Revamped!

[Remember that month-ish long break I took because of school? Yeah, that was a waste because some of my grades were still garbage]. [2020: *laughs in university summer school with good grades and no breaks*]


Chapter 82: The Contingency Plan Part Two

Outskirts of Town - 19:00 PM

Xavier stands in front of the team, reciting the plan on how they would approach this building. As he further explains, Merida pulls out her bow from the quiver and pops it open with a thrust of her arm. With her free hand, she pushes back one of her curls to insert and activate her earpiece.

Merida looks up at Xavier to hear the rest of their plan and his voice starts to muffle as if he was speaking underwater. The world slows down and her ears start to ring louder and stronger than ever. Then, to her surprise, Xavier starts speaking in Russian. Russian. Fluent and effortless Russian.

Merida is beyond perplexed and tilts her head in confusion as she listens to Xavier speak in perfect Russian. She can't help but wonder how he possibly speaks it better than she does and it's hypnotizing. His words are liquid, melting into her ears. She doesn't have to translate them for the words to take her breath away.

When she hears English again, it's not his voice. It's her mom's in her head.

"You're a genetic anomaly, Merida," her mother told her once, "you weren't supposed to be conceived let alone born. Black Widows were surgically engineered at a certain age and skill levels to become infertile. I knew there was something about you the moment I found out I was pregnant."

"...so do I have something from the Red Room inside of me?" Merida asks.

Her mother shrugged. "I wouldn't be too concerned about it."

Merida's lips move but they construct gibberish words. She looks back at Xavier and he's saying something again, repeating what he said before but the words he's saying are Russian again, the same as before but they don't match the shapes his mouth's making. When Merida pieces together the words, her mind snaps.

She's in The Red Room.

Xavier makes direct eye contact with Xavier and her heart stops. He asks her a question but she doesn't hear it.

-o-

"Merida!" Xavier exclaims in her face.

He looks at his frozen friend who is staring at him non-responsively. He, along with everyone else, calls her name and snaps their fingers in hopes to get Merida's attention once again with no success. Then, her head snaps up and she looks at everyone like a deer that's caught in headlights.

She starts screaming in frantic Russian, panicking.

Everyone else stands back, on their toes since they don't know what's going on. Nobody else speaks Russian.

"Merida…" Apollo mutters, holding his hands out in a steady stance to show how he and the others mean no harm. "English, please! We can't help you if we don't know what you're saying!"

Merida looks directly at him and tears are suddenly in her eyes. That is a sight that nobody has seen come with no context. Something is seriously wrong here, especially since it seemed to have happened at the snap of their fingers.

"Мамочка, дай мне бодрствовать, я боюсь, но я не собираюсь ничего делать!" Merida exclaims.

Apollo continues to try to talk but Merida suddenly drops her bow and holds her head while screaming. She screeches like a banshee. Angela runs over and grabs Merida by her shoulders. Merida continues screaming at the top of her lungs and headbutts Angela. Angela staggers back.

"We should ice her!" Daniel yells.

"She's losing her mind…" Iqadi mutters, subtly scanning the others to see if the same is happening to any of them.

"Merida!" Angela exclaims.

Merida looks at Angela and the others once again before blacking out and crumbling to the ground. Everyone slowly towers above her. Daniel kneels and feels for a pulse which is still there along with a steady breathing rate.

"Did she knock herself out?" Emily asks. "Or did one of you stealthily ice her while I blinked?"

Nobody acted. She went under on her own.

Iqadi shakes. "Merida is in a catatonic paralysis due to an old Russian hypnosis that was being said to her in the form of a lullaby intended to put her to sleep. It was something they would engrain in the minds of developing Black Widows in the Red Room and was found to have been passed on genetically and innately. It's how they controlled the radical ones."

Iqadi kneels beside Merida and brushes her hair off to the side. She pulls out her earpiece and shows the others.

"SHIELD standardized," Iqadi states, raising a suspicious eyebrow at that."But it's rigged with electrodes that rewired the neurons in her brain to hear what she had to, which was the lullaby."

Dropping the earpiece to the ground, Iqadi crushes it with her foot, grinding it into the concrete below until only bits of twisted metal remain. She orders everyone else with earpieces to do the same and they follow without questions, even doing the same towards their own. Now, if they were to continue on this mission, they would go in without communications with one another.

"How does she wake up?" James asks.

"There's another rhyme out there," Iqadi replies. "A wake up call, as you'd call it. As for Merida, she was hearing Xavier say the lullaby as he was going over the plan. Her earpiece changed it up. What she yelled back at us was something like, 'Mommy, let me stay awake! I'm scared but there's no way I'll do nothing.' And yet, it took her down."

"How the hell do you know all this?" Xavier asks.

Iqadi looks at him, at all of them, with an expression that is full of guilt, regret, and sadness. She's too late. She's out of time. She can't find it in her to explain as if the butterflies in her stomach have found their way to her throat and created a lump there. Tears form in her eyes and fall. Iqadi starts shaking her head, looking down at Merida and watching her tears fall on her friend.

It's too late.

"Don't ruin the moment by talking," Daniel tells Xavier. "Maybe another one of us could fall under a hypnotic spell."

Iqadi remained kneeled beside Merida. Her head is bowed and her hands folded as she mutters intensely in her dialect, praying and sobbing. Everyone else looks at one another. Do they interrupt this spiritual and reflective moment or not? They choose the latter.

"I think we should just ask about all this later," Angela says. "We still have a mission with some unknown target here that we need to find. Xavier?"

Xavier nods. His eyes keep on going back and forth from Angela and the rest of his team, to Iqadi who prays over Merida.

"I'm starting to understand why there's nothing in that building, no targets for us here," James mutters.

"How so?" Apollo questions.

James points right at Merida. "We're the targets."


[By the way, the Russian translation was from Google Translate].