Steel over skyline. Sky made of glass. Made for a real world.
Once a time, there nearly might have been, but it slipped away when her eyes strayed to her face in the mirror. Eyes shot and this moment fled from her the moment she stepped out of the bathroom to scan the hall of the base. Room by room Sonya Blade found herself more and more alone.
Her partner far behind her, she was eager to resolve the matter with the Black and Red Dragon. Each step forward was a moment she didn't have to look in the mirror again. Each step forward however, was another empty room and another empty hall, staircase, and breath.
She heard a coo, a sound soft and low three doors down from the staircase she followed to the ground floor. It was almost as if a gift had landed in her lap after the busted mission, however, each step down made it more and more concerning.
Each step down her mind played tricks and games until finally she carefully peered around the corner to the lone hall that lead to an exist through a back alley by sight of the brick down the hall through the cold glass of the metal door.
The noise was Cyrax, an update in his system chimed and was forced still to allow it the chance to complete. Prone to attacks, he had lowered to ground level, having left Sonya Blade to pursue the floors above alone.
She approached the large machine and checked the flap at his chest plate for the readings. Ninety percent complete. It wouldn't take much longer. It was a good time to call it as well.
She traced her wrist for her comm link and called the search off.
"We've been had, it's time to leave."
"Roger Roger." Takeda responded.
"Star Wars is not official Military language." Jacqui scolded him, tongue in cheek and bite less than Sonya would have given.
"Ermac, get them to base." Kenshi could be heard over the comm and Sonya knew one by one they'd be immediately transported back to the Special Forces. There were no worries there, but for her, she had to wait for Cyrax.
"Our informant lied." She turned to the unresponsive cyborg.
She watched his systems blinking red and dimly so at the eyes, chest plates beneath the boards. Once. They'd turn blue, they'd be good to travel.
Blink.
Blink.
Blink.
Her eyes scanned the hall. There were three doors on the left and two on the right. The last one down the hall lead to the alley which was just dumpsters that filled the alley and the team could only move one at a time if travelled down. The three rooms she remembered were empty, the two as well. Office rooms and a storage.
The informant was so sure the Red Dragon had chosen this spot in Montreal as the base.
Blink.
Blink.
Her gun holstered at her hip, her hair pilled back in a ponytail and tucked clean under a black U.S. baseball style hat and her breath fell slack as the urgency for the mission collapsed around her. A waste. An absolute waste of time.
"I am prepared." Cyrax chirped and caught her off guard.
"Let's go back to base, soldier, there's nothing here."
"Yes, General."
It took a day to compile all of the information discovered at the building and all of it amounted to nothing. She threw files spread across the hotel floor and sat back to stare at the mess as if something was missing, not just in those files, but as she stared longer and her mind ran further, she realized there had to be something missing from her as well.
That moment in the mirror, she shrugged it off. The silence as she carefully tread down the staircase to the soft childlike coo of Cyrax's systems being updated, she had forgotten with hard liquor.
She stared at the glass, the crease of saliva at the edge, the spill of bourbon as it rinsed down like a tear drop to the center of the glass. If Jax were here, she'd share this with him. Jacqui would be old enough for it, but Jax wouldn't let her drink, probably. Maybe Kung Lao would be like that with Kung Jin, though she heard that their relationship was more strained than Kenshi and Takeda's
She realized she clung to those little moments when she'd hear back from Kung Lao, or Kenshi would talk after a briefing. Jacqui didn't have that. Her father was gone and that emptiness spilled out into Sonya's life as well, but not just Jax. This emptiness was more.
So, she filled it with more alcohol.
My beautiful Sonya.
A voice would play in her ear like a devil on her shoulder as the grip of Bourbon began to take her senses. She threw the glass at the wall at the sound she thought it came from. Once the shattered pieces filled the room, she received communications back from Cyrax. This was important.
"Sonya Blade." She answered.
"General, we have found the informant."
"Where are they now?"
"Here at the base." He offered, "shall I retrieve you?"
She looked at the tattered remains of her mind spilled out over the hotel floor where the carpet would absorb the stench and her feet the glass and after a long ugly pause, Cyrax appeared before her.
"You were silent." He noted.
"I'm not prepared."
"Jacqui should question them, she has earned it."
"Fine."
"Are you well?"
She shook herself from her thoughts and looked up the bulk mass of the machine before her until her eyes reached the lights in the sockets that represented his. She wasn't sure if she could see the disgust in her, or the grimace she made, but she pulled herself from the bed and pushed him aside, to no affect.
"Don't do that."
"I am still a man, Sonya Blade."
"You are a solder, Cyrax."
"Can't both be true?"
"No"
He took her with him, a rift opened for him as easy as it would for Ermac. His comprehension of science far greater than hers, but his connection to the real world, perhaps in this moment, stunned her, and shamed her, because she too wished to be as much a machine as she saw him as.
With Cyrax at her side, they reached the the room behind the great glass wall that hid them from the informant. An interview room for for questioning, Sonya and Cyrax stood with Kenshi and Jacqui. Them and them alone would be here for this.
The informant sat in the chamber alone with just a glass of water and table and chair to comfort them. A young man from Hong Kong that had travelled over after the capture of Liu Kang. Someone that had seen the ship when he was a child, the comings and goings of outworlders and the grasp the Black and now Red Dragon had on the streets of Earthrealm in the poverty struck pockets of the world.
He knew a lot. Perhaps too much, Sonya thought, for someone who just so happened to have witnessed all this as some bystander.
They went with it at first, everything checked out, sometimes he would be wrong, and that's quite all right, but this, this mission of grandiose was a lie so explosive it could have been a trap and they'd have fallen right into it.
"Go inside." Sonya situated herself with headphones and a recorder, then leaned and nodded to Jacqui.
"You mean it?" Surprised, the young Major contained her joy at this moment, but knew not to milk it and with a second nod from the General, she traced out of the room, and curved into the hall until they could watch her open the door behind the informant and enter the chamber.
"You don't look like Sonya Blade." The informant rejected her. "I will only speak with Sonya."
"Everything is coming down from the General, you answer my questions and we'll cut you loose as an informant, you're free, or we could tether for longer for playing these damn games." Jacqui put the hammer down, but the as Sonya watched the man's eyes and mannerisms, it seemed scarily familiar.
The apathy in his eyes, the whim in his smile and the arrogance of his shoulders as they shrugged and he turned to face the wall he knew was just a means for the team to watch him.
"I will only speak with you, Sonya Blade. You don't need a child."
She stared. Jacqui looked up at the wall, though she could only see herself.
Ugly pause.
The pain in her stomach and the ache in her head sobered her enough to pull from the table, slam the headphones down and cross over to the chamber. She entered the room as Jacqui exited and took her place to watch and record.
"I don't play games." Sonya wanted to flip the table, instead she kicked it ahead and slammed a fist down to lean over and stare hard into the callous eyes, those eerily familiar eyes of his. "Why did you lie to us?"
"Why do you drink so heavily, Sonya Blade?" She was embarrassed he would call her out. The stench on her breath, her clothes, she knew then that the entire team likely knew as well. After this remark from the informant, she stared up at the wall, almost as a means to ask forgiveness, whether it was to hit him, or for her condition, she wasn't sure.
"My beautiful Sonya." He whispered back at her.
In a strange sequence that scribbled words and thoughts and voices into her head, she slowly turned back to eyes of the informant like it were slow motion. The young man who claimed to be from Hong Kong had become a man that looked to be in his young thirties.
It took a second, and she felt the pit stain of vomit scratch at her throat, but she recognized him. First his eyes, then the rest.
"Missed me?"
Shang Tsung smiled up at her. Rejuvenated, he leaned back as she recoiled in horror.
A cold pit in her stomach dropped and her throat seized. The demons played horrid nightmares on repeat in her mind and flashed before her across his face, everything recited in his voice, and the voice of Quan Chi, and the sound of her nails scratched off the table surface was like the screaming of that young man that Quan Chi had forced upon her.