November 5th, 1983
White walls. White ceiling. White lights. White lab coats. White uniforms. White hospital gowns. White slippers. White bedding. Five was used to being surrounded by white.
She was surprised therefore when two orderlies came to retrieve her from her cell, holding a gray sweat suit and gray shoes for her to change into. She complied wordlessly. They escorted her down the hall, not to the usual training room, but towards the elevator, going down. They hadn't given her the shot today with breakfast, so the daze she was so used to being under had less of an edge. She still felt like her mind was a distant thing outside her body, but less so than usual.
When the elevator doors opened, the orderlies led her down a hall she didn't recall. They entered a lab space, where scientists went back and forth between monitors. Papa stood in the middle of the room, observing their work. He turned when he heard the doors slide open to see the teenaged girl flanked by two orderlies. Number Five was the only other child that had survived the massacre almost two years ago. She had a very pretty face, but what made her especially captivating were her eyes. On her paperwork, they weren't sure what to write down under eye colour. It was a shade of brown so light, her eyes looked like gold. Irises bordered by dark rings, it made for a rather piercing gaze.
Dr. Brenner lamented how her talents were more of a physical nature. While formidable, his work revolved around psychokinetic abilities. Of all the children, she had the most difficulty with the exercices of the mind. Training sessions with her mostly resulted in fried machinery and power outages. It was more hassle than he could justify. He had her chipped like he had done to One, he kept her sedated to slow her down, but he'd kept her at the facility as a precaution. He had orderlies take her to the gym and tutor her in benign subjects in the event that he might ever have a need for her.
"Hello Five, I have a very special task for you," Papa said as the orderlies led the teenaged girl to the middle of the room. She nodded silently, her eyes downcast, as her fingers tugged on the end of the sweatshirt she'd been provided. She wore the matching sweatpants and had plain slip-on shoes on her feet. She knew this wasn't a usual exercise. It had been quite a while since she'd been brought out for one of those, after all.
"Today, I'd like you to go through a door, go as far as you can reach, and tell us what you see on the radio, okay? Do you think you can do that?" Papa asked, his hands behind his back. She nodded slowly, and he silently motioned for the orderlies to get to work strapping her into a harness. They had her put on a backpack and attached a walkie-talkie around to her front. They led her through to another room, an observatory deck, overlooking a strange opening in the wall. She was handed over to a man in a bio-hazard suit to go the rest of the way, down the stairs and onto the platform below. She quietly noted the fact that they were not providing her with a bio-hazard suit of her own.
On the platform in front of the strange opening in the wall, she felt someone attach a rope to the back of her harness and handed her a helmet. At least her face would be covered then. Someone else came to check that her radio was properly dialled in and explained how to use it to communicate with them. She nodded. She turned back to look up to Papa standing safely behind the windows of the observation deck. He grabbed the intercom and began to speak.
"Five, once you have stepped through the door here, I would like you to describe what you see. What the surroundings are like. What the climate is. If you see any people there," Papa explained.
"Am I looking for someone in particular?" Five asked, speaking for the first time since being retrieved from her cell. Dr. Brenner had to pause for a moment. For just a second, the hazy film over her eyes from the sedative seemed to dissipate completely, but when he blinked it was back like it had been for the better part of the past year. He decided not to dwell on it.
"No one in particular," he replied, "we just want to know what the other side looks like and what kind of people we can expect to meet when we follow you. If anything goes wrong, just tell us on the radio and we will pull you back with the rope." She nodded and turned back to face the strange doorway. It was not a door like the ones she was so used to going through in the lab. The single doors, the double doors, the sliding glass doors, and the reinforced doors that swung shut to lock. This could hardly be called a door at all, in her opinion. Nevertheless, she made no show of her apprehension. An orderly in a suit handed her a pick-axe, because this uninviting door needed to be carved through. She looked back up one last time at Papa, who nodded at her. Other people in suits had been busy carving what they could for her to get through partially. She would have to continue on alone and see how much more of the tendon-like webbing remained before she could say she had crossed to another side.
It took a fair amount of effort to get through. A pick-axe was probably not the most effective thing they could have given her for the task but she made good work with it regardless and pulled herself through to the other side with a slippery thud. Standing up, she tried to wipe the helmet clean to get a clear view of her surroundings. It had been years since Five was last outdoors, nevertheless, she knew immediately that she was outside, in a dark place. Even through the helmet, the air felt damp with ash floating down from a blackened sky. Everything here was grey. She lifted her left hand to check that she hadn't turned grey too.
"Five? Are you there, Five?" The radio crackled on her shoulder. She pulled the helmet off her head and pulled the receiver off the strap of her harness.
"Yes, I'm here. I've made it through," she replied, remembering how the orderly had shown her to press the button on the side of the receiver before speaking and then letting it go when she was done.
"What do you see?" Papa asked. She started walking forward. "I'm outside. Everything is gray. It's wet and cold and it's raining ash," she stated slowly. "Can you see any buildings?" Papa asked. She did a full turn. She was barely through the door that the strange tendons had already repaired themselves; only the rope attached to her harness was still getting through. The door jutted out of a large blocky building. She assumed this was the lab. "There's the building I came out of, but then nothing. Just trees. Dead trees," she replied.
"Can you go out a bit further? Towards the trees? Maybe there's a little hill you could climb?" Papa suggested over the radio. Five dropped the helmet to the side. She twirled the pick-axe in her hand, realising she kind of enjoyed the feel of swinging it through the tendons of the door to get through.
Slowly, Five started walking towards the trees. It wasn't loud in the lab, but the silence here was deafening. She quickly realised that each step she took made a crunching sound. She frowned, stopping. She couldn't hear anything around, but uncertain of who — or what — was out there, she didn't want anything else to potentially hear her. The radio was already a nuisance in her opinion. She shifted her foot on the earth, deducing that it was quieter when she stepped on the ball of her foot rather than when she walked normally, on her heel. She got the hang of it after a few steps, and by the time she made it to the tree line, she was accustomed enough to the movement that she didn't need to think about it as intently.
She continued through the trees, wondering if at some point, the rope attached to her will reach its limit and snag her back to the lab.
"Have you found anything, Five?" The sound of the radio echoed through the trees around her. She huffed annoyed. This is how she'll be found, not the other way around.
"No," she said, "the forest just keeps going. There's...nothing here though. No birds, no animals." She remarked, remembering things she'd read in the lab to pass the time. Books described forest scenes as full of life, here was the absence of it.
When she heard the snap of a twig in the distance, she did a 360 trying to catch movement.
"There's something here," she said into the radio. "What is it, Five? Is it an animal?" Papa inquired. Finally, her eyes landed on a tall figure coming around a tree several yards away.
"It's...nothing I've ever seen before," Five replied, keeping her finger on the radio to keep the airway locked, hoping that the creature hadn't heard her. But it had. It snarled, its strange bulb-like head opened in the shape of a flower revealing a long forked tongue and rows upon rows of teeth. Clearly it wasn't here to say hello.
With a roar, it lunged forward, running on all fours straight at her. Five narrowed her eyes, weighing her options. Running would be a waste of time, this thing will catch up with her and overtake her from behind easily. The only option is to stand her ground. She dropped the radio and twirled the pick-axe in her hands, ready to plant it into whatever this threatening thing is.
Coming up on her, the creature swung a clawed hand up. Five saw the opening and swung the pick-axe at it's exposed side as hard as she could muster. The flesh tore but did not throw the creature off its course as much as she had hoped; so in exchange, she felt the claws slice down her shoulder. She pulled the pick-axe out of its side and lunged straight up into its neck, making it fall back and away from her.
She screamed with teeth bared at it. Not because she was in pain from the new injury on her shoulder, but from the realisation that it went a little too high up into her neck. Indeed, on the ground in front of her lay a capsule-shaped chip covered in blood. By pure luck, the creature had ripped Soteria out, allowing her power to course through her veins once more. She couldn't help the grin that took over her whole face, twirling the pick-axe in her hands again, little bolts of lighting licking up her forearms.
The creature started circling around her, while she stayed in a defensive position waiting for its next move. When it lunged at her again, she barely controlled the blast of lightening that burst out of her right fist. She hit her mark directly, throwing the creature backwards, but it wasn't enough to kill it. She lunged towards it, pick-axe already over her head when she reached it and swung it down into the creature, more times than was truly necessary, tearing it to shreds.
That was not elegant, she thought to herself, finally coming back to her senses and looking down at the carnage at her feet. She let the pick-axe drop out of her hands to the ground and took a look around the area. The radio that had been attached to her shoulder was sitting on the ground in pieces, near Soteria, but she was still wearing the harness. She thanked her lucky stars that no one had thought to reel her back in towards the lab in the heat of her battle, but she saw in the distance that the rope she'd left behind her was slowly starting to go taut. Using one of the mangled creature's claws, she cut through the strap of the harness on her injured shoulder and slipped out. It was already stained by her blood, but for added effect, she ran it across the creature's guts to give it a gorier appearance, like she had been properly torn apart.
Satisfied, she laid it on the ground and watched as it slowly started moving back towards the Lab. When they had sent her through a strange portal in nothing more than a sweatsuit with a flimsy helmet and a pick-axe as a weapon, she held no illusion that they expected her to return. Not alive anyway. For all intents and purposes, they were right, but not in the way they were probably hoping. She hoped that they would be satisfied with the harness as evidence and just mark her as disposed of in their records.
No longer inhibited by the chip in her neck, Five could barely feel her injury, the rush of her power returning was too exhilarating. She knew better to ignore it though. Not only could the blood attract more unfriendly visitors, the adrenaline will run out sooner or later and that wound needs to be treated before it becomes a problem of its own. The time to move is now. Without thinking twice, Five took off running like a bat out of Hell, away from the scene of her unexpected freeing, away from the place she'd needed to be freed from.