Hope You Learned Your Lesson
Nail-biting was apparently frowned upon.
Then again, she had taken it a little farther than she had expected. In her nervous and pained state, she had managed to chew them down past the quick, barely taking notice of the blood that dripped from each digit. She was so used to pain that she hadn't felt anything at all.
Her punishment came in the form of a translucent plastic muzzle. Very silence of the lambs. It even had its very own lock. Not that she would be able to undo it with her hands wrapped in a mountain's worth of gauze. Part of her wished she would have taken a chunk out the doctor's hand like Hannibal Lecter, at least then she would have really earned the need for the mask.
This is your punishment, Lyra. The mechanical voice droned on above her head, its voice distorting slightly through the worn speakers. You cannot harm our property without consequences. We hope you learned your lesson.
Fuck.
Property.
That was at least the twentieth time they had reminded her of that, she was counting. At least they hadn't scheduled her any surgeries. Or tests. They needed her to recover for whatever they had planned next. Apparently, she had lost a decent amount of blood from chewing her nails. She did feel faint, but Lyra had grown used to that feeling so it didn't bother her as much anymore.
The redhead didn't mind it much. She finally had a day to herself. Maybe they would give her real food instead of the liquid nourishment they pumped into her through the tube in her stomach. It reminded her of how her grandfather had been fed when he was in a nursing home. Lyra received more than a dozen pills each day that supplemented what she would normally get out in the real world. Vitamin C, calcium, magnesium…the list went on.
This is your punishment, Lyra. You cannot harm our property without consequences. We hope you learned your lesson.
Twenty-one.
Lyra let out an irritated sigh as she rolled her eyes, the unusual amaranthine color darkening slightly as her annoyance flared. She was bored. Her books had been read and she had discovered that her cell was approximately 16 meters squared, meaning it was four meters by four meters, therefore 64 meters cubes and would hold 64000 letters. The white tiles on the roof and floor were also one by one meter, which meant that there were sixteen tiles on both top and bottom.
Who designed this room? Leonardo Bonacci?
The air in the cell was no doubt filtered. The only scent that she could pick up on was the sterile cleaning product the janitor used at the end of each day. Made her cell smell like a hospital morgue. Lyra expected that the cells were also mildly soundproof, not individually because the glass between each cell had allowed sound to pass, but she hadn't heard a peep the night they disposed of the creature they referred to as a Xenomorph.
If she was a normal human the glass would probably mute whatever was on the other side, but that was the problem—she wasn't normal. That's why she was there.
Lyra had always known she was different than others around her. She was able to interpret distance, height, and mass at a glance, easily determining how high she could jump when running at certain speeds, how much momentum was needed to clear an object based on height. If she was in her peak physical condition, she believed she would have a better chance at cracking the glass that separated the cells if she hit it at its weakest point.
But she was not at her peak physicality and she hadn't been in some time. She was practically a walking cadaver for the asstards in lab coats. A living human test subject that had a greater chance of not dying due to her enhanced healing ability. It was the only reason she lived through any of their experiments.
That was slowly coming to an end.
Lyra could feel it in her body and spirit. It was gradual, but it didn't go unnoticed that it was taking her longer to heal. Her rate of healing, if she had to garner a guess, was at the rate for a normal person. Newer incisions were delivered with much more clinical preciseness and scarring worse than before, leaving pink, ugly deformities behind.
She was undernourished and her muscles were starting to atrophy from lack of good physical exercise. Not that starvation was a new thing to her. There was a time before her capture that she would eat an entire roast, an entire potato bake, and follow it up with a tub of ice cream and still feel hungry. Lyra assumed that her appetite was tied up with all of the other mutant things wrong with her.
Super smart, super strength, super healing, and super hungry.
Super fucked.
Something inside the redhead clicked. There weren't any surgeries today just because of some blood loss.
This is your punishment, Lyra. You cannot harm our property without consequences. We hope you learned your lesson.
Twenty-two.
Her body was failing, and it wasn't going to be long before her body failed her. And those asstards knew it.
A/N: HOpe you like it. Please review and let me know what you think. NO flames, just constructive criticism. Chapters will get longer.
