::Sneaker's SnacShak – It's Like Red Light, Green Light::

Hands linked, breath held, Wendy couldn't stop staring at the eyes. They were purple, she realized; a disturbingly bright violet that watched her and Stan as he counted aloud, hesitating on the last number that would signal a mad dash for the exit.

When she'd first come over, she had felt very much like a mother investigating the monster under the bed while a child insisted it was real; Stan had seemed so shaken when she arrived, and quickly jumped to a violent conclusion. It hadn't been until she had looked away and found the metal imitation of a human body from inches from touching her that she realized the monster was very real.

Her first refuge had been denial, but there wasn't any space for that. Not as the hairs on the back of her neck stood straight up and her stomach clenched.

When Stan squeezed her hand, she squeezed back. She felt like it was the last thing she'd ever do.

"THREE!"

Together, they turned and bolted. With Stan clutching Aiden with one arm, and his other hand in hers, his flashlight must have gotten dropped or put away- leaving hers as the only spotlight for their path, pointed ahead and jolting with every hasty step between them and the glowing red exit sign above the door at the end of the lane.

Behind them, something crashed into a metal shelf. Hard. She heard it go over, and knock into another one, setting off a domino effect of metal clattering and a sharp smell of split solvents. Another heavy impact followed the first, on the other side of the lane, like the thing behind them had over-corrected and crashed into another shelf, but with just a touch less force.

Then it was steps, hard metal steps, striking against the concrete floor in pursuit of their own footfalls.

Too close, it's too close-!

"This way!"

Wendy shouted out at Stan, gripping their link and yanking him suddenly to one side; out of the narrow lane created by the makeshift partitions in the garage space... and just in time. The clanging of steps behind them ceased for a moment, before a crash sounded ahead of where they'd been.

The thing had attempted to pounce them. If they hadn't swerved out of the path...

"C'mon!"

Stan didn't let her think about it, striking off again... but the thing was now between them an the red exit sign above the door. Wendy could see it, silhouetted in the red light when she glanced that way, its strange head a mixture of abstract shapes; a square of the jaw, circles for the eyes, and round wire frames that probably allowed for the fitting of some kind of animal ears when the endoskeleton was dressed in its costume.

Stan's grip didn't let her linger, forcing her eyes and flashlight beam forward as he dashed into another lane between spaces, perpendicular to the one they'd been traveling through before... and taking them away from the exit.

Wendy didn't hear it chasing them. In fact, she heard no movement at all- like it knew it was between them and where they needed to go to get out.

"Stan?"

"I know." He cut her off before she could express a concern. "Just- there!"

She didn't know what he was talking about, but she trusted him as he kept pulling her along. Hairs on the back of her neck rose up, the eerie sense of them being watched coming back as Stan, in not so many words, announced he had some kind of plan.

They were getting close to the wall of the building. Wendy wasn't sure where he was going with this... until her flashlight beam tilted up slightly, and realized that there were windows set into the wall. Small, and fairly high up, but a workbench would make a suitable enough boost to get up to one...

"You first." Stan insisted as they arrived, releasing her hand and holding it open to take her flashlight. There wasn't room for debate; he'd taken charge. "If it doesn't budge, I'll hand up the light for you to break it- quick!"

His last word came as they both heard it; metal feet taking curious steps forward, and the creaking of under-lubricated joints bending to turn and look at them. Curiosity, prepared to return to the chase.

Wendy clambered up onto the workbench, standing upright and finding the window at her chest-height. If it slid open, the open part would be just enough for her to fit through... and hopefully too small for the thing they had found.

Her hands grasped the middle frame for a latch, in the dark as Stan re-directed the light away from her and back out into the workshop; maybe hoping that if he sighted the metal monster it would stop moving again. Fingers found something suspect, but it was either rusted or locked; it didn't want to slide.

Glancing back, she saw Stan had sighted the monster, and it was holding still- all the way at the end of the lane they'd run down to get here, staring at them with violently purple eyes.

"Any luck?" Stan asked.

"It won't move." She reported. "Just... just wait a sec."

She turned herself, one hand becoming a fist and the other gripping over the top of her knuckles, lining up her elbow with their intended point of exodus.

Man this is gonna fuck up my jacket if it works.

Biting her lip, expecting pain, she struck the glass with her elbow as hard as she could.

The gunshot came too quickly to have been accurately aimed, even if the flash had given away Dee's position. The sharp crack of the bullet leaving the chamber, a sound that impacted her ribs just as violently as it stabbed into her unprotected ears, came too fast for her to focus on a backwards hop in time- her reflex for when she'd fucked something up and required a do-over. The gunshot was a sound that instigated a bodily flinch instead, driving her to duck down lower in her hiding spot and form herself into a protective ball as her attempt to work up the appropriate gas ended with a pathetic and ineffective poot that was hardly powerful enough to stop the clock, much less push it backwards.

Near instantly after, one cacophonous sound instigated another; the pricing bells of shattering glass.

The skylight!

Was she close enough to be in the danger zone? There wasn't time to look or calculate, instead falling back on an old reaction; one that her brain had been screaming at her since finding out about the abandoned lab near South Park, pounded in over and over again, like a nail into her brain that was slammed down by a hammer labeled anxiety.

Fucking run!

Her reaction was one of pure panic, shoes getting traction on the concrete to push her away from everything. Away from the falling glass, the white truck and it's mysterious cargo, and the stranger with a gun who knew her family's pet name for her. Blindly, knocking hard into the toolbox that had been next to her and stumbling over a cable along the way, she fled like a terrified deer... possibly one with a concussion for all the random shit she kept running into. Her body bounced off a metal shelf, the edges biting into her before it was knocked over, contents hitting the ground with the terrible sharp clacking of metal on concrete. Her face made hard contact with a hanging button box, no doubt for the industrial sized hoist that hung from the ceiling, which also had sharp metal edges.

It didn't matter. She didn't feel pain right now. She didn't feel anything- there was no deep breathing or careful steps, there was only the certainty that she was alone with someone who knew way too much about her, offline as a fucking safety precaution and miles away from any help or protection.

There was no room in her left for anything else. Paranoid certainty that something was going to get her that had been left simmering since the episode with the Bitch-in-Chief had boiled over, and she did not intend to stop running until she was out of this room, out of this building, and finally made it somewhere with bright lights and witnesses.

"Hold still!"

The shout over the top sounded like an enemy NPC in a game- like the bandits in Skyrim or the Raiders in Fallout who demanded the player hold still or come out of hiding, as if that would actually cause them to do something... only the tone was different. Rather than angry, or indignant, it was... self-assured. Sharp with a cold confidence that it would be listened to. It was neither a plea nor a complaint, but something altogether different.

It was a command. A ludicrous one, to which Dee had no intention of listening to.

Nonetheless, her body complied.

When she comprehended the language and her terrified sprint came to a sudden halt as her entire person froze in the position of the moment, she felt the visceral horror that could only come with surprise; like a sucker-punch with a rusty nail held between the knuckles. Joints locked, muscles tensed and halted, and the leap she'd been taking through the air as part of her flat-out sprint became a sudden crash to the hard floor.

Her face hit something that split her lip. She tasted blood.

She couldn't move. She was a toppled mannequin, without a stand, frozen mid step and obeying gravity in the worst way. Her knee was wedged up against something else, and she was certain it was going to hurt later.

If there was a later.

She could hear those heeled footfalls again; following after her in the dark, picking through the trail her crazed run had left. As the stranger approached, she heard the woman tutting.

"Always a little bruiser, hmm? I guess some things never change." She mused, the voice exactly as it had been when Dee had first heard it; cleanly enunciated, coolly delivered, almost as if the person it came out of was as unfeeling at the machines in this workshop they found themselves in. The voice was that of a mature woman, without the sweetness of youth... and perhaps its particular edge being something that developed in the elder years.

There was a beat of silence, though. Maybe a breath of hesitation.

What the fucking hell did you do to me?! Was the question Dee wanted to scream at the top of her lungs... but her lips were just as frozen as the rest of her person, and that gave her a terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach... which made her all the more terrified of the fact that the stranger in the dark had a gun.

She commanded me. Like I command people- the shattering glass- was that an improvised priming noise?

"We weren't supposed to meet yet... not yet, Little Lyssie..." The woman continued on.

What is she waiting for? Why in cock-swallowing hell is she here?!

"It's okay, I promise- it's all going to be okay. I'm going to make it okay- but you have to wait a little longer." A few more footfalls. The woman was right next to her now. The shifting of fabric clued Dee into the stranger crouching down next to her, and she felt a hand digging into the pocket where she'd shoved her phone... the pocket she always shoved her phone in when she was wearing these cargo jeans, unless she actively thought about putting it into one of the five other ones.

Evidence was stacking up. It got higher as she heard the woman tsk again. "Nearly got away with a picture." She observed, revealing that she'd unlocked the phone.

That required a thumbprint.

"I'm afraid we can't have that, Lyssie... Wendy would go and unravel everything just a little too soon, smart girl that she is, and we'd have to do this whole dance over again... I don't know how many tries I have left to get this right."

The phone was replaced, slipped back into her pocket just as easily as it was removed. There was a sense of violation, and it was more than laying helpless on the ground- hearing Wendy's name as if the woman were just as familiar with the girl as Dee was; there was no subterfuge here, no attempt to hide it, nor need to state the obvious.

But the obvious, unstated, only presented more questions. Terrible temporal questions that seeded doubt in with every other ugly feeling that made her want to retch, held back only by the command to remain still.

"And now... I suppose I'll have to tell you a story. Something to remember instead of all this- that was your mistake with the last agent you dealt with, by the by. You made him forget something, but didn't give him anything to remember instead. Causes delirium, every time. Brains hate it; they're gluttons for information. They try to fill in the empty spaces on their own if you don't give them anything to work with... badly."

The immobilization; Dee was fighting it. The longer she fought it, the more she felt like she had identified a specific force holding her down. A great many hands, seizing upon her bones and muscles, forcing to hold an unnatural position that left her helpless and painfully pressed into the floor without any way to take stress off of poorly padded points, like knees or the singular point of her hip that had made contact with the ground. She could think of them as individuals, and one by one she imagined working free of them, fighting back.

At this point, she finally forced her lips and throat to make some kind of sound.

"Fffffffffffffffff-"

"Mm?" Surprise, the first actual honest emotion Dee had yet identified in the woman presiding over her. The questioning tone sounded like permission, permission to explain, permission to answer.

Dee decided that was exactly what it was, and suddenly it was like she'd thrown them off. Her body arched upwards, and an elbow was thrown out where she was certain the stranger was, screaming as she arrived on her knees and scrambled for her feet.

"FUCK YOU!"

This wasn't the irrational urge to violence she felt when faced with a time twin- no, this was different. Actual rage, confusion, and a failure to compute everything she'd been given tonight.

Sadly, much like her panic earlier, that rage was blind. Her elbow didn't connect with anything, and she remained, as she had been thus far, in the pitch dark gulf between skylights.

"Just like the doctor- resistant, but not immune."

Dee let out a guttural roar, turning in the dark and throwing a punch in the direction the voice had come from. It didn't connect with anything but air.

She didn't hear footfalls anymore- how?!

The next thing she heard wasn't a voice. It was... an artificial sound, high and piercing, like-

Like feedback.

Her hands slapped over her ears, knowing exactly what was coming next. Of course she did- she and Wendy had invented that trick.

Her only hope was to escape before any embedded commands took hold.

::The Author's Corner::

It has taken us

Five and a half fics

And we finally introduce our main antagonist for the 'season'.

Y'all have no idea how much work I've put into the fucking time-travel shenanigans on this one.

All feedback is greatly appreciated. Every chapter you read represents hours of work. If you'd take a few moments and leave a comment, it makes all that work worthwhile.

ONWARDS!

-Buttlord