Snuggles The Symbiote
So I'm pretty sure that Sauron's main building was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. Out there was a building the size of a house and in here was a god-damnd maze. And of course, there were no signs or labels because supervillains never want easily navigatable lairs. I guess being evil meant you were immune to needing to get up to pee in the middle of the night while you were groggy and disoriented.
Still, after a few minutes of aimless wandering through twisting halls, my only comfort being that the insects I had spying on the village were telling me that Ashley was doing well, Yuri and I found a staircase going down.
"If I were a betting woman," she said staring down into the darkness, "this is either a dungeon where Sauron keeps hostages or a secret laboratory. Probably both."
Slowly we stepped down into the abyss to find... Another hallway.
"Well, fuck."
Eventually, the hallway opened up into a wide-open room lit up with fluorescent lighting. Across from us was a set of steel doors with an electronic terminal in the wall next to it. To our left was a massive console with dozens of blinking buttons which gave off an unsettling ambiance. To our right...
A tube that was full of some kind of liquid. Suspended within it was a nude female figure resembling a human woman with weird feet and the scales, head, tail, and back spines of an ankylosaurus, with a focused beam of green energy pouring down on her from an unseen projector in the ceiling.
...A glowing green knife was on the floor next to the tube.
"Well, we found her," I said. "And she's being turned into a dinosaur. God damn it." I turned to Ashley's mother, "by any chance do they teach you how to undo that in high school here?"
"Not when I was in school," Yuri denied with a shake of her head. "And my degree is in astrobiology, not paleo-genetics. I can try poking around in the console but I doubt he's using a standard operating system."
Then a buzzer went off. The beam transforming Miss Militia ceased and the fluid drained from the cylinder she was floating in. The glass retracted into the ground just in time for her to collapse onto the floor.
The transformed woman coughed up some of the fluid and I approached.
"Miss Militia?" I asked, 'Are you alright?"
She looked up at me, her dinosaur brow crinkling menacingly. "You."
My Spider-Sense went off just in time to dodge a punch.
"Look what I had to agree to because you and the other one refuse to just do what you're told," she said, summoning her weapon to herself in the form of a ridiculously oversized hand-canon of a revolver. "You get one last chance to sit down and listen," she finished as she took aim at my heart and pulled back the hammer.
She was very agro the other day, but this was something else entirely. And her body language was off... "Master/Stranger Protocol Beta-Seven, Access Code 156748-A."
Miss Militia paused for a moment... Then screamed and pulled the trigger. Again, the pulsing sensation in the back of my head warned me just in time to dodge, but she simply adjusted her aim and fired again.
After the fourth time I outran her gun, she changed her tactics. She transformed her weapon into a massive club, and charged at me, swinging it like a barbarian while making deep, animalistic grunts. It was like she'd gone completly feral.
Dodge left, bob right, on the third swing I was able to grab her arm. Then it was a simple enough matter to release some of my special spiders and have them swarm her.
Dozens of spider-bites, dozens of doses of their special venom, and Miss Militia began to get sluggish. Then I let go of her, let her keep swinging while I kept dodging. With every exertion, the venom coursing through her system spread faster. Within a minute she faltered and I grabbed her again so that I could gently lower her to the ground as she passes out.
"I really hope she's still mostly human on the inside," I mused out loud as I checked her vitals to make sure I didn't overdo it.
"So that was a thing that happened," Yuri said. "What was that thing you said that set her off?"
"A code phrase we're trained to use if we think an ally has been replaced or mind-controlled. There was something off about her and then when I used it, she stopped to think and then immediately went berserk. Whatever Sauron did to change her also compromised her mind. Made her more aggressive." And more bad news, my buggy spies told me that her gunfire had been heard by the people outside. Now Sauron and a contingent of his people were heading for us, with Ashley being dragged along because he no longer believed her cover story. "And we need to bug out."
I winced when I realized what I'd just said.
"Well, one of her stray bullets hit the control panel for that door," Yuri said pointing to the doors opposite our entrance, which was now open.
The interior room was dark and I could hear a sickly, unsettling, hissing... Like several people were struggling to breathe.
"Now, I wouldn't put money on this," Yuri began, "but I'm pretty sure that's the only locked door in this village, let alone this building. Wonder what it is that Sauron doesn't want anyone else to know about?"
"Together?" I asked.
As one, the two of us stepped into the room. The lights flashed on, and... I couldn't help but scream.
In the room, in steel cages, were roughly half a dozen things... Creatures messily transformed halfway between man and dinosaur, breathing heavily and occasionally moaning in quiet agony.
"These must have been the first test subjects for the dinosaur man process."
Wait... One of the cages was open. Where was—something grabbed my ankle. I jumped and looked down...
It was the least horribly mutilated of the creatures, resembling less a dinosaur person and more some kind of cross between a snake and a salamander. It tried to grab at me again. "Help me... Please... I was... Once a man... Was once a man... once a man..."
I almost lost my lunch, but then Yuri groaned. "Seriously, Cobra Commander?"
The creature chuckled bitterly. "What's the point of being a freak... If I can't have fun with it... But... I am in terrible pain... Please help."
This was just getting better and better all the time. "Alright, but Sauron's gonna be here in maybe a minute. We have to think of something fast."