Intro: Wow, this one took forever to get out, and is (relatively) short. I could go into great detail about why this is, but I'd be boring you I'm sure. Suffice to say that I haven't given up on this storyline, though I have had a great deal of other things to occupy my attention, not the least of which is another story I've started. Not sure when I'm going to post that one, but I'll let you know—it'll be arriving on before too long now. Here we have a rather provocative little number where I have, for reasons of said distractions, decided to accelerate the plot a shade. Hope the twists don't bug you too much, I've only been hinting at them for ten or so chapters.
Chapter 23 (Section 5, part 3): The Other Side
Slade's Secret Base
"You must understand, my dearest Slade," spoke the disembodied female voice from some indeterminate location nearby, "just how difficult it is to find a worthy opponent in this universe."
"Yes," Slade confirmed, answering calmly as he made his cautious way down the dark, featureless halls of his own inner sanctum, "I've had that trouble myself. I suppose I could see where you'd run into an identical problem."
"Oh, I'm glad I don't have to explain that to you then," the woman's voice spoke, and Slade continued in vain to determine just where it was coming from. "To answer your question, that's why I was holding back before. It's simply been a little while since I've had to utilize all of my abilities to take care of an opponent. For quite a long time now, I've had to operate under an extreme handicap to keep things interesting, and even then I've been generally matchless in the universe. You should be honored that you've brought out this side of me, my dearest Slade."
"Honored… yes…" Slade muttered, his fury restrained by the titanium willpower plating his mind. It had been hours now, an unending conflict, innumerable and meaningless units of time rushing by as he sparred with this incredible opponent. The transformation she'd undergone, the magnificent power she was marshaling in her effort to taste his blood, was intoxicating in its magnificence. So much was he enthralled in the duel he now waged that his natural frustration as her apparent invulnerability was overcome by the singing joy in his twisted heart. Such an opponent he'd only dreamed of.
He eventually returned to his cautious stalking, all the while cursing the necessity of spreading his facility over so much area. Of course, his rapid transit system had been the first thing to suffer from biological sabotage, and now he was in these damned, unshielded maintenance tunnels. Local geology was working in this bitch's favor, as he still had better than half a mile of ground to cover before he'd be in his research sector. A disembodied giggling, utterly effeminate and completely infuriating, told him that she intended to enjoy every minute of that journey.
The past eight hours had been a nightmare of incessant combat, his favorite kind to be sure, as the creature exercised its new, true, frightening power upon his base. Without form now, what had once been a mildly interesting example of the weaker gender had become a monster, a freak as detestable as any of the striplings that had blocked his path to supremacy these many months. She was now no longer the minuscule vessel of steel-wired strength that had nearly gutted him in the streets, but rather, and only as far as he'd been able to observe, some indescribable amalgamation of vegetation, a sentient plant with a terrible affinity for violence.
Such a thing hardly intimidated him, it was just another kind of foe after all, but disposing of her in this new form had proven… problematic. No matter what he did, he could not seem to cause her any meaningful harm, and even his endurance and arsenal would only last so much longer under the constant pressure she applied so strategically throughout this duel. She dogged his steps incessantly, striking out--
Suddenly the air cracked with rending noise as a wall panel he'd been leaning against burst forth and pressed him through the air. He rolled off of it and was flipping away by the time it slammed into the opposite wall, coming out of the flip with a phaser blazing just in time to fry several titanic, 2 foot diameter roots. There was a hissing screeching sound as the fleshy brown pseudopods went up in flames, the lashing limbs slurping back into the wet earth behind the paneling. Slade waited for all of the motion to stop, then holstered his weapon.
After he'd left his control room so many hours ago, his progress through the base had been one botanical ambush after another. Ignorant of the danger, he'd walked right into the medical room to begin tracking her from the spot he'd left her, only to find her exactly where she'd always been. Inspecting the flaccid body on the gurney had rewarded him with an empty husk with an inner coating of that nauseating pink liquid and the knowledge that the creature he'd brought into his inner sanctum wasn't nearly as helpless as he'd believed. Until he was holding the pile of flesh and body armor in his hands, he'd almost been convinced that this was another outside attack, a strike from the woman's insipid allies. This battle had driven into him how mistaken he'd been.
The trip to his armory had been uneventful, made at full run, but he'd arrived to find all of his equipment infested with crawling roots that infiltrated his walls and dug themselves through his explosives and ammunition like a billion hard, unyielding worms. He'd salvaged a number of small bombs, and of course his laser weaponry was all powered by fuel cells he kept in liquid nitrogen storage, not that he hadn't had to chip the frozen, dead roots off of that before he could get any. That was around the time he realized that she was playing with him.
His reminiscing was interrupted by an explosion of movement from behind him, where the bare earth the last attack had exposed sprouted and crawled with green growing things. He turned and tossed a bomb to cover his escape even as he began to sprint down the hall. The metal flooring in front of him began to shudder, and he threw himself forward in a full dive roll, clearing that section just in time for the whole building to buck violently as a fireball blew down the enclosed space behind him. The shuddering floor exploded at the same moment into a rising tower of metal and greenery that he cleared just as his shoulder touched the floor, and by the time he was on his feet and running again it had been intercepted by the chasing flames. Shrieking and hissing echoed down the hallway as his ears cleared from the explosion, and he stopped to lean against a wall and take several long, deep breaths.
Ambushes, constant and incessant, as she toyed with him in this prison his base had become. He searched in vain now for some vital spot, some heart of the beast at which he could strike, anything to counteract her unfathomable advantage of position. As long as she continued to dictate the terms of this death match, as long as she held the ultimate high ground, buried in the rich soil surrounding his fortress, he would not be able to defeat her. This fact gnawed at this acute mind as he worked through his entire knowledge of botany in search of some action he could take against her. In the end, she was but a weed, a festering lump of floral biota that would bend to his will just like everything else in this world, if only he could find the correct stimulus. He knew where he had to get to in order to have a chance in this, and so did it, and thus the constant harrying, the herding through every side passage and detour she could manage in an attempt to cut him off from his chemical warfare laboratory.
He had enough vile reagents stored there to wipe out all the flora in the state of California, and the Nuclear/Biological/Chemical (NBC) seal on that portion of his base would serve to keep out any inquisitive plant life. His detour to cut off main base power would prevent her from hacking the independent hard drive that controlled security there, even as it plunged them into darkness, and then there was always the 'backup' plan should even this fail. All he had to do was make it into that secure area, whip up his special formulation of Agent Orange, and begin to teach this alien freak what it meant to mess with the human species' crowning achievement—himself.
Slade checked the charge on his phaser as he began to stride down the hall again. A rustling in the air duct above him tipped him off, and he had five shots into the nearest vent before an eye's blink could have drowned out the flashing of incinerating air. The rustling stopped, and after a moment he began toward the tertiary route to his lab once more. As he passed under the spot he'd just quite literally ventilated, there was absolutely no warning this time.
A blossoming orange flower peeked out of the hole above him discreetly, and though he didn't see, it grew a wreath of serrated, pronged spines from the very heart of its bloom. There was a choking sound, and then the slightest tingling on his neck, and he spun and waved his arm just in time to nock down the barrage of barbs and come back with a purifying beam of hot energy. As the flower crisped and withered on its stalk, Slade bent to examine one of the barbs, only to drop it in disgust as it began to secrete some vile, stinking toxin.
A new rustling drew his eye and gun upward, where he was just in time to see something like thirty identical flowers emerge in three distinct bouquets, and his snapshots fried two as he backfliped away to the tune of an orchestra of choking and dodged the storm of virulently deadly needles launched by the third. He was around the next corner just in time for a second volley to paint the walls and floor with quills, and he froze on the corner, poised to strike until he knew the murderous flower arrangement was not going to follow him down this hall too.
Eventually, he pried himself off the wall, pressed a button on his belt that activated another auto-hypo injection of neural stimulants to fight off creeping fatigue, and began to stalk the hallways once again. It wasn't that much further now, and then she'd learn to fear him.
Oscillogenerator Secret Construction Site
Yellow floated his robotic exoskeleton along one of the building area's thoroughfares, giving a spot inspection of construction status as per White's orders. That pompous, insufferable slave driver knew that such an inspection was a waste of Yellow's time and talents, but ordered them anyway to demonstrate his power, and obviously to get Yellow away from the computer systems that gave him so much power. Having dedicated an insignificant portion of his mind to the menial task, his higher thought functions were free to occupy themselves by seething at White and laying out plans for his annihilation. He probably would have continued at these two tasks for some time if he hadn't happened to hover across the path of the being in question himself.
"No Blue, you simpering idiot, I won't see to the restoration of you eye personally!" he was shouting into the pickup for his portable com link as he simultaneously directed a team of mind slaves through the construction of a delicate power coupling in the side of the epically large structure towering over them. "Because I don't have time, and even possessing such I wouldn't waste it on such trivialities! I KNOW it's your only eye, I'm not blind like you pinhead! Just leave it to the regen tank, and leave me ALONE!" That was the end of the conversation as Yellow heard it, and though it hardly took much imagination to construct the other side, he none the less set one of his sub minds to the task of pirating the other half of the conversation for his archives. Even he had need of a touch of humor in his life now and then.
As his inspection rounds brought him closer and closer to the frightful being that had dragged them all to this dirtball backwater planet with his insane promises of galactic and intergalactic conquest, Yellow couldn't help but take in the creature's presence once again. It was certainly the kind of presence that took getting used to, like that of rattlesnake or a pluvian murder dragon.
Humanoid in form he was, identical, in fact, to the semi-intelligent simian species dominating this hole of a planet. Standing something like six feet tall as people here reckoned things, he appeared to be in the equivalent state of biological development as that displayed by the late teenage organisms Red had abducted so far. With the advancement of nanotechnology these days, that said little, especially considering the extensive work White had ostensibly had done, but it always intrigued Yellow to think that a being lacking even twenty cycles of experience at life could already be such a fiend. Bringing to his foremind the record of data he'd managed to claim from the IDP database, he began to review on the spot what exactly he was dealing with in White's rather diminutive but oh so dangerous form.
Records of his existence dated back to what must have been the incipience of his conception if his apparent biological age was at all accurate, prompting Yellow to think instantly of biological weapons programs he knew for a fact were running within the IDP's research branch in that period. However, for something like eleven cycles after the first records, all of which were censored beyond his ability to decrypt, there was no reference to him at all. This is where he arose again from obscurity, with several years of unexplained crimes, all involving unprecedented telepathic atrocities and horrendously violent power games, being attributed to him in retrospect by the IDP's investigation branch. The truth was that no one discovered White's existence and megalomaniacal goals until a number of cycles later still, something like the fifteenth cycle of White's life, with the appearance of one mysterious humanoid 'Skye,' in the IDP's death squad—err… elite special agent division.
For years the man had avoided all contact with the IDP, even though his criminal activities clearly violated the sphere of influence of interdimensional transmission and ultratechnology that those arrogant beasts so fiercely protected. Yellow himself hadn't lasted three quarters of a cycle after he'd first gotten into smuggling illegal slipspace drives, and so this fact rankled badly with the arrogant puddle of jello. Despite his obvious instability, the creature was devious in his plotting, meticulous in his preparations, and ruthless in his execution—more so than anyone Yellow had ever come across.
As he watched, the biped stood motionless, lording exceptionally exacting control over the meat puppets he'd personally lobotomized. A team of them worked in concert on the delicate parts of the superconductor conduit, all of them representing a tiny portion of that creature's almost infinitely divisible willpower. Suddenly, one of the emaciated zombies made a sickly groaning sound and collapsed, a large power coupling slipping to the ground. Yellow felt this neurons jangle as he braced himself reflexively, recognizing that particular component by the safety labels he'd personally applied to it.
The next moment there was a resounding 'whompf' and an incredible hiss as the cryogenic module released its payload into the workspace, a huge cloud of white mist expanding outward in a ballooning haze. Yellow backpedaled himself frantically, setting his hover cart to reverse in a desperate attempt to escape the creeping death of that white smoke, his minds boggling at the thought that White could be finalized by such an absurd stroke of chance. Flash calculating the odds, he felt a creeping glee as he set other portions of his mind to the task of organizing his escape from this rock and yet others to planning his return to business in the universe at large.
"DAMN USLESS SHITTY WORKERS!" bellowed an incensed voice from the middle of that creeping cloud of deathly cold, and Yellow stopped all his premature celebrations instantly. If he'd had anything even roughly equivalent to a heart, it would have dropped at the sight of White stalking stiffly from the cloud of murderously cold vapors, dragging the right side of his body in a hard limp as he escaped temperatures that should have left him stiff as a board.
Listening to him stream out a steady pulse of curses and swears in a number of popular languages, Yellow moved quickly to express the proper concern for him after that explosion, the trusty toady façade being a very safe one for White's unstable personality type. Greeting him with a sour glare, White continued to mutter as he staggered over to a convenient crate and slumped to a seat.
"Whige… if I mighe inquire… how exacgly did you survive ghag cryomass? That supercondugor operates at effecgive zero…" Yellow gurgled his confusion as politely as possible as he used a robotic arm to hand White a heating laser picked from the multitude of tools within his hovercarrier. White snatched the offered device and trained it on himself wordlessly as he smirked at Yellow's open confusion. He achieved a spectacularly malicious grin, then pointed it at the hovering bowl of slime next to him as the laser's gentle red glare melted flakes of frosted water vapor off his nondescript gray jumpsuit.
"Why Yellow…" White began, a frankly dangerous tone to his voice, "how terribly considerate of you to ask." The tone and smile warned Yellow clearly, but now that he'd asked there was no escape, and a bubbling fear began to play through his biomass as that malicious duo put out clear threat against his life. "This seems as good a time as any then for me to comment about how interested I've become in this incredible curiosity you seem to have about my past pukewad." That was it then, Yellow's biomass went rigid in terror, he'd been found out. White knew he'd been snooping into his history.
"Now… Whige, ghere's no reason to be hasgy here, ig was an idle curiosigy… greally noging ag all…" Yellow began to make excuses as best he could through the terror impressed upon him by that murderous grin, his minds racing through thousands of simulations as to what explanation was most likely to save his life. White ended all that with a very few words.
"Meh," he scoffed dismissively as that smile of his metamorphed from dangerous to manic, an almost euphoric glow of irrational happiness overcoming White's clear viciousness in an instant that left Yellow reeling. "You'll never escape my geas Yellow, not as long as I live. There's no reason you can't know more about me… simply because I'll never die… and thus you'll never have a chance to get away. The sooner you face up to this fact, the sooner you can get your small share of my galactic conquest."
Yellow was stunned by the change in White almost as much as he was terrified by the insight the creature had gained into his schemes. So far there had been no mention of his marshaling of Skye's resources against White… and there would be none, because there was NO WAY he'd learned of those. Keeping up an outer mask of cowed terror, Yellow's inner minds calmed down and began to absorb the facts of White's peculiar insanity, preparing to process the freely given knowledge approaching him. This episode he was witnessing could be critical in securing his escape.
"So you want to know of my past? You want to know why it is I can walk through a cloud of cryomass without being frozen into a meat popsicle?" White's voice was fluctuating oddly in tone, unable to hold a continual thread as he began to speak of himself. Without saying more to answer his question, he giggled insanely and flipped the heating laser into his right hand. Before Yellow's sensors, he pointed it at his left hand and slowly began increasing the intensity one notch at a time. The variable laser was at heart a high-power cutting tool, and in seconds the humanoid's hand was bathed in a red light used to shear ultradense alloys. His laugh reached a towering frantic pitch as the flesh on his hand blackened and crisped, smoking flakes dropping of in clods and lumps.
"Do you SEE Yellow? Do you see my PAIN?" White screamed, whipping the charred lump of flesh through the air to press the baking, sizzling meat against the sensor array on the front of his hovercarrier. Had Yellow possessed any concept of what it was to have limbs, he would have been nauseated. As it was, he looked through the bloody, blackened mess to see… metal.
He was synthetic! He didn't freeze in the cryomass because of an internal temp-sink for the power core. Yellow tried to conceive of how White could have concealed such a thing from everyone for so long, how that much metal could escape his own sensors and those of the IDP, how the maintenance and service had been kept secret, and as he did, White passed from his episode and back into silence.
"Whige… how did you geep…"
"It matters little the how my dear lump of bile..." White had regained his composure, apparently, "But so very much more so the why."
"Why did you geg the syngetic—"
"DROP THE ACCENT BEFORE I COOK YOU!" White snapped suddenly, the wave of pure psychic force coming off of him sizzling across Yellow's mind shield and exploding the heads of some nearby workers, the clouds of red haze floating the ground to land on the limp, decapitated bodies as the utterly cowed mentality altered his translator's audio configuration on the fly.
"Uh, you were saying then sir?" spoke a nondescript robotic voice, as completely devoid of emotion as any computer's, and White relaxed visibly as that nagging bite to his ears finally came to an end. Openness like this was so much more convenient than the dance of deception and tolerance of earlier days. For the powerful and the subjugated to be securely in their respective places… it was the way White liked things.
"Much better. Now, as I said, the important thing, the thing that matters about why I am what I am, is why I was forced to replace fifty percent of my perfect body with these disgusting, inefficient, ugly mechanical placeholders. I'm going to tell you, as I said, because it would simply be that much more representative of my ultimate power over your worthless fate." White was speaking calmly, gazing distantly at the bare metal from which all the charred meat had fallen, the tri-tanium claw of his cybernetic hand. The instability in his personality would have been contemptible if it weren't for the fact that he could eradicate a person in an instant… which promoted it to terrifying.
"Are you familiar with a condition known as gemini antipodal aurectomy?" White asked suddenly a moment later, and Yellow allowed the suitable pause for the rhetorical question. "Of course you don't, because it's a completely unique, artificial condition devised by my creators. Brilliant in the extreme, visionary even, GAA takes a single spiritual force and divides it between the corporeal matter of two virtually identical genomes. In such a way, the neutralizing opposing energies held within every soul can be separated and enhanced, leaving two beings infinitely more powerful than anything that soul could have been when confined to a single lump of biomass."
Yellow's minds worked frantically to decipher the unspoken portions of what he was being told, cross-referencing and making leaps of intuition and logic that his species was well known for. In the seconds during which White was distracted by the need to direct mind slaves with a prohibitive amount of his consciousness, Yellow snapped up the answer. GAA. White… and… Skye?
"However," White continued, Yellow undergoing a heavy realignment of all his perceptions as the enormity of this concept drove home. "There was a little something my progenitors failed to account for when they split a single soul between two beings. I mean, do you know what happens to flesh that lacks an underlying life force to support it?"
"I—"
"DECAY! ROT! DEATH!" White shouted to the room, leaping to his feet and thrusting his synthetic arm into the air. "Those fucks condemned me to rot in my own living body! To feel my organs and flesh decompose and fall dead to the ground, even as my perfect genes struggled to express their divine magnificence!" Yellow was accosted by a pummeling wave of psychic force, his mind shield flickering into a brilliant orange aurora under the force of White's passions, mind slaves all over the room falling dead to the ground, belching their feed pap onto the floor, or exploding into spheres of shattered skull and brain matter. The construction site was left quite a mess, and almost out of hand, White ordered robots and what mind slaves were still ambulatory to begin cleaning up the mess. He was calm again, staring down his body with those horrific, empty eyes at his mechanical left side.
"Of course, they suffered justly for their crimes against me. I didn't know this would happen at the time… but in retrospect the fate I granted them fit nicely with their actions. To think I believed myself to be merely securing the universe for my future conquest when I finalized them… but no matter, it all worked out in the end. My only solace in the matter is that my… 'counterpart' suffered the same fate as myself. He must have… yesssss…" With that final hiss, White stalked off, the sluggish motions of injured mind slaves stopping as he snuffed the ones that wouldn't recover and whipped the rest back into action.
Yellow was left cold, his biomass shivering uncontrollably in the wake of that monster's passing. He'd known the crook was evil, that he was megalomaniacal, even that he considered life to be expendable. Flaws all around to be sure, but nothing particularly unforgivable in the grand scheme of things, he'd done good business with far worse entities in that respect. No, the thing that chilled Yellow's goo, the thing that filled his many minds with revulsion, was this most recent revelation. White was completely unhinged, insane, out of his right mind. He'd been free of such episodes thus far, but if his insanity expressed itself in random violence and emotional instability like that often… well, he was going to get them all KILLED! Or perhaps even just kill them himself in a fit of some insignificant sound and fury. More than ever, Yellow was determined to escape, and he worked his neural connection to his computers as he set the next phase of his manipulations into action.
White was in a delirium of pleasure/pain as he stalked through his secret underground domain. On his right, the comforting enormity of his secret weapon sat in its immenseness, hulkingly huge in the cavernous space around them. All around him, his mind slaves worked their meaningless, valueless lives away at his whim, a tiny portion of his mind constantly tweaking their actions, directing everything around him in a symphony of motion that he constantly tracked and yet never consciously took any part in. As he moved he considered… things.
Things had been odd for him since his latest defeat by… that man. It wasn't as though he'd never lost to him before, but this one had had that strange effect on him, had thrown him into a funk of a kind he couldn't quite wrap his expansive mind around. Even now, he vaguely recalled having a conversation with Yellow only moments ago, but had no concept of what he'd spoken to that disgusting puswad about. It was probably just orders for the last few building materials he needed to complete his device, and so he let that concern float away in the stew his mind had become.
Instead of wasting a moment's concern on his minion, White turned his thoughts to the next phase of his plans. He'd have to find some new way to distract his opponent, clearly, and he felt that it would take little effort to range the general public against him as he had on several worlds where they'd sparred like this. That wasn't the problem at all really, rather, the acquisition of those special components he needed to complete his grand device. He reviewed his plan for this strenuously as he entered his office at the edge of the compound, locked the door behind himself, and proceeded over to the adjoining biological accommodation facilities.
Breaking into the IDP's special holding facility wouldn't be easy, not by any stretch of the imagination, and he wouldn't be able to use the others for this either, not with Green out of the picture and everyone else baiting his opponent's attention away from the real threat. He paused here for a moment as he splashed some water over his face, rubbing the chapped flesh vigorously, wondering momentarily why the left side of his face was getting so scratched up. Stopping, he glared at the fleshless mechanical skeleton that was his hand, paused in silent confusion as he tried to remember opening it for maintenance, then shrugged away his concerns and pulled a metal tub out from under his sink.
The tub was full of pink goo, and when he dipped the metal hand in, it came out coated in the viscous slime. An electrical current ran through it the next moment, and in seconds he had a perfectly formed hand once again, completely real and living in every aspect except actual fact, fully able to stand up to any test, and containing special nanodevices that would tell any sensor directed his way that it was a calcium-bone skeleton beneath the living flesh. As long as it was on his mind, he also took this moment to get a good look in the mirror.
The autoflesh on the left side of his face was scratched and bleeding, but knitted cleanly as he watched. Feeling over the strong, pale features, he paused to look into his own eyes. A thrill ran through his body, a flash of hate so strong he could hardly contain it, the same one that always staggered him every time he was forced to look at his own visage. So much he reminded himself of that man, that detestable being who possessed the other half of HIS soul. The only comfort he had anymore was in the infinite reflections of the mirrored contacts he kept over his eyes. The clear image of himself/that man bounced back and forth a thousand thousand times into the distant depths of his own eyes.
What had his creators been thinking? He was willing to grant that they built him with certain desires in mind, and that the demands of gene linking left him without melanin in exchange for his powers, but why still, WHY had they left such a blatant imperfection in his immaculate DNA? Albinism, huh, he hadn't stood for that for a moment, and he listened to the whisper of servomotors in his skull as he shifted his eyes back and forth to test their articulation. Those useless eyes he'd gouged out with his own hands rather than put up with, months before the GAA rot had set into his left side. The mechanical ones with their utterly black, mirror-polished surfaces were so very much more attractive, separating him at last from the identity of that man.
His mind shifted back to his planning almost randomly, and had he been aware of his brooding at all, he would have been concerned by this leap. The IDP special holding facility, the best kept secret in the cosmos… and he knew where it was. After the ordeal of discovering it, extracting what he needed would be child's play. Because, of course, it didn't matter how quickly they completed the shell of his machine unless they also obtained the key components, the twin catalysts that would allow him to harness the energy of existence itself to his whims. The core containment chamber was done, two child-sized life support thrones to hold his two secret weapons in place.
It tickled him to no end that he would use his parents' legacy, the ultimate brain child of his creators, the most brilliant product of consciousness ever to exist, in his bid for material domination. How the pieces and parts of his creators that remained would twitch and jiggle in the coffee can he'd buried them in, should they know what use he would put their creations to. It wasn't that much short of the use they'd had in mind, but it was so ideologically different… it was beautiful. Oraborus, snake who eats her own tail, the infinite, all that is, eternity. Zephyrum, the ultimate absence that allows all others to be, the nothing, the placeholder, zero. Those would be his weapons.
An interlude—Red
The finely cut man in his 20's sat at the bar in the nightclub and sulked slightly. He carried his right side a little tenderly, but not so much that it was noticeable on his chiseled body. There was a bottle of hard whisky on his one side and a bottle of hard vodka on the other, and in between was a row of several dirty glasses. Both bottles were half full, or half empty if you prefer.
"Ish… ish not even like I knew her that well…" Red slurred out to the barkeep, who did a great job of ignoring him and keeping perfect track of his tab at the same time. "I mean… I mean… she hated my gustth—my gustthh—my insides. She wouldn give me the timea day if I washh the last male in the uinvershh. But… but… sheshh gone now!" The extensive nature of his misery was clear to the barkeep, who continued to politely ignore him. It was early in the day still, and he had glasses to clean before the night rush came. Honestly if the guy wasn't in so good with the owner, he wouldn't have thought twice about sending him to an actual bar somewhere where a professional could listen to his sob story. This was his freekin night job for christsake.
"Oh honey," spoke the other barkeep, a young girl working her way thorugh college whose name he couldn't remember, "You need to sober up and forget about this other lady. I'm sure an attractive hunk of man like you can get plenty of other women…" As she batted her eyes at him suggestively, the barkeep got completely fed up and left them behind. Back at the bar, Red was highly receptive, seeming to loose about ten shots worth of inebriation in a few seconds as the woman really turned on the flirt.
"Yeah… Yeah you're right. Say, you wouldn't want to go out for a steak or something? I know this place that makes the best rare steaks—"
"Oh now, I couldn't," she rejected coyly, stepping back from the radiant smile he put out suddenly, "I'm a vegetarian."
"Really? What a coincidence… I have vegetarians for dinner all the time!" and Red began to turn on all his charm without shame. It was actually kind of sad how easy it was sometimes.
"Well, alright. I can order a salad or something," she gave in, as though there was some point at which she hadn't been drooling over him.
"That's the spirit, I promise you won't live to regret it." Chuckling internally at his own shallow wit, Red took the young woman by the arm and led her out the door, his metabolism destroying the alcohol in his system the minute he let off pumping it into himself. As he took in the potpourri of the woman's flesh, trying to imagine what it would taste like, trying to envision the sounds of her screams and the warmth of her blood and vitae on his mouth, he let thoughts of Green slip from his mind.
In the end, he never even really knew her as more than an unreachable goal, a meal he'd never have. It was a shame loosing her incredible mind as far as ditching that whack job white was concerned, but he was relatively certain that Yellow had something going on the side too, so even that didn't worry him too much anymore. She had been frightening, but still… not as scary as he'd always heard. What was it about her that had people so terrified, that prompted the IDP themselves to go out their way and lock her up? Ah well, in any case, he had something to occupy his mind and energies now. Licking his serrated teeth, he took another long drag of the woman's aroma, prompting her to brush away his overly forward nuzzling. Mmm, sweet anticipation.
Slade's Secret Base, halls near the biological warfare laboratory
Lasers blazing, Slade cut a smoking path through the hard greenery standing between him and his destination. The walls were alive, the ground was crawling, and the ceiling was hung with vines, flowers, seed pods, all rippling with death aimed his direction. As he burnt down another projective seed pod, torching it before it could put a hard pea of plant matter through his body armor, a flower dripped down to spray a cloud of paralytic toxins into his already dripping-wet biohazard mask. A few more of those would clog the filters and suffocate him, but he was a little too busy slicing hot light through vines as thick as his leg with thorns like wicked daggers to worry about such a passive expiration.
Twisting through a complex leap, he lashed out in every direction with burning death, a terrible screeching and hissing meeting his twin, high-powered hedge clippers. Landing awkwardly on the shifting earth, he threw himself forward to avoid a wall of poisonous prongs, then opened fire again to burn down the spearing thorns. His next roll caused him a flash of agony as a fresh coating of thorns on the ground stabbed his armor, penetrating slightly and drawing blood. Without time to worry about toxins there, he threw himself into a full-tilt sprint, guns blazing away at everything his eye could track, the flashing light, bursts of flames, and all-consuming shriek of agonized plant melding together into an unreal orgy of sensation that flooded his adrenaline-sharpened mind like the ultimate cocaine high.
An indeterminate period later, he caught site of the bio-lock, the entrance to his secured laboratory, and the incredible armada of resistance that still stood between him and it. Without thinking twice, he holstered his guns, pulled his last bomb from his belt, and flung it forward full force, pegging the door dead on as he drew his knives and dove into the writhing dirt. Several seconds of desperate struggling with strangling, stabbing vines, and the explosive turned the hallway into hell.
When he could see and hear again, everything was one bright orange glare from the fires, he switched to reserve oxygen from his mask and began to beat his way through incinerated foliage with his knives, slicing down vine after vine as the screech of dieing plant joined the roar of the flames in a delightful knell of misery. The space was a raging inferno, but his armor kept out the worst of it while he endured the ungodly heat that penetrated. In moments, he was at the lab door, and he initiated the secret manual override key he kept in his armor, working quickly to escape the heat and the counterattack his opponent was no doubt ranging against him even now.
Sliding the key into a locking bar, he twisted it hard, pulled out the manual control lever, cranked the door open, withdrew the key, slipped inside, and slammed the mechanism locked again from the counterpart panel inside. The sound of the lock clapping home was a delightful pronouncement of his ultimate victory, a single clang that trumpeted to the universe his superiority. Turning from the wall of security that would buy him the time he needed to cook up a more permanent solution, he sheathed his knives and stripped the filter mask from his faceplate. He took his first unfettered breath in an hour as he glanced into his lab, and it mutated into hideous hiss as his every muscle tensed in a spasm of fury and reflexive hate.
In an instant he was crushed by a wall of vines that wrapped him in a steely vice grip and dragged him into the room. His guns and knives, his garrote, his lock picks, his detonators, his utility belt, his amour, everything was striped off of him in a flurry of leafy motion as his arms were wrestled above his head and his legs were bound together. In seconds he was in the center of the room, striped down to this skin suit and his mask as an enormous branch jammed into this back and bent him backwards until he was utterly immobilized. His muscles bulged and rippled, tight cords of hard flesh flexing futilely against the overwhelming force ranged against him, but as his air was cut off by a noose of vines tightening around his throat, even this resistance came to a halt.
Left only semi-lucid by the strangulation, the world took on a shimmering edge he knew to be oxygen deprivation preceding to asphyxiation. Into his limited field of view, filling the world available to him from his single eye, there came a face of sorts, or at least a conglomeration of foliage that his failing mind recognized as a face.
"Oh Slade… how close you were, how very very close." Her voice was a taunting tickle across his ears, and if he'd had the wind, he'd have snarled at her. As it was, he was saving the little bit he had left. "You wouldn't believe the trouble I had to go through to get in here. I mean, stealing the explosives, building the shaped charge, knocking out the wall, it's just not the kind of thing you can do without fine manipulators. I think that's why the humanoid form is so popular among this universe's intelligent and… semi-intelligent species."
That said, the face grew downward, as though the body was emerging slowly from the base of the hovering head, and in an explosion of motion, a full form bloomed out of the budding. Gracefully falling to the floor, Green stood up tall, a perfect humanoid body completely constructed of plant life, living bark, leaves, and stems all reaching, twisting, and combining into a spectacular female construction. Crowning her head was a fantastic drapery of willow branches and flowering vines that fell in flowing waves all the way down to her feet, and somewhere in that mess of weeds, a trail of core roots fed back up into the ceiling again, connecting her to the biomass surrounding his base.
"So Slade… before I, in my benevolence, extend to you the courtesy of quick death that you would have denied me… how does it feel to be beaten? Does it sting?" and she punctuated the question by stretching him harder over the branch, his spine creaking with the strain, discs threatening to separate over the nauseating stretch. She was obviously trying to wring the last breath from his body, to extract a gasp of agony from his lips before finalizing him. He knew this because it was what he would have wanted. Of course, he wasn't about to waste his last breath in agony, not when there was such a great joke being brought to culmination.
"Heh… heh heh heh… heee" Slade wheezed out a distinct laugh through teeth clenched in seizing, burning pain. His one eye was wide with hilarity, his oxygen deprived brain staggering through oceans of fury, hate, pain, and humor, the last showing the strongest and catching Green off guard. She sputtered in disbelief, stepping back in a swirl of her own flowering hair, then her ethereal, perfect face twisted in terrifying anger.
"What's so damn funny?" she spat at him, and it was several long moments before she remembered herself and let off of wracking him far enough for him to draw a breath. As he wheezed for air, suspended off the floor in an unbreakable grip, the first thing he did as he fed his burning lungs was choke out ever louder laughter, reveling in the way that thing's face distorted as he taunted her in the moment of her 'victory.'
"Do you really…," he gagged and laughed at the same time, "think I'd come here…," he stopped to take a gasping wheeze, "without a solid contingency plan?" He was grinning manically under his faceplate, and his eye showed every moment of his incredible defiance to his opponent.
"Oh really?" her skepticism was clear, but he'd planted the seeds of doubt, he knew she couldn't be sure he didn't have a backup plan, and the best part was—he DID!
"Why yes… I am a cautious man after all. While I admit I never saw this particular challenge coming, and while I also admit that I was ill-equipped to fight your particular brand of attack… I'm confidant that you'll find my failsafe much more able to meet the challenge you've presented me with. Granted it's hardly a satisfying victory… but I'll take it." The edge on these last words tipped Green off at last, and her eyes widened in comprehension as she came to understand the particular form of failsafe he was talking about. She clearly hadn't thought him capable of it, but this humanoid form she'd granted him to interact with was showing that she believed it now.
"A death safety… linked to your vital signs yes?" she guessed, and he simply chuckled all the more at how much alike the two of them thought. "No doubt you've linked it to something nasty hidden away in your little hidey-hole… a hydrogen bomb… or perhaps a chroniton detonator? Hmm… no, no… let me guess," she chided him almost amicably when he began to breath a taunt of his own, her mannerisms almost pleasant as her mind worked at unraveling his surprise. "Yes, there do seem to be unusual amounts of refined chromium residue around the reactor core of your power plant." Suddenly, she turned a violent smirk on him, sliding in close until she was rubbing her body against his. "You dog you, hiding a weapon like that in a place utterly incapable of supporting life! I guess I won't be killing you as immediately as I originally thought."
"Heh, yess, I was hoping that would be the case." Slade wasn't entirely sure what was going on, but suddenly, the fact that she'd technically beaten him all the way down to his suicide contingency didn't seem to matter anymore. He'd beaten her soundly in hand-to-hand combat between two humanoids, humiliated her even, and in light of that, his current situation was almost comically poetic. He HATED poetry, and it rankled him to be beaten in any way to be sure, but there was something here, an echoing spark of genius from this creature that he couldn't deny. Perhaps… perhaps there was one worthless old adage he might give some credit to here. If you can't beat them…
"Green, or at least, I believe that was what they called you—" he began, using a tone as confident and businesslike as he could manage considering his bound position. He wanted to make it clear he felt he was dealing with an equal, despite appearances.
"Your organs would be incapable of producing the sounds that comprise my given name… so yes, that code will do for now." Her tone was imperious, but at the same time, receptive, and she was still extremely close to him. He could tell she was sensing something of what he had.
"It hasn't escaped my notice that you and I have similar opponents to deal with. It occurs to me that we may be of a great deal of use to one another, as such things go," he continued slowly, and her interest peaked visibly as she somehow managed to wrap herself around his muscular form even more closely.
"Well, I suppose a base for a base… and a humiliating defeat for a humiliating defeat may just about even the score between us. Go on monkey man… I'm listening…"
Preview: Now that that's behind me and similarly now that the term is over and I'll actually have TIME, the rest of this story should be easy enough to finish. This was always little more than a practice piece for me, and now that I've spent the better part of a year warming up, its about time for me to move on to other things. That said, stay tuned for what will probably be the last or second-to-last section: The Quiet War. It promises to be bitchin' good.