Chapter 33: Chad Cole

"They're running away."

"Grrr…" Musashi took off after the few Rocket executives, "Come back here and accept your punishment!"

Leo and Karen took a millisecond to look at each other, both acknowledging that it could be a trap, before following Musashi and Raph with Mikey behind them.

Musashi had gotten one, two, three of them down and was chasing after the one who still frantically and half-hazardly avoided her attacks. He turned and ran blindly into a room, sweat pouring down his face, and Musashi, not thinking, followed him. Raph and Mikey were right on her heels, and Karen couldn't manage to stop her momentum or yell a warning to the others.

The door behind them slammed shut with them trapped inside, all of them except Leo.

He was at the metal door in a second, pounding on it, trying to pry it open in vain. "No!"

The guy they'd chased in there spun around, backing up rapidly, his hands in the air, his narrow features contorted with fear, "I'm new—please don't hurt me," he babbled, his pale face slick with sweat—

Karen wished they'd paid more attention. The guy wasn't even wearing a dan'in uniform. He was dressed like an electrician instead. Probably just some naïve worker.

To their left a face appeared at the window, in the metal wall, distorted by the thick plexiglass but obviously grinning. A short brunette, dressed in some blatantly indecent red outfit of ribbons.

She looked away for a moment, one hand reaching up to touch something they couldn't see—and a mocking voice floated into the room from a speaker in the ceiling.

"Sorry, Cole," The woman said, her moving face warped by the glass. "And allow me to introduce myself. I'm Marianne. And whoever you are, I'm very glad to meet you. Welcome to the Planet's test program."

Karen looked to Musashi who still had her blade at the near hysterical Cole's throat. They were in deep…

"We're not scheduled to go on line for another twenty-three days," Marianne continued, smiling widely, already imagining the look on Warui's gloating face, "At which time, I was going to host the initial run of our carefully designed program for a group of extremely important people. It was going to be specimen only, we hadn't planned on putting humans—" She paused momentarily, squinting at the two turtle creatures, but nevertheless continued her self-important monologue, "—through the phases for a while yet, let alone soldiers. But now, thanks to you, I'll be able to show my little party actual footage of what our specimens were created for. The four of you will suffice, I think. Yes, you'll do quite nicely." She scowled again, What are they? Never mind, I'll merely collect the information from their DNA. She laughed, "You may want to kill Cole before you start, though, he'll only drag you down—and he did lure you in, didn't he?"

Cole pushed away from the wall and flew at the door, pounding on it with his fists. The two-inch metal didn't even rattle in the frame.

Marianne shook her head, still grinning, "I am sorry, Cole; we'll miss you terribly. You never did finish with the intercom system, did you? Or the audio…at least you hooked up this one, for which I can't thank you enough. Is it clear enough in there? Getting any static?"

Whatever demon had possessed the electrician fled, the man collapsing against the door, breathing raggedly. He watched as the bigger of the two green men, the burly dark one, stepped toward the window with a menacing expression. "You ain't gonna get us to go through no tests for you," he said, his deep voice quivering with rage, "Go ahead and kill us, cuz we're not alone—and the Rocket Gang's goin' down, whether or not we're around to see it happen!"

Marianne sighed, "Well, you're right about not being around. But as to the rest…you and your grassroots campaign are nothing to us; you're mosquitoes," She smirked, thinking of making it a nickname for Warui, "An annoyance. And you will participate—"

"Participatethis," he spat, hurling both sais at her face, despite the thick plexi.

"Musashi." The winged woman said coolly, "Why don't you break out one of those frag grenades?"

Marianne sighed again, "The walls are plaster-coated steel, and the door will withstand a lot more than you could possibly have. You'd only succeed in blowing yourselves up. It would be a pity—but if you must, you must."

They didn't seem to have a smart reply to that. No one spoke, although Marianne could still hear the troubled gasps coming from Cole through the intercom. She'd grown tired of goading them anyway. "Now I have other business to attend to—like releasing our pets from Dr. Stockman into their new homes. Rest assured, though, I'll be watching your debut; try to make it through at least one of the phases, if you can."

She stepped away from the window to the control panel on the left, and punched in the activation code. One of the green men started shouting that they wouldn't go through with it, that she couldn't make them—

--and then she hit the large green button, the one that simultaneously opened the hatch into One—and released a spray of tear gas into the small anteroom from vents in the high ceiling. She stepped back to the window, interested to see how effective the process was.

Within seconds, a white haze came pouring down from above, obscuring the five. She heard shouts and coughing, and a second later she heard the hatch lock down, which meant they were through. The pressure plates in the floor thus unencumbered, there was a low hiss as the ventilation system kicked on, clearing the room of the mist in under a minute.

Nice. She'd have to remember to commend whichever designer had recommended it.

See? No problem; I'm boss material. Eat your heart out Warui.

"All right, so that's what we're going to do." Kojirou concluded as Ura finished picking the cage locks.

"Ura, your Rapidash. Those well enough can ride; Donatello and I will carry the worst injured."

She nodded and tossed the monster sphere to him while she grabbed the shell cell with her free hand as it started to vibrate. That was probably the others waiting for the thumbs-up. Everything would have gone smoothly with them, Musashi was probably complaining that she'd hardly gotten a work out, and they were all waiting in the control center, twiddling their thumbs boredly.

She hoped.

"Yeah?"

"Ura. It's not good. The others got trapped. I-I don't know what's happening to them, I need back up, pronto."