Chapter 70: Finest Hour
B-50 Training Report 02281989-C (Continued)
Training Segment: Navigation
Time: 1800-1900
Description: B-50 is given a map and instructed with the aim of memorizing the layout of The City of Townsville, as well as the surrounding country. This includes the power grid, sewage systems, phone lines, and other infrastructural layouts.
Results: B-50 is able to commit to memory even the finest details when it comes to any location in Townsville and the surrounding area. She scores 47/50 on a quiz prepared before the lesson, with the 3 mistakes attributed to misinterpretation of the elements on the map, not a failure of memory.
Training Segment: Infiltration
Time: 1900-2000
Description: B-50 is put under the charge of Corporal Nana Weston, who has moderate experience in covert operations and infiltration, in order for her to learn how to blend in with the general populace The lesson is conducted in a manner similar to a game of dress-up to ease the enhanced subject into the lesson.
Results: B-50 is able to disguise herself to the point of being completely unrecognizable as an enhanced being. The fact that there are very few physical aberrations to hide is a huge factor impacting her level of success, something which subjects created by even Chemical W does not have. Through the use of contact lenses, dyes or wigs, and various everyday clothing or uniforms, B-50 is able to blend into any environment ranging from a school to a summer camp to the streets to a suburban area.
Training Segment: Dance (Ballet)
Date: 28 FEB (Tuesday) 1989
Time: 2000-2100
Subject: B-50 'Bunny Utonium'
Role: Black Ops Organic Weapons Platform (Bioweapon)
Status: Nearing Graduation
"Come on, sweetie, don't be shy," Nana Weston coaxed Bunny into a multi-function room, cleared for the hour's activity. "Take off your armor - here, let me help you. There's a good girl. Now, you're going to change into these tights and we're going to have some fun, okay?"
Bunny had been following her every word without question. Besides the fact that 'obedience brings victory', Nana Weston had become something of a surrogate mom in the absence of Selicia Goodwin, her real mom (though she didn't know, of course, that she wasn't really her biological mom). Nana had been extremely sweet to her, as a mom would be when other women would either give her the stare or avoid her entirely.
Nana was in a pair of dancing tights herself too, and while Bunny was busy putting her purple tights on, she was doing some warm-up exercises, stretching her muscles and even doing a split on the ground. Nana was so engrossed in this that she didn't notice that Bunny was done, and soon, she was spinning on the tip of her toes and pirouetting gracefully across the air as if effortlessly.
"But what are we doing?" Bunny asked, perplexed by the moves Nana was busting out. She knew beauty and art when she saw it, even if she couldn't quite describe them, but she couldn't see how it was related to protecting her family or fighting crime. "Do I do this when I'm out in the field?"
Nana stopped soon after Bunny started asking questions, listening.
"Heavens, no. We're just going to have some fun, Bunny. You and me, together," Nana said cryptically, a mothering smile on her face as she came forward and took Bunny by both hands.
"But I want to protect my family!" Bunny said, still focused on her previous lesson in 'enhanced interrogation'. It'd made clear what her purpose was. "General Blackwater said-"
Nana put a finger on Bunny's lips to shush her, before continuing.
"You know, I used to do this a lot before I joined… this place. I still dance sometimes," the corporal explained. "Dancing taught me many things - not just hard work and art. I learned to follow orders - really complex stuff, right down to where I point my toes and which direction I leap to and how. It made me who I am, and it gave me something to look back on. Now, why don't we start?"
Unknown to Bunny, General Blackwater and Director Cliff were watching from behind a one-way window.
"Ballet? You're joking. Right?" the director said, incredulous, as he watched the expensive enhanced individual he ordered doing a few basic spins and twirls, mastering them quickly.
"Dancing has its uses," General Blackwater said as he watched through the same window, far less surprised by the direction of the crash course he'd set Bunny on.
"And what would they be?" Director Cliff said sarcastically. "Is she going to dazzle the enemy with her dance moves? Are they going to fall over or fall in love with her because she knows how to put on a good show?"
"No. It will teach her how to use her body better," the general defended his decision, barely even aware that the director was highly skeptical of the current lesson. He was watching Bunny intently, determined not to miss even half a second of her doing ballet. "That, and it'd show her a thing or two about following orders. To the letter."
"If you say so," the director deferred to his decision. "As long as she does what she's supposed to do."
Training Segment: Music
Time: 2000-2100
Description: B-50 is to be taught how to sing by Nana Weston, with material taken from lullabies, children's songs and military marching songs. She is also taught the anthem, its meaning and significance to instill a degree of patriotism. She has been taught the use of several musical instruments common to US military tradition, such as drums and flutes.
Results: After a period of shyness, B-50 is able to 'sing like her most promising classmates' according to Weston. The most important thing, however, is B-50's new-found sense of rhythm and enhanced receptiveness and adherence to orders even if they are not given in the verbal or written form. The use of instruments is another matter, as memory work has nothing to do with skill. It will take time for her to master the instruments Nana Weston has chosen for her, but that is secondary to the actual objective of the lesson.
Training Segment: Basic Military Drills
Time: 2100-2200
Description: To complete B-50's training and ensure that it is well-rounded, she is introduced to the basics of regular military training, which includes marching drills, precision drills, cleanliness and grooming regimes, and alertness and scramble drills.
Results: B-50 is successful. No additional notes.
Training Segment: Final Revisions
Time: 2200-2300
Description: B-50 is given one final chance to clear any doubts by asking questions and practice whatever she believes to be lacking in her abilities. The entire B-50 training staff is present to assist, except for Sergeant Selicia Goodwin.
Results: Believed to be successful. B-50 is proactive in asking questions, filling holes in her understanding of her role that even our training doctrine has been unable to pre-emptively fill. One good example is regarding what she should do should she encounter specific enhanced enemies mentioned in brief to her – something that would only have been disseminated to her on a need-to-know basis. Not a single minute was wasted, and she spent the remainder of her time practicing unarmed and melee weapon drills.
Training Segment: Finest Hour
Date: 28 FEB (Tuesday) 1989
Time: 2300-0000
Subject: B-50 'Bunny Utonium'
Role: Black Ops Organic Weapons Platform (Bioweapon)
Status: Nearing Graduation
'Your mission is simple,' Bunny recalled General Blackwater's words as she flew down the highway on her modified motorbike. Despite all her training and every preparation she made, she could still feel a tingling down her spine, goosebumps rising on her skin, nervousness making itself clearly known in her mind. There were butterflies in her stomach, fluttering aggressively. 'Your sisters, Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup, will be scrambled to attack a confirmed Foundation hideout. You will beat them to the location and attack it before your sisters do. You will do so without being seen by your sisters. The more enemies you kill, the less danger your sisters will be in. There's a chance there will be enhanced individuals similar to you guarding the site. I estimate that you have about 30 minutes to complete your mission if you leave immediately.'
The general would then go on to show her the location on the map. She was given free rein as to how she prepared for the mission. She would choose to equip herself with only a suppressed pistol and a combat knife for maximum stealth, not counting less offensive articles of gear. After painting black camouflage stripes on her face and contact lenses to mask the purple glow of her eyes, she took off in her motorcycle beyond the top speed, purple X-contrail trailing behind her.
With even the geography of the outskirts of Townsville memorized, Bunny was able to take the shortest route to the location, stopping a couple of miles away to proceed on foot – just like what the general said to do when approaching an enemy position in a vehicle.
Despite ditching her favorite and only bike hesitantly, Bunny was able to zip across the wilderness quickly, avoiding roots and branches and rock with her superior reaction time and finesse. Two miles were covered in mere minutes and Bunny would even leap to clear obstacles a normal human being would take minutes to scale, and she'd done it silently too, using what she'd learned about footfalls and landing in her stealth lessons.
The contact zone came within sight. Bunny squinted at her watch under the moonlight. She had about 14 minutes and 22 seconds left to complete the mission before her sisters showed up. Assuming they were on time. Part of her hesitated – oh how much she'd missed her sisters! She wanted so badly to meet them, too! But the mission was the mission, and orders were orders. 'Obedience brings victory,' she remembered what the general had so painstakingly and lovingly taught her. Victory, this time, meant protecting her sisters.
The site was an abandoned bunker. Two Foundation terrorists were guarding the entrance. Another two were patrolling its parameter, consisting of a ring of rusty, broken-down chain-link fence with many opportunities of entry for her that she was spoiled for choice.
She spent further precious seconds shifting her angle of reconnaissance, sighting the entrance of the bunker. The door was closed. Made of steel. Rusty, but sturdy. Still, it was likely no match for her.
She gave the patrolling terrorists time to circle away from her, their torchlights shining haphazardly across the wintry forest, but she had hidden too well to be seen. It was only when they had their backs turned that Bunny zipped in for the kill.
As she flew across the snow, past the chain-link fence, she unsheathed her knife. Her footsteps were soft, but still loud enough to be heard in a forest frozen by both the winter and the night.
But she was fast – blindingly fast. By the time one of the guards could shine his flashlight on her, she had already jammed her combat knife through his eye socket. The other Foundation agent could only give a frightened shout before his throat was slit in a single motion - a slice of the knife - and he couldn't even squeak. The bad guys' flashlights and guns tumbled to the ground, followed quickly by their bodies – Bunny was only able to catch hold of one of them. Flashlights were shining in her direction, mostly blocked by the surface protrusion of the abandoned bunker. She could hear the patrolling terrorists.
"Did I hear something?" One of them said, ignorant and puzzled.
"Could be nothing," the other said. "Just them fooling around again. I'm not radioing that in."
Bunny could tell from their lights that they were going to check anyway. Rushing to the wall of the bunker, she unholstered her suppressed pistol, came out from the corner and fired two precise rounds, the bullets, though subsonic, penetrating their foreheads. They fell almost simultaneously, and their comrades would be none the wiser because of their rusty, steel door.
She looked at her watch. 11 minutes and 35 seconds left. She stood before the door that would lead into an underground complex full of bad guys, some possibly stronger than her. After taking a deep breath and remembering that she would get to see Daddy the next day if she pulled through tonight, she sunk their fingers into the steel door, ripped it off its hinges and threw it aside in short order. The next thing Bunny saw was a flight of stairs leading down, lit dimly by barely-functional lights. A man sitting on a rickety wooden chair at the base of the stairs leading down squawked in surprise and fumbled for his pistol when he saw the impossible happening before him.
Bunny promptly quick-drew her pistol and shot him between the eyes, instantly killing him. The time for sneaking and hiding was up - this the enhanced girl knew when she heard more men and women barking orders and scrambling from deep within the bunker.
Leaping down several steps at a time, Bunny hopped to the landing of the concrete stairs to confront a group of six or so Foundation fighters. With pistol and knife in hand, Bunny rushed them, ignoring rounds fired in her general direction, the pain a mere inconvenience, before firing shots of her own while she closed the distance; two were killed outright, one with a bullet to the heart while another in the cerebrum. Another somehow survived a gunshot to the eye - which qualified as a miss to Bunny - collapsing as she screamed.
When Bunny was right next to them, her victory was a foregone conclusion. In rapid succession, she pistol-whipped one man, dashing his head against the concrete wall fatally before plunging her knife into the ear of another. The last man standing was wrestled to the ground as he screamed and fired pistol shots into Bunny's chest fruitlessly before she tore his head off his shoulders, painting the otherwise dull gray ground with his blood.
With the last man down, Bunny stood up again and looked at her watch. 10 minutes 20 seconds. Her armor was drenched in blood. There was gasping from the floor. Bunny searched it for the source. The woman who was shot in the eye was still clinging onto life. She pointed her suppressed pistol at her and squeezed, putting her out of her misery.
Next, she searched the bunker room by room for any other enemies who would hurt her sisters. The underground facility barely qualified as one. It was small, and the rooms were empty; the enemy had made it convenient for her by bunching together, it seemed. Thankfully, it also meant that there were no enhanced individuals like the feared four-armed Naga or the scheming Mojo Jojo in the area. She took a glance at her watch again. 4 minutes and 45 seconds. She had searched every nook and cranny of every room for any survivors hiding in any possible crack or hole or furniture, but there were none.
It was over. Her first mission was done. Beaming as she returned to the main corridor of the bunker, she admired the work of art she had created there - six bodies in one tight spot, most of them killed with clean shots, with only one of them executed rather messily. There were ten in total, which wasn't bad for a first mission. In the back of her mind, it was shocking - the blood, the gore she'd made, the violence and loud noises - but she'd learned to separate herself from it by the general's grace. She knew it had to be done. They were the enemy, and they were going to hurt her sisters.
Going back up to the surface and ditching the underworld, Bunny ran off to reclaim her motorized bike. Minutes later, pink, baby blue and lime green streaks of light would weave past trees and rocks and piles of snow towards the bunker.
Pokey Oaks County. Abandoned Bunker 63-5A.
28 FEB (Tuesday) 1989. 2336.
"Where is everybody?" Bubbles said, confused at how silent the forest was. Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup had flown into the forest expecting to take heavy fire. Yet, there was silence. They had crept up to the rusty chain-link fence, their eyes lit up like lanterns.
It didn't take long for them to discover the bodies as they inched their way towards the bunker. One of them was shot through the eye. The rest, the brain.
"I guess that answers your question," Blossom commented as they made their way towards the rusty steel door of the bunker. It was ajar.
"What a buzzkill," Buttercup said as she pointed her Stoner machine gun to and fro as she swept the landscape for enemies, only for there to be none.
It was the same story inside the bunker. A heap of bodies, all expertly killed, efficiently dispatched with a bullet to the brain or something less elegant but equally fatal.
There was nothing for them, and it'd confused them. It was something that had never happened before.
"What's going on?" Blossom wondered out loud. She didn't have to wonder for long.
"This is comms unit Bravo-3. Powerpuff Girls, what's your status? Over," the Girls' radio came alive.
"There's nothing here, Mister Bravo-3," Blossom reported.
"Everyone's dead, Mister Bravo-3!" Bubbles exclaimed into her radio.
"Yeah, there's no bad guys to fight! It's boring!" Buttercup complained. "Can we go somewhere else!?"
"Observations noted, Bravo-Four-Seven, Bravo-Four-Eight and Bravo-Four-Nine. There's nowhere else to go. Return home for R&R, over and out," the comms officer on the other end said, with an air of finality.
"But who did all this?" Blossom asked over the radio. There wasn't a reply to that. Compared to Bunny, the Powerpuff Girls' performance had been slipshod, though no one was there to tell them that. They had gotten lost on the way to the bunker as even Blossom wasn't very familiar with the county outside the City of Townsville. As a result, they were late. Even if they had arrived earlier than Bunny, they would have made a mess of things by attacking the Foundation cell head-on, alerting it to their presence right from the beginning outside the bunker and allowing the terrorists on the inside to send out a distress signal to the closest Foundation cell. The entire illegal organization would then come to know that they were being raided, and shift locations entirely.
Training Segment: Graduation Ceremony
Date: 29 FEB (Wednesday) 1989
Time: 0000-0030
Subject: B-50 'Bunny Utonium'
Role: Black Ops Organic Weapons Platform (Bioweapon)
Status: Operationally Ready
Bunny's bike roared as she drove it back to the USDO HQ beyond full speed. She was proud of what she'd done – she had protected her sisters, and she had beaten them at a game they were supposed to be better at. She'd barely even seen their X-contrails while she was leaving.
The garage doors had opened for her automatically while she was turning into the headquarters' underground carpark. She knew that it was strange – she knew at heart that she was supposed to answer a challenge question or give a password or a series of key phrases.
Something had changed.
And that change was made obvious when a surreal scene met her at the lobby of the HQ carpark when she came through. Two rows of USDO honor guards flanked her on either side of the door, ten on each side. At the other end of this human corridor was General Blackwater in his ceremonial uniform. Corporal Nana Weston stood beside her, in ceremonial uniform, too.
"B-50. Bunny," he announced to her. "You are ready. Graduated. Come forward."
She was so amazed at the sight that she couldn't react immediately, the general's request not registering immediately until she was aware that she would spoil it soon if she did not move. Coming forward to him, still, in her combat gear, her eyes met the general's, and they both agreed with each other.
The general saluted her. Bunny saluted him back. He then presented to her a pair of rank patches, each with a chevron on it. The general had deliberated for the entire length of Bunny's crash course on the manner of the enhanced girl's service. With each day that passed, he became ever more convinced of the current route he would take.
"You are not a cadet anymore, Bunny. As of the first hour of the twenty-ninth of February 1989, you are now Private Bunny Utonium," the general said before putting the rank patches into Bunny's outstretched hands. The girl's eyes misted as she smiled at the general. "A soldier in your own right, prepared, trained and qualified to defend your family, your sisters, the USDO and Townsville, against the forces of evil. Congratulations."
"What do I do now?" Bunny asked, unsure of what to do with herself now. It was all too overwhelming - just three days ago, she didn't even know which end of a knife to hold.
"For now, rest, Private Bunny Utonium. It's going to be a new day when you wake up," the general ordered. Nana took Bunny by the hand to guide her, first taking her into an elevator. By that point, the first thing Bunny was thinking about wasn't even Dad or her family any longer. Now, she wondered what the next mission would be…
