A/N: Well, sorry it took so long, but I wanted this chapter to be worthy. And I changed a bit at the end of the last chapter, but since I'm nice, I'm also putting the corrected paragraph here, because I figure there are other people as lazy as I am. Hmm.. other notes… I was being strange and so I used both "elevator" and "lift" interchangeably, so don't freak out and be like "omg, wth?!" and another think not to be like "omg, wth?!" is "soda" which is also called "coke" and "pop" and other stuff, too. I tried out a new style of writing in this chapter. It's very tedious to write, so I doubt that I'll use it very often, but it does come in handy for CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT lol.. I like char development, I don't know why. annnnd that's it for notes at the beginning! Yaaaay! Remember, kids, only you can prevent authors from going crazy. Read it and Review it.
D/C: same as always, I only own Rhiannon, 917, and the other A-lines (and now… watchboy)
~~Last chapter, in Rhiannon:~~
It was a most unhelpful talking head.
Now Rhiannon was sitting in the same position, her glare slightly more menacing than before, as the head jabbered on about anomalies and missions. She could not care less about any of it. She was busy contemplating, mulling over what had happened. She hated the machines for killing the first A-line. She hated the agents for being so cold. She hated the A-lines for being indifferent. She hated 917 for standing up to her. She hated herself for getting angry. She hated Agent Doe for leaving her stranded in the hallway. She hated the head for being an asshole. She hated the Architect for creating the Matrix. She hated to machines for fighting the people. She hated the people for making the machines. Her own thoughts and words came rolling back to her, echoing through her mind, drawing her inexorably closer to the one decision she did not want to make.
Rebels or Machines?
~~~
Rhiannon, Chapter Nine:
Rhiannon snatched the disk off the desk and stalked out of the room, elbowing one agent to get to the door first. She stalked down the hallway, looking for a way to get back to whatever floor had the strange black hallway. She was still stewing in her own self-loathing and was not paying the slightest attention to anything but the floor immediately in front of her feet. She walked headlong into…
Agent Doe missed the conference to check on a disturbance on the other side of town. When he had returned, he had stood speaking to a secretary about a new way to file reports. He turned around just in time to catch…
Rhiannon felt strong arms bracing her shoulders as she crashed into someone. The someone wore a suit. It was slightly dusty, as if the person had been near a falling wall. She stepped back shakily and looked up into the face of…
Agent Doe looked down at one of his charges. She seemed to be in a temper and had a cross look on her face. Her face changed to some expression he could not read, something like surprise or anger. His charge was demanding that he explain how to get around in this place to her. He had explained everything to her last night.
Rhiannon wanted to scream, but she bit her tongue and asked how to get back to her office. This agent was driving her mad. This whole world was driving her mad. It made no sense to her!
"Go to the end of the hall, step in the elevator, and ask for area 12," Agent Doe said. He couldn't understand the look the girl gave him as she stormed off down the row of desks and doors and conference rooms and interrogation rooms. He saw her aim a kick at a rebel being escorted into one.
Rhiannon tried counting to ten as she raged down the hall, fuming. Two agents and a rebel stepped out of an elevator on the left in front of her. She reached ten just before they passed, but she felt no calmer. She swung her leg at the young man's shin and continued to turn everyone's heads as she made her way to the elevators. Her anger somehow caused the doors to snap shut behind her.
"Twelve," she growled. The lift dinged and rose into the air.
Its empty walls enraged her even more, so that when she finally reached her floor and heard the ding of the lift, she was in a murderous rage and was likely to kill the next thing she saw. She made her way down the hallway, and realized, for the first time, that there was no way that she would ever find her office. No doors, no numbers, the whole area was the same. This fueled her already out of control bout of fury, and now she was likely to kill the next thing she saw—slowly and painfully.
She walked forward, gradually increasing her speed until she was running down the hall. Soon she was sprinting, and she quickly forgot her inhibitions and flickered from sight, rocketing down the hall too fast to be seen. She screeched to a halt, punched the left wall, kicked the right, spun around, and plopped onto the floor in a huff.
She looked back down the hall, but the elevator was the end of the hall, which was dimly lit anyways, and shrouded in darkness. It had looked the same the night before, but now, she couldn't tell if it was the light or the distance. Rhiannon shouted her fury to the empty hallway. The silence ate up her call like a ravenous beast, and in the following stillness, she heard a lock clicking. The door opened, and—wonder of wonders—through the door stepped…
Dahr Zados was in his office, throwing darts at a wanted picture on the wall, a poster that was so full of holes, you had to look twice to see the battered visage of Thomas A. Anderson. Dahr had blindfolded himself, and was aiming for what he thought was the middle of Anderson's forehead, but after he removed the pink bandana, he saw that he had just spilled all of poor Mr. Anderson's left eye jelly. His shots always went a bit to the right, and he had forgotten this. It didn't matter, it was still a lethal shot. He turned to the mini-fridge beneath his desk and pulled out a soda. He was just polishing it off when he heard pounding on the walls and a scream.
Oh, bloody, he thought. It must be the girl from the hallway. Who else would beat on the walls?
He slipped his darts into a drawer and tossed his soda can into the wastebasket. Straightening his tie with one hand, Dahr slid the chain off the door with his other. He pulled it open and stepped in the hallway to find…
Rhiannon was crying. Everything had happened so fast. She had never really believed that she would seriously have to fight; she never really believed she had any special powers at all. She believed that all the weird stuff that happened to her was the mainframe looking out for her. She could not believe what the head had just told her, that she could move anything within the Matrix, from ink to people. She was now to begin her final training, and as soon as she was ready, she would be sent out into the Matrix to search for and destroy any and all Resistance. Although she had heard the click of the lock, it the door had taken to long to open and her tears had broken the floodgates, streaming silently down her face, by the time the opener saw her. She didn't even notice that the person who had opened the door was…
Dahr looked down at the girl who had slept in the hallway. This time she wasn't asleep and her watch wasn't going off, but she noticed him no more than she had when she had been asleep. He cleared his throat, and suddenly he was looking into the tearstained face of…
Rhiannon was embarrassed to be found a second time by this man, this agent, in a less than dignified position. He helped her up, saying
"My name's Dahr. Dahr Zados," he said. "You must be new. Did they just tell you that you can't go back?" He was startled to see the incredulous look that…
Rhiannon gave him a bewildered glance. "N-no," she said. "I can't get into my office. Actually, I have no idea where it is." She couldn't believe that Dahr actually said
"You're crying because you can't get into you're office?" Dahr asked, stunned at woman's frailty.
"Nani?" Rhiannon cried. "Hell no! And I don't have to tell you why I'm crying anyways."
Dahr said, in his haughtiest and bossiest tone, "Oh really? I'm a superior officer, and I can demand that you tell me anything!"
"That's what you think," Rhiannon muttered darkly.
"What was that?"
"Nothing… nothing…"
"It better not have been. Now, am I to assume that your office was behind where you slept last night?"
"Yeah," Rhiannon answered, looking down the hall.
Dahr seemed on the verge of correcting Rhiannon's response, but thought the better of it and said, "Well, then follow me. You're in…"
He trailed off as he led Rhiannon down the hall, checking something that Rhiannon could not see.
"Here we are," Dahr announced, stopping under a lamp.
"How do you know?" asked Rhiannon.
Dahr said, as if he were teaching a whole auditorium, "Well, there's a door under every light, and you can tell which is yours by the number on the light fixture itself. You are 1284."
"Twelve for the floor, right?"
"Yep. And to get in you say 'open.'"
Rhiannon looked at him. "That's it?" she asked bitterly. "Not, 'Open Sesame?'"
Again, the boy chuckled. "No, I suppose not," he said.
~@~
Rhiannon stepped out of her room backwards, closing the door. With the new power she had realized, she moved her hand in the air in front of her and heard the brass chain on the other side of the door lock itself.
"You aren't allowed to do that," a voice said.
Rhiannon spun on her heel to find Dahr huddled and leaned against the wall in a casual set of black clothes. His brown hair covered what little of his face was visible, and he used the dim light to his advantage, hanging his head so that the shadows kissed his face just so. She wouldn't have known who he was but for his voice, which she had memorized.
"I'll bet you aren't allowed to do that, Dahr," Rhiannon retorted icily. She was supposed to go to the sparring rooms as soon as she had uploaded the information on the disk to herself, and didn't want to keep her record of tardiness.
Dahr looked up. He said, "You knew me!"
As Rhiannon walked towards the elevator, she said, "Your voice. Besides, who else could you have been? Would you mind not following me?"
"Fine," Dahr said, but he continued to walk down the hall behind her.
"As long as you're following me, would you mind telling me how it was that I sprinted down the hall and didn't go but two or three rooms past my own?"
Dahr smiled. "Simple," he said. "Have you ever noticed how time slows when you're mad?"
"Why do you think I was mad?"
"Well, assuming that you are the same girl who kicked a rebel in the shin this morning just because he was there… The folks downstairs said that you were in quite a huff," Dahr explained. "I can't think of many other women types here who would be 1. angry and 2. angry enough to kick a random person."
"I see," Rhiannon said as they reached the elevators. "Well, Sherlock, your deduction was accurate."
They stepped inside the lift and Dahr said, "Sparring level, please."
After the lift began to descend, Rhiannon demanded, "Excuse me?"
"Oh, I thought that you knew," Dahr said apologetically. "You are supposed to spar several people today. I was sent to make sure that you got to where you needed to be, and also to…"
"To what?" asked Rhiannon.
"Nevermind."
"Fine. But I did know that I was supposed to go to sparring, and I was going quite fine without your help."
Dahr said quickly, "Well that's all good and well, but we are to follow our orders, and I was ordered to fetch you."
A few minutes later, Dahr said, "If you win all your spars, I'll take you out for coffee this evening. If you lose, you get to take me out for coffee."
"Sounds good," said Rhiannon, feeling confident that she would get a free espresso.
The lift dinged and stopped. The doors opened to reveal a large, open gym with high ceilings and blue mats everywhere. There were all sorts of training equipment everywhere, and there were doors at one end that said such things as, "Target Practice." In front of her stood about fifteen or so agents. She smiled and was mid-nod when she heard and felt a gun being leveled behind her. Time slowed. She spun on her heel for the second time in a day, saw Dahr preparing to fire his gun, and she let herself spin out of the way as she disappeared. She reappeared, spinning, behind the agents. She put her left foot down and stopped herself, facing her adversaries.
Dahr had already pulled the trigger several times before he saw Rhiannon appear on the other side of the room, and three agents went down. The other 12 attacked her head on. He watched as they exchanged blows, most missing Rhiannon completely as she popped in and out of spaces attacking where she could and reappearing to attack somewhere else. He watched her closely until he realized her weakness, the thing that could stop her space-hopping. True, she did have decent reflexes and a challenging speed to match, but Dahr felt confident that he could catch her.
Rhiannon knocked out several agents by popping up behind them, attacking them, and popping out. She didn't really knock them out, but the had been instructed to stop fighting when the average human would lose. After all, she would not be fighting agents. She had already taken out nine agents this way, but not without several bruises of her own. She had only figured out the k.o. strategy after one agent tried it on her. Three left. She dodged and delivered her own blows. Caught off guard, she flipped backwards several paces. Rhiannon was just about to attack again, but someone caught her arm in an unyielding grip of steel.
-}^^#~@~#^^{-
ooooh a cliffhanger! And now a word about Dahr.
Dahr is a name that means "time" and I suppose you can only guess why. (hint: my own loving nickname for him is watchboy) and his last name, Zados, was suggested by Tony.
You know Nightcrawler from X-2? Well, Rhiannon's "space-hopping" is very similar, although I swear I didn't think of Nightcrawler when I came up with it. She doesn't leave smoke or anything behind her, either. She just reinserts her code somewhere else. She can also do this with other objects. Like she could make a marker write in thin air. (When I came up with that, I was babbling to myself about coordinates because my step was grilling me about my use of coordinates in another story.)
Sorry about how this fight scene was not as detailed as the last one, but this time, I have bigger fight scenes to plan. I mean, I totally did not just say that…
As to Pandora… she's a bratty little girl in the Twin's charge. I think I'm just going to include her because it saves me time.
SO, I guess that's about it, and until next time, this is megami saying, "please, oh please review my story, or I shall be forced to sing a slightly altered queen song about reviews…" (to the tune of bicycle race, probably) jaa
