"…Alright, team, remember your briefing," One informed them. "We breach in sixty."
Rain rappelled down with her team, tackled Addison, hit him hard enough to knock him out. She waited until her team dispersed, roaming through the house to make sure there weren't any hostiles laying in wait.
Then she knocked out One, while he was busy trying to interrogate Alice. She goggled in horror as Rain proceeded to subdue JD and quickly handcuff both men. She took off her gas mask and gave the woman a half-hearted wink before leaving the room, taking her team down one by one.
Oh, she could have killed them far more easily than if she'd just knocked them out. It's not like they wouldn't be back without a hair out of place the next time she or Alice died. But fuck it, they deserved to live… or at least to not die more often than they had been.
She returned to the main hall, where Alice had picked up one of her teammates' rifles and was nervously aiming it at her. "Hey, relax, I'm not gonna hurt you," Rain assured her. She walked up to the concealed entrance to the train platform and started using Kaplan's little wrist computer doohickey. She'd seen him using it often enough.
"W-who are you people?" Alice asked. "And why did you attack your teammates?"
Rain snorted a laugh through her nose. "The less you know about us, the better. Look, you've got amnesia, right? Can't remember a thing?" Alice hesitated, then nodded. "Your name is Alice. You're head of security at a secret Umbrella lab, except something's gone terribly wrong down there. Hundreds of people dead." She gestured towards the photo of Alice and Spence. "Your fake hubby there is responsible."
Alice picked up the picture and studied it. "Jesus," she muttered, letting the gun fall to the ground. She looked back to Rain. "What do we do?"
"I am going down there, and I probably won't be back," Rain admitted. "If you want my advice, you grab Addison there —" She gestured to him, still unconscious but un-handcuffed. "— and you take the car in the garage, and you drive. Don't stop at Raccoon City, get as far away from this Godforsaken place as you possibly can. Okay?"
Alice slowly nodded. She grabbed Addison up in a fireman's lift and was soon vanished into the garage, out of Rain's life (this one, at least).
Rain made her way into the train platform, restarted the train's electricity, and got it hurtling down the tunnel (making sure to secure the sample case beforehand). She pulled in to the Hive's platform, then restarted the train going the other way. She damaged the controls and leapt off onto the platform before it really got going, though. "Good luck trying to stop it, you fucking prick!" she hollered at the departing train.
She acquired the cutter and proceeded to cut her way through the door. Halfway through, the distant echoing sound of the train derailing and wrecking at the other end of the tunnel reverberated through the area, and Rain smirked beneath her welder's mask at the imagined carnage. Once she finished cutting a hole in the door (again, courtesy of having seen Kaplan do this something like half a dozen times by now), she reached into it and opened the door. She put on the night vision monocular, entered, and turned on the lights in the entryway.
"Hey!" she called out. "Red Queen! I know you can hear me!" No answer. "Talk to me, goddamnit!"
Nothing. Rain scowled and continued on to the Red Queen's chamber.
She made her way down there and looked at the computer. Okay, that, she hadn't quite learned how to do on her own yet. But she had… an alternative approach.
She walked up to the camera. "Hey! I'm talking to you, you little red bitch!" Again, silence. "Look, I just want to talk, alright? I'm not here to use that EMP thing on you or anything." Again, no response. "…Look, if you don't want to talk, that's just fine. You don't have to say shit to me." She reached into the knapsack she'd taken from her friends. "But I've got a bag full of C4 here, okay? I will blow off your outer door, blow off your inner door, and then use all the rest to turn your silicon guts to molten slag… and I'm pretty sure it'd all get buried under tons of rock, to boot." She started walking to the door.
"I wouldn't do that, if I were you." The Red Queen had finally deigned to make an appearance, her face showing up on every monitor in the room.
"Now we're getting somewhere," Rain said with a smirk.
"What do you wish to discuss, Miss Ocampo?" the Red Queen asked. "Given your actions, I believe you are here to steal the technology behind my existence, presumably to sell to another corporation."
Rain crossed her arms, intrigued. "What makes you say that?"
"Both Microsoft and Apple have heard enough rumors of my existence that they've attempted to breach the Hive several times apiece with spies," the Red Queen explained. "None of them survived their attempts. Nor shall you survive yours."
Rain smirked. "Wasn't exactly planning on it, to be honest. What part of my 'blowing you to smithereens' plan made you think I was here to steal you?"
The Red Queen hesitated. "…I will admit, my confidence in that likelihood was only at 62%. …What are your intentions, then?"
Rain took a seat at the chair and kicked her feet up on the control console. "What does Umbrella know about time travel?" she asked.
The Red Queen paused. "Not very much. Umbrella has made advances in the field of physics considerably beyond what is generally understood by the public, but nothing whatsoever about the traversal of time itself. Many researchers regard it as a pipe dream."
"Are you sure?" Rain asked.
"I know you have no reason to believe me, but I also have no reason to lie to you, Miss Ocampo," the Red Queen pointed out.
"Uh-huh," Rain said, a little skeptical. "You see, the reason I ask is that I seem to be caught in a time loop. The loop begins sixty seconds out from breaching the Looking Glass House; on my first go around, I watched my teammates die, before succumbing to the T-virus and becoming a zombie. When I got shot in the head, I came to again on the helicopter, sixty seconds before breach."
The Red Queen took in Rain's story. "Have you considered the possibility that you are undergoing a psychotic break, Miss Ocampo?" she asked. "That does explain your actions with a much higher degree of confidence than you being an industrial spy."
Rain chuckled. "I have considered it, yes. And until and unless I wake up from one of these loops being fed baby food in a loony bin somewhere, it's a possibility I'll have to discard for the time being." She sat up, feet back on the floor. "So if Umbrella doesn't have some super secret time whatsit around here that's synchronizing with my brain, then that means it's something else altogether, and I have zero fucking clue where to begin. …Do you have any ideas?"
"None come to mind," the Red Queen admitted. "Least of all due to the fact that what you've described is completely impossible. Perhaps if you go into further detail, there might be something I can help you with."
Rain nodded, and described the loops she'd gone through, how her death each time had thrown her back to the start — except for the two loops where Alice's death had ended things.
"So… what do you think it means that Alice's death ends the loop like it does with me?" Rain asked. "And why doesn't she remember like I do?"
"I suggest you find the wizard who cursed you," the Red Queen said. "I expanded my problem-solving matrix to include anything that was both impossible and crazy, and I have concluded that magic must secretly be real and one or both of you angered the same wizard at some point."
Rain glared at the image of the Red Queen on the monitor in front of her, then leapt to her feet, climbed up on top of the desk, dropped trou, and sprayed the image with urine.
"I don't see how this is meant to be constructive," the Red Queen said.
"It's what I think of that wizard shit," Rain snapped. She shook herself off, got dressed again, and started walking to the door. "Come with me, sweetheart," she said, zero affection in that little nickname. "If you can't help me with the time travel shit, then I've got some different shit to try."
Rain arrived at the facility's infirmary. It wasn't part of the areas that had been sealed off, fortunately, as Rain didn't want to have to ventilate a bunch of zombie skulls in order to use it. It was decently geared up for being a podunk little infirmary; as far as Rain could tell the only things it was really missing were big-ticket items — big diagnostic machines like CT scanners, or a surgery room. Rain quickly found what she was looking for: an EEG machine.
"What do you intend to do with that?" the Red Queen asked.
"You remember what I told you, about being conscious after becoming a zombie?" Rain said. "I want to test that out further."
"…You cannot be serious," the Red Queen said.
Rain couldn't help but smirk. "…Oh, I'm dead serious. Or I will be."
"I can tell you already that the undead no longer possess any higher brain function," the Red Queen informed her. "None of the standard four brain waves are detectable in any subject that has been tested. There is no reason to suspect that you are any different."
"Yeah," Rain said. "And there's no reason to suspect that there's a disease that brings people back to life in the first place, and yet here we are." She opened the sample case and readied a syringe with the T-virus. God, she'd already killed herself so many times, and yet this seemed like a fucked-up new step, deliberately zombifying herself.
"What fucking ever," Rain dismissed, plunging the needle into her arm and injecting herself.
The door to the infirmary closed shut and locked tight. "I hope you are aware I cannot let you leave unless you successfully administer the antivirus," the Red Queen informed her.
"Yeah, yeah," Rain said, giving the intercom on the wall a dismissive wave. "Look, just keep an eye on my vitals and let me know if there's any change, okay? Even when I'm a walking corpse."
"Very well," the Red Queen said. "You won't hear any of it, though, not in any appreciable sense."
Rain just winked at the intercom, with its little video lens staring right at her, before she removed her knife and slit her throat with one quick motion.
She quickly blacked out, and when she came to her body was again moving of its own volition, without any input on her part.
"Miss Ocampo, your brainwaves are all registering as nonexistent," the Red Queen reported. "As expected, and as warned. Since I know you can no longer hear me, let me congratulate you on being a tremendous imbecile."
Rain was kinda shocked at how rude she was, and vowed to take control of her dead self just so she could call out the little red bitch. But… nothing worked. No matter how hard she strained herself (straining what, that was another question), she was unable to so much as blink on command.
Hours passed. An entire day went by. A second day passed. Rain soon lost track of time.
Rain stopped trying. It was clear that nothing was working. It was immensely frustrating, especially after she'd managed to gain control of Nemesis a few loops back. She relaxed (again, a small part of her wondered exactly what she was relaxing) and let her mind return to that moment. Alice and Nemesis exchanging blows… being impaled on the jagged piece of metal… Alice thrusting her fists, making contact with Nemesis' flesh…
The memories…
Of course. At first, it had been some kind of involuntary mental reflex, but something about being T-virus carriers had somehow enabled some kind of psychic communication. She and Alice had played tag with memories of one another until that Umbrella dipshit had ordered her to kill Alice, at which point she'd found herself free to blast him into bloody ribbons. She didn't have a T-positive Alice down here to communicate with, though.
Let's look at things from a different point of view, Rain thought. Maybe it wasn't the game of psychic tag that jostled her from control… maybe it was the memories themselves? She closed her eyes and let the memories of Alice wash over her… the little glances, the touches… that kiss… and that led her to remembering the kiss she'd shared with Olga, in their final moments… and the kisses she'd flirtatiously planted on Terri's cheek… and the half-remembered memories of languidly kissing LJ as they slowly fucked in his apartment… and the forbidden moments stolen with JD as one or the other would sneak into the mens' or womens' locker room or showers… and that led to her camaraderie with the rest of Sanitation, her respect for One, her secret hope to be as good of a leader as he was someday… and being taken in by Carlos, their squad being sent on what was surely a doomed mission, yet Carlos fighting like hell to keep everyone under his command alive as long as possible… and that just led her in a circle back to Alice, stroking her cheek that first time. "No one else is gonna die… I could kiss you, you bitch."
"This… this should not be possible."
The Red Queen's voice snapped Rain out of her reverie, and her eyes shot open to see what was happening. It took her a moment to realize: her eyes shot open. She opened and closed them again several times, then looked down at her hands (she looked down! On purpose!) and clenched and unclenched them into fists.
"Your brainwaves… they're operating at a baseline normal level for an uninfected, awake human," the Red Queen reported, the EEG machine's readings being directly beamed to her processors. "This… this absolutely should not be possible."
"Who's the imbecile now, you fucking bitch?" Rain croaked out, her throat dry. She ripped off the EEG sensors from her head, before she walked over to a nearby sink and slurped water straight from the tap. "Let me know when you find that wizard, alright?"
"How were you able to… to re-attain yourself?" the Red Queen asked.
"Simple," Rain said. "I just focused on the people I care about in this life. Lives. Whatever. That good ol' human connection, you know?"
The Red Queen didn't respond to the rhetorical question. "I… I have alerted the Umbrella scientists who have breached the Hive. Dr. Isaacs in particular seemed very interested in your situation."
Huh, guess without shutting down the Red Queen, nothing escapes containment, Rain thought. She cocked an eyebrow at the intercom. "You really think I'm gonna let some Umbrella dipshit dissect me again? I don't think so."
She removed a C4 brick from her gear as several of the hazmat assholes came into view, hiding it behind her back just in time. She smiled and waved at them, and one of them stopped and removed his headgear, staring at her in naked awe. Rain vaguely recognized him from her transformation to Nemesis. "Dr. Isaacs, I presume?" she asked, inadvertently invoking the famed explorer Henry Stanley.
"…You can speak," he murmured. "…You can think!" He licked his lips. "Y-yes, I am, indeed, doctor Jason Isaacs."
Rain crinkled her eyebrows together. Wasn't that the name of the guy from that fucking asteroid movie? "Yeah, doc, I can think. And do you know what I think?" she asked. Isaacs leaned forward, expectant. "I think… you can go fuck yourself." She shot one last glance at the intercom. "See you next time, you imbecile computer." She slammed the C4 brick against the window, laughing as Isaacs and the others recoiled and fled away from the window. She squeezed the detonator before they made it three steps.
XXX
"…Alright, team, remember your briefing," One informed them. "We breach in sixty."
A crooked smile spread across Rain's face beneath the gas mask. Oh, she was gonna have some fun with this.
XXXXXXXXXX
Okay, gang, this is gonna enable SO MANY shenanigans, you don't even know yet. I'm currently on chapter 16, and I'm so, so excited for y'all to see how wild shit's gonna get.
I honestly don't remember if it's come up in any of the AIR stories, but this Isaacs clone is indeed named "J. Isaacs", an homage to Jason Isaacs who was meant to play William Birkin (and indeed provided the narration for the first movie and unnamed evil scientist chatter in the ending). So, I figure to just go whole hog and make his whole name Jason Isaacs, hahaha.
I think, for the time being, I'll shift this to update on the same schedule as the AIR series (I.e. once every three days). As mentioned above, I have about eight chapters in the can, and I keep pumping them out with great enthusiasm! I'm thinking that it may top out at 20 chapters, maybe 25? Who knows, maybe I'll keep getting insane ideas and this'll hit 50 or more chapters.
Good news for fans of my hyperfixation: I've got ANOTHER RE movie fic in the works! It's got my typical offbeat premise, but — shock horror! — it's NOT an Alice/Rain story! Truthfully, I don't have any notion for what pairings it will have just yet, and I'm not ruling out A/R either. Keep an eye out for it coming soon to finer fan fiction websites near you!