A Tertiary Perspective

In Good Taste

The Next morning...

Agent 3 was out cold, leaning on agent 8s bed. Suddenly, agent 8 lost her mind, waking up and panicking. The ruckus woke up agent 3, as well as half the other patients.

"What's wrong!" Agent 3 said frantically, jumping to her feet. Agent 8 saw her, and calmed down.

"Wh-wh-where am I?" Agent 8 said shakily. Her eyes were wide.

"You're in the hospital." Agent 3 said. "You were sick."

"I wasn't sick." Agent 8 said. "It was terrible... I couldn't do anything! I punched metal man and broke his hand! I lashed out at everything in reach!"

Agent 3 had never heard agent 8 speak in full sentences like that before.

"It's ok now. No one's mad at you." Agent 3 said reassuringly. "You weren't yourself."

Then she got a good look at agent 8. Her face and hands looked normal again, mostly. But her eyes hadn't reverted, and her tentacles were still blue at their ends.

"It looks like whatever cure Axel mixed up worked... Mostly." Agent 3 said.

"What do you mean?" Agent 8 asked, concerned.

Agent 3 dug out a hand mirror from her pocket and showed agent 8.

"Ah! My eyes!" Agent 8 said.

"Are they hurting?" Agent 3 asked.

"No... They look like yours did, back when..." Agent 8 trailed off.

"Oh. Yeah, I see that..." Agent 3 said. She embraced agent 8. "But it's ok. There's no goo, it's just an eye color."

Agent 8 felt better being hugged by her best friend.

"Yeah... I guess you're right." Agent 8 said.

"By the way, I wanted to ask you a few things." Agent 3 said. "Starting with the obvious one, since when do you talk in full sentences?"

Agent 8 finally realized she was talking aloud, instead of in her head. "Oh! I... Don't know." She said. "I always thought the full idea it just never came out."

"It's like a whole new you!" Agent 3 joked. "Using your big girl words!"

"Oh stop you." Agent 8 laughed lightly. "What else did you want to know?"

"Well, here's the thing. While you were, uh, sleeping? Yeah, everytime I'd come in you would kind of wake up. That I get. But you would also kind of wake up whenever Colt walked in. Why's that?" Agent 3 asked, genuinely curious.

"Oh? I did that? Hmm..." Agent 8 said. "Maybe because he reminds me of my late brother, kind of."

"You had a brother?" Agent 3 asked.

"Yeah. I don't know what happened to him. I know he escaped you when you saved the Zapfish, but I never saw him again..." Agent 8 looked down.

"Hey hey. If he got away, I'm sure he's ok." Agent 3 said, patting agent 8 on the back. "After all, I'm the big scary agent. Rawr."

"Heh. I guess." Agent 8 said. She poked agent 3's cheek. "You're not that scary to me."

As the girls caught up on everything, Axel was in the lab, making sure the virus was non lethal to mammals. And he had one test subject. Himself.

"Cell apoptosis is negative, that's good." He wrote down some notes. The human half of his body was still entirely venerable to the sanitized goop, but it couldn't affect him because of the machine half. Thus, he could monitor the virus without risk, though he would miss out on some possible side effects.