SABER was real.
It wasn't made up of only ones and zeros- actual memories were sewn throughout the simulations; people that experienced war, violent crime, and catastrophic injury had donated their recollections of such events unwittingly when they went to Company backed trauma clinics- places with the best reputations and recovery turnouts. Those memories were what made the program real. You could feel the heat of fires, the agony of a gunshot wound, the sweat from a cold cup in a hot day. The environment adapted to everything you did, and you could spend days lost in a program as it ran its course. Who you really were came out in those programs, and the Company would judge if you were worthwhile.
The drawbacks came out later when people that went through it started experiencing lucid flashbacks stemming from those simulations. Memories that were programmed in would manifest at random in a person's mind, altering their perceptions and creating false memories that conflicted with their daily routines. It caused violent outbursts over the smallest of details, yet, it was only really noticed during psych evaluations much later: traumatic stress had cut down on production and efficiency with no visible root cause; the subjects' grasp on reality started faltering and was conflicting with missions; a wide variety of personality disorders began to crop up in healthy people.
SABER was eventually deemed at fault and shut down- left to be forgotten and ignored, and anyone that asked or looked for it was told that it simply had never existed. It was real, no matter how bad The Company wished it wasn't. It was real because out of all the lives it ruined, it had saved Alexander's.
Gunshots drummed down the halls like an endless thunder as they shuddered, nearly throwing him off his feet as another explosion rocked the facility. The child catches himself and keeps running, blood staining his white clothes as he holds a crying bundle of cloth tightly against his chest. These hallways were once quiet, bright, and cold; they are everything that they were once not, confusing and scaring him in ways that he had not yet known he could be. It was all new, different. Unorganized and chaotic.
Then, he sees something that he is very, very familiar with. The grunt, a man wearing white armor with darker armor hiding behind the plating, is wearing a helmet that covers his eyes with a silly visor that leaves the rest of his face exposed. The two see each other at the same time, and the man shouts: "Return to your cell!"
There is no going back, only forward. There is nothing behind him but the people that had once studied him with metal tools and clipboards and sour tasting liquids, and a man that claimed to know him who had made the mistake of bringing a knife into his cell with the intent to kill him before he could be found.
In the darkness, the grunt fails to see the blood coating the child's white clothes, as well as the loud, metal tool in his hand until it is too late. The child is holding the gun wrong so it flies out of his hand when it fires, but his aim is true and the bullet strikes the man's armor and knocks him onto his rear.
Running past the gasping man the child ducks under a fallen pipe and down crippled hallways, counting doors as he goes. He doesn't know when or how he learned this, but there is a service elevator on this floor that leads out of the facility. It isn't far, and he hopes that he is right as the shouting from the grunt grows louder and is accompanied by more voices- he had angered them by ignoring their commands and killing their friends.
There was no choice, he reminds himself as he feels blood running from his cheek, they were going to keep putting them in cold, dark tubes and injecting them with fire until they were satisfied. If they did not grow tired first and kill them.
Loud groan echoes across the facility and the lights flicker again. Whatever was happening, it wasn't good.
The elevator appears before him, it's lighting the only steady source in the facility. A loud bang echoes behind him and the child feels the air ripple by his head; a glass pane beside the doors explodes into dust in retaliation. He ducks and grits his teeth as he runs through the mess barefoot, focused more on the banging behind him and the sharp pings erupting around him as the metal dents from unseen impacts. He makes it inside and the doors close behind him, sealing his fate as the elevator begins to ascend.
He doesn't have comforting words for the crying bundle in his arm so he rocks it gently, trying to put his mind on something familiar instead of all the new, terrifying things around him. He stops abruptly as he notices that the sides of the elevator are clear, and he can suddenly see that he is in a large expanse of concrete.
The source of all the noise becomes clear, but he doesn't understand what he is seeing. Large flames erupt from canisters and containment cells. Grunts in the armor he recognizes are fighting a different group of humans dressed in black, using their guns and monsters to fight. The new humans came prepared, and their weapons are much, much different than the ones the grunts are using. Their monsters are different too, stronger. Large machines that the child has never seen before are also in the fray- some are burning, others are attacking the grunts, and some are even attacking the building itself.
With horrified silence he watches all the new, scary things annihilating the grunts he knows. All were bad and never had anything nice to do or say to him, but they were all he knew. A particularly large explosion shakes the entire complex, and right before he sees what caused it a sudden ding within his little bubble goes off, and he turns sharply to the doors.
He goes running through them but stops dead as they open, revealing a monster that blocks the entire frame. The child has not seen this one before, and its sheer size causes him to whimper and try to press the button that closes the doors. It reaches out as they do, grabbing each metal panel and tearing them off before the child can escape.
Realizing that he couldn't go back down he runs straight into the behemoth, slipping under it before it can grab him. Two steps are as far as he gets before something flashes brighter than any light fixture he had seen yet, blinding him. A roar directly behind him deafens him as well, and all he can do is feel the floor tremble as something happens around him, and all he can see is a blinding white before it vanishes and something is grabbing his shoulders gently.
It is another human, he thinks, but he cannot tell under the armor. He doesn't understand what he is saying, but his words are soft and not threatening. A monster hovers above his form, as that is all he can see in the dim light, and his eyes travel to it. It begins to glow.
Another bright flash of light and Alexander is looking at a tile ceiling when he comes to. Out of any flashback, it had to be that one.
The grunt closes his eyes as his body catches up with his mind- had he been hit by a truck? His body reacts slowly to his demands, and a dull roar has settled down in his bones as he tries to move. Breath, you've been through worse.
The grunt tries to tell himself that but isn't very convinced. It was his head; nothing before now hurt like this. If the power of a hurricane could be contained then it was trapped within his skull, pressing against its confines to free itself. It wasn't as sharp as the migraines he had been experiencing, but the pressure more than made up for it.
Alexander closes his eyes and blinks a few times, but goes still as something cold touches his leg. The sensation jumpstarts his body and he forgets his pain with a jolt of adrenaline. He sharply sat up, nearly fainting as blood rushes to his head, but he ignores it and yelled the first thing that comes to mind: "Your damn hands are cold!"
Haunter is a well known and feared pokemon. Every pokedex entry on them warned trainers of their predatory nature, where they could reside, and how they were an evil pokemon that generally wanted to kill you. Most of it was folklore; the ghosts were very dangerous but outright harmless to nearly everything. How such data was scientifically accepted befuddled the Company- Haunter were almost huggable. The frustrating thing was that most of them resided around human settlements and knew they had a reputation to uphold, giving them a misplaced sense of pride that they enjoyed.
It turned out that science didn't know everything about them: They could be startled; they yipped when startled.
Alexander looked up at the gas pokemon, who had fled all the way to the ceiling. Its normally purple coloration slowly turned to a light pink before it turned and started barking at a small audience of ghost pokemon that were starting to make one hell of a racket. He counted two Ghastly, another Haunter, and a Misdreavus in the crowd, all taunting their fellow ghost, who had turned a deep pink as this was going on.
You're embarrassed. Alexander realized, and a moment passed while the group continued taunted their unfortunate friend that the grunt took to look around. It was startling to realize he was in a morgue, laying on a steel table in a row of occupied tables. The room was dimly lit, but he could see many body bags lined and stacked in a corner; it was a clear violation of ethical code and law, but not the first. He was down there and breathing, after all. He was down to the base suit of his armor, and with an unsurprising revelation, he noted his weapons were also missing.
They were probably in storage lockers, but Alexander couldn't see where they could be due to a couple of curtains blocking off part of the room. He didn't recall how he got here and being prepared couldn't hurt, so with his priorities affirmed the grunt dared to test his legs. They felt like lead, but he managed to drag them off the table. Pins and needles worked through them as blood started flowing again, and with a grunt, he waited for a dizzy spell to pass before testing his weight on them. A faint smile crossed his face as he was greeted with success, but it faltered as a cold hand grabbed his shoulder and forced him back onto the table.
"Did you forget about us?" The Haunter asked, drawing out the sentence as if Alexander were slow. It- he, tapped the human's forehead a couple times and smiled, giving him a nice view of the gas pokemon's teeth and beyond. The scare tactic failed as he focused more on how the pokemon was speaking to him, and how he had forgotten that they existed within a couple seconds. With raised brows he nodded, causing the ghost's smile to waver slightly before it grew even larger. "Well we can't have that now, can we?"
A cold snap filled the room and it felt like liquid nitrogen filled Alexander's veins. With a startled gasp a clawed, purple hand plunged out his chest and waved at him. In the same moment the light flicked off, and only a red pair of eyes looked down at him gleefully.
Silence. A trickle of sweat ran down his temple as Alexander locked his jaw; not a peep escaping him as the other Haunter's hand rooted around his chest. It stilled and retracted from him as disappointment spread among the ghosts. The Misdreavus muttered something and the Common-speaking Haunter sighed, his own annoyance clear in his eyes. The lights turned back on and the human had a moment to see him reaching forward before sharp claws tapped his head slightly harder
Alexander barely felt it. He continued to watch the ghost in front of him, his expression blank as he tried to comprehend what type of a situation he was in. The Haunter scowled and looked over his head. "You might be right. Hey, are all the gears turning up there?"
He asked, once again putting a claw against Alexander's head to get a rise out of him.
Something was wrong. He didn't know what was wrong exactly, so the grunt examined every inch of the phantom as if he would have the answer hidden in his form. Unsurprisingly, he didn't find it there, and even if had been written out for him he wouldn't have comprehended it. His head hurt too much to properly think; coherent thought was nearly impossible. Due to this Alexander just couldn't find the energy to care about where he was. Woke up in a morgue? He didn't care. Ghosts trying to taunt and torment him? It was falling flat. Being physically assaulted and embarrassed by one of them? He'd been through worse.
Alexander felt the presence of the ghosts behind him weaken as they lost interest, but the one that spoke Common appeared far from done. He had cost him his pride after all, and pokemon acted the exact same way as humans when it was damaged.
Haunter sank down until he was eye to eye with Alexander. A whispy appendage grasped his shoulder lightly and sat there, its temperature seeping into him and causing the grunt to shiver. "Come on, I know something has to be working in that thick skull of yours. I'll gladly take a look myself if I must."
Shivering, Alexander feels the faintest bit of annoyance. Haunter wasn't intimidating, not after what he had seen. "That would be a disaster, and your hands are absolutely freezing, so please let go of my arm."
"Oh! You do functi- was that a pun?" The Haunter's hand dropped from Alexander's shoulder; the ghost's face was full of surprise. The human himself was startled that he came up with one so easily, and he found himself quietly nodding as he whispered:
"What? It can't be that Farfetch'd." The Haunter floated back a bit, his agape mouth slowly turning into a grin. It was an amused one, and not the threatening one that Alexander had been looking at for the last minute or two. "I see you're not so Krabby anymore, so do you mind if I stand?"
He laughed, and it echoed. The other ghosts grew quiet and Alexander felt them approach as the temperature began to plummet again. "He works! And he can make some great puns!"
The crowd was back just as soon as they had left; their previous plans are seemingly forgotten as they waited. They were waiting.. for him? To make another pun? He froze, not expecting them to be back so quickly, and felt himself choke. His mind, as scattered as it was, started scrambling for something else to use. "I, uh... sorry, sorry. I Machoke when I'm thrown into the spotlight like this."
A couple chuckles let Alexander know that he wasn't falling flat. He scrambled for something else to use when the Misdreavus muttered something that the group didn't find popular. "You don't need to be so Tentacruel to him, he's fun!" Haunter said, his own pun getting a couple snickers.
Alexander smiled despite himself. He should be trying to formulate a plan to get out of there and away from the ghost types, but he was starting to like them. "You can Shelder your ears if these puns are getting to you."
"It isn't the puns; she's Grumpig that you didn't scare earlier."
"Does she want me to stop this Spheal now?"
The Misdreavus groaned and Haunter frowned. "They're not that bad!"
Alexander allowed his eyes to wander and immediately recalled that he was still in a morgue full of corpses. Why in the hell am I forgetting everything? The grunt's mood shift was easy to notice as he looked around, his smile collapsing as he closed his eyes to fight a new wave of nausea.
A clawed finger tapped his jaw lightly and pushed his head up; his vision wholly taken up by Haunter, who was looking down at him with a frown. "Chin up, human. You're awake and talking, right? That's a whole lot better than the other ones they've put down here."
The change in seriousness left the room awkwardly quiet. Alexander nodded in agreement- he was very much alive, and his migraine couldn't make him wish otherwise, no matter how badly it made him want to drive his head into a wall.
"Why they thought you were dead is beyond me; your head is a bit banged up, but you managed to wake up at least so you're probably going to be fine."
The migraine would have argued.
If the Haunter was going to continue talking about how lucky Alexander was, it never happened as a new voice spoke up from behind the human. He didn't know what the Gengar said, but it visibly changed the demeanor of the ghosts around him. Eyes narrowed and teeth bared; the Haunter that spoke Common looked downright furious. They started chatting at each other before abruptly leaving him behind, angry voices that he couldn't understand trailed off one by one behind him; the grunt turned and watched as they vanished through the wall.
Haunter tapped his shoulder as he passed, hovering overhead so that Alexander had to look up to him. "Woulda liked to talk longer, but there's important business we need to attend to. Your stuff is in the third, fourth, and sixth lockers." Without any further explanation he too vanished, leaving him completely and suddenly alone.
What business it was that took them away, nobody human knew. At least, not yet. How they left, however, rang more than a few warning bells for those that knew they had been there. There was rarely anything that could drag them away from a 'fun' human, much less at such speed.
The room remained silent, and it was a couple of minutes later when it started heating up without the ghosts' presence, and a couple more before anything started moving.
Alexander didn't trust that they were completely gone, but sitting on a cold, metal table any longer wasn't going to do anything for him. He slid off the table for the second time and took a couple of hesitant steps, looking back for any signs that his phantom friends were going to come back. Nothing.
He began again, shaking off nausea and the urge to vomit as he stumbled across the room and through the curtains. With Haunter's information, he finds his equipment easily. It looks like hell, but it works, and with a final click the last plate of armor seals shut. Alexander takes time to look over his weapons next. Nothing was out of order so he slipped the pistol into his suit and slung his submachinegun over his shoulder. The kukri came next, hidden within a space in his armor; the ammunition for it all was stashed in every available space allowed in the suit's design.
The luster of the transceiver glinted off the harsh lighting and took Alexander's breath away. His recollection of everything before the hospital comes flooding in, and he shudders as he wonders how he managed to forget it. It is made worse because he does not know how long it had been since Kara had gone into stasis. If her injuries were too much...
The desert that represented Alexander's emotional state flooded and was lost under a sea of despair and fear. Taking a breath to steady himself from the sudden onslaught he slammed his helmet on and left the morgue, kicking open the steel door. He cursed a couple of times as he immediately hit another steel door, locked and lacking any response when he banged on it.
Cursing at the door as if it had insulted him, the grunt backed away a couple of paces and grasped his SP90. With little care for what could be on the other side he began firing into the lock mechanism, then the hinges. Each report was incredibly loud in the tight space, and the shearing of metal on metal followed the echo down the hallways. Alexander lowered his gun and reared back; his kick striking dead center and launching the door from its frame. The bottom caught and it fell, clattering to the ground as it landed without grace.
A short, empty hallway greeted him, ending in a T-junction. When he approached the intersecting hallway he raised his weapon and pressed himself against the wall, clearing one direction before swinging around to gain eyesight of the rest of the hallway.
"Freeze!"
An officer blocked his path, his body hidden behind a clear ballistic shield while the barrel of a pistol peeked around the side. He was expecting him: wearing body armor, and judging from the crackling radio on his hip he had already radioed reinforcements.
Alexander made a choice at that moment. The armor wouldn't hold against his rounds- the shield might protect him for a moment or two at the most. With careful precision he slipped his hand off the grip and away from the trigger, holding it out and to the side.
"I'm Interpol. Please lower your-"
Many, many people knew what it looked like to be staring down the barrel of a gun as it discharged. Of course, nearly none of them survived long enough to describe it, but they knew the flash of light as the gunpowder ignited, the flames that erupted from the barrel as the copper exited, and how there seemed to be a halo around the gun at the moment before they died. There were a few infamous photos of it: giving people a decent idea of what it looked like in those final moments. The only inaccurate part of those photos was they didn't show how bright it was.
The HUD flickered and the faceplate splintered as the halo of fire wafted away from the pistol. The impact of the round snapped Alexander's head back and he stumbled backward, too startled to say anything as another bullet stuck his chest plate, and then another. He raised his arm to protect his neck; barely protecting the chink in his armor as a bullet struck his protected flesh instead. He tripped as he fell back, sprawling across the tile as he found his grip on his main weapon again.
"The Possessed is wearing armor! Who put a soldier-"
The officer's update was cut short by his own screaming as a much bigger round than what he was prepared for cut through his leg. He toppled, squalling all the way down as he lost his grip on his pistol. His shield stayed attached to his arm, mostly because of straps, and it saved him from the next couple slugs that came his way.
Alexander gasped and sucked in a breath as he sits up. His hands trembled slightly as he kept the business end of his gun trained on the fallen officer. The man whimpered and tried to scoot over to his pistol, reaching out from behind his shelter to try and grab it. He yelped and yanked his arm back to safety as around stole the gun out from under his grasp, ruining it and sending fragments of metal scattering across the smooth tiles.
The grunt huffed a couple of times and pushed himself to his feet, the thought of killing the officer floating around in his head. It would take too much time. Reinforcements are coming anyway- killing him won't do anything except make them want to hunt him down.
The officer sounded like he was praying through his hushed whimpering, and if he heard the grunt departing he didn't show it. Alexander struggled to keep his pacing even as he walked down the opposite path, clearing corners as he followed signs leading to another part of the building.
He faintly heard shouting from where he had departed and sped up, turning a corner and almost running into a pair of surgeons walking out of a brightly lit room. To them, he clearly wasn't a soldier or anyone that was supposed to be back there: Different armor, different weapons, a bullet sticking out of his helmet.
It didn't take any more than a motion of the barrel to convince them to go back into their room.
Alexander continued on, passing operating rooms until he found himself outside the surgery wing. Dozens of people looked up at him- the entire waiting room- and their expressions all went from hopeful to confused to scared within the time it took for the doors to close behind him. The two officers that were guarding the door were the most startled by his appearance, and despite what their radio chatter said they let him walk. There were too many ways the situation could have soured, and in an overcrowded room full of unarmed civilians they didn't want that blood on their hands if a gunfight erupted. So they stood aside and let him pass, everyone did, and as soon he found himself pushing his way past a partially barricaded fire escape.
Sirens wailed all across the city as ash fell from the sky like snow. Fires still raged out of control, and a flaming tower on the horizon slowly imploded in on itself: vanishing from sight in an orange plume of dust. Some of the streets were impassible, buried under yards of debris or cut off by abandoned police barricades. A few helicopters were buzzing around with loudspeakers, warning people to stay indoors and abide by the curfew that martial law had instilled. People were ignoring it, judging from the gunfire and looted businesses.
Alexander weaved his way through a quiet street filled with abandoned cars, scanning dark alleyways and the skies for threats when he passed the large wreck that had congested the street. The roadway cleared immediately, save for police tape and a seemingly forgotten cruiser. Its lights were still flashing, reflecting off the remaining windows on the street, but there were no officers on the scene.
He heard metal scrape along the asphalt just behind him and ducked, the air above his head whistling as something passed through it while someone behind him grunted in surprise as their effort was met with failure. Alexander twisted and without hesitation let a stream of bullets fly. The point blank assault lifted the assailant off the ground and into a car, a tire iron clattering to the ground before more footsteps came from different directions.
A bullet pinged off Alexander's armor and set off a car alarm as he fired back. The grunt's returning spray threw the gunman to the ground, and as he hit the pavement a third person came roaring out of the darkness wielding a bloodied baseball bat. He made to swing when Alexander's boot came up and struck his sternum. The impact knocked him off his feet and onto his rear, then his back as he fell over to hold his devastated ribs.
He was silenced with a pull of the trigger, and Alexander scanned the area again for more looters. With no other souls in sight, he moved on as if the bloodshed hadn't happened, climbing into the police cruiser and checking over the tools on hand.
The radio was overloaded with orders and updates from around the city, so much so that he turned it off to cut out the drone. A laptop sat open in the passenger seat; the grunt began to scroll through it looking for the GPS app. It was a waste of time finding it because the stupid thing wasn't working, and more than a couple minutes were lost waiting for the loading icon before it crashed and said there wasn't service.
It was the biggest city in Alola, how did it not have service?
It was six in the morning, and the Pokemon Center was an absolute madhouse.
The outside looked like it was in the process of being made into a fortress: a co-op between the local police and National Guard. The entire block was sectioned off from the rest of the city with dozens of vehicles were being used as improvised blockades to do so. The windows and walls of the center were being reinforced with military grade steel plating, and the roof had an easy dozen men setting up reinforcements of their own, as well as sniper nests.
The police and Guardsmen were heavily armed and jumpy, but arriving in a police cruiser with Interpol identification was enough to get them to relax around Alexander. He threw up an act that came off as professional, but no sooner had he entered the center did it crumble.
The inside of the center was a complete and total mess. What might have been a cafe at one point had been completely changed into a sick bay, and within it were both humans and pokemon. The waiting area was crowded with civilians that didn't need immediate medical assistance and were there for their pokemon, some of which were out of their balls and wandering around, completely unharmed. Many were stuck in groups socializing while their trainers yelled at broken video phones, watched the news on the many, many televisions, or crowded around some officers barking orders into radios. Desptite the crowd there still wasn't enough bodies to cover the bloodstains and damage from whatever had happened within the building when things came apart.
There were no Joys in sight, and Alexander had to do a double take when he saw a kid half his age run by in pink volunteer clothes. There were dozens of them, now that he counted. Pink uniforms were intermingled with the sick bay and the waiting area, giving out medicine and rushing around.
Despite the sheer number of people in the center, Alexander had no issues getting to the front desk. The crowd parted like water for him; nobody wanted to get in the way of the armored giant that looked like he had been put through a meat grinder. Hushed whispering slowly spread among the people he passed; By the time he made it to the desk the volume had dropped, and when he looked back over half the building was watching him.
When Alexander turned back a volunteer had seemingly appeared out of nowhere, eyeing him nervously. A Mismagius flanked him, hovering slightly higher so it looked like he was wearing a wide, flowing hat. There was an energy that emanated off of it- one that seemed to show its age without asking and scream its power without speaking. The luster of its gems was nearly blinding, and he almost missed the volunteer's question as he met the ghost's gaze.
"Can I help you?"
Alexander's eyes trailed from the ghost and settled on the kid. A kid. A pale, scared child was manning the front desk.
"I need to talk to a Joy."
"You can't. The head Joy is resting, and the others are busy tending to pokemon. What do you need, Sir?"
Don't call me Sir.
"My partner is in critical condition. If the Joys are not available then I need you to..." The Mismagius was looming over the volunteer now, watching Alexander intently. It blinked and looked down at his hands before its eyes glowed a faint blue. There was a harsh tug on his wrist that yanked his arm up, and something he hadn't noticed snapped off and floated up to its face for closer inspection.
It was a plastic, grey tag that was slightly larger than a credit card. The Mismagius analyzed it before it vanished in a puff of smoke, and its eyes once again tried to pierce his soul in its search for something.
"I'm sorry about that- Kauane, give it back." Kauane looked down at the volunteer, its trainer, and laughed. His eyes narrowed and Alexander had a start when the trainer started chastising it like it was a child: "Come on, that's the fifth thing you've stolen since we got here! I'm sorry about this; since everything started she's-"
Alexander waved a hand and cut off the exasperated trainer. "I can live without it. Now, my partner. If there's nobody available then I can help her myself." He didn't have time for needless conversation, and without any further conversation, he walked along the length of the counter.
Kauane responded to Alexander's statement with a faint smirk. It faded as he went from being in front of the counter to behind it, and she moved slightly closer to her trainer as he stammered that the grunt wasn't allowed back there as he shoved open the door leading deeper into the facility.
"You're not allowed back there- he's not allowed back-" The door clicked behind him, and Alexander took a breath as the empty room greeted him. He passed computers, various medical technology, and doors leading to the nurses' sleeping quarters as he walked; then through another doorway and into the recovery wing. A few nurses looked up from their work as he passed- all were busy dealing with injured to try and pursue him, so he strode unhindered through the facility.
The machine he was after was near the back, between the emergency wing and where he was now. It was meant for pokemon like Rotom, who needed a special environment and operation to recover. Alexander wasn't certain, but he thought that they couldn't be healed like other pokemon; they were not organic, so the medicine had to be administered differently.
He found the station he was after. He immediately began to set it up for a transfer and popped open a second, smaller panel near the killswitch on his transceiver. A cord was neatly packed away and was only compatible with machines like this and irreplaceable if damaged. Taking it he found the correct jack on the machine and plugged it in, tapping the screen and paling as the feedback started coming in. Swiping it away he found the procedures that were needed and quickly entered in the confirmation prompt, not realizing that he was looming over the screen until a hand gently touched his shoulder.
Something croaked within the suit that was not the soldier from the lobby. His eyes were burning and his throat was swelling up. He hung his head and strengthened his grip on the corners of the machine to avoid crying, silently cursing himself for his weakness. He needed to stay strong. He couldn't falter now.
Alexander took a quiet breath and forced his emotions away. He leaned back and turned, to spent to do anything. The volunteer had followed him, probably from the moment he had left the lobby, and he let his arm drop once he was certain he could be heard.
"When you're done here, we need you up front. There's something happening and the NG's and police are losing their minds. They're scaring the younger kids."
Alexander felt a chill go down his spine as he focused on Kauane, who resided beside the volunteer. She was fidgeting in place and wasn't looking at either of the two, but more so where they had come from. Call him crazy, but the ghost looked nervous. What could make her nervous, he had no idea, but there was a sinking pit in his stomach that told him he was going to find out.
What are your thoughts on this chapter? Things are going to finally start affecting more than just Alexander, and the next chapter should be a fun one. Tell me what you think: is there anything I should improve? Am I doing fine? Should I have more confidence in myself? Only you can tell me!