Tier 2 Chapter 3 Version 3
When Rallen and Jeena arrived on Slayso, they noticed that something seemed... off... about the tower. Something just didn't seem quite right.
"Does the tower seem taller than the last time we were here?" Rallen asked Jeena.
"N-no, it's just an illusion caused by the lack of the... uh..." Jeena couldn't find the right words to respond to her partner's question. "Let's just call it our imaginations and get inside."
Once inside the first floor of the tower, the sense that something was wrong only got worse. The elevator was waiting, shield down, for the two cadets. This just increased Rallen and Jeena's suspicion as neither Tidy nor Scout could have sent down the elevator without coming down themselves.
"Well," Rallen started towards the elevator, "down we go." He stepped into the elevator and was followed by Komainu and Jeena. As if the elevator had sensed the direction the two wanted to go in, it immediately lifted the shield and began its descent.
"Is it just me," Rallen inquired, "or is the elevator going at a third of its normal rate?"
"I'd have to check your math on that, but it's definitely moving slower than usual," Jeena replied. The elevator was soon completely surrounded by the darkness of Slayso's subterranean world. Through the clear walls of the elevator, Rallen and Jeena could see only the occasional blue light moving by to signal that the elevator had power.
"Do you hear that?" Jeena said as a light rumbling emanated from the shaft around them.
"If I say 'no', will it go away?" Rallen replied with his own question.
The elevator slowly descended into a wide cavern. It was lit by a primitive form of artificial light. Some of the light emitters were dimmed or not lit at all. Across the room, a series of tube-like structures was lined up in columns and rows. Strange shapes floated in some of these tubes.
"Jeena, does this look like anything you've seen before?" Rallen asked his partner in shock.
"Not that I'm aware of. It looks very similar to the stasis pods in our ship, but it doesn't directly resemble any sort of prototypes I've read about," Jeena thoughtfully responded. "I'll need a closer look."
The elevator finally touched down on the floor of this strange room. While Jeena walked straight over to the tube-like structures for a closer examination, Rallen and Komainu sniffed around the rest of the room. Rallen couldn't help but think that there was something else here, something he wasn't seeing.
"Rallen!" Jeena shouted in shock as she realied what she was looking at. Rallen and Komainu came running over to where Jeena was standing and looked at the glass tube in front of them. It was held in place by stone rings at the top and bottom that connected to the floor and ceiling of the room. The tube was filled with some sort of ice-like solid with an odd blue color to it. Encased in the ice was a creature with two legs that were human enough, but it's upper body was amoebic in look.
"What is that thing, Jeena?" Rallen inquired incredulously.
"I-I think it was human..." she relied quietly, "but it's not anymore. By the amount of frozen precipitation on these tubes, I'd say these creatures were frozen around the same time that that tablet was carved. I saw some broken tubes farther back, maybe we should check them out."
As they approached a broken tube, Komainu suddenly ran forward and barked fiercely at a particular chunk of ice. When the two cadets saw exactly what was in the ice, they gasped. Encased in a thick sheet of ice was a common Swar.
"B-but how?" Jeena stuttered. "How did they capture a krawl with their primitive technology, while ours fails to even deal significant damage?"
"What if these krawl aren't captives?" Rallen suggested. This got him a strange look from Jeena. "I mean, how would you explain a creature with the leags of a human, but the torso of a Blova? What if this room isn't a prison? What if it's some sorta lab?"
Before Jeena could reply, Komainu ran off again. This time, the little red creature headed towards a large control panel on the opposite side of the tubes from the elevator. After closer inspection, the panel closely resembled the controls in the ancient starship. There was a cavity in the panel that was shaped almost exactly like Rallen's prizmod. When Rallen inserted the prizmod into this slot, the entire room seemed to suddenly surge with energy. The dimming lights suddenly began to glow brighter than Nanairo and the frozen tubes quickly began to thaw.
"Rallen, pull out the prizmod!" Jeen shouted at the top of her lungs. The small device was firmly latched in place, though. The krawl that were free from their tubes began to head towards the control panel. The still sealed tubes began to churn as the creatures inside continued their interrupted metamorphosis.
"If I can't get the prizmod out of here, then I can't summon any spectrobes!" Rallen shouted as the krawl quickly approached. Just as the krawl seemed as though they would lash out at the two, they stopped in their tracks. Rallen stopped trying to remove the prizmod from the trap on the panel. "Aren't they going to attack?"
The krawl then did something that neither Rallen nor Jeena had expected. They spoke. They spoke an ancient dialect that Jeena had to get her audio scanner to translate for them.
"Who are you? Is the project complete? Are we adaptationals now?" Jeena was speechless. Rallen, however, was not. Jeena reversed the setting on her scanner so that the krawl could understand Rallen.
"We are members of the Nanairo Planatery Patrol," Rallen introduced himself and Jeena. "We don't know anything about your 'project,' but what we do know is that you are a race of high threat level beings who are no to be shown any form of mercy under any circumstances. I think we can count this as an exception."
"Nanairo..." several krawl muttered. Then they looked around at each other, noticing their odd appearances. They recoiled from each other and began frantically looking around the room. "What happened to us?"
"Using the data in this lab's memory bank, I can assume that you were part of a failed attempt at adaptatio called 'Project Genome-Fix,' The project was originally scheduled to be shut down when you first showed signs of unanticipated mutation, but the scientists continued the project." Jeena explained.
"They knew that this is what we were becoming?" The Swar asked to no one in particular. "They knew, and yet they continued to change us. What of the others? I suspect the broken tanks that are unaccounted for - Jim, Caleb, Martha, Sam, Helen, George, Dan – are all dead."
"Actually," Rallen started, "I think something worse than death got them."
"Tell me," Jeena began to interrogate these new krawl, "do you feel any sort of violent impulse or odd craving?"
The Swar looked between them for a while before saying, "I'm not getting any good vibrations from that dog of yours, but other than that... Wait, what was your friend saying about worse than death?"
"I think your friends escaped from this facility and created a new genus that we know as 'krawl,'" Rallen replied. This could possibly be the smartest thing he's ever said.
"Krawl?" the Swar asked, "In what ways are we like these... krawl?"
"Your appearance is, so far, the only resemblance," Jeena said. "This light would normally drive krawl mad. Most krawl can't, and wouldn't want to, communicate with humans."
"I can't believe those people were turned into a high threat level species while we're just a bunch of freaks. What exactly do these 'krawl' do to make them so threatening?" an approaching Blova inquired.
"They devour planets and stars," Rallen stated bluntly.
The krawl were shocked. Neither of them spoke as this information sunk in.
"What were the affects of this project supposed to be?" Jeena asked.
"I-it was supposed to make humans more adaptable so that terraforming wasn't necessary," Blova replied. "One of the adaptations was supposedly the ability to obtain nutrition directly from dirt rather than having to grow our crops on this planet. I guess it backfired..."
"Should we bring these kra- sorry, these people back to hq?" Rallen asked his partner.
"Yes," Jeena responded quickly, "but not yet, I want to look at the site where Neal found the tablet."
Rallen had no trouble removing his prizmod from the cavity of the control panel this time. All he had to do was twist two knobs that released the panel's locking mechanism. The two humans and the thirteen-or-so krawl all managed to squeeze into to elevator as it moved at its unusual slow speed up into the main room on the first floor. Rallen and Jeena were still feeling that something was wrong, but neither could figure out what.
After exiting the tower, the two humans and their krawl companions began to walk around the tower's massive base. Little more than a third of the way around the tower they saw it.
Saw what? I want you people to decide! This is an interactive fic, meaning that I'm taking reader ideas and turning them into chapters for this story. I bet you people already know that, though.
I owe this idea to one of my friends outside of deviantART who now goes by the deviantART name
zapdragon555
There's a link in the description.