Lull 4.02

We were down in my room. "I'd just like to say again that I'm still not sure about this."

"Yeah," Rachel said, a touch annoyed… or angry. It was sometimes hard to tell with her. "You already took my blood and made the stuff."

I wasn't quite a Tinker. Tinkers at least played at being scientists or engineers and I just sort of put ingredients together and zerg stuff happened. Like the flies-I knew that feeding maggots on creep that was mixed with bits of crushed up bugs would make zerg-flies that had bits of the other bugs in them, but I had no idea how it worked and mixing it together and wanting it to happen was the full extent of my involvement. I knew that certain kinds of chemicals were needed for the cocoon, but not why or what they did. And I know that I could use a few drops of my blood, any convenient source of relatively clean water, a little bit of biomass from whatever was handy, and just a touch of creep in a vial left to stew for a couple of days to make a solution full of infestation virus but I had no idea how any of that cooked together. My best guess was that it had something to do with psionics.

The closest thing to actual science I had done was trying to modify the virus to give me what I wanted. I had vague ideas of how to go about it, but I was mostly just shooting in the dark-the first successful rat had been a fluke that it's taken me three more tries before I'd known how to do it.

"I'm just saying," I explained, "out of ten attempts I've only got four successes." I'd managed to create two more rats that weren't in the hivemind and didn't look like Zerg, and I'd been able to replicate it in a half-dead squirrel I'd found floating in the sewers when I'd tried. The trick, so it seemed, was to taste some of the infested to be's blood, then mix a little bit of it with mine before it went into the vial. "I know I've made the virus already, but you can still back out or, or put it off, it's not too late."

Why did I make the infestation pod? I'd said I'd have to have made a full sized one before I could even consider testing it on Rachel, then like a dumbass, I'd actually made one. Turns out, infestation pods didn't take as long to grow as the Cocoon.

"Taylor," Rachel began, "you said all that already. And what could happen. I'm not stupid."

"You could die! Or worse!" Oh God, why did I even start this?

"I could also die in the hospital because a doctor fucked up," Rachel answered bluntly. "I trust you more than a doctor. You gonna fuck up?"

"I'm going to try not to!" That wasn't the point, why couldn't I…

"If I may?" Lisa interrupted as she stood from her seat on my table. "Bitch, Taylor doesn't think you know what the risks are-let me finish," she said as Rachel looked ready to interrupt, "but she's wrong. Rachel, on the other hand," Lisa continued, "doesn't seem to get just how worried that you are Taylor, and I don't think we're gonna get anywhere until we get this settled. I'll be right back, Rachel, why don't you tell Taylor what you think the risks are?"

Lisa then left up the stairs. I turned back to Rachel. "So..."

Rachel growled, just a bit, "this is stupid. Look, you said that if it doesn't work I'll die, end up a puppet, or be stuck with you forever, right? That last one doesn't sound that bad, really" she said looking away.

"Or you could end up a freak like me, or a complete monster."

"The assholes already think I'm a serial killer, so why worry about being a monster?" Rachel said with all the wisdom of someone who clearly thought I was overthinking this, "and I don't give a shit how I look as long as my dogs still recognize me." Rachel answered simply. "So it's not a problem. Why are you so scared? Brian said it was okay."

"Yeah, but between his dad and getting… Aisha settled, I'm not sure he's on his A-game right now, so..."

"He takes his job as our leader very seriously," came Lisa's voice from upstairs, "and you might not have noticed since you hardly ever left your room in the last few days, but he's been kicking himself over letting us get captured. He's not gonna half-ass a decision like this." Lisa was holding a stack of four standard sized school notebooks. "We looked at your results, you only had the two dead rats and the one puppet," Lisa said, "Rachel knows the risks. I know she knows the risks, because of the detailed instructions she gave me for how to take care of her dogs." Lisa then handed me the notebooks and I looked through them. "I had to write it all down," she continued, "because each individual dog has it's own ludicrously specific schedule, diet, discipline methods, and preferred treats, and they cross reference each other." The notebooks were all full. "Rachel explained this to me several times and I'm pretty sure that she'll either break my legs or haunt me if I make even the tiniest deviation." Rachel glared at Lisa, who ignored her and gave me the cheekiest of grins, "we've all been busy while you were experimenting… except for Alec, I haven't seen him in a few days. Now, assured that Rachel knows what she's getting into?"

I nodded, "yeah."

"Okay then," Lisa continued, "and Rachel, Taylor has no faith in her pseudo-tinkering and would never forgive herself if something bad happened to one of her new friends and it was even tangentially possible that it was her fault."

"Look it's not-excuse me for a second"

I had to redirect some drones. Someone else was poking around in the tunnels I'd set my drones to digging. Some kind of machine. It looked a bit like an animal of some kind. It hadn't spotted my drone, as far as I could tell, not yet. I had a few circle around and approach from the other end of the tunnel so I could get a better look.

The machine was kind of hard to place. It was clearly some kind of winged probe, but it was modeled on a quadruped and walked on four legs. It kind of looked like a cross between stealth jet, a cat, and a dinosaur, or maybe a…

"Dragon!"

"What?" Rachel asked.

"Dragon has a suit in my tunnels, Dragon is exploring my tunnels, Dragon knows about my tunnels which means the PRT knows about the tunnels they're gonna think I'm preparing for war or something my emergency escape plan is ruined, we're so-"

"Taylor!" Lisa shouted, "calm your scaly blue tits." I forced myself to take a deep breath. "Okay now, what's it doing?"

"Looking around," I said, splitting my attention between my room and the tunnel. "It hasn't spotted my drones yet, but-never mind, it just saw one!"

The dragon suit moved around a corner and turned its eyeless head in such a way that even with its blank expression it was clearly trying to evoke the idea that it was looking my drones in the eye.

"Taylor," Lisa asked, "is the suit armed?"

I had my drones give it another once over just to be sure. "Not that I can tell, but there could be weapons inside or something."

"Does it look stealthy?"

"Not particularly," I answered.

"Okay," Lisa continued. "Has it acted at all aggressive since it spotted your drone?"

"No. It's just kind of staring at a drone and-It's backing up," The dragon suit was retreating, back the way it came… and walking backward, which had me concerned about what it was capable of seeing or what it had already seen. I raised a finger to cut off Lisa. The dragon suit backed away slowly, and after thirty seconds I hesitantly had a drone follow after it. The suit was capable of moving quite fast, but I was hesitant to make my drone speed up. Eventually, I managed to track the suit back to a tunnel I hadn't dug and found it climbing up through a trap door in a steel panel on the tunnel ceiling. The trap door slammed closed as the drone approached, and then the edges of the opening started glowing red.

It took me a moment to realize that, just above my drone, the dragon suit or someone working with Dragon was welding the trap door shut.

"It's gone," I said. "And I don't think it's coming back."

"Where was it in the tunnels?" Lisa asked. "Was it anywhere near here?"

I thought about it for a second. "No."

"This was a test," Lisa said with complete certainty. "The Protectorate Capes implicitly agreed, on camera, to leave you alone and not come near here as long as we didn't start shit, but they didn't say they wouldn't poke around in places you've worked… And if you'd attacked Dragon's probe, then they'd have had an excuse to come after us since you'd have technically started it..." Lisa got silent for a while. "Dragon wanted you to spot her, too," she said… I kind of got the impression that she'd meant to start with that. "I don't like this. Either the substitute director is retarded, or he's not that concerned with casualties… Well, it could also mean that the PRT finally has a good psych profile on you and they're just being dicks because they know you won't retaliate, but I'm not seeing Dragon going along with that and honestly, who would be that petty?"

I shrugged just in time for Rachel to say "Drunk Alec?" Alec was not a fun drunk, and now I had a lock on my booze fridge.

"Okay," Lisa said without acknowledging Rachel, "This is a problem, but it's not a big one. We'll just have to up our schedule… Taylor, can I borrow your communicator? I think I'm gonna have to talk with your dad directly for a few days and… wait, did I ever ask you if you were okay with doing a call-in interview?"

"No, you didn't, but I guess it'd be okay." Honestly, I had no idea what to do and was more than content to let Lisa and Dad take care of this. "And yeah, you can borrow the communicator if you really need it."

"Okay," Lisa began, "if that's..." she looked at the Cocoon and then sighed. "Right… Taylor, I looked at what you've done with this infestation stuff… Which really needs a new name if you're gonna be doing what you want to be doing with it, and I'm like 90% sure that nothing bad is gonna happen. Most of what's left is stuff Bitch would be okay with. Between that and what we covered early, are your fears soothed?"

"A little."

"And Rachel," Lisa continued, "just so we're all on the same page: We're the first positive human contact Taylor's had in months, you're the first one she got close to, the first real friend she's had in years, she considers you her best friend, she's noticed that you don't exactly get along with the rest of us-and if I may give my own opinion," she said shifting gears, "I think this friendship is good for the both of you-and she kind of loves you in a friendshippy way."

"Lisa that's not how I'd-" I was cut off by Rachel hugging me. Which was awkward, because she'd stripped naked in preparation of getting into the pod first thing upon coming down here

There was a flash and a clicking sound and I took note of Aisha's presence in the room. I could have sworn that Brian had taken her back to his apartment-the one he lived in, not the one here, but with her power, it wouldn't have been hard for her to sneak back over I guess. It was a simple matter to telekinetically snatch the phone from her hand and gently pull it to myself. Rachel released me just in time for me to look through the device to try and figure out how to delete photos and…

...Where did this phone come from? I set it down on my table and got back to the task at hand.

"So," Lisa finished explaining, "You can understand why Taylor's worried about something going wrong, right?" Rachel nodded, "good. So, now that everybody's concerns are addressed and everybody knows why everybody else is acting the way they are, so we can get down to business." Lisa blinked. "Or not. Postponing this would probably be a good idea and… No? Okay."

A flex of my psychic muscles caused the front of the semi-translucent purple infestation pod to unfold. I went over to my workbench to grab the vial of Rachel-Keyed Infestation virus and a syringe. I had a full box of needles. When our boss, Coil, had been talked into supplying me with, well, supplies for my quasi-tinkering, he'd also provided me with basic medical supplies, even though I'm not that kind of wet-tinker. I think the needles were meant for collecting samples, but honestly, I'd never touched them until I needed to inject test subjects with experimental viruses.

"Okay first, Rachel," I began, "I'm going to inject you with a bit of this virus. It's specially keyed to you and it'll work by essentially rewriting your DNA." I began preparing the needle "Then you'll step into the pod," I used my psychic powers to gently pull a flexible organic tube from inside the pod, "and then this goes down your windpipe. You'll be breathing through this while you're in the pod so you don't drown in goo. Then I close the pod, and it fills with this, well, goo that's supposed to stabilize the Infestation process, and that's it until it's all done. That could take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks." It had been variable with the rodents, and Rachel was a lot bigger and a lot more complex than a rodent. "The breathing tube will mix in a gas that'll relax you and make you tired once the pod is full, so you should sleep through the whole thing. Once I put the virus in you, there's no turning back." Actually, trying to stop after that would probably make it worse now that I thought about it. "I want to hear you say that you want to do this."

Rachel's body language told me that she'd had it with me asking things like that, but she complied. "I want to do this."

I took another deep breath and waved her over. I gave her a shot in the arm, got her situated in the pod, and promised that "I'll be here when you wake up, whenever that is." She tried to smile at me… she's not good at it, even without a tube down her throat, but I appreciated the gesture. Then I closed her up.

I didn't say or do anything until two minutes after the pod was full and I could sense Rachel's emotions calming down and her consciousness coming to a rest. Then I sat down on my bed and started to breathe in slow, careful patterns. I'd read that doing that was supposed to help you stay calm. Lisa took my communicator and left shortly after, presumably to get to work on… whatever she was doing that involved me giving an interview.