(A/N: this chapter is the continuation of the last chapter – the second part of Reihana's flashback)
Love and Burden
by The Great Red Dragon
Chapter 19
It was late at night; all the Experiments were now in their dorms. Most of them were fast asleep, with a few night-owls still reading or watching television. The security cameras had been activated to make sure that nobody went wandering around at night (this wasn't, of course, under just plain and untrusting suspicion; several of the Experiments were known for sleep-walking). All halls were now dark and shadowy, with mere corner-lights to illuminate them. Jumba Jookiba snored and turned over in his sleep.
471 was easily as tired as all of the rest. She had spent nearly the entirety of the day and most of the night searching for the place that she could input the two codes she held in her hand, written on a piece of paper.
Aside from finding several other consoles that she didn't know existed (but didn't respond to the code), there was no progress. She had gotten to know the lab a lot more than she ever had before…she had even discovered what she believed were a few secret passageways. But seeing as all of these led to either the kitchen or a locked closet, they didn't help her much.
And after many hours of searching around, she couldn't honestly say that her morale was still completely intact.
The only advantage she gained at night was that there were no others roaming the halls. She was longer stopped, pursued, or questioned by some nosy Experiment; now there were only the security cameras to worry about, which could easily be avoided by a bit of wall-climbing.
But even the slight thrill achieved by espionage had worn off some time ago, and now she was simply tired. She had been wandering around now for longer than she had wanted to, and fatigue was upon her.
As she did so, there was an audible 'beep'. Only then did she realized that whatever she was leaning against wasn't smooth and cold, like the walls should be…
"Please input access code."
471 looked up as the computerized voice said this. It was darker than her eyes had been able to keep up with, but an electric-blue light lit up from a small view-screen in front of her.
A code-input console next to a door!
…The excitement seemed to fade for a moment; surely it had be one that she had already been to before.
But then, as she began to look around herself (and as her eyes adjusted to the darkness), she realized that she wasn't in a place that she recognized. Her eyes traced around, in search of a feature even vainly familiar…but there was none to be seen. In response, she couldn't help but feel the bit of panic that rose up in her at the prospect of being lost alone in the dark; what if she was never found again, and starved to death in the maze of these long, metal corridors?
Luckily, she managed to get a hold of her panic before it overwhelmed her – if she could find her way into the place while she was half asleep, she'd surely make it with all her wits about her…besides, she was confident that if she managed to get herself filmed on a security camera, there'd be somebody there to get her ASAP.
She turned around to go back…but then stopped short.
471 turned around to face the input-terminal next to the door – wasn't this the reason she had spent twelve hours looking around in the first place? Now that she found it, wouldn't it be a good time to check it out?
With a renewed feeling of liveliness and vitality, she focused intently on the input-console, straining her eyes as they still adjusted.
"Please input access code."
The buttons on the pad below the screen also glowed blue with light; entrancing. Slowly and cautiously, as if she felt a hidden camera was watching her (one she hadn't spotted yet), she reached out her hand, and with the index finger on her right hand, typed in the letters and numbers she saw on the paper in her other hand, it too illuminated by the light.
…'PYSIJ1I7'.
There was a short pause…
"Please input the second access-code."
The screen went blank of the first set she had put in.
As cautiously as before, she typed in the second combination.
…'Q1877KLB'.
"…Access confirmed! Code recognized. Door opening."
"Yes!", 471 cheered to herself, jumping a few inches into the air with joy.
The usual and often-heard hiss of the door opening was heard…but this time, it sounded more special than any other time before.
The door opened, and at once, 471 covered her eyes quickly as fresh light hit her eyes. The panic rose within her again ("It's just light, it's just light…"), but she pulled herself together enough to quell it.
When she finally let down her hands from her face, she looked on with squinting eyes…and found herself looking into what appeared to be another row of shiny, metal corridor.
Like a curious feline, she slowly edged towards the doorway and poked her head inside. Looking in both directions, she found them as long, barren, and empty as the ones that led to the baths (not very many of the Experiments enjoyed bathing). Where was this? How could she have never been here before?
Daring another step, she placed a single toe into the next hallway, almost expecting for a monster to rise out of the floor and bite it off. When nothing happened, she dared to plant her whole foot in the room. It all looked safe, so she decided to start with the other foot.
Inch by inch, centimeter by centimeter, she moved into the room at the rate of a caterpillar; with each move, she expected a dramatic reaction for the worse…but even when her whole body stood in the hallway, there was still nothing bad happening to her.
She decided a free step further into the hall wouldn't hurt…but as she increased the distance between her and the doorway, the door behind her slid shut horizontally with a hissing thud.
She whirled around fast; she was trapped. The door had been closed on her, there was no way out, she was gonna die-
A moment before a nervous breakdown set in, she caught herself and quickly tried to rationalize. The door had closed automatically because she had moved too far away from it. She checked the code-input console on this side of the hall, and found to her reassurance that it had not been locked. Everything was stable again.
Now, in her current position, her eyes caught hold of something that they couldn't have before: above the doorway was a large, glowing diagram of several straight, slanted lines that seemed to interconnect with many colored dots with labels at their sides.
It was a map.
The lettering was large enough to see, and written in plain Turian. Most of the described circles were all group in a cluster at the eastern corner of the map. At the very end of a spiraling, zigzagging collection of corridor in the mid-to-western section, there was a single dot. 471 read the label next to it.
"Hangar".
She wasn't sure if she had ever seen the hangar before…thought she might have…but wouldn't it have been at some other end in the other set of hallways?
At the eastern side, the labels in the cluster read names like "gymnasium", "data storage/collection", "target gallery", "large-weapons storage", and "Experiment holding-cell".
Between the east-side clusters and the west-side hangar, there were only two labeled dots: "food storage" and "exit to primary Experiment-laboratory".
She was standing right by the second-mentioned dot (she knew this because it was labeled "You are HERE"); the door that separated this lab with the one that she knew. The dot labeled "food storage" was not too far away from her.
As she stood there, very much in awe, someone in her mind asked her why she didn't go check some of the places.
Well, 471 saw no real objection to this…as long as she remembered the place where she had entered (which would also need to serve as her way to exit).
She turned to her right and began a walk down the corridors, in the direction of the "food storage".
Not much was to be said about the journey, except that it was longer and more tedious than 471 had expected. The path was pretty much straight forward, but it gave her the feeling that she was running into an endless mirror; how long just was this place?
Anxiety started to build on her after the first five minutes. She looked back behind herself, and found the hallway to be a barren as that what stretched in front of her. And with no other doors, security camera, or guiding maps in sight, a feeling of slight dread rose within her.
But she figured that her destination couldn't be too far away now. She moved on, quickening her pace as she did so.
Her efforts were finally rewarded. With a rush of joy, she spotted the soft light of a console, the kind that belonged to a door, a distance away from her. She ran over as fast as she could, and stood in front of the door as it towered above her. The label on it read "food storage".
The console next to it was different than the ones she was used to – it was a single, round button that glowed with the blue light. No viewing screen or input-pad…and it was a lot higher on the wall than she was used to. Obviously, it had been constructed without the idea of mainly Experiments using it.
Not about to abandon her curiosity, she pressed the large button with her thumb, and the door hissed open.
The change was quite dramatic; from the well-lit hallway, she entered a dark and shadowy room.
Skeleton-like metal shelves lined throughout the tiny, dingy little room like bone-work. Hardly a room of 15x15 feet, there was barely any space between the aisles to walk – Jumba wouldn't be able to fit into the room at all.
She walked in and examined, by the protruding light of the hallway, the lowest shelf of the cabinet in front of her. It, as well as the other shelves of very other cabinet, was stacked with several boxes of a substance wrapped in plastic. It seemed to be done professionally, but was stamped with a writing that looked like had been hand-written and then Xeroxed. It was the same pidgin Turian that had been typed in the contents of the red disk.
She lifted one of these out of the cardboard half-box and held it in her hands. She pressed against the plastic wrapping, and found it to be horribly slimy and gooey…she held it into the light coming from the hallway, and found it to be a nasty, dark-brown/greenish color…the color of a spoiled pot roast.
She set it back with a look of disgust and searched if any of the boxes contained anything besides the nasty, plastic-wrapped sludge…indeed; there was something else. A few of the boxes were packed with small, palm-sized white bottles. She picked one of them out. Plastic.
The label read quite clearly: "vitamin drink".
"What the heck is all of this, Jumba?"
She set the bottle back among the many others and took another search around the room…there was nothing else.
Not wanting for the door to automatically close on her in this dark place, she quickly hurried out of the room and back into the hallway. As she stepped out of the doorway, it closed behind her with a hiss.
471 now noticed something that she hadn't before – it was another one of the glowing map-diagrams. This one, however, was much smaller than the last one, and hang directly opposite of the doorway she had just exited.
"You are HERE", proclaimed a red dot, next to the label of the room "food storage".
471 noticed that she was now considerably closer to the cluster of circles at the each end…she had cleared more than half the distance between the cluster and the entrance to the other lab. Her morale increased with a smile, and without much hesitation she hurried back on her way towards the east end.
It took less time to reach the next door; it was already a shorter distance, but now she was moving at a faster jog.
The door, unlike the last, stood not in the side of the wall; it marked the end of the seemingly endless corridor.
471 finally came to stand in front of it. It loomed over her like a monster guarding something important…like the dog Cerebrus, from the story Jumba had once read her. Like the other door, it had but one button on the console…no; this one was different. It included another button and a slot for a keycard; she knew it was a locking-mechanism. Thankfully, it wasn't activated.
Overcoming the fear that the door would open up to reveal a gigantic set of teeth, 471 pressed the button and the door opened ravishly…
ZHOOM!
It was dark, at first. Then, automatically, a lined row of lights at the ceiling illuminated a short, narrow hallway that led to another a door, identical to the first. This hallway wasn't nearly as the one behind her – barely one-third of its width, to be exact. Could Jumba even fit in such a cramped corridor?
Beyond the floor and ceiling, she could see the control-console, with the specific light that indicated that it wasn't locked. Fighting the oncoming fear and paranoia of entering and being trapped inside of such a small place, she stepped inside slowly…and then immediately ran as fast as she could to the other side. She hit the door and held herself close to it for several seconds before easing loose slowly stepping back.
After so much behind her, and yet another door ahead, her nervousness was at its peak…was this the door that all the secrets were hidden behind?
The secrets about the information on the disk, the mysterious Experiment, and the strange names?
She was sure that she had arrived at the cluster displayed on the map…was this the storehouse of the information she was after?
…There was only one way to find out…
She reached up, and pressed the button that opened the door.
ZHOOM!
She peered inside…and once again, faced darkness.
Without hesitation, lest her courage give way, 471 breathed in steadily and stepped inside. The door shut behind her with a hiss.
For the first minute, all that was heard was the audible pounding of her heart, and her anxious breathing through her mouth.
In the darkness, the tints and angles of shadows revealed shapes to her…they were unidentifiable, but it looked strangely like…
Carefully, she began to fumble around the walls next to the door for a light-switch. Her anxiety rose when she couldn't find one immediately, but finally her clawed hands caught hold of a small, circular button, unlike the one on the door's console. She pushed it.
The lights came on with separate clicks, and flickered eerily for several moments before the achieved their potency. Finally, 471 could look around her environment.
It was another office, much like Jumba's…seemingly.
It was large and circular and metal-colored; larger than Jumba's. A desk protruded from the wall and circled all the way around the room, stopping a few feet from the door. At the front of the room, opposite of the door, was a large glass pane – 471 thought for a moment that it was a viewing screen, but quickly realized that it was a window. Between two separate panes of the glass that made the window, criss-crossed 'chicken-wire' was stretched across the view; was this bullet-proof glass?
The surface of the rounding desk was cluttered with papers, folder, and several computers; it instantaneously reminded 471 of Jumba's own desk. The desk space underneath the window, however, was cleared free of cluttering – it housed what appeared to be a large control panel, or buttons, knobs, keyboards, and tiny viewing-screens. She wondered intently what it was for…she hurried over and jumped on top of the desk, and peered with squinted eyes through the glass, into a dark, gigantic room. She glanced down at the consoles, and found a red button that read beneath a label; "gym lights".
She pressed it, and with the same effect that it had with the room she was, the lights flickered on to reveal a humongous, hexagonal-shaped gymnasium with a ceiling about a hundred feet off of the ground.471 sat in awe – the size of this place nearly rivaled the size of the cafeteria! Lockers line about a third of the walls, and several doors were set into the walls.
471 noticed strange yellow taping on the floor of the gym. Creases and what looked like constructed cracks in the metal…she wondered what it was for.
Looking back at the console, she noticed that other buttons were labeled 'turrets', 'rail 2', and 'blocking guards'.
She pressed one of the buttons carefully, and the effect showed on the floor of the gym. A square-shaped box-crease flipped itself around mechanically, hiding its flat surface, and revealing something that looked like a punching-bag mounted on a floor-post.
471 pressed another button, and another floor-panel flipped around to reveal a jumping barrier. Another button, and there appeared what seemed to be a miniature race-track!
She couldn't help but smile – this was fun!
She reached down for another button, but stopped short as she did. The label above it read "gun turrets 6"…and she wasn't about to go messing around with dangerous things; 471 hopped off the desk, as if her mere sitting there could cause disasters.
She had just begun wondering how you were to enter the gym when she spotted another door in the room; on the western end of the room, placed snuggly between the outings of the desk. It too, luckily, was unlocked.
Through the door, she thought for a moment that it was a dead-end; a flat wall faced five feet away from her. Then she realized the staircase next to her. She looked to her right and down – a metal staircase made of grillwork led about thirty feet down into the gymnasium. Once again, she wondered how a person as large as Jumba could possibly fit into such a tight and narrow space…
At the bottom, she stepped off of the last step, and onto edge of the gym floor. She could well see the obstacles she had activated from the control-pad; they seemed much larger now.
The room was too large to fully viewed from her current position, she realized…and she began a walk towards the very center of the room (making sure not to step on any of the lined 'boxes' on the floor, in case one of them hid the gun-turrets). The walk took nearly half a minute, and once she had reached the center, 471 only truly realized the gym's full, enormous size; it was nothing short of amazing.
She glanced at the ceiling, nearly one hundred feet over her head. The lights that shone down on her and the rest of the floor seemed so small from up there…
471 turned her attention towards the walls…the gigantic walls.
Most of the lockers were lined along the two walls angling off of the direct west-end wall. She noticed then that there were also lighted signs above the doorways. Her immediate thoughts were that this made the doors look like entrances to clubs (she giggled at her thought). However, the words on the sign seemed to point away from that inquiry.
Four different signs read; "Data storage/collection" (this one hung next to the staircase she had come down), "Target gallery", "Large-weapons storage", and "Experiment holding-cell".
Her eyes stopped on the last sign she read – it hung above door shouldered by the lockers.
…Was the Experiment in there?
Obviously, if the signs were to be taken into consideration…
She walked slowly towards the door, ducking underneath a jumping-barricade as she did. The trip to the door took as long as the trip to the center of the gym did, but she paused as she neared the lockers next to the door – were they locked?
There was no lock on any of them, so she curiously put her hand onto the handle of the locker and pulled it open, and peered inside…
BANG!
Within a split second of looking inside, she slammed the door shut again and braced herself against it with a look of terror on her face, as if she had seen a monster.
The locker had been stacked full with rifles and other firearms.
What the Hell were they there for?, were 471's thoughts.
What kind of an operation was Jumba running? What kind of operation required a hidden laboratory complex, a secret Experiment, and guns?
What the Hell was this?
Instinct screamed at her to go back. If what was behind the lockers scared her this much, she really didn't want to know what lay behind the door…or did she?
She glanced to her left, at the door that supposedly led to the Experiment…it was unlocked.
The screaming of common sense was blocked out by a tiny whisper of 'why-don't-you-take-a-look?'. There were of course, many reasons why she shouldn't…but the 'why-don't-you-take-a-look' had now double-teamed with her inborn, heavyweight curiosity, and was winning the fight. She cursed her nosiness, as it addicted her to danger, and closer to the door.
"Damn, damn, damn…"
She inched slowly away from the lockers, and slowly, slowly made her way to the door. When she finally stood in front of it, her hand was slowly pulled towards the button. Somewhat unwillingly, she pressed it.
ZHOOM!
The door hissed open, and 471 (wanting to get it over with) stepped inside.
…There was no Experiment. In its stead, however, 471's face was illuminated by ion-blue light. She blinked but not because of the brightness – the chamber she peered into looked like…like…either a dungeon or Frankenstein's laboratory.
The floor, walls, and ceiling were made of black, kidney-shaped rubble-stones that seemed very medieval. The room was small…and held two wooden desks. On these stood large, thick vials that held bubbling blue liquid that illuminated the room. A metal monitor flashed green statistic-lines close to a corner.
On the right side of the room there was what seemed like a glass half-circle atop a slightly-raised platform. There was a red light on top of the inner-circle(it looked purple, in addition to the blue light), very much like a warming-light for newly-hatched chicks.
Next to this was the largest contraption yet…a very large glass tube that looked very much like a test-tube. It stood on a metal podest and several wires and cords extended from its base. The glass was broken…
471 noticed that it looked very much like the incubator-capsules that Jumba's Experiments were conceived in…
She took a step closer, but squeaked in surprise and pain as she stepped on something sharp. She fell back, clutching her foot, and her head tensing with what had happened on top of all the anxiety she already held…
Tenderly, she reached down, and picked from the inset of her foot a tiny crystal of broken glass.
She looked back up at the broken incubator-capsule; had it come from there?
Her eyes trailed from the capsule to several feet next to it…there was another door. Unlike the others, there was no console next to it, high or low.
471 slowly stood up, limping on her hurt foot.
…After all that had happened, she didn't think that she could make it through another one of the doors.
…But somehow, she felt that this specific door would be the last one.
"…Why?", she asked herself.
"Because", her subconscious replied to her.
"You know."
Slowly, she hobbled over to this door, with the bubbly blue light making it appear somewhat symbiotic in complexion. She wondered how she would be able to open the door if there was no console…but as she stood about a foot before it, it hissed open like the others.
This room that she looked in on was the smallest yet…but, then again, it didn't really seem to be a room.
Entirely white on all sides (it reminded her of a sanitarium), about seven feet stood between the floor and another wall…which also held another door.
This door, unlike the others, was as white as the walls and indented patternly. Like the last, there was no console next to it – only a tiny, square-shaped window, set in near the top of the door. There was nothing else.
Something ominous about this presence, the walls, the room, and the door, seemed so much graver than all she had faced before. Her mind was no longer screaming and begging her to leave – it was warning her, in a cold voice that seemed to separate body from spirit. 471 knew something sat beyond that tiny window that was generating the ominous-ness, and it definitely wasn't friendly. Invisible, clawed hands seemed to extend from inside the room and pull her closer…an action that seemed sure to seal her death, but she stepped further anyway.
Obedient to the call of the mysterious, she dug her claws against the door and began a slow climb up to the window. Finally, after what seemed longer than necessary, she faced her head straight and peered inside.
More metal walls surrounded a cell so small, it would've made some Experiments claustrophobic. There were no lights visible; the light probably came strongly through the window to illuminate the room.
…And there, she saw something…
Sitting on an iron bunk that extended out of the wall, was a small, blue…something.
What species was it?
A small body…with proportions equal to other Experiments she had seen. A muscular anatomy was held under blue, aqua-marine fur and large, unsplit ears.
It was an Experiment!
…It didn't look female; too thick-bodied. He sat hunched-over on the cot, with his back to her, apparently breathing heavily. Only one set of his arms were out…did he only have one? There were no antennae or spines visible…
A tiny pool dripped from his forehead onto the metal floor – pit, pat, pit, pat, pit, pat…
Was it blood?
No; it was sweat.
Powerful muscles on his back expanded and contracted with each breath. His figure wasn't hulking…but it was definitely powerful.
471 couldn't see the Experiment's face, no matter how she twisted her head.
Yet…she was sure that the face of the Experiment would match the face she saw on the computer screen, earlier that day.
She breathed quietly against the glass of the window, and to her surprise, the Experiment raised his head.
"Starting torture early?", he said stiffly, in a dialect that seemed to mirror the strange form of writing from the disk.
471 almost fell from her grip. She felt a need to reply in some way…but something was keeping the words from leaving her throat.
The Experiment turned halfway around on the edge of cot; half of his was visible to 471. Did the features match the photographs?
"Open the goddamn door and let me at it", he said, to someone he obviously thought wasn't her.
Slowly, 471 swallowed the lump in her throat and said, in a tiny, near-inaudible squeak;
"Um…hello?"
The Experiment's ears shot straight up; his face went alert in surprise. He turned his face completely to 471, with more than surprise evident.
It was 541!
"You-!", he began to say in a choked voice.
"How-…who-"
ZHOOM!
471 spun around and fell from the door as the one behind her whizzed open. Horror-struck, she saw there standing a pale-skinned creature with an ugly, protruding mouth and an elongated head. His tiny, wet eyes showed utter rage.
"You-!", he hissed aggressively and hatefully, and 471 let out a scream.
(A/N: ooh; an actual cliffhanger!
Don't worry; Reihana can't die – she in the story later, isn't she? And don't worry; everything will be explained eventually.
…By the way, the creature that came through the door in the last paragraph was Zimbel, from 'Before Perfection'. What's his part in this?...
Gotta wait…
-to BlueFox, Mimic, Faith, and raVen: thank you so much for your compliments! Always appreciated, and returned with love! Thank you, my friends!
-WolfAmArOq: I re-sent those emails after you asked, last time…did you get them?
-DanMat6288: guess ya got your answer, huh?
I hope to get the next chapter up quickly; it's gonna be a short one.
Until then, may peace be with you! Stay non-violent, non-violent…by any means necessary.
See ya!)