Title: Choices and Chances: Chapter Eleven

Author: Stormhawk

Chapter Word Count: 1721

Notes: I wasn't going to upload so many chapters today...but here they are anyway...

Please read and Review.

Stef woke up, and rubbed her head, knowing that there was a bruise there. She stood up and looked around. She was stuck in hell, it had been Carlson' string so she had no link to the Matrix, no way back.

No way back. No way home. This was going to be her prison forever...unless the zombies ate her.

As she walked down the hall, the weight of her reality set in. She really wasn't going to get out here. This was nothing and nowhere, the only way out was when you went in. She ran to the rotunda and through to the room they had landed in.

She jumped up as high as she could, remembering how far the door had been up. She looked around as she passed it...but there was nothing, as if there had been no door there ever. Nothing above and only hell below...how very appropriate she mused as she turned and fell back down, this time she landed so hard that the floor cracked.

"No!" she screamed at nothing in particular and punched the floor. "No!" she beat her hands against the rough concrete floor, and then slumped, defeated. She slowly picked herself up and walked back down one of the other corridors, wiping the tears from her face.

Only then did she notice her knuckles were bleeding. She kicked open one of the doors to a room and found an old mattress and sheet, no one had used them for a long time.

Sitting on the mattress she took off her tie and wrapped it around the one that bleeding the worst, and tore a strip off the sheet for the other. Even in this lost place, it shouldn't take more than a few hours to heal.

But what was the point in healing them? She wasn't going to get out of there, she was going to be alone forever. She lay down on the mattress and tried to get as comfortable as possible, given that the mattress was covered with dust buildup from an unknown amount years and there was no pillow.

She was never going to see Darth again.

She wasn't going to ever see anyone ever again, but the prospect of never seeing Darth again broke her up inside.

She choked back a sob, but the tears fell anyway. Unless Mero got drunk and felt generous enough to get her out of there, there was no way she was ever going to get to see Darth again.

She used the sheet as a handkerchief and wiped her face with it, well at least, if she was gone, he'd be able to find a normal girl, a human who his crew could accept, instead of a half-breed experimental agent who did nothing but complicate his life. He'd be better off without her.

That didn't mean she wasn't going to miss him.

She grabbed the corner of the mattress and cried into it, weeping for what she had lost and what had never been and could never be.

Even though she knew it wasn't possible, sometimes in the dead of night, she had imagined what it would be like to be normal, living without the war or the Mainframe, just being young and in love without having to worry about anything, like it should be.

Then she sat up and slapped herself, "crying isn't going to solve anything," she said to herself. "You know that. Stop being a wuss and get up and do something."

But I'm tired, I'm in pain and I have no way out of here.

"Stop whining."

Sleep first? Then figure a way out of here?

"A couple of hours, nothing more. Just enough to get back to full strength."

Ok...

So she fell asleep, determined that when she woke up she was going to get a way out of there.

Some time later, she was woken up by someone roughly shaking her, "you wanna live?" the man asked her.

"Huh?" she asked as she rubbed her head.

"They're coming," he said as he pulled her to her feet and started running down the corridor.

"Who?" she called after him. "And who are you?"

"Hank McCoy, people call me The Beast."

"Ha ha, so funny I forgot to laugh," she said as she tried to keep up with him. He was a tall, bulky, rugged-looking man.

"Hurry up!" he said as he increased his speed even more.

"Who the hell are we running from?"

"We're in an assassin's playground, where the hell do you think we are?"

"The bowels of hell."

"This place ain't as nice as that." He grabbed her arm and jumped fifteen feet straight up and then into a small crawlspace. "Now quiet if you value your life."

She looked past him and saw a bunch of other programs hiding in the same space. She went to ask something but his hand clamped over her mouth and grew shaggy brown fur and claws. A bear's hand. He looked at her with golden eyes and shook a single claw at her.

She nodded and sat quietly.

"Dear god help me!" a man screamed from the hallways below. Several of the programs in the crawlspace leaned forward to see who it was that in trouble.

It wasn't unusual for a program to use seemingly religious sayings, it wasn't that they had faith, they were just appropriate at the time.

A dark-skinned man with blue clawed hands was thrown against a wall by a vampire. The vamp chuckled and watched as the man tried to get up, but he was bleeding from a wound in his leg.

The vamp took out a dagger with an elaborate handle and twirled it menacingly, "you know, the wolf-brothers are right, this place is fun."

Stef shot the werebear a look, "are you going to let him kill that guy?" she mumbled through his hand.

The werebear looked at all the programs and whispered, "the needs of the many outweigh that of the few."

"Yeah well," she said as she pulled his hand away and jumped from the crawlspace, "watch Star Trek sometime!" Tackling the vampire to the ground, she grabbed his dagger and stabbed him in the heart with it.

With a scream, he disintegrated and turned to dust. Only CAH vampires do that. Real vampires don't turn to dust, only the ones who had been human, as the coding was inherently unstable.

She tossed the dagger to the ground, "well, that's some of the anger out of my system." She looked down at the exile who was tearing strips off his shirt to bandage the wound in his leg.

"Are there any others down there Scai?" the werebear called down.

"No," the man called up. "He was the only one left."

"Are you sure? It sounded like there was a lot," the werebear said as he jumped down.

"There was," Scai replied, "two more CAH vamps, but I took care of them."

"They're getting better," he said as he shook his head. He looked up at the crawlspace, "you guys are right to leave now, but be careful." He looked at Stef, "I'm Joshua, who the hell are you?"

"Someone who feels like an utter, total and complete idiot. I don't believe that that bastard actually outsmarted me."

Scai took a look at her and then scrambled back, holding out his claws in a defense position, "forget idiot, that's agent."

"What?" Joshua exclaimed as he jumped back and transformed more toward a bear.

"Relax," Stef said. "Except for that stupid Frenchman, his traitorous ex-agent lapdog and the rest of the jerks who work for him, I like exiles. And I think I need your help."

Scai relaxed, "I at least owe you one. What are you doing down here anyway?"

"I don't believe he tricked me," she muttered. "I bought it, I bought it hook, line and stinker."

Scai looked at Joshua, "you have any idea what she's going on about?"

"I thought this place didn't exist, I thought you people being here was a mistake, I mistake Mero overlooked, that he didn't know you were here. I never even thought about it, I was just happy that Smith was alive. I'm such an idiot."

"Merv programmed this place, it's a prison," Joshua explained. "He doesn't keep all of his prisoners in the cells of the chateaux, the ones he's finished with come here. And then his assassins and henchmen use as target practice, we're just shooting gallery ducks, fair game."

"Is there a way out of here?"

"If there was, would we still be here?" Scai asked her.

"But there is a way back to the Matrix?"

"Back to?" the werebear asked her, "where are we then, the magical land of Oz? This is just a programmed room tacked onto the dungeon. Nothing fancy."

"But I came in through the backdoors..."

"Then it was a backdoor, literal one, into a program. Like a computer program, instead of a location cheat within the Matrix, the door you took was a program cheat."

"If I had a key, could I get out of here?"

"I suppose it would be possible," Joshua said, "but no one in here has a key."

Stef patted all her pockets and fished out her key, "not quite no one." Scai and Joshua looked at it like it was the Holy Grail or something equally precious.

"How come they didn't take that off you?" Scai asked in amazement.

"They didn't know I had it with me, we used their one of their keys to get into the backdoors."

"We're finally getting out of here," Joshua said, "we all were prepared to die in here."

"The funny thing about being prepared to die," Stef said with a nostalgic smile, "is that those are times you usually live. Now which door?"

"There are a lot of doors in here," Scai said, "but only a few actually work with a key, we know this because the assassins and whatnot only use a few, if the others worked, they would use them as well."

"Good point."

"We'll have to gather everyone up," Joshua said.

"Then do it," Stef ordered as she pulled the impromptu bandages off, her hands were better now, and it was time to get the hell out of hell.