The truck rolls to a stop, waking Rex up as his hidden compartment lurches, his body slamming into the metal wall.
"Ow," Rex mutters as the back of his neck starts to cramp up. He scoots away from the wall of his compartment and tries to roll out his cramp with his fist to no avail.
The truck lurches again as it suddenly starts back up, and just as quickly as it starts up, it comes to a stop again. This time, Rex is prepared and avoids further agitating his neck.
What was the driver doing, starting and stopping again so much?
Rex strains his ears to try and get a feel for where the truck could possibly be now. Was the truck stuck in traffic in another city, blocked from another round of mindlessly capturing and killing EVOs?
That didn't seem too plausible to Rex. Providence trucks, or any Providence vehicle for that matter, were state-of-the-art vehicles, and most had at least two modes of transportation. If a road was blocked, a Providence truck could simply transform itself into a flying truck (Rex had no idea if they had official names or not) and fly over the blockade.
The truck lurches forward again, and Rex catches the faint muffled sound of electronic beeping, like the kind you would hear at a grocery store checkout line.
'Ah, card scanners! The truck must be right outside a base,' he thinks to himself.
Curious, Rex mentally latches onto the device making the beeping sounds with his nanites, just to see if he could glean anything useful from the device. Base name and location would be particularly useful, as Rex knows from experience the vehicle could have taken him up to Canada if it was fast enough. (Rex misses the convenience of Cèsar's lab.)
Rex's vision goes wonky as he successfully connects to the device. Half of his vision is suddenly consumed with abstract blocks of color, making his eyes sensitive to the barest amount of light, including the barely lit numbers on Rex's digital watch. Rex flips his wrist over and concentrates on reaching his nanites deeper into the device's signal.
Without physical contact, connecting his nanites to devices and other nanites can be quite finicky so Rex isn't surprised when he can't tell much about the device, except the fact that the device is heavily protected specifically against nanite attacks and that the device is an I.D. scanner that accesses the database for registered Mercy Base agents.
The scanner beeps as it reads an ID card and Rex starts to receive information as the scanner cross-references the card with the Mercy Base database.
The card reads:
[Agent Six: [Redacted]
(There's a string of numbers here that Rex reforms to form a hazy image of an Asian man wearing a green army-like uniform. He's staring directly into the camera, a hint of a "sexy" smirk on his face.)
Date of Birth: April 18, 1996
Status: Act-]
Someone hits the ID scanner against their hand and in surprise Rex jumps and scrambles off the scanner's signal, stopping the stream of information on whoever Agent Six in the truck's seating above Rex was from beaming directly into Rex's head.
Inside the truck, someone loudly complains about the speed of the guard's scanner. Rex looks away from the noise guiltily.
It looked like Rex's nanite presence was a little bit too much for the scanner. If Rex is already having that kind of effect on electronic devices, he must be nearing his next overload.
After all the IDs are scanned, Rex patiently waits in anticipation as the truck is waved into Mercy Base.
The truck slowly makes its way to Providence's garage and parks.
Rex is gently shaken as the people hop out of the truck and grab their equipment out from the back. He listens as the agents' voices fade into the distance as they leave the garage.
Rex waits a few more minutes with bated breath before he tentatively opens up a hole in the bottom of the compartment he made for himself. His body plops onto a dirty garage floor. Dirt and what Rex thinks is oil gets onto his hands and knees.
He wrinkles his nose at the harsh tangy copper smell. Providence must not clean their facilities as often as they should.
Rex wipes his hands onto his shorts and grabs his woobie from his modified hidey-hole as quietly as possible. He winces every time the synthetic material loudly rustles. He pauses every so often, waiting for a Providence agent to inevitably hear his shuffling, but no agents head his way.
After Rex gets all of his woobie out, he grabs his backpack and starts the slow process of completely erasing any trace of the modifications he made to the Providence vehicle. If there's anything Rex had learned since the Nanite event, it was to cover his tracks as much as possible when he could, even if at the moment it seemed safer to escape instead of cleaning up after himself. It was a matter of life or death for him, or at the very least freedom or entrapment.
Rex rolls over onto his stomach and scoots himself forward, towards the back of the truck, until he's in a position where he can view the garage while still staying relatively hidden from view.
The garage Rex is in is filled with mostly ground-based vehicles: cars, trucks, tanks, and bikes. There are a few small flying aircraft, but nothing gigantic like the stuff from major Providence EVO outbreaks Rex has seen aired on TV.
Rex wonders if this is base is big enough base to even warrant having one of those bad boys lying around. It would be cool to sneak aboard one and try to figure out what cool features were on it, but that's something he can do later. Rex first needs to get out of this garage and go somewhere safe.
There are a few Providence agents scattered around the garage. Most are cleaning junk off vehicles that had just come back from the field, all covered in dust and gore while the other Providence agents make repairs to various vehicles.
Some of the repairmen agents are on the ground, the perfect elevation level to spot Rex, but they're all distracted, talking to one another and laughing at jokes Rex doesn't quite get.
Still, Rex keeps a close eye on them as he quickly crawls out from underneath the truck, his blanket folded and tucked underneath his armpit and his backpack firmly on his back.
He stands up and calmly walks with a purpose to a vent in the wall, his thankfully small (enough) stature hidden by the height of the lined-up trucks. He uses his nanites to quickly pop off the cover, and he crawls in.
It's slightly cramped for his size inside the vents, but not cramped enough for Rex to justify using his nanites to rearrange the vent walls. Rex grabs the vent's cover and slides it back on.
He contemplates using his nanites to weld the vent to the wall since he can't screw it back on, but he decides that would be more suspicious than a loose vent cover. A welded Providence truck underside and a welded vent cover? Unlikely that they would notice both oddities, but it's better to be safe than sorry. Besides, Rex is tired from using his nanites all day and spending an uncomfortable amount of hours cooped up in a compartment he barely fitted into. Why waste energy on something so small?
Rex retreats fully into the vents, with the intent to find someplace to set up a home base to use during his stay at Providence.
Rex crawls deep into the maze of never-ending twists and turns of vents and eventually ends up finding a weird crawl space branching off one of the vents, forming a little room perfect for what Rex needs.
The mini room the space makes must have been a happy accident, as it's not quite entirely rectangular and flat in shape. The "floor" of the room isn't level with the rest of the vent and has a short drop down near the entrance of the room.
It's drafty and cold, but Rex thinks his parents will be able to block out the air circulation once they've settled in, no problem. He needs to remind himself later to nick something softer and fluffier than the emergency blanket he stole so he can sleep more comfortably in the drafty room in the coming nights.
As Rex enters the mini room, snakes of metal eke out of the skin of his hands and knees as he reinforces the entire room with his internal supply of nanites, generating metal to thicken up the walls and add extra support so he doesn't fall through the floor.
Rex throws his emergency blanket in one corner of the room and slips off his backpack. He carefully unzips the main pocket.
"Mom? Dad? You guys awake?" he asks, whispering.
His parents answer by slowly oozing out the backpack, the cold had made their gooey clay-like flesh sluggish, and settled in the entrance of the room, blocking out the cold air.
One of his parents' hands lingered on his as they had moved into the entryway but it had slinked back into the mass of the EVO that was his parents.
Or at the very least, a part of his parents. It was hard to tell since his parents weren't exactly as responsive as they were when they were human, and Rex couldn't very well ask if he had brought equal parts mom and dad from their main body in the ruins of Abysus.
Rex was at the very least sure he had brought a little bit of both of his parents with him when he had left Abysus two years ago.
Rex poked at the wall his parents had made in the entryway, something he finds they do instinctively whenever they have the chance, like a spider. No matter what Rex offers them, they always find a window or doorway to guard, preferring to be a literal wall than to rest in a bed or a chair.
"Hey, mom and dad," He whispers. One of their eyes lazily opens to stare at Rex. "I'm gonna head to bed. Night!" he mumbles before he crawls into his emergency blanket nest and falls asleep.