Chapter Three

"Step 2 A," Khan iterated as if he were reading assembly blueprints, tossing a newly-completed photon-converger rifle to Thad, "check the perimeter."

The teenager caught the weapon thrown to him, the unexpectedness of it bypassing his football skills and making him fumble it briefly as his sister walked up beside him, phone eternally held out.

Lizzy gave the familiar thing a look. "I thought all her dad knew about was building doors?"

"The only thing I Applied my skills to was building doors." Khan corrected the assumption himself. "Engineering is engineering. Sure, my daughter's the one who's got a thing for sci-fi nonsense and anime, retro-future, Gundam weapons," he spun around to face them, pointing their way and trying his best I'm a cool dad now face he could, "but that doesn't mean her old man can't give it a try!"

Another rapidly-assembled weapon flew through the air as he tossed it their way, with Thad properly catching this one and then passing it to Lizzy.

"Ah but one thing building doors all my life does give me a better angle on is Practicality." Khan removed the remaining items from the bag parts they'd gathered during the hour leading up to that moment, starting to put together something that initially looked similar, but quickly began to look very different. "Uzi's too focused on power and intensity, Epic Devastation and all that." He shook his head with a smile. "Didn't even consider it would be easier to keep the power intake amplifier on a separate platform and swap out power cells with each shot."

The final item he'd produced looked at least like the rear 1/3rd of the photon converger weapon, obviously missing the rails and line barrel, along with being noticeably wider. It bore several resonance prongs, onto which Mr Doorman began placing a collection of the same glowing green power cells the weapons were fueled by. When he squeezed the large trigger, instead of a blast erupting, separate charging meters lit up on the side of the device and began slowly building their way toward full.

"Anyways! Step 2 B, descend into the gaping crevasse of the unknown." And he leapt down with no further warning.

The two highschool drones looked at each other, and then down into the dark descent.

"I am so Not going down that hole." Lizzy declared.

He knew she would anyways, but still, Thad played it up just to make sure she stayed on board. "Oh. So, no secret lab battle pics to post and dunk on Rachel with?"

Lizzy's pink eyes narrowed, and circled her visor in a roll. "Ugh."

And down they both went as well.

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.

"Is the secret elevator . . . labeled?" N felt it couldn't hurt to ask, but got the same really? look from all three female drones at once.

In Russian. "Your boyfriend is insufferably dense." Doll remarked to V without looking her way.

The comment left Uzi with an dejectedly uncomfortable expression setting, and caused both N and V's eyes to switch to dot-in-circle, though for V that only lasted a fraction of a second before hers filled in again and her yellow eyebrow lines lowered.

"Watch it." She said back.

Doll ignored the response and walked away in her chosen direction, holding her hands out together with her bug drone perched atop them, waiting to see if it alerted to any sensor proximity. Uzi went with her, or at least followed a step or two behind, leaving N and V to follow at the rear together.

Before V could enter her alert for danger mode, she felt a gentle tap on her arm.

N's eye circles were still open, with both blush lines nearby and apologetic lines higher up on his display. "You good?"

She knew he asked that question with all the genuineness in the world. She knew that better than anyone else ever could. And that's partly why V didn't want to answer . . . since she wasn't sure how. Her own eyes remained filled-in, but her digital eyebrows relented and her eyelid lines appeared, dipping down over the upper part of her eyes as she looked away.

When she looked again a second later, his eyes had filled in, and his own eyelid lines had appeared. They flicked this way and that on his visor, showing him thinking, searching for something to say. And although cautious with it, his expression did grow happier when he found something. "Hey, so I guess when you told the campers you weren't defective, just full of love, you really weren't lying."

V's display lowered her eyebrows, narrowed her eyes . . . and then just displayed them shut as she sighed with cringe. She opened them again to see his back to open circles, with lines encroaching over each eye from both above and below. It was almost like his nervous laugh face, the one she'd left him with so many times when she'd pretended to not even know his name. Only this time it was a more . . . happily hopeful version.

Toughness, intensity, harsher exterior. Part of that was real now. No matter how much of the former persona she might cease to put up, she had changed. And though a lot less so, he'd changed as well.

Everything had.

But her feelings for him hadn't.

Her eyes went dot-in-circle, and after her eyebrows receded to the upper part of her visor, the lines encroaching on his eyes disappeared from his.

N's raised hand was still just existing there awkwardly, filling part of the space between himself and her arm he'd tapped a moment prior. And though she had to look away when she did so, she took it with her own. Then, whether as some form of venting over her frustration with her own uncertainties, or instinctively clinging onto something she'd regained, V squeezed his hand, rather tightly.

"Haha, ouch."

N's response made her look to him with alarm, but she found him perfectly happy, just with a few digital sweat drops now showing on his visor.

During the same time, Uzi and Doll had walked forward a bit, methodically waving the drone bug one way then the other as they moved, waiting to see if it triggered. "Sooo," the english-speaker asked, "you actually got to hear stuff from your mom? All I got left with was a secret closet full of creepy drawings."

Doll stared at the floor for a few steps. In Russian. "I don't think she wanted to. But, when I was eight, she began telling me there were important things I might need to know one day. She told me about these," she indicated the drone bug she held out, "that the green one was the key I'd need. She told me I'd need it if the world was ending, and to look for a friend named Mitchell, who would be dead now." A pause came as she ran through a thought she'd had before. "I think they meant to come back here themselves to search, your mom and mine . . . but then the murder drones arrived on the planet."

"Aaand nobody could go outside anymore." Uzi vocalized the obvious conclusion. "Great you got to have her around that long. Think eight's just when I really got the idea that she'd been killed for the first time, and that started me off down the dark and edgy road." She gave herself a cringe-worthy, judgemental look. "Declared myself DarkXWolf17."

Doll looked over with a single lifted eyebrow before facing her visor forward again. In Russian. "My mom was a gamer."

"What? Siiick!" Uzi approved, to say the least.

Doll actually smiled for the first time in weeks. The last time she recalled, or the last time she had genuinely done so, was before she'd betrayed her former bestie's trust for the sake of chasing after revenge. She wasn't about to start calling Uzi her friend, but chatting with her as they searched this place reminded Doll that she'd all but destroyed her friendship with Lizzy.

Soon enough they came to a T junction where they'd have to choose to go one way or the other.

They both saw the same thing when they turned around to consult with the other two. N and V had removed the distance, now only a couple steps behind Uzi and Doll. V was clearly scanning for threats as her head turned about, while N was looking as well, but still with an air of the more simple curiosity one would expect from him. There was something else to them though . . .

The two disassembly drones were holding hands.

They stopped when they realized the two workers had stopped. N's facial display showed his nerves at first, while V's did have blush lines, along with her eyes narrowing at the two as would be expected . . . but also with small curved lines near the bottom of each eye, indicators that she just didn't feel like protesting anything. When N made eye contact with Uzi though, his expression shifted; guilt, emotional confusion, and care for his short friend lifting his eyelid lines and undoing his default smile.

Uzi's visor displayed her eyes in a sad state, and she was sad, but she also was . . . she smiled, not wide, but enough, enough for N to see, for both him and V to see.

"Oy!" Whether Doll meant to grab their attention, or complain, she accomplished the former. She had disregarded the scene and stepped away, and now the three of them walked over to where she stood, and lifted their heads to see what she saw.

Up above, hanging from the ceiling was a directory sign pointing the way to multiple sections of the facility . . . with Secret Elevator literally being one of the items listed.

"Oh hey!" N was obviously delighted by the discovery.

"Seriously?" Uzi threw both her hands and eyes upward.

And V, she was squinting her digital eyes uncomfortably. She hadn't noticed until then, since they'd just been in combat, but it seemed like even though she'd never had her memories removed, something from the past had still returned to her as well after their memory hack hours before. She could see the sign, but what was written on the sign . . .

Quietly, she reached into her jacket, and after a second of hesitation, slowly withdrew her old glasses. Her broken glasses. The glasses she wore at the manor. Bad optics requiring glasses had been part of her individuality and uniqueness settings. Nothing of her own choice, just a preset she'd come manufactured with. She hadn't needed them after, until now, but she'd kept them all this time, solely because of the memory of N handing them to her. Now she stared down at them for a moment, just holding them and gazing at the fractures and cracks made so long ago.

She got the context of what the sign said soon enough from Doll's remark.

In Russian. "As they say in Russia: better to label your secret elevator than to trust incompetent people to locate it every day."

N put a thumb and finger to his chin, and had his display visor showing inquisitive eyes. "Huh, are secret elevators just that common in Russia?"

"Yeah," Uzi mocked the idea, "just as common as people having to build staircases out of mirrors to escape being trapped in a bathroom."

.

.

Lizzy leaned on her weapon as she took a selfie in the dark, blue-lit maze of run-down cubicles.

Her post uploaded, captioned:

Girl-bossing through the secret labs to save the universe!

What are YOU losers doing with your weekend?

"So," Thad spoke up to ask, "what exactly are we looking for?"

"I haven't the slightest." Khan happily admitted. "My wife wasn't that big on the details with this one, but she did say it'd something that'd strike my fancy." He was leading them through the place by the guidance of a rough map Nori had drawn long ago, one of the many items from her Kooky Closet. It was the most basic of layouts that matched the floor they were currently on, and although it labeled no rooms, there was one she had heavily circled and drawn several arrows pointing to, with the note written beside it reading "You'll love this!"

He removed his eyes from the map to check on the two teens following him. "Phones away, weapons up!"

Lizzy was the recipient of the comment, and rolled her digital eyes in response. "Um, excuse me, I'm the one keeping tabs on them."

"They're texting you in the middle of . . . whatever they're doing?" Thad asked.

"Nooo," Lizzy held her phone up to the other two, "I'm tracking them with StalkerApp, obviously." It showed an even rougher map of their surroundings, if it could even be called one, that seemed to primarily just be serving as a distance indicator. And, true to her word, the name title of the application was literally "StalkerApp"

One of Khan's eyebrow lines lifted, raising some of his simulated wrinkles with it. "A bit concerning something like that's so readily available to you young people, but then again, I did just toss you each an extremely destructive weapon a couple minutes ago, so if my daughter was here she'd tell me I was being picky about what I find questionable." He shook his head proudly during the last part, and brought his wife's map back up in front of his visor. "Aha! Almost there!"

They came to a room marked by the sign "Facility Control Center" which upon entering yielded the a sight of divided stations, each comprising a wide control panel set beneath a broad array of displays, gauges, and in the case of one panel station in particular, live camera feeds from various monitoring cameras that still functioned. The two younger drones raised uncertain, or in Lizzy's case, weirded out / whatever eyebrows at another sight, however. That being Khan's face lighting up, literally, with his eyes and all other display lines visibly increasing their luminosity, and a mesmerized smile crossing his face.

"It's . . . it's a MASTER, DOOR, CONTROL SYSTEM!"

.

.

The others continued on their way to the secret elevator, transitioning from one portion of the facility to the next, leaving the array of offices and cubicle mazes behind and finding themselves at the start of an area that honestly resembled something closer to a wide hotel hallway rather than a research complex, even transitioning from dim blue to brighter gold lighting. The humans' architecture and interior design in this place had been really inconsistent, to say the least.

V held her glasses, still not having put them away. She held them, the old things . . . between the bladed fingers of one of her disassembly hands.

. . . Whether they were unable to help her now or not, she just didn't want to let them go.

"Hey," N's voice drew V's attention up from them, "never knew you still had those. They look uh, ahh," his eyes crept into a brief digital wince, "I'm sure if you want we can get you some new ones."

For the first time in a few hours, V was at least mildly embarrassed by something other than her and N. "I wouldn't need any if someone hadn't reverted my optical calibration…"

Uzi's head spun around with an apologetic eye display. "Yeeeah, sorry, that uhh, might've happened earlier when I reset your OS admin settings." Some nervousness made her hands slip behind her back briefly, until she decided to tell more. "Your optics correction was probably just something Cyn did to make sure you were a better killing machine. I didn't reset it on purpose. The only thing I did to both of you other than the admin change was restore your core operating temps to something normal."

That was news to both disassembly drones, who shared a look with each other.

Both brought up their temperature readings, finding the same thing. They were elevated from the fight earlier, but even the elevated temperatures they saw were short of the prior 126 that used to be their default setting.

Temperature Analytics

Set Operating Temp : 82 F

Current Internal Temp : 99 F

Outside Air Temp : 16 F

"Haha, hey," N was glad for the change, "that's awesome."

V was conflicted, and her eye display showed as much. She actually wanted to thank Uzi, it just wasn't . . .

"If you want, I can try to normalize your sight for you again?" Uzi was . . . not used to being nice to V.

In Russian. "Later. She shouldn't have trouble reading this."

Doll's words drew everyone else's attention to where she was looking. On one of the nearby walls, someone had gone through great effort to make a crude, but very large drawing of a . . . dinosaur head? Whoever had done so also left enormous words to accompany it.

"DON'T look at the Light!"

They all stared for a second, with V even raising her cracked glasses to squint through them.

A head suddenly sprang up from behind a nearby desk, drawing Doll's attention first as she was the nearest to it. A blue light flashed and the thing barked out an animalistic sound. Doll fell to the floor, a buffering loop appearing on her display visor in place of an expression.

Though they hadn't been directly looking, the other three had still reflexively raised a forearm in front of their faces, even as a normal reaction to a sudden brightness.

"Alright," Uzi remarked through her metal teeth, "we got the message."

A massive thud behind V made her spin around, right into the flash of another robo-raptor that had dropped down from somewhere up above.

That blue flashed, but . . . it didn't flood her vision, and didn't disable her.

It sparkled. It burst. It broke over in lines layered upon each other. And all the effect she suffered was her vision glitching for an instant around its outer edges.

Her glasses? They were so cracked and broken. The disabling flash had been too refracted to properly work on her.

Whatever the thing was, it tried it again, and it failed again. And this time V instinctively swung her free hand, switching it out for a disassembly one mid-swing.

Claw-bladed fingers tore through the neck and face of the thing in front of her, and it produced a few more distorted versions of the prior dinosaur noises as its now-exposed wires sparked before it fell over and ceased operating.

"That's it?" V sounded, and was, disappointed and unimpressed.

The raptor that hid behind the desk leapt onto it and began vocalizing into the air. More of them began to pop up and out of numerous concealment spots where they'd been dormant in power-saver mode. Their summoner then quickly leaned down from the desk, biting ahold of Doll's ankle and thrashing her frozen form to and fro once before throwing her off down another hall and turning to snarl at N and Uzi.

"Shoot it before it–"

Uzi's forceful suggestion was answered before she could complete it. N had already switched out one hand for a machine gun while keeping the other up to shield his visor. He blind-fired in front of them, sheer proximity making it effective enough to perforate the horror movie machine in front of them.

The sight of another one of their number falling enraged the others, or at least set them into legitimate threat mode.

"Solver?" N suggested.

"Uhhh don't know if that's the best idea." Uzi wasn't a fan of not being able to participate to her best, but she didn't exactly know what the extent or range of Cyn's glitch-out power over her might be, let alone where that abomination was right at that moment.

Right as the two approaching from the hallway Doll had been thrown down tried flashing their bluelights from a distance, V skidded in front of N and Uzi and threw out . . .

Uzi's arm actually lowered from her face. "Did you just use freaking ninja stars?"

"Shut up!" V's response was expected, though she relented her eyes to roll them instead when she saw N's now giddy face. The two bots she'd targeted fell over in dying seizures, ninja stars now embedded in their metal skulls. V made sure her glasses were fixed well in place and looked around to the other robo-raptors now racing towards them from every other direction. "Go grab the Russian freak!"

N reached a worried hand out, but she leapt past them without any hesitation.

"Come on!" Uzi scooped up the key bug Doll had dropped and took off toward their friend's unconscious form, with N following close behind.

With V remaining at the junction of four hallways, sentinels charged her from three of them, screeching and flashing as they ran, their disabling lights refracting pointlessly across her cracked glasses' lenses, all while her eye display gradually narrowed and a grin beginning to form on her face.

One hand switched out for a chainsaw that she jammed into the first raptor's mouth when it made its jump. She rolled back with the impact and kicked the sentinel with the now-shredded face off and into the path of another. Vaulting back to her feet, she deployed and swung a sword at the same time, decapitating a passing bot that had just missed her. She spun into a kick, foot smashing into and pushing away one who would have otherwise reached her, and she used her spinning momentum to throw her tail and stab the one she'd tripped in the head with her acid syringe.

In the midst of everything, as he and Uzi ran to recover Doll, N looked back in time to see V mid-spin. Whether or not she was looking at him or just facing their way in that particular instant, he couldn't tell, her eyes on her display were concealed behind her glasses, both lenses shining gold as they reflected the surrounding light, but she was smiling one way or another.

It was reminiscent of the V he'd been most used to before regaining his memory, of the front she'd suffered through holding up for so long. But it wasn't, it was something else. Even in the briefest glance he got, N could see . . . the sadism was completely gone, but V was still enjoying herself. Now she was just having a confident thrill.

He felt like he should shout something encouraging.

NO! No time! They had to–

N bumped into Uzi, who'd come to a dead stop. And when he saw what she did, he understood why.

Doll had stood back up on her own. But to say she was standing normally would be . . .

Her head was hanging completely back . . . until it wasn't.

She snapped her head upright to face them, but when she did, her eyes were yellow, and it was Cyn's voice that emerged when she spoke.

"Peekaboo, guess_who?"

She made Doll's head tilt jarringly to the side.

"Doll was, taking a_nap, so," and then she threw her head to the other side, "we decided to_say, hello."

Doll began walking toward them, or rather Cyn began forcing her legs to move, each step coming just as awkwardly as her own had been back on the surface. And with her steps forward, they began equally stepping back.

N, though raising a machine gun arm and using his other hand to hold it steady, did try to talk. "Um, New Buddy? You still in there?"

Doll's display visor glitched briefly. "Do you, not want to hang_out, with us?" Cyn asked, before Doll's visor glitched again, its owner's red eyes fighting to reappear for an instant. "That hurts our feelings, big_brother." She finally stopped, lines on display straying everywhere for a full second until Doll apparently regained control with a gasp.

Both Uzi and N instinctively wanted to advance toward her then, but they only took a couple steps before she reversed the prior dynamic, now holding up a stop hand and backing away from them for what time she had.

While Uzi had seen Doll grow uncertain, and nervous before, she had never seen her terrified.

In Russian. "Get . . . run."

Her hands grasped her head as her visor glitched violently again. And though her robot teeth gritted as she fought it for a few seconds, yellow eyes emerged on her expression display once more.

"Leeets do what she said!" Uzi suggested.

"No complaints here!" N agreed, and they took off.

Cyn pursued them as Doll . . . for a few meters before her puppet face-planted against a thick fire door that swiftly descended from above, sealing off one section of the hallway from another.

"HA!" A familiar voice to Uzi shouted over an intercom system.

They both came to a halt, practically back with V already, who had the last sentinel in a headlock and was apparently taking a selfie.

"Dad?" Uzi asked aloud, looking around.

"We've got your back, Zi!" Thad's voice sounded out from the lab's intercom as well.

A yellow solver symbol appeared on the metal door they'd left behind, doing a rapid spin and then prying the metal apart from the middle outwards.

"Move it losers!" Lizzy finally got her turn on the speakers.

V took in the new development without delay, immediately producing a gun hand just long enough to give the headlocked raptor a kill shot and put her glasses away.

"Which way do we go!?" N panic-asked.

Uzi remembered the last sign for the secret elevator they had seen had only used a straight arrow, no bends or curves to the left or right. "This way!"

All three of them raced down the hallway that would have been straight ahead had they never been ambushed.

Cyn made Doll step through the gaping hole she'd solver-pried open in the door, visor glitching for the quickest instant as Doll tried to fight. But her puppeteer remained in control, making her continue down the hallway.

Until another massive fire door slammed down in front of her.

She solvered that one open as well, stepping through and rounding the corner at the junction to follow them . . . until another door came down.

"Sigh."

And another.

"Groan."

And another.

"Annoyed_expression."

Uzi, N, and V meanwhile found the secret elevator just around the next corner, even less secret in actual appearance. It was pretty obvious, just right there in the open, including a few safety violations like exposed elevator cables. Placing the key bug on the detection pad triggered the elevator to open, but while the elevator doors were still parting, a circular hole was torn open in the last fire door blocking Doll-Cyn.

V fired off a rocket the moment their pursuer was visible through the opening, while the elevator's door gap finally allowed N and Uzi to enter.

"V! Come on!" N yelled out to her.

And she intended to . . . but yellow solver-thrown objects came flying out of the flames of her rocket's detonation. Rebar from beneath the floor, jagged pieces of doors Doll-Cyn had collected, any sharp object available.

V was standing one second, and pinned the next, numerous projectiles impaling her against the wall through her stomach, both legs and an arm.

When she looked up again, she saw Doll's and Cyn's solver colours sputter together in flickering lines as the puppetted drone teleported forward, removing a quarter of the distance between them.

Open-circle eyes, eyebrows slanted down, V looked to the other two, to the elevator they stood inside, to the looks on their displays that clearly showed they were about to come back out for her . . . and to the exposed elevator cables just above.

A quick flash. No hesitation. Her one semi-free arm fired off her cutting laser and sliced the cables through.

Uzi looked more horrified than V wanted to believe she'd be.

N was crying out V's name.

She tried to make sure she smiled, for the half-second they could see before the cables gave way.