Are any of us right where we belong?
Unable to stare, he waited blankly in the cage built to protect them the world they've created. Kenshi sat beside Sub-Zero and Smoke, Sonya ahead of them in the tight space of an elevator that barred them from the real world in a casket of metal. It raised up at her direction and throughout the duration she stared back at her reflection in the door.
It was never all that she wanted it to be, and all she could really believe was the crack between.
The metal cooled to Frost's touch, her bare hands against the flat of the cage until it stopped and the cage opened for the animals to free.
"Touch nothing," Sub-Zero eyed her as they departed the box.
"Why couldn't Fujin just transport us directly there?" Frost pondered.
"Everything in this level is classified." Sonya stopped before another set of metal doors with a singular black panel. The room not unlike the elevator.
Her voice was enough to open the portal into another metal casing, but lined with computers, and a great long table settled down the center of the large room.
Kenshi pulled up behind Frost as he could sense her feminine flesh, scent, and the chill that cast from her breath and very essence. He placed a hand on her shoulder as it raised to touch something he was sure she shouldn't and smiled, passing her.
"Listen to your elders." He warned.
"Thanks dad." Idle eyes, but she got the message, hopefully.
Everything around her wasn't quite as it seemed. No windows, so it must have been deeper in the building than she realized. Fujin had transported them already inside the national security site they refused to divulge.
Everything an elaborate dream of computer parts, wires, metal and a coffin to the rustic seams that built the grand steps of the Lin Kuei lifestyle. The best of it for her, the six foot yellow humanoid at the furthest wall from the entrance. A slumped lump of black and yellow, Cyrax had been fixed from its battle with the Lin Kuei on Shang Tsung's island, but its original design kept intact, should Sektor return from the ether of the dark net.
Devils, Gods, living and dead, none of them quite compared to artificial life.
Kenshi couldn't sense it, not even with the knowledge that somewhere in the silicon and electrical impulses a human being still remained. He gave him pause as he could hear the machine activate. What was this monstrosity and how could it exist this way?
Is it all it wanted to be? Is it the very thing he was destined to become or already have been given the path he had chosen?
The machine repeated a series of ones and zeroes, binary as Sonya explained, and after several inputs under a lid beneath the chest plate, its operating system booted and its eyes lit a bright white.
"Agent Cyrax activated, General." Green lights flicked from the white and began coarse like blood through several of the cracks and crevices of the black between the yellow as the machine raised its posture and addressed Sonya.
"Nice droid." Frost remarked.
"This isn't Star Wars, Leia." Smoke commented.
"Where do we go?" Kenshi cut in.
"Africa, I'm downloading the coordinates into his system. Sub-Zero already knows." Sonya ignored the commentary. The hollowness in her heart could only be filled by the mission. Here, right where she belongs.
All the world inside of Kenshi's head, a creation of his own, unsettled by the hum of the machine as it moved closer. All the word in its head, all that is wanted for it to know just put there. Could be anything. Could be the same web of lies that string his own conscious.
"We know where." Sub-Zero said.
The group gathered at the end of the table and a chill climbed up their flesh like a rapid moving glacier ready to encase them for a hundred years, only to drag them under and into the very source of heat that Fujin had pulled her from.
After all that time, after they disposed of her partner in the moment he needed them most, she was happy to return.
"Let's get Jax out of whatever hell the Black Dragon has him in." Kenshi urged.