Still, Halvra was a friend, and that meant that Alvade owed it to him to find out just what had happened; even though he was starting to suspect that he had already guessed right in the first place.

Alvade picked up the slip of paper with some trepidation, not exactly wanting to have his worst fears confirmed; still, he had to do good by Halvra, and if that meant reading something that was pretty much guaranteed to be unpleasant and upsetting – though to what exact degree was still up for grabs – then that was what he was going to have to do. No matter how bad the news most likely was. No matter how much he was probably going to wish that he could unread it after he'd finished with it.

Sitting back down on his own bed, leaning against the wall and holding the paper almost gingerly between his fingers, Alvade scanned it for any pertinent information.

There were hundreds of words on that single page; presenting him with a great deal of potential information. Alvade didn't absorb a word of it, however; a few short sentences at the top of the page made everything else there completely irrelevant: Specimen 152-3873, Codename Halvra: terminated, 1400+10.

And there it was: his worst fear, confirmed. Laid out in black and white where no one could deny it. At least no one was as realistic as Alvade had learned to be; life as a Lost Unit was good for beating the last dregs of idealism out of anyone's head.

No one could keep believing in stupid things like justice, fairness, or equality after they had lived this kind of life for long enough. If they did, of course, then they were due for a trip down the incinerator chute to take a dip in the magma. He'd seen it happen a few times; hell, Ralgax could even predict just who was going to end up down the 'chute and who wasn't just by watching them for three days.

It made for a bit of morbid fun around the lab, at least.

But then, that was only for the normal Lost Units; the ones who could do the same kinds of things that a Standard Zoanoid could do. Well, all except for breed or be reproduced. But hell, that was what made a Lost Unit Lost in the first place.

Halvra, though, he hadn't been one of the normal ones. Halvra hadn't even had a Zoaform, but he could do something that none of the other Zoanoids – Standard or Hyper – produced here could, and for all Alvade knew it was beyond the capability of any of the Zoanoids that Chronos had produced. That was why Halvra had ended up on the table with those bastard lab rats cutting him apart.

It was the same thing that happened to all of the non-standard Lost Units. If you ended up going blind, deaf, or being permanently deformed by The Process, then the lab rats would have you shipped here, stuck into this hellhole masquerading as a lab, and cut you open while sampling all of your organs and fluids. All to find out just what it was about you, in particular, that disagreed with The Process.

In that respect, Halvra had been lucky. He may not have been able to formshift, but he had been able to function; he'd also possessed an ability that no Standard Zoanoid could claim to have. Halvra had also lived a hell of a lot longer than any of the poor saps that had been deformed by The Process.

Still, nothing would change the fact that their Lost Unit Five had been reduced to just four members. They'd still be using the name, though; both as a memorial to Halvra and as a way to piss off those shithead Hyper Zoanoids.

The words on the page, the only ones that mattered, had seared themselves into his mind by now. So Alvade tossed the paper onto the shelf by his bed, not particularly caring if it stayed there or not. Flopping back onto his bed, emotionally exhausted from both the tension and the release, Alvade threw the blankets on top of his body and stared blankly at his fellow Lost Units for a few moments before he closed his eyes.

"Bastards," he muttered.