always win in the—
"The D.U.P's been disbanded by this point" Seymour interjected. "These Conduits were the byproduct of the D.U.P trying to rid of the one who would have caused the war" he says. For a moment I felt relieved that my whole future wouldn't become messy but then again… who were these new Conduits? "So they tried to create more Conduits to battle us. But in the end, this destroyed them and killed nearly two-thirds of the world population"
"Seymour, what you're saying is… it can't be real, right?" Emily's voice seemed so fragile, so afraid. I wanted to scoot over to her and wrap my arms around her and say convincing words of courage, but I can't.
Seymour was about to say something when I, he and even Edgar felt it. A wave of fear. Fear indescribable, it was like… like I was thrown into a pit of my worst nightmares. I felt a cold wind run against the back of my spine and I shuddered. I see Seymour and Edgar had also felt that fear. That uncertain cold wind running through the back of their spine.
We hear Mariela scream from behind the door and Seymour, surprisingly, moved swiftly towards the door and threw it open. I see Mariela hunched on the floor, shaking and afraid. She was crying, sobbing nonstop. Whatever that wave was, I'm sure every Conduit out there felt it, I just know everyone did, it carried scents of fear from different people, a myriad of images. And atop those images, I saw the face of a young woman, her eyes covered by a black bandana. I shiver when I try to recall her face. Seymour cradled Mariela in his arms and excused himself to take her to her bedroom. Edgar was slowly backing away from us trying to run. I shackle his feet to the ground by 'hardening' the space around his feet and he falls backwards with a loud thud.
"Don't try to run" I said.
"Fuck you! I need to worn Mikey about the thing that guy saw… fuck this! I need to get away from the lots of you!" he tries to raise his feet from the floor but they're stuck there.
"I can cut off your feet right now and throw them in the Pacific Ocean" I said, never realizing until now how… evil I sounded. What has being a Conduit done to me? I feel warm hands wrap around mine and I turn to see Emily.
"Don't force yourself to do something you'd regret later on" she says. I look into her eyes, her beautiful hazel eyes. I briefly nod and release Edgar from the floor. He turns into liquid and seeps into the crevices of the floor boards.
"You did the right thing letting him go. He doesn't need to be involved in this" she says.
"Emily" I start looking around the room. The fire from the fireplace had dwindled to a low burn. "Every Conduit will be involved if we don't stop whatever it is coming for us"
- 0 – 0 – 0 -
Metal? No. Gravity? No. Magma? No. Every power I had was being overturned by this thing. The more time I spent trying to destroy it, the more it becomes more power than me. I'm beginning to think that it has the same power as I have. I need to run away. Find a good place to be safe and try it from there. I duck under a punch and tackle it to the ground. It pulls its knees towards its chest and kicks me in the chest. I go flying through the air and slam against the ceiling sending bits and piece of concrete falling towards the ground like snow. I open my eyes just in time to see it flying towards me. I phase through her and I had just enough energy to do that. My Hyper Healing had kicked up the first injury I got and has been using a lot of my energy since then just trying to keep me on both feet.
It turns a 180 degrees and plummets down towards me, it's right arm, a large silver—Chromium—sword. She slashes forward and I had enough strength to phase through the initial sweep but the sudden twisting feeling in my stomach made me solid again, making me get hit by her kick and sent flying to one of the walls. It hurts. My entire body was screaming from the pain, my Hyper Healing has finally failed me and all I could do was get up on my knees. I watch as it zooms towards me, its hand turning into a sword once more. I closed my eyes thinking what I could have done to stop it but every single thought of action… overturned against me. I was done. Kaput…Teleportation! Damn, I was so fixated on fighting it that I had forgotten I could easily escape her. I open my eyes just as the sword was to pierce my left eye and I easily disappeared and reappeared in behind her, a few good yards away. It looked surprised… no, rather it looked like it was calculating. It was an android, after all.
I was about to teleport, It—Nemesis, as Augustine called it—turned towards me. I see its heels slightly adjust themselves, forming silver like tubes extending outwards behind her. Her feet were covered in a Chromium plated shoes that somehow gave her the ability to float a few inches above the floor. It was charging right for me when the metal doors Augustine went through earlier slid open. A lone figure was running towards me, her hair flowing behind her, blood ran down her face. Blair.
"Lehm!" she shouts and becomes a figure of light moving faster than Nemesis itself. She reaches me while Nemesis was a good ten yards or so away. "I'm sorry" she says. I turn to see Nemesis was right in front of us. I closed my eyes and hoped that I would be able to open them again…
The wind was blowing hard against my body. I held Blair in my arms, holding her in a tight embrace. I open my eyes to see we were not in the large training room of the D.U.P Headquarters. We were… we were in Chicago. My birthplace, the city of my Past.
Author here: sorry if this chapter was rather "short" I'm planning on a Unknown/Emperor-centered chapter next to finally bring out the truth of what he really is. Also, what do you guys think about Nemesis? She's based on the Greek Mythology figure. She's-rather, it-will be making a lot of appearances from now on. Stay tune for the upcoming war.