Hello, hello, here's some more about Abigail and her history, and yet another explanation, or filling in of blanks about Max and Dread. Nothing shocking nor terribly important, but it popped into my head as I was typing, and it fit with what I was currently writing, so I decided to just go with it. And yes, I have started writing my little A/N up here before writing the chapter instead of writing one before and one after each chapter. Also, I do realize that some people throw hissy fits at authors for putting A/N in the middle of their fics, but I honestly do not care. Ciao.
Chapter 7
Abigail zoomed through the air in her hovercraft, firing her lasers at everything and everything that got in her way. She laughed as a group of villagers ran from their burning grass huts.
"Welcome to the twenty-first century!" She cackled, loving how well the craft handled. It was routine for her to test out and receive prototypes of brand new technology...especially the kind that could do some damage. She had a lot of anger to work out. A lot. She knew that her grandfather also had a great amount of rage stored deep inside of him, but he had learned to shut himself from it. He had never revealed, even to her, the source of his anger, though he was quite familiar with the source of hers, which she hadn't learned to shut herself off from, and suspected would never be able to do so. (A/N: A bit of a run-on there, I could probably fix it, but don't really care.)
Abigail had been with her grandfather in his mansion in Russia the fateful night N'Tek had killed her parents. He had been teaching her to play checkers, what he saw as a sort of a chess for beginners game. Same basic theory, get rid of your opponents pieces. When the phone rang, he had just triple jumped her. He never let her win. John Dread saw letting someone win as an insult to their intelligence. Unless, of course, it was a trap. He had taught Abigail this theory and reinforced it strictly, as he did the rules of chess.
The phone only rang twice when the butler answered it. "Yes?"
Abigail did not look up, although now thinking back on the night, her grandfather didn't receive many unexpected calls. She was concentrating on figuring out what her next move would be. Her grandfather, however, could sense things, and stared at the butler, the former scrutinizing the face of the latter. After a few minutes, the butler hung up the phone and made eye contact with the other man, then cast a sad look at the then innocent little girl and nodded.
John Dread let out a sigh and waved his hand, dismissing his servant. He watched as Abigail moved in on a direct attack on his king, which he could've gotten a double jump out of. Instead he put his hand gently on the girls hand and began to talk.
In later years, her grandfather had revealed information of her parent's demise in small bits. Beginning with the fact that they were dead and that she would be living with him. Then came the name of their killers, both died shortly after her parents, and both had been employed by N'Tek. Then the information began coming more fluently, including John Dread's opinion that the mission had been a kamikaze mission, that he had tried to talk Abigail's parents out of, but they had been convinced that they would pull it off. The final thing he had told her that there was to know about her parent's death was that they had both gone down fighting. As would she, Abigail knew. It would be an insult to her parents' memory to ever give up, even if her death would be the price.
Aware that she was traveling into dangerous anger-stimulating categories of her mind, Abigail snapped back into attention to avoid crashing into an astonishingly large tree. She laughed. Nature couldn't get rid of her that easily. Science had made her, and only science would be able to kill her in the end. She had been a test tube baby, the first one. She had been 'attempt 782', and the only success. She knew that she was unnatural, that she wasn't meant to be on the earth. Nature had tried nonstop to get rid of her. When she was younger she had been constantly ill, and had only been cured of her many ailments from an injection of Max probes that made her immune system nearly indestructible. She received only enough to boost her immune system permanently. Her speed, strength, and skill were all her own.
Yes, that was why her grandfather was ceaselessly attempting to capture and study Max Steel instead of destroying him when he got the chance, as Psycho would have preferred. Recently there had been great advances in max probe research in her father's many labs worldwide, including new strains of the probes that could repair parts of the human body. For example, for two years now Abigail's vision had been inexplicably been going downhill, another one of nature's little 'gifts', she assumed. Her grandfather wanted Max to test certain strains of the probes on first, as he refused to use his granddaughter as a test subject.
Abigail still had above average vision, but it used to be perfect. Slowly it was on its way to just being good. This, on her levels, was not good but bad. Very bad. She decided to test out her vision with a little target practice. She narrowed the laser's width, until it was about the side of a dime, and took aim at a children's toy in the middle of the street, far below. She aimed for the head, and with two shots had taken out both of the doll's eyes. For her, it was not exactly an extraordinary feat, but she was still proud of the perfect shots. However, looking down, she realized that she could not see thin streams of smoke that were rising from the laser holes in the doll's head.
She slammed her fists down in fury. Two years ago she would have been able to see the smoke! Why was this happening to her?! With a jolt she realized that the nose of the craft had began to tip down. She reached over to the controls to get the vehicle moving again and then saw the sparks shooting out of the dashboard. Shit, I must have hit it harder than I thought it would, she thought. She tapped at one of the buttons on the other side of the craft, trying to alter the craft's current location- the ground- without success. Knowing that she was going down, she picked up the radio, and contacted her grandfather. The radio linked to one in his office. "Mayday, mayday, this is Eagle1, going down." She gave her coordinates. "Grandfather, are you there? Repeat, this is Eagle1 calling in a Mayday. Mayday. Is anyone there?"
She continued to repeat her mayday and the latitude and longitude of her location. She continued as the nose of the hovercraft continued dipping down. Realizing that if she did nothing, the aircraft would only continue to tip until...she didn't know what would happen if she let it go. The hovercraft chose to tilt another twenty degrees at that point, and Abigail decided that she wasn't going to wait until the vehicle capsized in mid-air. All types of high tech and modern solutions to fixing her current problem ran through her head, so needless to say, she slammed her fist onto the controls again. More sparks flew, and the vehicle immediately straightened itself out.
The redhead allowed herself a sigh of relief, but was cut short when the vehicle suddenly lurched forward, and started traveling at full speed.
"CRAP!!!" Abigail fought the controls, but it made no difference at all. Looking up through the windshield, she saw the rainforest below her becoming larger, the blanket of green rushing towards her. "MAYDAYYYYYYYYYY!" she screamed as the craft picked up speed, now on a collision course with a large tree. She kept yelling until she and her metallic exoskeleton rammed into the tree and the front of the vehicle crunched, and tortured metal shrieked. The craft slid down the trunk of the tree, hitting branches on the way down. At the end of the descent, Abigail laid motionlessly inside the machine, her left arm twisted at an unnatural angle beneath her.