Occurs alongside Chapter 19, Chapter 20, Chapter 21
Whatever Wesker had pumped into his veins did a fine job of rapid regeneration, Don noted. Once the p-Epsilon fluid had cut his metabolism, the virus had been able to reverse the effects of the venom within less than three hours. He'd seemed more peevish about having his equipment touched than anything, much less grateful at still being among the living. After some bristling, Don had managed to convince the man that he was more interested in getting a deal than screwing him over.
Wesker had barely raised an eyebrow over the loss of at least a unit and a half - more now, from listening to their encrypted channel with Wesker's radio (this in particular had seemed to raise the man's hackles), but Don wasn't volunteering that information himself. From the little that had filtered through about the loss of Spencer mansion, this one wouldn't give a shit about throwing meat at the problem, so long as the means got him the ends he came for.
It would have been a weirdly refreshing change, had the venom not been burning slow tracks through the veins of his arm, making its slow progress to his heart. The pain was bad enough to make him nauseous. Don drilled his focus into making sure he had everything for the antivenin, although his thoughts would frequently drift in fantastical directions before he could wrench them back on course.
Don glanced up at the camera feeds. The two soldiers had disappeared from sight, but he had a pretty good idea of what wing they'd retreated too. Delta had been scouting that floor just as the party had broken out down here (something about that seemed wrong), and it seemed like a natural fallback point.
"Nosferatu's found the central maintenance shaft, so this floor's likely to stay clear for a bit, assuming ye mind the ants," Don chuckled aloud. Wesker said nothing, looking across the bank of screens. Don glanced back at him. "I assume you'd want to know, since this floor and the one just above us has the shite more relevant to T-Veronica. Little bit of triage, that. Spencer won't wait forever before he decides he's seen enough. It's not like you need to get to the stasis chamber anymore, since the girl's up now."
Wesker nodded. "I expect as much." After a moment, he said, "So the growths on the wall began when stasis ended, is that what you're saying?"
Don grunted affirmatively. "Some sort of sensory thing, if I'm to guess. I'm staying the fuck away from them." He paused. Might as well get some intel. "A couple of your crew came down looking for you, a little earlier. Delta, I think, and someone from Gamma? Looked like they decided not to hang out in the hunting grounds for too long." Wesker's jaw tightened a bit at the mention of Delta. Interesting. The little wolf wasn't too popular with the rest of the pack. He'd have to keep that in mind. "She- that's a guess, from the build- seems pretty spry. Weak stomach though. Managed to duck right through Nosferatu's first good hunt through a team further down- you passed it on the way. Holed up for a bit before hauling Gamma out. Lucky fuckers, but they're not being careful about touching that shit. They don't seem to be answering the comms when I hail them, but might be that they'll want to know you're up and moving. Survival of the fittest, eh?"
Don stood, trying to make himself appear as relaxed as he might at the end of a well-earned day off in the canteen bar. He needed a little more time - and more importantly, he needed this one occupied somewhere well away from his brewing antivenin. The bioreactors made some noise, but the bastard would start poking around if left to his own devices, and the centrifuge spinning away behind them wasn't exactly being silent. "Come on, then," he said. "Start with the old lab - it was set up for old Edward, poor codger. Not sure if there's all that much of interest on this floor. The girl's old lab is upstairs. I'll show you the way."
Segers was watching 'Delta' carefully. Once she had started leading him through the winding corridors, the zombies had left them alone. She'd had to shush him several times when he'd started to ask questions. After a few attempts, he'd noticed that the zombies became just a little too active again when her concentration waned, and he'd allowed himself to be led quickly through the wing. Fuck it. Maybe she had a bone to pick with the commander, but she also had an express pass through infected areas.
When they'd reached a specific room in an area with an uncomfortably dense infestation, she'd quickly opened the door and shut themselves inside. "Get out of the way," she'd hissed at him, and he realized that there were another several undead lounging about in this room as well. She did. a quick headcount, and, satisfied, pushed them gently out of the room, shutting them both in. Looking up at him, she shrugged. "Early warning system. I need to set up."
About an hour had passed since. Delta seemed weirdly more relaxed now about him, but looked ill. She had been sweating, and breathing hard, taking down the mask and hood hiding her face to try to breath a little easier. In the interim, she'd started humming to herself while they worked. He wouldn't have pegged her as the type for dad rock, but he was able to handle a few nervous, repeating bars of Lynyrd Skynyrd's 'Free Bird' than some teen pop tune right now.
"Would you actually tell me if you're mutating?" He asked. several of the men on Rockfort had tried to hide bites. "You look like death warmed over."
"I'm not mutating. If I were going to mutate it would have happened a very long time ago."
"You still look sick."
Delta shrugged again. "I'll keep. There's stuff in the air from…those." She gestured to the black stuff on the walls. "Spores. I've been exposed before, and I know how I react to them. My system's not fond of them, so I'm probably one of the few people that can fight them off naturally. It's more of an allergy. I'll be fine once I'm out of here."
"Why were you in such a hurry for this?" Segers gestured to the row of beakers Delta had laid out. She'd pulled two bricks of powdered…something…out of her bag, and was measuring pieces broken off from one of them very carefully into a glass beaker on a scale.
Delta glared at him, sidelong, retorting, "Why do you think?" She pushed the other brick out at him. "I need the amount you see on the card here," she pointed to a laminated card she'd laid out on the bench, "into that beaker."
Segers looked at the other brick. "Not that one?"
"No, I could probably snort the contents of that brick and be fine. You would have a deeply unpleasant adventure from even handling it."
"So this one is the snortable one, is what I'm hearing." Segers began chipping bits of the solidified powder into the beaker provided.
"That one is also bad, but you're breathing in a version of that passively anyhow."
"Oh, well, if it's just a little more crazy-making." A thought occurred to him. "Ashford lives here at least part-time, doesn't he."
Delta glanced at him, not responding. Segers pressed on. "So with…that…he won't be crazy?"
"I last saw him when he was eleven. I can't answer that. Will you help, or not?" She snatched up the laminated card, getting as close to angry as he'd seen. "Look, instructions for idiots, even, we're both covered. I could do it if my hands were steady."
"Fine, fine," Segers said, measuring out the last of the powder until the scale read the amount they needed. Delta nodded, looking pensive. "What?" he asked. Fuck, if she decided she was done with him here, this could end badly. He followed her line of sight to a broken camera in the corner. "Did you do that?" She nodded. "She can 'see' me anyhow well enough. I might have to register you into the system, so to speak. I don't trust things to stay quiet indefinitely."
"What-" was all he got out before Delta grabbed his arm and dragged him over to some of the black growths, pressing his hand into it. She wrinkled her nose at the disgusted face he made at the wriggling things. "Oh, what - you've never had kids show you a frog before?" She was actually laughing at him.
"Why do I have to touch it?" He wrenched his hand back, wiping it furiously against his pants. "Did you not just say this shit was bad for you?"
"So you'll take some mad science antihistamines when you leave, stop whining and take your damned hall pass."
Segers starred. "What? You are crazy."
"The situation is crazy. What part of that are you having trouble with? Until we part ways you just got added to the 'not acceptable collateral damage list'," Delta smirked, holding herself like a sorority girl hazing a new pledge. "Happy Christmas, by the way."
The hyphae in the room all seemed to shudder at once, like a tree in a light breeze. "What the fuck was that?" Segers went still, eyes darting around. "It did that downstairs too, when you touched them."
"Sulking, I think." Far from unsettled, Delta was smiling, almost relieved. "That's safe enough. Let's get the rest of the ingredients together. Could you get the generator going for the centrifuge?"
Segers shook his head. "You are an extremely confusing woman, you realize that?"
Delta only smiled at him as if he'd made a clever joke over brunch, and continued on with her work.
The walls between his and Alexia's rooms were far thinner than he liked, at the moment. Alfred shut his eyes when the…sounds…of Alexia and Grayson finally tapered off.
The pills he had taken prior to getting in the jet to leave Rockfort had kept him awake. The were still keeping him awake. They'd been an emergency measure, and now he was slumped in the wingbacked chair of his room, staring at the ceiling and begging his brain to give him a chance to finally sleep.
Sleep didn't answer, but something else did. My poor Alfred. She's actively flaunting how little she cares now, isn't she. Alexia's voice again. This version of Alexia, the one in his head, had been getting more aggressive in the last few hours. Alfred was barely aware that he was vocalizing her words to himself, getting into a quiet, but heated argument.
Trying to pacify this one was nearly as difficult as trying to win over the one who'd just awakened. In childhood, his twin had always held competition in contempt, and the version he'd constructed was no different. His phantom wouldn't go quietly into the night.
As his body struggled to manage the drugs, sleep deprivation, and adrenaline letdown of the past few days, his coping mechanisms had begun to truly spiral out of control. He'd lost weight. Worse still, the stress and atrophy had released a potent mixture of the toxins from the botanical lab, mixed with the mycosis-causing spores which had breached containment. Aunt Callie's sober intervention on Rockfort had quieted the voice down a bit, but the tide would always come back in. The fact that she was almost exactly as she remembered, helped a great deal to bridge the gap for him.
'Alexia' sneered inside his head. She would have left you to die out there if Auntie hadn't intervened, you do know that, yes? We're all going to die down here if you don't do something. Grayson too. Do something, or I will.
It was getting harder to argue with 'her'. Alexia had always been stubborn, after all, and used to getting her own way. This version doubled down at any sign of resistance as well. Absorbed as he was in managing the dispute, he didn't notice the flash of purple pause for a long moment by the door, then disappear again down the hall in the direction of the foyer.
A moment later, Grayson appeared at the door, looking carefully blank. Something was wrong. "What do you want, Grayson?" Alfred snapped.
"You okay, Alfred?" Alexia had followed Grayson in and was peering at him from behind Grayson's large frame. The other one sneered in his head. Of course, she's using him as a shield.
"I'm fine." It was difficult to separate the two.
Alexia decided to speak up. "Brother." Her tone was just as imperious as the one in his head, but there was a thread of anxiety there, now. He looked away, and like the other, she refused to drop it. "I'm speaking to you."
"I want to talk to Callie," he responded back. Aunt Callie had checked in on him before going down into the facility, right before some nutter had gone and released Nosferatu. Alexia had mentioned the release earlier, when they had decided to finally tell Grayson the truth about what had happened to Alexander.
From the look on Grayson's face, she clearly hadn't gotten around to telling him about Callie yet. "She died, Alfred." The blankness slipped. Now he looked openly worried. Alfred felt his jaw tighten, but said nothing. Callie should have been back ages ago.
Unless they're hiding something else from you, the voice whispered. It was too warm in here. Alfred pushed himself out of the chair, surprised when his leg would barely hold him. The dull throb of the wound intensified.
Grayson busied himself with guiding Alfred back to the chair so he could get a look at the wound again. As the two of them discussed getting antibiotics amongst themselves, he felt a pang of indignance toward Grayson. He'd not had to bear the burden for any of this over the years. He'd only come back because his old haunts were under the rubble of Raccoon City. He barely even realized he was saying it until it was out. "If Grayson had actually ever bothered to learn his job correctly," seethed Alfred, "he would've done this right. But he was too bloody busy playing ne'er-do-well in Raccoon City. If Scott was—"
"Scott isn't here, brother," interrupted Alexia, voice sharp.
The pain was getting bad again. Scott had retired, yes. Because…actually, he couldn't remember. But…the other voice went strangely silent at that last rebuke.
Alexia wrinkled her nose at the sensation coming from within the lab Marigold has disabled the cameras. At least she'd made it out of the BOW level unscathed. Alexia was sure she'd be getting an earful about Alexander when she returned, but this was still one step closer to actual return. That didn't mean that she had to like this particular request of mercy. between Marigold and Grayson, there was getting to be rather a large stack of pardons from death sentences.
It wasn't like she was invading their houses. If she had leaned a bit harder on the hard-wired eusocial attine ant behaviour, that wouldn't have even been a question. From what Marigold had told her, her aunt had done her best to drive out the intruders by their own survival instincts. Still, the invaders - both entrenched and surficial - were stubborn. Alexia had to keep reminding herself that eventually, she would have had to prime herself for dealing with much more diverse ecosystems.
She had to get herself under control now. Even if Grayson could give what she'd done to Alexander a pass (the splash of gore upon the hyphae was a distinctive warm sensation, somehow reminiscent of Auntie Marigold taking her to an art gallery when she was barely eight years old whilst attending Oxford), he'd trained himself to pass under mundane scrutiny. The significance of his "Sterling Limit" comment earlier had taken some time to sink in, but Grayson's discomfort, coupled with the strangeness of Alfred's dissociative behaviour was beginning to hit home.
She'd done her best to clean out the infection from Alfred's leg. Marigold had been strangely unconcerned about the placement of the bullet wound, despite how close to the femoral artery it had passed. Both Marigold and Grayson had avoided the question of what in the hell was wrong with her brother, Grayson only yielding under the pressure of direct inquiry of hearing him speak in her own voice. In his delirium, Alfred had slipped in front of Grayson about Callie, their old childhood nickname for their aunt. Grayson had been in a nostalgic mood a moment prior, and had written off the reference as the same, mixed with fever. God, she'd have to tell him sooner or later.
Hurry, Alexia thought with a fierce sense of dread. Grayson had insisted on going down into the facility for antibiotics, once the infection in Alfred's leg wound had been discovered. Once Marigold came back, they could starting working out evacuation. As angry as she had been at Alfred- as angry as she still was - he'd still kept her safe for years while she slept, in his backwards little way.
There were so few people whose lives she actually gave a damn about, and two of them were running around the facility. Alexander had been hunting for hours now, and only getting more territorial in that form. Marigold had periodically tapped the hyphae to let her know she was alright, and was able to get down to work in the little burrow she'd constructed, and a few moments ago that she was near finished. If she and Grayson could just hurry the hell up, then Alexia would be free to start dealing with these invaders, and get her family to safety.