"You SHOT me!" yelled Kim, eyes wide.
A rather sheepish looking carbon copy was trying to look everywhere but at the short haired original. "How do you know it was me?"
"You're the only bloody one with a forty five!" shouted Kim, pointing at said pistol still smoking in her clone's hand. She then waved her hand at the soldiers lying dead on the ground who were all holding a different variation of energy rifles.
Fiona sucked on her teeth with a puckered brow. Her green eyes shifted nervously over the obvious difference in firepower as she discreetly tried to slip the pistol out of Kim's sight.
Kim, catching what her clone was doing, gave her a hard glare. Her free hand now held her shoulder, blood seeping through her fingers and soaking her shirt. A scowl remained fixed on her face as she gave her shoulder a pointed look. "My arm is useless now, thank you. There's no way we can finish in time and get to our separate transportation with my shoulder such a mess!"
Fiona winced, scratching her cheek absently. "I really didn't mean to… I just… got excited?"
"That doesn't fix the problem!" Kim growled at her before stomping around the office in hopes of finding a first aid kit.
"No wait! Here! I've got something that will work!" Fiona hastily dug into her pant leg bloused around the top of her boots and pulled out a rather bulky looking object about the size of her fist. She crossed the room and started pulling Kim's hand away from the wound.
"Stop that! What are you doing?!"
"Trust me! This will fix it right up!" Fiona shoved Kim's erratic hand away and quickly examined the wound. She grunted an odd affirmation before stuffing the object in her cargo pocket so she could start ripping Kim's shirt open to have more access to the wound.
It took all of Kim's willpower not to freak out and shove her clone away. It didn't help that her shoulder hurt like a-
"There!" exclaimed her clone. She wiped her now bloody hands onto her pants before pulling out the object again. She pushed a button and some gel started seeping out, which she quickly applied to the bleeding hole on both the entry and exit points of the wound. She double checked her work before nodding to herself, ignoring Kim's hisses of pained protest. "Last step!"
A click was heard as a button was pressed. A beam of light shot out of the odd contraption, which Fiona was quick to narrow until it just encompassed the area of the injury. With a slightly irritating flat tone, light began to pulse up and down across the punctured flesh, Fiona careful to keep the beam steady and on target. Kim tried to crane her neck to watch, but it proved fruitless as the angle was just too sharp to get a good view. She ended up staring balefully at the wall, trying to ignore the stinging itchy feeling burning through her shoulder.
The machine clicked off. Before Kim could say or do anything, Fiona maneuvered behind her and turned the machine on again. Kim huffed, gritting her teeth.
It felt like forever. It didn't help that she was twitchy, seeing as they could be ambushed at any moment. Overall, however, it was a relatively quick process before Fiona turned the machine off a second time and slapped her hard on shoulder.
"There! All done!"
Kim rounded on her, ready to tear her head off…
Until she realized her shoulder didn't hurt at all. She probed the area with her fingers only to find new, and quite tender, flesh.
"It's something I nicked from the place they kept me. Heard them talking about it, so I convinced my kidnappers to take a detour, saying it was safer. The stem cell gel, five hundred twenty eight hertz, and a healthy dose of photons get the body to repair itself faster. Works pretty quickly on small wounds, it seems." She inspected the area critically before smiling broadly. "There! It's like it never even happened!"
A hand swiftly jerked, striking Fiona soundly on the back of the head.
"Except it did!" retorted Kim, green eyes dark. "'The hell is wrong with you?!"
"I said I was sorry!"
"No you didn't! Are you blind?! How could you hit me?! They're all wearing that stupid navy blue uniform!" She points at her shirt. "Steel gray! Big difference!"
"You stepped in the way! I thought you were beside me! I was trying to sweep across the room when you stepped forward!" Fiona thrust an accusing finger in Kim's face. "If you'd stayed next to me I wouldn't have hit you!"
"I was knocking that guy's rifle from his hands! He was going to shoot you!" argued Kim. She kicked the accused dead guy.
"Oh… he was?" Fiona considered the dead guy as Kim rolled her eyes.
With a huff, the short haired woman started making her way across the room to set up a small device. "Whatever. I guess you can do anything, including shooting your partner."
The spontaneous urge to stick her tongue at Kim was fighting its way to the surface. It was not something she was used to feeling, so found the action shortly after happening just as Kim turned back around to face her.
Kim's eyebrow twitched.
"I'll give you to the count of three to put that away before you have a fancy new piercing," drawled Kim, hand fingering her own pistol.
Fiona blew a raspberry before lurching out of the room and back into the hallway they'd taken to get there.
A wide grin adorned the clone's face, eyes bright. Adrenaline and the newly discovered feeling of joy surged through her veins, and she was wantonly submerging herself in it even as she heard Kim spewing curses and threats behind her. As she raced through the halls, Kim hot on her heels, she never felt more whole than at that moment. The feeling of life, of living, was so… intoxicating, she found herself fervently trying to drown herself in the experience. It caused her cheeks to flush and her body to practically fly. She felt entirely weightless, even as she barreled through the secret base toting an energy rifle and three pistols.
She burst into a room, door banging open against the wall loudly. Inside, a rather large group startled and stared at her blankly. She grinned and threw a handful of small discs into the room before slamming the door closed again.
*whuff!*
A puff of air burst from below the door, followed by a slithering hiss of ash that dusted the tops of her boots white. She flung the door open again to find the room auspiciously empty of human inhabitants.
Kim came up behind her and merely lifted an eyebrow. "Another toy you procured?"
Fiona winked at her. "Something like that."
Kim merely grunted, having done similar things herself when she'd hunted down other such bases on her own. "Let's go. Our window is beginning to get smaller, and I don't trust delaying things with this group."
Fiona shrugged, straightening from hacking one of the computers. "Sounds good. Looks like anything of interest is literally the furthest and smallest hole they could stuff it. I figure the maps only show partial blueprints so that only the 'need-to-know' group has any idea its true dimensions."
"I figured as much. I've been to enough of these things to know how much they like their secret cubbies. I know this one will be the largest, however." A glint lit the short haired woman's eye.
Her clone lifts an eyebrow. "What exactly do they have that's got you all in a tizzy?"
A grin was her only answer.
Fiona sighed. "Fine. Whatever. Be a cryptic ass. Let's just go. We've only just reached the first security check point for the labs. It looks like we have another three before hitting the jackpot."
They ran down the corridor behind the security panel, using the access cards to sweep through all the blast doors. It was short work getting to and past the second security panel. Sadly, the ease of their progress was quickly hindered. The third and fourth were tricky, as the alarms meant security measures had all access cards to those areas on the people located in that area, as well as retinal and fingerprint scanners on top of that. When they reached the blast door just outside the third security room, after destroying the mounted defenses that had fired upon them, Fiona turned to Kim expectantly.
"I don't have anything to get us through that."
Kim grinned. She pulled out a tube of… lipstick?
She took off the cap and pointed it rather dramatically at the door. "Star Serious Laser!" she shouted after twisting the end of the lipstick and creating a rather wide beam that cut a nice waist sized hole in the door just by hitting it dead on.
The clone gave her DNA donator a deadpan look. "Did you seriously just say that?"
"Yep!" Kim popped her 'p'.
"Who the hell even watches that show?!" retorted Fiona. "It's terrible!"
"And yet you've obviously watched enough to know what it was from," commented Kim, giving her clone a broad smile.
Fiona's visage fell to mortification. "Nuh-uh! It was that damned Dr. Spice! She watched it all the damned time! Whenever she was running tests on me, I had to sit there and listen to that crap!"
Kim tossed two grenades into the created hole. "Someone dost protest too much!" she sang.
*BOOM!*
Both redheads watched from either side as debris and smoke billowed out of the hole between them. Before the smoke even cleared, both rolled into the room and opened fire on anyone still moving.
"That's a load of crap!" spit Fiona, her cheeks a faint pink. "That show sucked! Only children might be stupid enough to like it!"
"Oh, I don't know. I thought that, what's her name? The blond racer? She was kind of cool."
"Haruka?"
Kim flashed Fiona a triumphant smirk.
A scowl answered her. "Fu-"
"Halt!"
*bang!*
"-you!" finished Fiona. A body hit the ground behind Kim, Fiona's gun kicking the expended shell over her shoulder.
"I love you too!" chirped a grinning Kim. She practically skipped on to the next hallway. Her clone followed her, grumbling the whole way.
After fourth security room, both redheads were getting edgy.
"Are we there yet?" groused Fiona. She pulled out her last magazine, inserting it with a crisp snap into the butte of her pistol. "Seriously. I'm almost out of ammo."
Kim frowned, looking at her own dwindling supply. "I would assume so, but we have no idea what else is down there. Some labs have secret defenses that the schematics don't account for. I once ran into a giant that could spit acid."
A tint of green colored Fiona's face. "The one at mine was a human spider hybrid, kind of like the minotaur. Its blood was acidic and it was bloody fast as hell." She shivered. "I don't think I've ever seen anyone shoot as quickly or accurately, or as much, as Sloth did when she killed that thing. Couldn't tell what the hell it was when she was done with it."
A shudder crawled up Kim's spine. "Why the hell would anyone want to even create something like that? It's just wrong-sick."
"Agreed."
The door before them hissed open, the largest blast door they'd seen so far. The interior was small, but both redheads knew it was a front. They quickly searched the room and found another switch. The whole floor begin to sink. Both waited as its descent slowly crawled deeper into the earth, making Fiona and Kim both yawn to pop their ears.
When they hit the bottom of the shaft, lights begin to flicker on around them.
"Holy-!" blurted Fiona, jaw dropping open. "Is THAT what we're taking?!"
Kim smirked. "You bet."
"Can I drive?!" begged Fiona.
"HA! Not on your life! I got dibs when I uncovered hints about it two years ago!"
"You suck." Fiona crossed her arms with a huffy pout.
Kim rolled her eyes. "It's not like you aren't riding shotgun. Now hurry up and start hacking the files. I'm going to go check out the rest of the labs."
"Yeah, yeah," groused the longer haired redhead, shuffling her way over to the nearest computer and plopping into the seat. "I bet it's just cause she's still angry that I shot her…"
"You bet your scrawny butt I'm still angry about that!" came the distant call.
Fiona blinked. "How the hell did you hear me?!"
"Acoustics!"
"'Acoustics!'" murmured Fiona, using air quotes.
"Keep it up and you'll ride in the cargo hold!" shouted Kim.
Fiona flipped her the bird.
Yo! I'm just editing this chapter because there's a small comic strip of it being done on Deviant Art, and I think it's hilarious and wanted to share it with you. Four pages are hashed out, but only the first page is posted. Look it up under wickedlilme.
Anyway, I will try to get a new chapter out as soon as I can, but I have a lot of art I need to catch up on.
Toodles!
-salute-