"Careful Rex!" Holiday yelped out as she brought up her clipboard over her eyes as the EVO's cage Rex had been lifting out of the armored vehicle came crashing down on the teen after the EVO shifted in the cage and unbalanced it.
Providence had recently gotten their hands on a particularly...coveted EVO after a raid on a billionaire illegally holding and selling EVOs with special abilities, and Rex had volunteered to help Providence agents unload the creature's cage.
Sought by many organizations, this EVO was rumored to be able to sedate and put a person in a "dream-like" world where anyone unlucky enough, or lucky depending on who you talked to, lived out their dreams…or their nightmares.
What interested Providence about this EVO was that reportedly one was able to enter someone else's "dream world" and could influence the dream to uncover information the person under the EVOs control wouldn't or couldn't tell.
Holiday wasn't particularly interested in the dream EVO's potential to squeeze out testimonial evidence or government secrets from unwilling participants, but what did interest her was that the EVO could also put other EVOs under its control and that particular aspect made it desirable to Holiday.
You see, it was sometimes extremely difficult to tell the difference between human-based EVOs and animal-based EVOs. (There had been once an unfortunate accident where Holiday had mistakenly placed a human EVO in the Petting Zoo and didn't realize her mistake until Rex had gotten bored one day and went around the Petting Zoo seeing if any of the animals were suddenly curable. Let's not talk about that.)
Take a look at Bobo for example! Just by looking at him, you wouldn't be able to tell if he was some unfortunate man turned into a chimp EVO or a chimp that turned into a human EVO. If Bobo wasn't able to talk to others and tell his side of his story, Holiday would have been forced to make an incorrect educated guess.
But with this new dream EVO Providence had acquired, you could pop into the dream world and find out EVOs' previous identities instead of guessing!
Not only could the dream EVO be used for identification purposes, but also to track where the EVOs had been. Often in dreams you would revisit places you've been to or had memorable experiences of and Holiday could manipulate this aspect of dreaming and the EVO's abilities to her advantage.
In the case of some animal EVOs, they hadn't just mutated randomly but instead had mutated because they came into places in the wilderness that have gathered large amounts of active nanites, creating EVO spawning hotspots. Holiday could use the new dream EVO to find out where the other EVOs had been previously and use that to map out a more accurate hotspot map.
Holiday wanted to test the dream EVO out on the bunny EVO in particular for her first test run. She wouldn't lie, she was a little curious as to why the bunny had such a grudge against Rex, and she wondered if the bunny's aggressiveness had come from a particularly aggressive EVO-making hotspot.
But right now, Holiday was concerned that the EVO had possibly squished Rex flat with its cage.
"Rex? Rex!" Holiday called out.
Holiday dropped her clipboard and rushed over to the cage and started shoving her body against it, trying to push the cage off Rex.
Nearby Providence agents joined her efforts, pushing and lifting up the cage. With a couple of grunts, they managed to slide the cage off of Rex, revealing the slightly squashed teen.
The bottom of the rivets on the cage was imprinted onto Rex's skin, and Holiday could spy small puncture wounds on Rex's face.
It seems that during the cage's fall, the dream EVO had lashed out its barbed tongue and had whacked Rex with it.
Blood slowly leaked from the puncture wounds, along with an almost iridescent liquid, which Holiday recognized from the samples of the dream EVO's saliva that had been sent to her just that morning to analyze.
That wasn't a good thing.
Holiday hesitantly shook Rex's shoulder.
He didn't stir. Rex was fast asleep.
"Crap," Holiday muttering, sighing. She then turned to an agent and spoke up. "Someone go notify White Knight that Rex has been put under one of EVO's dreaming sessions. We'll have to organize an extraction operation to get him out."
The agent nodded and ran off to one of the stations on the walls directly connected to White Knight's room and phoned him. Holiday turned back to Rex once she confirmed that White Knight had picked up the agent's call.
"You two," she said, pointing to the nearest Providence agents to her, "Go grab a stretcher. We'll need to get Rex to my lab for extraction preparation. The rest of you, go take care of the EVO and take it to my lab. Be extra careful of its tongue. I don't need two unnecessary dream incidents to take care of today."
The agents nodded and soon Rex was placed onto the stretcher, tongue lolling out. Holiday poked it back in and directed the agents to her lab.
Six pulled at the collar of the uncomfortable skin-tight black and white Providence uniform Holiday had forced him into for the operation to extract Rex from his dream.
Six didn't understand why they had to change their usual outfits when they were going into a dream for heaven's sake, but Holiday had claimed that since Rex had been always surrounded by faceless Providence agents during his time at Providence, Rex would respond positively to the uniforms.
If the extraction team needed to be ignored, Rex would let the faceless agents fade into the background. If they needed to influence Rex's dream to bring him closer to escaping it, he'd listen and not dwell on the extra characters in his dream. If the extraction team revealed to Rex he was dreaming, he might suddenly switch to lucid dreaming which could easily turn Rex's dream world into a nightmare.
Six's train of thought was interrupted as Holiday slid a small black handheld device into Six's hand.
"What's this?" Six asked, scrutinizing the object. It was about the size of Six's palm and had a little strap on it. Six pressed one of the buttons on the device and a lens cap popped off the end, which Six nabbed before it hit the floor.
"A small camera. There's the off chance that Rex will be dreaming of his life before he had amnesia, and I'd think it would be nice to take pictures if that happens to be the case."
Six nodded as he placed the lens cap back on the camera. He had been briefed on how the dream EVO's abilities worked early this morning in preparation for future excursions and knew that the dream world the EVO built was based on memories and desires like most dreams were.
With Rex's strong desire to know about his past, the dream EVO may have been able to bypass his memory problems when creating Rex's dream world.
Rex had already confessed to Holiday and Six about the weird memory dreams he would get when offloading nanites, so it was likely the team going into Rex's dream world would get at least some snippets of Rex's past life.
Maybe he'd finally be able to do good on the promise to find out where Rex came from.
"Alright, does everyone have their tethers?" Holiday asked the team.
Six, Jones, Wade, and Beasly all nodded, showing off their attached tethers.
Agents Jones, Wade, and Beasly made up the rest of the extraction team going into the dream world.
Six wasn't exactly sure who was on the team's ground control, but ultimately it didn't matter if an Agent Davidson or an Agent Gibbings was manning the ground control.
Six had heard Jones had requested to be put on the extraction team, and Wade and Beasly were placed on the team because they were...at the very least friendly acquaintances with Rex.
Holiday signaled to one of her lab assistants with an "all good" sign, who flashed a thumbs-up back at Holiday and pulled a lever on the device that was hooked to the dream EVO in the other part of the lab.
A portal, not unlike the EVO Breach's portals, opened up and the extraction team stepped through the portal one by one.
The first thing Six noticed after he stepped through the portal and into an edge of a forest at a road, was that the tether attached to his suit suddenly felt slack.
A brief sense of panic set in.
Did his tether catch on a branch of a nearby tree and it disconnected?
He looked down at the attachment point and saw that the end of the rope was still attached to his hip, but the trailing end faded into nothing.
Six took a couple steps left and right, almost expecting the tether to reveal itself to have been frayed off, but to Six's surprise, the tether followed him, faded end and all. He supposed that meant the tether was still connected to the real world, and so he relaxed.
Six looked around at the rest of the team to see everyone else going through the same momentary panic.
After a couple of experimental tugs on her tether, Holiday shrugged and reached into a small bag on her hip, and took out a tablet. She started up the tablet and was met with a screen of static. Ground control's voices could be heard through Holiday's device, but the visuals weren't coming through. Holiday whacked the top of the tablet and with a fizt, the screen came to life.
"Dream Team, are you safely in, over?" echoed out one of the ground control members back at Providence.
"Ground control, we are safely in." Holiday answered. "Can you check if our tethers are still properly attached on your side?" She lifted up her faded tether so ground control could see the issue. "Over."
There was a brief pause of silence from the tablet as the ground control member went off-screen to check.
After a moment the device crackled to life again.
"Dream Team, you are still attached. Over."
"Ground control, good to hear. Systems are working fine over here. We're about to turn on body cameras and we'll head out to locate Rex. We'll switch to radio silence once we find him, but we'll keep recording. Over."
"Dream Team, we can see your body cam feed. Proceed. Out."
"Okay, you heard the man! Let's go," Holiday said, shoving her tablet back into her bag.
The team nodded in response and fell into line as they followed Holiday out of the sparse tree line and down the road.
Besides the small patch of trees they had arrived at, the road was deserted and dusty, save for a few cars parked at the sides. Agent Jones peeked inside some of the cars and found they were all empty. Not even a small bit of trash or personal effects were in the cars, but that was to be expected. Rex had never really been in anything but Providence vehicles which were kept clear of debris.
As they continued down the road, Six observed the scenery as it changed from some dusty old road you could find right outside the Providence base to a bustling city road.
It wasn't exactly a smooth transition from dusty road to city traffic, the change was like how scenery changes in a dream. One minute you know you're in one place and the next moment you're in a totally different place, but the sudden displacement doesn't feel jarring at all.
The city road was lined with apartments and stuffed with cars. There were a few scattered shops but the shops had little to no substance to them and were mainly just bright, blurry signs with big open windows.
The apartments looked like some of the apartments Rex would have seen on missions to contain EVOs, mixes of different city apartment architectures with possibly a Mexican flair to the buildings, almost as if someone had photoshopped the apartments with little elements from stereotypical Mexican architecture in a way that probably wouldn't work in real life but was pretty to look at.
The apartments were all a little bit blurry to look at, save for one apartment building near the end of the road.
As the team neared the end of the street and the apartment, Six could spy a familiar someone's silhouette in one of the open windows.
Rex could be seen in what Six presumed to be his room in the dream world, getting ready for the day.
He looked a little bit different than usual and it took Six a minute to realize why.
Rex's hair wasn't slick back.
Rex didn't have particularly long hair per se, but his preferred hair length was long enough to get in the way of his eyes, so Six had taught Rex years ago how to use product to slick back his hair so he was ready to see EVO action. Rex was rarely seen without his usual slick back hairstyle because he had to be ready to go for any EVO missions for him that day.
But this Rex had his hair down, fluffy, how it would be without product. In addition to Rex's change in hairstyle, Rex's signature hearty jacket was replaced with a softer hoodie version of it.
All in all, Rex looked...relaxed. Ready to have a day of fun.