Act I: Enter The Dawn, Chapter IX: Grey

June 11th, 2028

Her semester, a long one with endless studies and homework, was over at long last. The nights she'd spend awake until 3 AM for an essay or a packet due had proved to kick her ass time and time again. Coffee was her best friend those days she slept for a short period of time, despite her not ever really liking the cup of joe to begin with.

But for a break, Caroline Pingrey would not have to brew it or buy the McDonald's brand until the next time she had a date with a killer assignment.

Caroline Anne Pingrey was your average college girl infatuated in her studies, married to it in a sort of sense. She was a twenty-three-year-old blonde of 5'6, body type and measurements being in the regular range as her female peers. Her hair was perfectly straight on all mornings, even in those coffee-induced ones, reaching out past her shoulders. The skin tone she had was the common pinkish-white recognizable among most of the white folk, but she had considered a tan once before.

The thing about Caroline was that, while mommy and daddy dearest Cynthia and John Pingrey were aiming to groom her into the politics game, the daughter of the two wanted to have a career in something else that did not open the gates into political arguments. Caroline denied it believing there could be some sort of a fuck up down the line should she go that line, and not to mention that she, being a girl, felt at a tight disadvantage. Fuck all that, she believed.

With that, she settled for something a little more her, and the career she chose was with the legal system. Truth, justice, and the American way.

A bit more to accomplish before she was certified to enter that particular field, and she'd then be proud. Anything that followed after would follow through her career, or bust!

The girl moved gracefully from the campus, dressed in a Cardigan over a plain white button-up shirt with half-sleeves untucked over a plaid skirt, an Alice band, knee socks and simple brown pumps, with an additional set of black earrings, all of which made her look cute and maybe sexy to the guys in her class, and those randoms who walked by her, showering their hungry, thirsty eyes at her.

Plot twist; Caroline was a lesbian, but wasn't ready to come out of the closet just yet. Her eyes did settle on a close friend she made from a past project, Marianne Winchester, a curvy redhead with a cheek full of freckles, candy-green eyes, and wavy hair that was almost one breeze away from a full curly style. It was merely a minor crush, but even with that, it scared her to be honest with her feelings, choosing to contain them.

Caroline had only had one boyfriend in high school. Some sweaty jock of the football team named Roy Mint. It only took one sexual encounter with him to tell her that she wasn't into it, and understood her sexuality slowly afterwards. Honestly, she had no idea whether to come out in the future or forever keep it locked away like some sin. And a sin that would disgust her parents, no doubt, knowing full well they took no kindly to the LGBT community.

Her car was a 2004 pink Jeep Liberty, a gift from one of her aunts on father's side of the family. The Jeep had been in her possession since she was seventeen, and showed the accurate responsibility in owning it, while daddy taught her the old grease monkey advice she needed to remember. The car was awaited her in the parking lot.

Party and sleeping in, here I come!

She showed her excitement through her content smiley that didn't fade away. When she got in and turned on the ignition, the stereo played out a Carly Rae Jepsen song to which she began to sing with heart, followed by the rhythmic movements of her shoulders. For one, the college girl had quite a melodious voice that would get her into a Hollywood deal, but that was a talent she didn't vastly explore. The passenger door opened without warning, making her cease her antics. "Hey!"

"Relax, 'Lina, it's just me," a familiar voice told the driver. Samantha Sharp had intruded with no explanation. "Hey, 'Lina."

"It's Caroline, not Carolina," she corrected. "What brings you by?"

"Where are you going?" Sam wondered while laughing. "We live in the dorms."

"Oh, yeah, but I just thought I'd go celebrate the break by stopping at a Starbucks. I love those strawberry... Ackas? Acai? Weird name, but you know!"

"Ooooh, I know which one you mean," she nodded with a wide smile. "Cool, cool... So, um, I know you are relieved to be on break but, well, I was trying to find a study group to go the extra mile, and-"

Caroline knew where Sam was going with this, and had her mind made up even before Sam could finish. "Ugh, listen, I admire your spunk, I really do... But, I want to relax and kick back until the next school year starts."

The frown on Sam's face, followed by her look of sheer disappointment, was like a needle inserted into Caroline's heart to poke her for letting the hard-working Sam down. The latter blonde simply nodded. "I get it, Caroline. No issue, heh..."

"Hey, d-do you want a-?" But Sam took off faster before Caroline could process it, door closing back again. "-Drink?"

Later

She went a steady forty miles when coming back to the college campus, taking a narrow road of a shortcut back. The music volume had been turned up, but her need to sing had died before she pulled out from the college. At least she had the nice Trenta-size drink on the cup holder.

Passing a stop sign, Caroline was distracted by the sudden ringing of her phone. When she looked down, she landed in a dangerous situation when a black SUV came ramming into the side of her car, spinning her out of the land in the intersection. Her drink had come spilling up high, phone smacking against the back window when the damaging impact broke away some of the other windows, sending glass hurtling around her face. Poor Caroline had struck against the window, leaving her disoriented and dazed.

"M-m-m-" She had a struggling fight to keep her eyes open, while the occupants of the other vehicle simultaneously exited the SUV unharmed and unscathed. There were four men in total, and three of them were armed, carrying a loaded weapon on them. She centered her blue eyes on them, thinking authority, then terrorist. This was wrong. This was all wrong. She had no thought but the intensity of fear rising to keep her company.

The air bag didn't go off for some reason, but it didn't matter. Her motor skills were still intact, able to help her unbuckle from her seat. The stereo still played like nothing had happened, having no care in the world. The men grew closer, close enough for her to notice the fourth guy, a tubby man in a white, long coat, holding an opened briefcase.

"H-help..." She assumed they were hostile, but the trick she believed was to appear as a victim, not someone they'd have a reason to shoot at. She moved out of her wrecked Jeep Liberty carefully, stumbling about. What a crazy world... "I'm- I'm bleeding."

"Get her up," the labcoat ordered. "Town-wide blackout active for one minute!"

The walkie-talkie dangling on the labcoat's waist buzzed out. "All roads are blocked successfully!"

One of the armed men face his weapon to another to pick Caroline up by her hands. "Sir."

The labcoat took out a syringe with a purple liquid moving around, planning it for the freshly-plucked victim for Vial Corp. He gave her the shot, a special concoction that slowed the heart rate down by over three quarters, which would reduce her need for oxygen. A second syringe held a reddish-orange substance, with this one paralyzing her in five seconds after it entered her bloodstream.

The labcoat closed the metal briefcase before contacting someone on the other end of the comms. "Deploy the truck!"

Twenty seconds later, an armored white truck rolled into view, with three occupants dressed in casual clothing hopped out, moving towards the SUV. Caroline could only watch, up until the guard holding her set her down near her Jeep. She fought the paralysis as hard as she could, trying her best to reactivate the feeling in her legs, but failed miserably. While she was subjected to her infernal immobility, the labcoat and his backing guards jumped into the back of the truck, which then drove away. As for the three civilian-type persons, two of them sat down, taking shrapnel and cutting each other up while the third readied their phone, counting down the time until the blackout was over.

Later

The cleanup crew came and collected Caroline thinking she was a corpse, calling her time of death at 3:48 PM, which played right into Vial's hands in securing another test subject. The "driver" of the SUV was not faced with charges of vehicular manslaughter, therefore getting off spic and span. From there, they handled it for themselves, while Corpse Caroline, placed in a black body bag, took such slow breaths that it was basically impossible to detect. She wound up at a hospital, where the autopsy would be taking place, and it was there that she'd have to be kidnapped and hightailed out of there before it could happen.

Not that she knew what was happening, but Caroline, eyes open the whole way, and having gone red from not being able to blink, wished she was really dead and not whatever this was. In what seemed like an eternity being picked up, dropped, and free from her body bag, she had finally the honor to stay out of one, with the downside being that labcoats were strapping her down to a stretcher, in some sort of lab. Her motor functions returned too late, way past beyond the point of trying to move about freely. Her eyes had gone through numerous sights, last few being whom she thought were doctors analyzing her physically, laying their hands on her which violated her uncomfortably.

Caroline had no idea where she was, who these pokey people were, or what that crash at the start was all about. All she hoped for was that she was fixed up and sent on her way back. In that instance, she knew fear yet again, shedding a literal couple of years while her legs wiggled slowly.

She, along with her forced company of labcoats, lay imperfectly on the facility's surgical room, the place where freakshows were born, if they were revealed to be compatible to hold down their own formula they'd receive. For Caroline, they were doing something different.

Two labcoats on her side placed large, metal cuffs high on her arms, closing them with a clicking lock. The procedure began when they applied the third serum Caroline had gotten today to her arms, followed by the activation of the cuff devices that felt cold like no other. Nothing happened for some extended seconds, until the cuff devices started to tighten their grasp on her. The pain was excruciatingly unbearable, driving her to move her feet and eyes all around in emergency response.

"Is it working?"

"Run a diagnostic scan on her arms! The chances heighten with-" The labcoat fest zipped up when Caroline's soft hands bubbled about grotesquely, skin popping away to reveal the inner flesh. "Raise compression levels to max! It must not reach past the arms!"

The cuffs closed in around her flesh even harder, making her body scream a high-pitched silent cry she could not emit, serving to block the serum from flowing away from her hands. On the plus side, her hands went numb as they disintegrated like cotton candy, spewing blood and chunks of flesh around herself and the labcoats. The screaming hadn't kicked in yet, but it would be soon, and only after she felt it again.

"Let the serum do its course! Have it compress until they regenerate!"

"Probability of regeneration is at eighty percent, stabilizing!" The labcoat holding a tablet-like device told her peers.

The outer layer of her arms were gone, reduced to fleshy branches at that point. Miraculously, her fingers were still connected, not having dropped off like melted ice cream yet. The meat on her boned had also followed protocol until there was a sudden stop, and her meaty arms turned into a frozen state, ascending to a dark red color.

"What's happening?!" She heard one say.

"I- I don't know, this is a new development-" They withdrew their voices when a liquid filled around her arms, changing the color from red to the original skin color of white. "Healing process has begun!"

"R-run diagnostics again!"

The female labcoat applied the tablet and hovered it again over Caroline's regenerating arms. "It's... IIt's now at ninety-six! It will not fail!"

"Now what of the compatibility-?"

Caroline imagined a knife or scissors to use to escape from her straps, and regarding these metal things that hurt her... "NO!" The college girl flung her arms high in the air, able to see them now. Only, she wasn't looking at arms any more, but rather long, skin-colored blades that she didn't believe to be hers at first. Hand-blades, with no reflection to show her what a nightmare she was now. For a second, it was almost unreal, a profound act made up of well spent visual effects for a prank that went too far. The new form of her hands was too mesmerizing that she didn't think of escaping now that she broke her hands free. "What-?"

"Get a guard in here-! Hey, she's breaking out!"

Caroline swayed her body from the sides, still aching from her whole arms. She had no chance to really run around loose, but had figured out that, right before being shocked into submission by one of the guards, this place was some sort of hell never seen before, definitely not a clinic or hospital, despite the layout being similar to that of one.

June 15th, 2028

They had her arms wrapped around in a special type of fabric blanket, impossible for her to break free with her artificially-mutated pair of hands, a precaution in case she had some funny thoughts. Apart from that, she had her speech rights kept due to her never having outbursts of her own. She kept quiet, thinking and wondering how long this journey was going to last. It had already hit her that she was a lab monkey of some sort, a kidnapped person from society to "help" in the name of science. It was such a violation of a person's rights, angering her enough to wish she could do something.

A woman. She was but one single woman, undermined by society. And maybe even here, too. That woman she had seen the first time, that labcoat girl- Did she possibly feel the same way? Why did Caroline care? That one was here of her own free will, her choosing...

She was visited by a trio of them, and none of them were that woman, gathering into her cozy, little cell. Again, she had no words.

"Good afternoon..." The speaker, a man of six feet of a chubby build and balding hair, greeted her as if he was a professor of hers back at the college. "Miss Pin... Grey? How do you pronounce that? Pin-gree? Pin-gray? Pin-gry? Oh, such unorthodox surnames... We don't normally come have a personal chat with our... Live-ins, but to those we pull from a great future..." He stopped to sigh.

The blonde girl caught some info based off that; they were doing this to others, not just the bright and healthy. She had pieced it that she wasn't the only one there, but nothing apart from that yet. Weird... She expressed no sudden fear, keen only on listening to this man telling her what was.

"If it were up to me, I'd not have bothered taking you in... Now, to the world outside, Caroline is dead, gone. A total ghost and nothing short of a memory now."

Her head bobbed via a reactionary twitch, arousing her curiosity... And the heat underneath. "How so?" Her bothering to ask opened the floodgates to fury.

The labcoat explained that Caroline had died in that car crash, sent to the coronary's and later swapped out for a fake model decoy in Caroline's image. This was the body that was to be buried at the funeral while the real Pingrey girl served a piss-poor purpose. It was genius, and no one had any reason to think otherwise. Plus, the surveillance around the vicinity had gone offline for anyone to really know what happened. And that was it for her life. Caroline Pingrey was dead.

She wasn't dead yet.

"All of this technology..." She assessed. "What about me?"

"What about you, miss?"

Caroline shook her locked hands at him, not moving from the back of the cell. "This. What is this? And what have you done to me?"

"Oh, we've given you a new purpose and hands," the labcoat further explained. "You are able to morph your hands to other shapes, which deviates it from ever staying in one form. With enough practice and mental focus, you would be, by our understanding, able to master it in little to no time. You may be trapped here, but if you comply with us willingly, we will have no trouble to accommodate you here. Maybe we can make you a VIP figure or something, just an idea."

Trade in my ideals and feelings for... Compliance and the VIP treatment? Carol narrowed her eyes at them, thinking about it. If she could fake her way up to top of this contained food chain, then there was a chance to escape. Her, with these arms. And what was more, she had no rebellious phase that would make them suspect she'd turn against them. "Yes, I'll comply. Just tell me what to do."

August 19th, 2028

The day came to try when they tested her in her cell. No guards this time, meaning they had trusted her enough to lower their defenses. Her current exam was to form certain shapes with her arms; the basic ones from circles to squares to triangles, a staggering process that hurt her bones when sinking her fingers back into her. That still had to be properly clarified on that, but with the less times she transformed them, the less it hurt. It was only in her arms, and no other body part.

She did let them know about her minor cramps, not letting up for them to find a way to help her there. Had it been past a few weeks already, she felt, which could only mean that college had started already. Marianne and Sam, sitting in their respective homerooms, writing notes and doing assignments. Have they gone to her fake funeral? Did they cry and mourn her like she wanted her close friends to? And what of her parents, her whole family tree? How did they handle it? Even as little as it was, there was that off chance where they might have been mad that she went off and "died" therefore ruining their foot on the door with her being around controversial figures. Quite a persistent pair of parents if I do say so myself.

She wasn't eager to see them again the more she thought of it, fearing their responses and thoughts on this. And that was before considering that the truth of what this place was would out eventually. She was a witness to her entrapment here, and not just her.

"Well done!" The labcoat leader complimented, looking over his affiliates as they finished writing up her progress. "Thank you kindly, miss."

Caroline reset her hands back to their original setting, grinning a perfectly white smirk. It was when they circled around each other that she saw a chance, another bigger one than she'd see up close. Flicking her arms once to the one form she learned, the blade-like design that she mentally compared to a mantis' own set of hands, Caroline rushed the labcoats, stabbing one unlucky geek right out of the cell. Her bones underneath her skin were reinforced, durable to carry what she would never even imagine bring able to handle. It was the only trick she could play and never repeat again.

She brought the world of harm to another labcoat, landing her jabbed arms onto their legs. The others got away, screaming orders with high voices. Caroline, uncomfortably barefoot in her white attire, ran one side of the long hall. It went her way until the floor became ground zero for multiple guards from the end of the hall, pouring out from the staircase at the end. Behind her, she met another large group of them, and that's where she hit the roadblock.

Later

You'd think they have some sort of maximum lockup, a confinement heavily under watch for the fighters, but no, they didn't. They had to trust that they were good as is, for the additional upgrading would rally up questions from outside. So far, nothing.

The blonde with brass balls was put back in her cell, this time having her arms locked up to refrain her from being a free-thinker. All perks were revoked, and the treatment had went from a formal to shit like a switch being flicked without warning. And she failed.

That was it for her. Life was over... So why was she still calm and rational up to here? Why didn't she have a full resolve and mindset to do what it took? What made her slow down when she needed to maintain a head thick enough to break through?

Maybe... Maybe it was because she was trapped- trapped not meaning in this place, but in the sense of who she was, and what she was supposed to behave like in for the conformity of society. Hide her sexuality, hide her opinions, keep it balanced and clean so that nothing could come knocking at her door for the sake of ruining her life. She didn't ever ask for it, but that's how it was and had been since before being born. She had a voice, but what did it mean if she never used it? Why was she afraid to speak if she had not once spoken? Was it right to apply the outcome of experiences and views told by others unto herself? Was it too much or right for her to do so?

Trapped. Maybe this place was just a living metaphor for her untamed fear, low-esteem, and lack of belief in herself, therefore escape was futile. She let herself leave it up to fate, unsure of what the future held. In any case... She had all the time in the world to think.

May 24th, 2030

She did nothing again, sitting against the wall, waiting for sleep. Funny. She could sleep forever and it would never be comfortable here. The day had come where fate broke a different path for her to take from the main. Her cell opened when there was no living soul on the other end, letting her out of the cage. Not only her, but the multiple cellmates, her neighbors, were also liberated. Something was surely happening.

"Hey, someone get me out of these!" Caroline begged to her fellow freaks. Her white knight, a powder-pale white fellow with cold yellow eyes ran a black fingernail down her lock, breaking it in half. She sighed with relief, rubbing her wrists. "Thanks."

She followed the crowd upwards, flocking to the main floor. Gunfire had rung out, meaning someone was defiantly fighting the guards of this place. It was only outside when she witnessed Luna in her reptilian form let out a roar to all around her. "RUN! RUN AWAY AND HIDE, MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS! VIAL CORPORATION BURNS TONIGHT!"

Vial. Vial Corporation. Was this... That? She tapped into her reserved rage, bringing it out to the party. "EVERY FREAK FOR THEMSELVES!"

Vial Corp. The name of the long-running metaphor. Life dead. Caroline dead. Dead and buried. Dead, but no longer trapped here. And if she wasn't trapped here... Could things change? Did she have a voice now? Confidence back? Yes, had to be.

She ran, running among these other hope-given human guinea pigs. And as she did so, it hit her. These guys would not make her be alone anymore. There could be a movement she could lead from this mess, and work these forces against Vial Corporation. A voice. She had the idea of being a strong voice now. Not through her ideal career, but from this. An experience of this, an atrocity against humanity. She could raise and spread awareness with them if she could gather enough. Soon. Soon for Carol.

AN: Rebooting the skin warping fiend of Liberty's cabal into a different setting, with much more development, so much that it's not the same Carol as 2026's! Oh, wait. That's cause it's not, really. Her being a lesbian is my own HC, with the additional one of her not being a girl who fancies make-up. That one time she had make-up when going to the Loud House was to make herself presentable for Lori, let's not kid ourselves. The infatuation is so, and will be realized. Mad Max: Yuri Road up in this site, I tell ya.

Next up, the awkward reunion of six family members! And Cici meeting Lincoln for the first time. Who's the middle man there, I wonder? Yay for fanonity.