::End Of The Line – Failure::
Kenny had a front-row seat as the lab exploded into activity. Drones who had simply been roaming here and there, carrying out repairs, transporting materials, and all other manner of maintenance activities suddenly snapped from their generalized work to more specific tasks. In less than a minute after Marie's announcement, one she conducted via a hand-held link-up to the PA system she'd been carrying in her long coat, the main lab flooded with people as every desk around the machine soon had a person standing over it and monitoring the machines atop them. The computer banks, ringing the room, soon had at least a person to every terminal, and frequently clusters of three or four. There was activity on the upper-most floor, too, although he could only hear that. The bright lights made it impossible to see what was going on above them, but by the sound of doors swinging and steps ringing on the metal catwalks, he got the sense that everyone who wasn't directly involved in monitoring or running the experiment was clearing out to the top layer of the complex.
Possibly in preparation for evac if something went catastrophically wrong.
Marie herself withdrew from the experimentation platform once she'd secured him to it. His body had been strapped down to the chair with straps made out of some kind of black mesh that had no stretch or give, and his hands? … fitted over the shadows that blemished the silver ball in front of him, and also strapped into place, anchored from both above and below by a system that crisscrossed over the ball and made any way he might have tried to pull only close the loops tighter around his wrists with slip knots.
When he wasn't looking around at the gathering mass of humanity, he was looking forward at that ball, and the distorted reflection of his face in it.
Not for the first time, he felt like he could sense those who had come before him, and their despair as they'd done the same.
Given time and maybe the help of a friend, he might have figured out how to get himself out of this... but he didn't see any friends. Glancing about, he sighted no one he knew coming to help him, and Marie had stalked off elsewhere; probably to some kind of control booth to get this party started once all her work crews answered with the all-clear.
Beneath him, he became aware of a subtle vibration of the machine. It had been there the whole time, not so much rattling his bones as resonating with them. Kinda like feeling the bass kick of a sub-woofer in his chest, but so faintly it was near ticklish. It was an uncomfortable sensation, and worse?
It was getting stronger.
He could hear the hum of power through the machine as the frequency rose from it's almost too-low-to-hear hum and into a more audible range, and the subtle vibration of electrical current as well as the mechanism within became more obvious and pronounced. Hair on his body stood up in response, and something in him felt... shifted. Like it was sitting wrong. Like there was something, core to his person, that had been nudged off-center by the mechanism below him- something he'd never been aware of before, never felt, never identified, without shape or understanding, that now made him gasp around it as it was out-of-place and the rest of his body rebelled against it being so.
He didn't believe it when Marie suggested this machine could make him mortal. He figured she was lying, or speaking in half-truths.
Now it felt like this strange resonance had taken hold of him in some ineffable way, and he wasn't quite so sure.
He looked around again; less to get his bearings on what was happening and more like the desperate glances of an animal that was looking for an escape route. He pulled at his hands, despite knowing full well that pulling would only pull the straps tighter. There wasn't so much movement, now; everyone had settled into place. The machines were manned, and there was a total of ten people who had gathered close to the machine itself, looking to be standing at the ready. Once in a while, someone at the monitoring desks called out a letter and a number, and one of those near by him hurried to adjust some dial on the machine itself, fine-tuning something as feedback was reported to the army of outdated computing devices.
Up, around the rim of the room, to the computer banks. Wendy- where did Wendy go?
He couldn't see her. He didn't know which way she went while Marie was strapping him in. Was she behind him? He yanked and craned his head, but failed to find her as a real panic began to set in- the sort that disoriented and confused him.
He was scared. Not of pain, not of lost time or of being forgotten, or even for the people he still needed to help.
For the first time in a very long time, Kenny was afraid for himself. Afraid that whenever this thing powered the whole way up... that would be it. Game over, no re-spawn, go talk to God or Satan for the next couple eons. Or Cthulhu.
"Test run is go. Repeat, test run is go. Begin power-up sequence."
Marie's voice, over the PA again.
This is the way it has to be. This is where my gut led me.
Small comforts as the countdown began.
"Begin cycle in ten... nine..."
Dee had hefted herself through the opening she made when she heard the announcement over the PA. Dimly, she felt like there might have been another one before that- but she'd been so focused on getting through the window that it hadn't even registered with her.
Now she was through that window, and finding her way along the halls of this little prison area she'd been put into, and the announcement made her tense.
"Test run is go. Repeat, test run is go. Begin power-up sequence."
Test run? Test run on who?
… don't tell me...
It was a paranoid notent, but it got her moving faster. There was no time to inspect the doors for other cells, and wonder who else might have been housed down here in the past. No, she was past identical doors for identical cells, all arranged along a single hallway. She took a sharp right, one that registered another long hallway that had a T intersection in the middle. Against the wall of said T intersection was some kind of hatch with a ladder running through the space, but that wasn't where she needed to go right now.
She wasn't sure how she knew that, but she knew it. The ladder, the hatch, those were vertical moves, either up or down- if she was in a place for test subjects, ladders were not good transit routes. At the T intersection, she looked both ways. Forward from where she came was another hallway with more cell doors. Turning to the right again? A hallway, a set of double-doors, another hallway lined with lockers, and then another set of double doors... like some kind of employee zone for workers to leave behind anything a prisoner might be able to use.
That was the way to go.
"Ten... nine..."
Through one set of double doors, past the lockers. The thing in her ass didn't hurt anymore- no, she was too high on adrenaline for anything to hurt. Impacts with the doors barely passed her brain. She was looking forward, out, as her knees picked up higher and her feet fell into the rhythm of a jog. The next set of doors were shoved aside, and she was confronted with a truly massive room, a multitude of desks manned by dozens of people, an upraised rim of computer power with more people... and the machine.
It was her first time seeing it bare, without a tarp over the top of it. It barely registered as anything besides a sort of circular pyramid with a flat top, constructed in steps, with a chair and a ball on the platform.
Kenny was in the chair.
"Eight... seven... six..."
There was a humming running through the room. Processing was something she didn't bother with. Instinct refused to let her stop moving. Once again, she was running- flat out, head down, feet slamming against the metal floor running like tomorrow wasn't a thing.
Only this time, she wasn't running away.
"Five... four... three..."
The desks. She was whipping by them, and the people behind them. Did they reach out to try and stop her? They might have, she didn't know. She didn't really see them, but she might have felt a stray hand slap her arm or shoulder as she passed through the open lane between the work stations at break-neck speed, digging in deeper and grunting out exhales between sharp inhales.
There was no pacing here, nor consideration towards distance- this was a balls to the wall short-distance sprint.
She was at the bottom of the pyramid. She was looking up at Kenny. She was taking the steps, unaware of how many at a time, simply flying up them with feet that did not currently know how to stumble.
He looked at her with wide eyes. The Mysterion stuff was gone. It was just him... and he was scared.
"Two..."
"Lyssie..? No-!"
The coin. The copper coin.
"One."
Marie hadn't looked until she reached the end of the countdown.
The control booth for the experiment was, naturally, the most well-protected section of the entire lab; accessed not by stairs or any regular methods, but through the emergency escape ladder that ran through the entire complex from top to bottom... and only if one knew exactly how to open it. It was both a panic room and a control room, most easily entered by opening the escape hatch in the middle of the Containment section and climbing upwards.
There was no window facing into the lab; windows could be broken. Her contact with the room was cameras, most of which had suffered damage, but she still had a one good view of the experimentation platform.
She'd looked away from it while giving the count-down, watching a light panel of indicators for power flow, searching for failures that would require the test run to be aborted.
She was rushing things. She knew she was.
She just wanted this to be over.
She knew there would be screaming from the chamber- the audio feed wasn't even necessary to hear it. It came through the wall, through metal concrete, and dirt. It didn't matter who was strapped in.
They always screamed.
She had screamed, when it had been her.
… it wasn't just one. She didn't hear the isolated scream of a young boy, she heard two people screaming.
She looked back at her feed.
No.
No, no, no, no, no-
There was a button in her booth, one that was supposed to cut all power. An emergency shut-down, and she quite literally punched it only to have nothing happen.
She might have called out an abort over the PA, but she doubted any of them would get close. Not with the non-peril clause- no one in their right mind would step into that. She wouldn't waste time trying to make them. She was out of the booth, sliding down the ladder, and sprinting out of containment as fast as her feet would carry her. Past both sets of doors, past the lockers, blowing across the open lane and between the desks to follow the path her younger self had taken.
She'd gotten out, how had she gotten out?
Didn't matter; what mattered was she was up on the platform.
Alyssa was on the platform.
The machine was at full power. The mechanism within it was spun up, and the current channeled through it had begun to arc and spark through the air around the rim of the platform on top. Blue-white sparks, reaching upwards and inwards, towards the silver ball atop the entire mechanism.
Only now someone was in the way, standing rather than sitting, with both hands on the ball like she'd been trying to get the test subject free.
Trying to get Kenny free.
The sparks were reaching higher and higher. High above the machine, brand new bulbs in the light rigging burst, showering glass down and causing the rest to flicker. A wave ran through the people on the work floor as things looked decidedly less and less safe.
The attendants to the machine itself were the first to run, screaming out their first words in hours since she'd taken control of them. They fled, confused and afraid, as she continued forward.
There was a manual shut-down on the machine itself. Near the bottom, to the side, next to a panel that shouldn't have been open but didn't much matter right now. Not while she was up there, not while Little Lyssie was very possibly dying as the lightening produced by the experiment began to concentrate at a single point. Not on the ball, arcing towards all parts of its surface- no, no, all to one point, a single point.
A conductive point.
Oh no, no-
Marie reached the machine, arrived on her knees to thrust her hand into the open panel, and grab hard at a switch that was quite literally inside the mechanism and behind the wires.
Her arm burned, but her knuckles closed, and she yanked.
She screamed now, too.
After heating and mutilation with a drill bit, Stan had finally gotten the hatch beneath the machine open. It had taken longer than he planned- movies really did make melting through a lock look way easier than it actually was. At his first attempt, he realized he had actually ruined the lock and been forced to turn his attention to the hinges of the hatch instead, exploiting them as a weak point and eventually able to yank the whole metal door off of the ceiling after thoroughly breaking every connection point it had to the structure around it.
The announcement for the test run had been made by then. Everyone around him had cleared out of the utility tunnels- he had to guess this area was one of those danger zones Marie had mentioned on the PA. He didn't care- Kenny had given him a job to do, and he was doing it.
The door came off nearly in exact timing with the count-down. Around him, he could feel the distinct hum in the air of electrical current; the sort of hum someone could hear when near a major transformer for a city block, multiplied by a hundred times or so in volume. It was something that made him more and more aware of the four major cables near him, that fed up into the machine above him, each of which seemed to vibrate as the test run above him got underway.
He tried not to panic. It was just a test run, right? This would be the perfect time to break something- Marie would think the machine wasn't ready, and delay things even more trying to troubleshoot.
The hatch beneath the machine appeared to be protecting some kind of fuse box; Stan was confronted with a number of switches, some tiny ones like the sort one would find in their home fuse box, others being as wide as his hand with a grip as thick as a broom handle. All were labeled, but not with anything useful- just alpha-numeric designations with rows labeled A, B, C, D, and columns going by numbers down the line.
The humming got louder. The tunnels were vibrating in resonance with the machine above him. Not panicking was becoming a more difficult proposition. He heard something... sparking above him- the distant snap and snicker of electrical current making jumps through the air.
He also heard someone scream- or- no, two people.
Oh god, she put someone in it for the test run?!
That killed any hesitation he was holding onto. He reached up over his head, and started flipping switches- but the old fuckers wouldn't easily budge. He couldn't just drag a clawed hand down the whole panel and take down a whole row in a single fell swoop; he had to grasp each one and force it into the open or 'off' position against age and rust, dropping all of his equipment to use both hands.
It didn't seem to do anything. The ambient hum of power around him, coming from every direction in these tunnels, had grown into a roar.
Wide eyes dashed over the box, and decided bigger was better. The largest switch was the one that needed to be pulled- one that had a safety hook over the top of it that needed to be eased back with one hand before the other could even grasp it properly, and yanked down with his entire body weight before it finally gave an inch with a ear-splitting squeal.
There was a third voice above him. Someone else was screaming. They were in just as much pain. Something was wrong.
Another set of hands clasped over his.
"On three." A voice said behind him. The hands were bigger than his- an adult's, but... the voice seemed familiar? Feminine, confident.
He tried to glance back, but they were right behind him- too close.
"One, two, three!"
The switch gave, snapping past the resistance and settling into its 'off' position.
The tunnels went quiet.
She'd gotten the copper coin into her hand at the last possible moment, before the first arc of electricity honed in on it and hit her.
Her hand had slapped onto the other side of the ball. Atop another hand. Kenny's hand.
The light had been blinding, but now her vision was dark. The noise had been deafening, horrific in her ears, but everything was quiet now.
Horribly so.
She'd been driven to her knees on the platform. She didn't know when it happened, or how. Her voice was raw, and it took several seconds before she remembered she could breathe.
When she exhaled, she sobbed.
She wished it hurt. She wished everything hurt, but she wasn't sure of any sensation. She wasn't sure if she was alive. She was pretty sure that if she was, she should not have been.
Her hands were still on the silver ball, clutching atop Kenny's hands.
Kenny.
Her body flopped more than it moved. A hard impact with her elbow occurred as she fell onto the platform, dragging herself over to the silver chair and hefting herself upwards after the fact. She had no sense of her knees or feet, but her fingers? They could still claw, still pull, still yank her along for the ride as she tried to understand what had happened, and what the aftermath was.
Looking up, she understood his shape in her dim vision.
He was slumped, and quiet.
"... Kenny?"
She shook him by her grasp on his leg; the handhold she'd used to drag herself upwards.
He didn't respond. Her vision was getting dimmer. She felt like some was... leaking somewhere, but couldn't identify where.
"No... no, Kenny, please..."
She wasn't holding herself up anymore. She'd flopped over again, but one hand of fingers was still pathetically clutched about his pant-leg.
She was still trying to shake him awake.
No, please no...
::The Author's Corner::
IDK WHAT TO PUT HERE LETS KEEP GOING
ONWARDS!
-Buttlord