[Paranoia] MDG Sector: The Revealing

[Ronster]

my eye!

[Phoebe]

I thought the bots were all Mike too, ha! Can't wait for the next parts because there was obviously extensive action I had no clue about!

[Cazmonster]

[Tahlvin]

So, Mike, uh, when's the next post coming???

[Mike]

Uh... I uh... I posted them already? Wow. Did you not see it? That's weird. I'll check it out tonight.

[Mike]

Chapter 6

READY FREDDY

Expenda kneels near K-ROL, "I'm sorry Kay, I thought this would be easier. We'll get you righted soon." She then turns to Jeth, "I'm nervous. I don't like being where I don't belong." The infared threads a laser barrel onto her pistol, her hands shake slightly. "Your team needs you Jeth."

"TENSOR, tell me what portion of your maximum speed we're using now," she orders to the hoverbot.

Without sound or vibration, Tensor accelerates from a leisurely walking pace to a moderate walking pace. Tensor replies, “Affirmative. Maximum speed.”

They are crossing the field steadily. The rest of the team is no longer visible on the trail ahead.

On the trail…

Sinda rolls her eyes and gives Mal a sarcastic salute. Unfortunately she doesn't think he noticed.

She deliberately slows down, she’d rather just let the others be targets, and she finds herself scanning not the path, but the shaggy poles and the spaces between. She has an urge to run through them and see what havoc she can cause but she tamps down the urge...for now. She figures that if someone was under attack and wanted to hide something valuable, it's not gonna be on the path, or in a shelter or whatever. If it were her, she'd hide it in something unfamiliar but not expected. She may just have to skip away, with or without Barb.

Cadav, still getting used to getting around with one eye, is focused on not falling down as his depth perception is almost non-existent. He pauses every few steps and listens for movement hoping to hear something other than his own team. He also does a head count and checks on the rest of the team members he can see. (Mal, Phoenix, Sinda, Barb… plus the bots Wilt and VLaD. There is no sign of Jeth or the infrared stowaway.)

Catching back up to Mal, Cadav quietly asks “Do you think you can tell how many of them there are?”

Mal looks thoughtful for a moment and then points to the floor with his rifle. “Just one set of footprints.”

Mal moves forward a bit further, then crouches down and signals to the others to move a little closer and crouch down as well. Cadav, Barb and Phoenix all crouch down with Malcolm. Barb hangs back a little, with her eyes on her toes. Phoenix wears a goofy grin and is almost vibrating with excitement. Sinda is still a dozen paces behind and seems intent on examining something off to the right. Wilt is outside the huddle, but bends over so that the visual sensors above his barrel body hover above the rest of them, looking down into the group.

Malcolm throws a sneer in Sinda’s direction and decides to continue without waiting for her. With the others gathered close, he whispers to them, “There is some sort of building up ahead. Keep your eyes open and be ready.”

He then turns and continues moving towards the building in a low crouch, looking back to make sure the others are following. Everyone is following in roughly the same formation as before, except for Sinda, who IS following, but now at a much greater distance. Phoenix claps twice as he stands up and announces, “Abso…LUTELY ready! Let’s do this!” Only when Mal and Cadav whip their heads around to glare at him does he realize he was shouting. Phoenix tries to look apologetic, but he’s still grinning.

Up ahead, there is an immense banging noise as if something very large and metallic just slammed into something that was not metallic.


BANANA SPLITS

"Jeth," Expenda tries to get his attention. "Sir, we're getting behind. You stay here with Tensor and K-ROL. I'll run on ahead and get them to wait for us." She then hops off the side of the hover bot and sets off at a fast jog to try to catch up to the team. She's watching the woods ahead for signs of trouble.

"It's okay," Jeth calls solemnly after her, "we're on an important mission." He looks around, suddenly realizing that some of the group has gotten away, which explains Expenda’s departure, but... "But our equipment... we need it! Can we get any of these bots to carry things?" Jeth steps off the back of the hover-flat and heads back to the transport, to make sure no important items have been left behind. "Let me get the rest of it!" he calls back to Expenda and anyone else who can hear.

Pam turns to look over her shoulder, and sure enough, Jeth has hopped off of Tensor and is just about to the train car. However, she also notes that Tensor has picked up speed now that the two clones have hopped off, and it is just about keeping up with Pam as she jogs.

K-ROL (still on her side on Tensor and only a few meters behind Pam at this point) says, “I’m okay here, hon.”

Jeth rounds the corner of the train car and sizes up the situation, trying to figure out how to carry the most stuff. The crates are pretty big, and he’s sure he could get one of them, but not two. But then he spots a smaller, open crate still in the car. If he stacked that on top of a big one, this would be no problem. Jeth scoops up everything he can readily grab—if it looks like a weapon or a tool or food, he drops it into one of the two crates, mostly leaving behind the extra clothes and such when he runs out of room. He slaps a lid on the big crate, but doesn’t find the lid for the smaller one, so he just sets it on top and lifts the whole affair. It’s heavy, but he thinks he can still manage a fast walk for however long it takes to catch up to the hovery thing.

In the woods…

Cadav looks for cover, turns to Mal and the others and says “I‘m taking cover. That sounded very large…and metallic.” Cadav scurries into a crouched position behind some sort of thick, short greenery. He checks his pistol to make sure it is ready to fire as well as the rest of his gear.

However, at the loud metallic noise, Barb lost her footing in her crouch-walk and tumbled forward rapidly. She tries to get her feet under her but just stumbles forward until she falls onto Cadav. Cadav staggers a moment, but doesn’t lose his footing. Barb follows this with what she thinks is hushed but is a fairly loud, "SORRY! Sorry. Sorry sorry... sorry. So sorry." Cadav has been pushed forward into the green tangle of whatever it is, and finds to his dismay that it A) rustles very audibly and B) is very pokey and scratchy, leaving him with faint, not-quite-painful scratches on the exposed skin of his face and arms.

Trying to be both cautious and quick, Mal tries to ignore his bumbling team and semi-hurries forward towards the building, without waiting to see if the others are getting their shit together. Vera is up in a ready-to-fire position. Shortly, around a bend in the trail, the pole structures come to an end, revealing another clearing, although not nearly so large as the last. The path of compacted floor continues up to a building. The main portion of the building looks like two or three floors, and it is constructed of a rough, brown, unpainted material. It has a single, gray, steel door set in the side facing the trail. There are also what look to be windows, but they have more of that brown, rough material fastened over them, preventing access. On the side of the main building, there is an attached structure made of metal that appears to be intended for vehicles and/or loading, because it has a very large door on it (also facing this side) about four meters wide and almost three tall. It has handles at the bottom that look as if the door is one intended to slide upwards. All the floor within about a meter of the metal portion of the building looks to be poured concrete. Mal has been most concerned with what might have made that banging noise, and now he’s sure it must have been this large metal door slamming shut into the concrete floor.

Mal also notices that one of the white drones that were part of their mission equipment is hovering ten meters up above the clearing.


DUELING DRONES

Cadav tries to remove himself from the green pokey cables and then tries to help Barb to her feet. He looks toward Mal and whispers that he is going to help Barb, then he pulls out a notepad and quickly writes on it

“You have damaged hearing and you are shouting. Please do not yell anymore. There is something big and metal clanky sounding coming this way and I’m afraid you will give us away so let’s both be quiet and listen. I can barely see and you can barely hear, so let’s stick together and maybe we can be useful.”

He hands her the notepad and the pen.

She takes it and reads the note. Barb responds with a slow, confused blink and whispers, “Sorry.”

Cadav now checks his gear again making sure nothing was dropped and that his equipment looks to be in good order.

Mal ducks back behind the last of the pole structures for cover, and calls to the drone for give him a sit-rep and video playback of the most recent 60 seconds of security footage, to see if he can get a look at what might have gone through the large door. He turns on his AI charm power, hoping the little drone is able to deliver what he wants while outside the bounds of Alpha Complex.

The drone immediately drops to hover about 2 meters off the floor near Mal—just barely inside the clearing. Mal can feel the bot’s confusion as a tickling behind his left eye. A small video screen on its underside (mostly) lights up with a color video showing the green spreading tops of these poles. The drone’s camera was angled to record mostly downward and slightly ahead of its motion. Mal can see one or two points of red through the green that he assumes were his team. Then the camera pans rapidly over the building in the clearing, and Mal can briefly see a very tall, very thick white-clad figure in some sort of power suit standing inside the attached metal portion of the structure just before the door rapidly closes. The video has no sound, but all of that makes sense. The final closing of the door isn’t in the recording, because the camera immediately pans to the line of poles and the team standing on the path. It ends with Mal himself waving for the drone to come down.

The drone screams at Mal in a distinctly angry female voice, “What the fuck, man?! Are you seriously trying to…” but it is cut off by a burst of automatic gunfire coming from above it. The other white surveillance drone (apparently not purely for surveillance) is firing a slugthrowing weapon at its twin from above. At least one bullet hits its target, but the extent of the damage (if any) is not immediately apparent.

In Mal’s head, he feels the drone’s mind completely shut off. He no longer has any connection or influence with it.

The drone’s voice shifts and becomes almost whiny, “Whoa! Whoa! Truce, dammit. I got this.” And the drone begins to reverse away from Mal, but it wobbles as it does so.

[Behind the scenes: The two ultraviolets here each have control of one drone. The drones follow commands and provide extra eyes for the competitors (as well as some backup muscle if shit goes sideways). Realizing that her drone was going rogue, Medd-U-SAH-2 has commandeered the drone and is now running it manually.]

Phoenix charges past the rest of the team with his laser in one hand and his truncheon in the other. “It’s gettin’ away y’all! Apha Complex… FUCK YEAH!”

[Here I allow a moment to react. Mal is still on the trail just outside the clearing. Phoenix is two steps past Mal into the clearing. The drone is another two steps beyond that and accelerating. Cadav and Barb are in the bushes just behind Mal. Wilt is in the middle of the path behind them. Sinda is a ways back, but her attention definitely been drawn to the action.]

Meanwhile…

Pam nods in response to K-ROL and keeps heading in the direction she saw the rest of the team. She grits her teeth in frustration that she couldn't keep one Red clone on task for ten minutes. She gets to the treeline and the path where she saw the team disappear. Behind her, she can hear K-ROL saying, “Tensor dear, follow the infrared clone.” Tensor responds, but his voice is lost on Pam. Pam follows the path cautiously, and in moments, she can see Sinda. Sinda is standing in the middle of the path, watching something ahead of her. Pam can make out Wilt ahead of Sinda and then glimpse of red uniforms farther ahead through the trees. A female voice way ahead that she doesn’t recognize is yelling something angrily, but Pam can’t make out the words. This is followed by distant sounds of automatic gunfire. She can however clearly hear Phoenix shouting, “Alpha Complex… FUCK YEAH!”

Meanwhile, vol. 2…

Jeth hoists up the two crates. Even with his crooked blue arm, he handles it well. The arm seems to work fine and there’s no pain—it’s just a matter of getting used to the angle. He jogs slowly back around the car and slowly pans his gaze around in confusion, looking for any sign of his team. Finally, he spots K-ROL still lying on Tensor. They are just to the right of that path leading out of the area way across the clearing. Tensor seems to have bumped into one of the thicker poles. Tensor backs up a meter or so, and then moves forward again, bumping into the same pole. And then again. Each time, Jeth can see the greenery farther up the pole shimmy with the impact, and the effect is vaguely mesmerizing. Jeth’s never seen anything quite like it.


HANG IN THERE

Jeth pauses for a moment, enraptured by the shimmering green trim atop the pole. He jogs across the clearing to the path into the poles and greenery that Expenda had been heading for. As he passes Tensor and K-ROL, he calls for them to turn and follow him. "They're getting away!" he shouts. "This stuff is heavy."

Tensor replies in its gravelly voice, “Following.” And turns to do exactly that. K-ROL adds with an air of relief, “Oh, thank goodness! Stupid hoverbot won’t listen to ME, will ya?”

Jeth heads down the path in pursuit of his companions as quickly as he can manage, laden down.

With the rest of the team…

Cadav decides it is probably best for him stay put and crouches in the bushes alongside of Barb. He writes her a note that says, “It’s probably best to not get involved. How many drones did we bring?”

Mal also stays put, watching. He thinks Phoenix is an idiot and will wait to see if he gets himself killed, or at least provides an opening that Mal can take advantage of. The two drones appear to be the twin white surveillance drones that came with them on the train. Mal reaches out to the second one up above, but neither drone seems to have a mind. There is no consciousness that Mal can connect to to try to influence them. Knowing that the first one absolutely DID for a while is extremely disconcerting for him.

Wilt crouches down next to Cadav and Barb. The tall medbot asks Cadav, “You seem to have scratched yourself quite extensively on the… uh… stuff you are in. I have prepared some antibiotic spray for just such occasions.” Wilt raises his tool-arm which now ends in what looks like an aerosol sprayer attachment and aims it at Cadav’s face.

Phoenix prepares himself and makes a desperate flying leap at the white drone just as it begins rising. The leap is near superhuman, covering an amazing amount of ground before Phoenix actually manages to grab onto it. His pistol hand has found secure purchase on one of the four arms that extend out to hold the propulsion fans. Somehow, the pistol is still hooked around his trigger finger which is bent back awkwardly. The other hand is now free as he dropped his truncheon during the leap. Due to the extra weight, the drone tilts and begins lurching unevenly towards the tall metal garage door, even as it continues rising. The drone is clearly trying to miss the building, but it’s going to be a very near thing.

At the sound of gunfire, Pam gets off the trail and into the underbrush. She grabs a rock and lobs it to land about halfway between her and Sinda. Sinda looks around, startled, with her pistol swinging wildly around. There behind her, just off the path, is Expenda. That black-clad infrared looks like a fully geared up troubleshooter (except not in red), and she is waving for Sinda to come join her amongst the poles and greenery. Expenda seems anxious.


SUCKER

Mal will continue to monitor the situation to see what the drones and Phoenix will do, all the while trying to keep an eye on the building for any signs of an attack or other movement. He’s also looking for a way that might be best to approach the door of the building, and deciding whether he really wants to gain entrance. This side of the building has a single door on the larger brown portion of it, and several covered windows. The coverings appear to be nailed haphazardly over the windows. The metal portion has the large garage-style door.

A scared Cadav grabs Barb by the arm and yells “It’s the Med-Bot! RUN!” and he runs as fast as he can away from Wilt with Barb in tow, right into the clearing and towards Phoenix and the drone.

This clearing is not nearly so large as the last. The path of compacted floor continues up to a building. The main portion of the building looks like two or three floors, and it is constructed of a rough, brown, unpainted material. It has a single, gray, steel door set in the side facing the trail. There are also what look to be windows, but they have more of that brown, rough material fastened over them, preventing access. On the side of the main building, there is an attached structure made of metal that appears to be intended for vehicles and/or loading, because it has a very large door on it (also facing this side) about four meters wide and almost three tall. It has handles at the bottom that look as if the door is one intended to slide upwards. All the floor within about a meter of the metal portion of the building looks to be poured concrete.

The drone is wobbling, with Phoenix still holding one of its fan-arms. The drone manages to clear the metal portion of the building, but Phoenix does not. Dangling by one hand now, he does little more than flail about and holler incomprehensibly. The edge of the roof catches him in the middle of the back. There is an audible crack, and Phoenix releases the drone. The drone’s fan is twisted at an angle now, and the drone starts to flip end over end. It disappears over the top of the roof, but there is no sound of a crash.

The second drone remains hovering above the clearing, although it now rises up quickly to hover much, much higher than the top of the building.

Phoenix’s torso is draped over the slanted roof while his legs dangle over the side. His feet are easily four or more meters from the floor. A bubble of pinkish energy two meters across forms around Phoenix.

Wilt chases Cadav into the clearing with his sprayer attachment extended. “It’s just antibiotic spray, I swear! It only stings for a second! Now show me what a big boy you are, and maybe I have a sucker for you!”

Sinda, who was about to take off into the poles had been planning to use the others, and the drones as a distraction to explore on her own. However, having someone like Expenda (or Barb) by her side, might not be a bad plan. There’s commotion up ahead, and all of it sounds like bad news.

She looks at Expenda, and heads purposefully towards the other woman, moving at a pace that is more urgent than panicked. She doesn't want to draw attention to herself and learned long ago that looking like you belonged at a place often made you fairly invisible. Normally she does this by acting bored, annoyed, and/or aloof, but fuck, important and busy works too.

She lowers her pistol as she walks towards Expenda, to try to make her less anxious, but does not put it away. When she reaches the other clone she says, "You called?" In a slightly less annoyed than usual tone and raises her right eyebrow questioningly.

Expenda nods her head. She's holding her own pistol so it doesn't threaten Sinda. "Yes Ma'am, we're in danger," she says in her timid voice. "Out of sight, maybe we can shoot them first. Maybe we can find out where they came from."

Expenda waves at Sinda to follow her and then heads into the poles, angling to approach the clearing cautiously from somewhere other than the main path. Pam uses her stealth training to move toward the sound of combat and try to set up a cross-fire. She'll keep aware of Sinda in case the other clone feels like doing something stupid, like shooting her.

Sinda is amazed at how quickly and silently Expenda disappears into her surroundings, almost ninja-like.

Pam nestles in behind a tree at the edge of the clearing, well off to the right of Mal’s position by the path. The path they were on empties into the clearing off to her left, and she can see Mal taking cover behind another tree there.

Jeth, still carrying his crates, gets far enough down the path that he can see some of his team. Sinda is off to his right, off the path and among the poles. She is watching something farther away that Jeth can’t see. Up ahead, the path turns a bit, and Jeth can see a flash of red uniforms and hear Cadav yelling, “It’s the Med-Bot! RUN!” He sounds panicked. Jeth clearly sees Wilt’s tall robot form moving very quickly to chase whoever’s uniform that was (probably Cadav).

Tensor is moving agonizingly slowly down the path. It keeps bumping into the poles, but is still following. K-ROL still lies silently on the hover-flat’s platform.


BAD OMENS

Sinda spots Expenda up ahead, crouching behind a tree at the edge of the clearing off to the right. Trying not to appear too eager, Sinda eventually strolls up beside her, trying to stay behind cover without looking like a dork. VLaD still hangs on to Sinda’s shoulder. He hasn’t moved since she placed him there, but still makes occasional comments.

Cadav, armed with his pistol and seeing Wilt gaining on him, releases his grip on Barb’s arm and continues to run as fast as possible. He banks to the right and runs around the right end (where the metal portion of the building is), doing all he can to avoid Wilt’s “help”. Barb stumbles and falls to the ground on the concrete in front of the metal garage-style door, directly below Phoenix’s dangling feet. Wilt leaps easily over her in pursuit of Cadav shouting, “Hold still, citizen! You don’t want those scratches to get infected!”

Around the corner, Cadav reaches the backside of the building with Wilt only a step behind and pulls up short, because there’s someone there. It is a figure entirely clad in white—which in Alpha Complex would indicate someone of ultraviolet rank, the high programmers. The figure is well over two meters tall and extremely bulky in what could be described as some sort of thickly padded haz-mat suit. It’s not that, but that’s the general size and shape of it. The figure’s face is hidden behind a black visor. There are no markings on the suit at all. The figure is facing the other way and is carrying a very large firearm of some sort. It is bulky and long, and two thick, flexible metal tubes run from the sides of the of the weapon to a backpack the figure is wearing. Hearing Cadav and Wilt round the corner, the figure immediately swings the barrel of the weapon around to face them.

[The pause here for your response is the moment just before the barrel is lined up with your position.]

With Vera in a readied position, and ignoring Phoenix, Cadav and Barb, Mal moves in a quick crouch towards the door of the building, watching for any movement behind the window coverings. Mal ends up to the right of the door, making sure to stay below any windows. He listens at the door for any obvious noises, trying to see if there are any gaps around the edge of the door that will allow him to see into the room for possible movement, but no such gaps exist. Slowly, he reaches for the doorknob to see if it is locked.

The moment he grasps it, he is violently electrocuted and dies instantly. But for the witnesses…

Holding the knob, Mal’s body suddenly goes rigid and begins to tremble violently. After what seems like a full minute, but was probably much shorter, Mal releases the doorknob and collapses. A shell of pink energy surrounds his fallen form.

"This is bad," Expenda whispers to Sinda, "real bad. It looks like Phoenix is dead. Malcolm is dead. Cadav and Barb are in trouble. Jeth said he was going to get more supplies. What do we do Ma'am?" It's obvious that she's just barely holding her composure against overwhelming fear.

VLaD says, “Oh this is juicy then. I loves a plan.”

Pam activates her memory erasing power at a very low level. She's going to be doing some things that an Infared would never do here in a few minutes. For the moment, she's going through her equipment and planning to make a move toward the house that will minimize her risk of fire from the snipers that might be hiding behind those window covers.

Jeth watches Sinda disappear through the woods and decides to keep to the path. Better for Tensor that way. When he reaches the end of the path (with Tensor and K-ROL still following), he finds himself on the edge of a clearing. This clearing is not nearly so large as the last. The path of compacted floor continues up to a building. The main portion of the building looks like two or three floors, and it is constructed of a rough, brown, unpainted material. It has a single, gray, steel door set in the side facing the trail. There are also what look to be windows, but they have more of that brown, rough material fastened over them, preventing access. On the side of the main building, there is an attached structure made of metal that appears to be intended for vehicles and/or loading, because it has a very large door on it (also facing this side) about four meters wide and almost three tall. It has handles at the bottom that look as if the door is one intended to slide upwards. All the floor within about a meter of the metal portion of the building looks to be poured concrete.

Barb is out there by the building. She’s laying on the floor in front of the big sliding metal door, she is working to regain her feet. Above her, a red clone lays motionless with its torso on the roof and its feet dangling over the edge some four meters over Barb’s head. The red clone (maybe male? Cadav or Phoenix?) is surrounded by one of those pinkish energy bubbles. Similarly, Malcolm is laying on the ground in front of the door to the brown part of the building. He is also motionless and also surrounded by a pink energy bubble.


I’LL TAKE THAT BET

Wilt is in the middle of shouting, "C'mon, take your spray! And I've got lots of flavors of suckers! Red, blue, lime... everyone loves lime!" and projectile shooting lollipops at Cadav - without the wrappers, of course – when he spots the white-clad figure, Wilt stops immediately behind Cadav. He whispers to Cadav, "Twenty credits says this isn't going to end well." Two suckers get stuck in Cadav’s hair, and one to the back of his uniform.

Cadav, however, drops prone on the ground with his hands over his head and fingers interlaced just as the strange white clone pulls the trigger. Wilt is immediately covered with a burst of burning liquid. The docbot is wreathed in flame.

Wilt realizes that several critical systems are overheating, and to his dismay, his internal safety measures start spraying coolant all over his pharmaceutical reserves before ministering to Wilt’s primary functioning. He tries to override it, but his positronics immediately shut down to prevent permanent damage. Wilt is functionally inoperable.

The white clone swears loudly in a male voice, “Oh goddamit! Just a fucking bot! C’mon! Recharge! Recharge!” The clone aims the gun down at Cadav and is impatiently banging the side of it.

Cadav is confused as to why the ultraviolet clone is here and wonders if the entire trip is a set-up.

[Gamemaster note: It is.]

Expenda goes through her pack. Unfortunately, she didn't grab any of the 'outdoor' gear and only has the troubleshooters' basic kit. (There is the infrared POD, but things are not yet that desperate.) Putting things back in place, she risks another good look at the structure and the clearing, but nothing jumps out at her. Expenda asks VLaD "do you have any sensors outside of visual? We need intel on the structure."

VLaD replies, “Oy! If only! My job is just hunting for anomalies inside ductwork. So do they give me nightvision? Radar? Sonar? Of course not! Why would VLaD need any of that when he has a perfectly good flashlight?” VLaD’s sarcasm module seems to be working perfectly.

"One thing we're not doing" Sinda says in a low voice to Expenda "is going anywhere near that building yet.” She studies the scene again quickly. “Well," she whispers "there's nothing we can do for Malcom and Phoenix anymore."

"If I even wanted to," she adds mentally.

"And Wilt is probably actually helping that idiot Cadav more than they realize," she continues, "probably safe to assume Jeth is off dead somewhere too, which leaves the three of us and Barb. VLaD, can you get close enough to Barb to speak to her at a relatively quiet tone, and tell her to crawl towards us? I don't want you stepping foot...er...claw, whatever onto that platform. I also don't want any unnecessary attention on any of us."

Sinda is agitated: pissed and scared at the entire situation and finding it hard to stay in control. She wonders in any if this shit is flammable. A fire here would not be good at this moment. Especially as she wasn't sure Expenda wouldn't out her as a mutant at a moment's notice to help herself. Although, it did always come on handy as a distraction. Sinda isn't sure what she'll do if and when Barb makes it to a point where she can meet up with them. She pulls out her POD, ensures it's on silent and turns it on, hoping it will give her some guidance, even the arrow from before. Anything to tell them where to go to get the blasted POD and get the fuck out of there. She would worry about getting it to the Leopards after her ass was safe back inside.

VLaD, still on her shoulder, says, “Oh! Funny story about that. It seems I can’t move my limbs since the impact back at the train. K-ROL says she can patch me up, but she’s laying on the side with all my parts. Of course!” Pause for effect. “Told you it was a funny story, right?”

Jeth is scared by the sight of all the pink bubbles and hurt clones. He wants to help Barb, but first he digs through the gear he's carrying, looking for something he can use to keep the med-bot at bay if it really has gone haywire. He sets the crates on the hover-flat next to K-ROL in order to search through them and quickly comes up with a heavy sledgehammer with a thick rubber head. Jeth then goes to pick the crates up again and realizes ponderously that maybe they’re just fine on Tensor. He heads over towards Barb, telling the bots to follow him. "Follow me again. She needs our help, hurry!"

Jeth enters the clearing from the main path. He holds a large, heavy sledgehammer in front of him, ready for anything. The Tensor hover-flat follows Jeth slowly. K-ROL is laying on her side on Tensor, along with two of the equipment crates. Jeth is clearly headed towards Barb.

Before Jeth can reach her, there is a faint whistling from above, and a 2-meter diameter sphere of pink energy drops from the sky and slams into Barb who has just recovered her feet. Barb is crushed quite messily, and the concrete beneath her body cracks from the impact. The energy field disappears, revealing Phoenix-R-ITE-4, who is now sitting in Barb’s pulpy remains. Phoenix blinks to get his bearings when a new energy bubble quickly surrounds Barb’s corpse, with Phoenix still inside it.


LIGHTNING NEVER STRIKES

Cadav reasons that this obviously ultraviolet clone will be impervious to his lasers, so instead he unsheathes the long stiletto blade from his truncheon handle as he lunges toward the white clad aggressor. The white-clad clone’s attention is occupied watching the weapon recharge, which Cadav can now hear beeping slowly. Cadav easily dives in under the napalm-hurling device (or whatever it is) and slashes at the clone’s thigh.

Where the blade contacts the white exo-suit, it leaves a deep purplish stripe across the surface of it, almost as if Cadav had painted the material with his blade.

The clone feels the contact and jumps back. He looks down at this purple mark on his suit and says, “Seriously?” He raises his hands up over his head, one of them still holding his weapon, now aimed at the sky. The weapon buzzes, causing the clone to look up at it and repeat, “Seriously?!”

Cadav continues stabbing at his opponent, but the blade never penetrates and instead just slides off harmlessly. Cadav’s attacks don’t leave any more marks on the suit.

With his hands still raised, the clone says, “Fine!” and suddenly disappears. Cadav detects a faint odor like burnt chocolate.

Out front…

Phoenix sits in the bubble with Barb’s body, realizing he is trapped. “Aw HEL Sector, man! Somebody help me outta here!”

Jeth is confused. There’s too many hurt/dead teammates here. At least Phoenix seems safe in that bubble. Jeth saw Wilt disappear around the far side of the building, so that’s where he goes. If that docbot really has gone crazy and the rest of the team is in danger… well, best not to think too hard on it.

Coming around the building, Jeth finds Wilt standing still, and Cadav laying on the ground in front of him. Wilt’s torso is so hot it is almost glowing. Jeth can feel the heat emanating from the docbot from a couple meters away. Cadav is holding a long knife and is facing away from the bot. Cadav appears confused, but unhurt.

Jeth says, “What happened? Are you okay?”

Pam is confident that Phoenix and Jeth never saw her or Sinda. With Jeth running around the building, Pam sees her opportunity. She uses Jeth’s distraction as an opportunity to strike Sinda at the base of the skull hard enough to stun her, causing the other woman to stagger momentarily. She then spins the barrel off Sinda’s laser pistol, which falls to the floor, and runs off across the clearing, following Jeth while hopefully staying relatively out of sight.

She pauses at the back corner of the building. Ahead of her Jeth has stopped running and is standing next to Wilt the docbot. Wilt’s torso is hot enough to be glowing slightly. Wilt is standing still and Pam notes that he has no lights lit up. Cadav is laying on the ground in front of the two of them. Cadav is holding a long stiletto that he seems to have drawn from the handle of his truncheon, and facing away from the other two, looking confused. None of the three of them are looking in Pam’s direction as she peeks around the corner.

Sinda has a moment of fuzziness. She suddenly feels as if she just woke up. The back of her head hurts, but she is still standing in the same spot she was before, VLaD still perched on her shoulder. She notes that the pistol in her hand no longer has a barrel on it. Glancing down, she sees the red barrel laying at her feet.

In her ear, VLaD is in the middle of talking, “…you like that. Hey! You should maybe go after her? Hello? Citizen?”

A whistling noise from above marks the arrival of another pink clone-delivery bubble. With horror, Phoenix looks up and sees that it’s headed straight for him. He screams and flinches and puts his arms up uselessly. Surprisingly, the incoming bubble slams into the bubble that covers Phoenix, and then bounces off into the sliding metal door next to him. The huge sheet of metal buckles inward at the impact, causing the bottom corners to pull upward, leaving substantial gaps underneath.

The energy bubble disappears, and Malcolm-R-NLD-3 slides down the newly dented door to land on his feet on the concrete. The impact knocks the body of Phoenix-R-ITE-3, which had been hanging from the roof and now falls on Mal and knocks him to the floor. Mal is shaken, but does not appear hurt. The Phoenix body rolls to one side and lays there on the concrete surrounded by its pink protective field.

Mal finds himself on the concrete in front of the metal portion of the building. Right next to him is the bubble containing the dead clone of Phoenix-R-ITE-3. Right next to that is another bubble containing a squished and pulply-looking dead red clone, and sitting in the clone’s remains, also inside the energy field, is a very alive Phoenix-R-ITE-4, who waves at him in a resigned fashion. To his right, at the front door of the brown portion of the building, Mal spots yet another bubble containing his own previous clone. None of the rest of the team is in evidence at the moment.

From the perspective of those out back…

From the front of the building there is a horrendous noise like the wrenching of metal. The boom of it reverberates through the building, causing the outside walls to visibly vibrate for a moment.


CLOSE CALL

Cadav sheaths his knife looking around for whatever it is that’s burning and turns to Jeth speaking breathlessly “I was trying to get away from Wilt, then when I rounded the corner there was an Ultra-violet clone trying to napalm me, but I ducked. I couldn’t even scratch them. It was purely in self-defense you know…” Cadav keeps his distance from Wilt.

Cadav spots Expenda peering around the corner of the building with a laser pistol leveled at his head. His eyes go wide in horror, but too late.

From cover, Pam shoots Cadav in head. Cadav spots her at the last moment and his eyes go wide, but he is dead soon enough. Pam doubts his memories will include this when he returns. 'Nobody is going to sneak around with hidden weapons but me,' she thinks to herself.

Ginning up some tears and rubbing her face so she looks like she's been crying, Pam tucks her laser into her belt behind her and steps out where she can be seen a moment later.

Expenda comes running from around the corner, wailing. "Oh! Thank Friend Computer I found you!" Expenda's tear-stained face splits into a wide grin when she sees Jeth. She runs to him (kicking the stiletto away from Cadav's corpse) and hops up onto the big clone's chest, wrapping her arms around his neck like a child. She blubbers into his shoulder, obviously terrified by all the violence. "You have to get into the structure! Malcolm said so!" Then she drops to the ground, seemingly embarrassed at her display of emotion and physical contact. With her eyes cast down, she waits for Jeth.

A pink protective energy field rises up to envelop Cadav’s corpse.

A beat later, the Tensor hover-flat comes hovering around the corner and parks itself next to Jeth. K-ROL still lays awkwardly on Tensor’s flatbed. Two equipment crates are on the vehicle with her. K-ROL asks, “Oh my! What happened to Wilt?”

On cue, Wilt lights up and swivels his head around. “K-ROL! I got broiled!” Wilt’s self-check reveal that everything seems to be in working order, except for his arms. The tool-arm is fine, but his grasping/manipulating arms report bearing failure and warn that any attempt to use the arms may result in permanent damage. He radios this report directly to K-ROL who replies by radio, “Get me back on my wheels and I can fix that in a jiff.”

In the woods…

Sinda is confused and angry. Angry at Phoenix for squishing poor Barb. Angry at Mal for his shitty attempts at “leadership.” Angry at Expenda for disappearing again. And… where DID she go? And how the hell did her laser barrel jump off her pistol like that?

Careful not to spill off the immobile VLaD, Sinda squats slowly and thoughtfully, picking up her laser barrel while trying to sort out whatever in HEL Sector is going on here. A glance tells her the barrel is still full and unfired, so she screws it back on to her pistol, and steps cautiously out into the clearing.

Mal glances back at Phoenix momentarily, then sprints over to his previous clone to recover Vera and his other belongings. As soon as he touches the body, the protective energy field disappears. With Vera slung over one shoulder, and his LASER pistol readied in his right hand, he rummages through the dead clone’s pockets with his left hand to retrieve the rest of his gear, including his brown wrist band. He quickly checks the body for any signs of what caused his death. All the while, he keeps alert, glancing around to watch for anyone, friend or foe.

The only clue his a stripe of burned flesh across one palm of his clone-brother’s corpse. He guesses that he probably tried the handle on the door, but it was electrified. He glances at the doorknob and is satisfied that it probably was the culprit. But it doesn’t really matter too much. With the substantial gaps he saw open beneath the large sliding door, he has decided he will make that his point of entry. So after confirming (or debunking) his hypothesis, Mal will head back towards Phoenix and the large sliding door, where he will plan to lay on the ground near one of the gaps, keeping his body behind cover, and looking through the gap to ascertain what threats are past the door.

Mal gasps in panic as he gazes into a large room with six of the bulky, white-suited clones inside. He immediately realizes that these are just empty suits, but the momentary adrenaline rush has his heart hammering. In the dim light, it looks like this is some sort of storage/maintenance area, with large machines, hoists, hoses, tubes, extra parts, etc.

Mal also quickly realizes that the greatest danger is actually behind him.

Barb’s new clone-delivery energy bubble drops from the sky barely a meter behind Mal and just a couple steps from the bubble where Phoenix waits patiently. It hits the corner of the concrete and shatters huge chunks of it, kicking up a small cloud of dust and debris. Coughing and hacking uncomfortably, Barb-R-RAA-2 stumbles out of the dust and inadvertently walks into the bubble around Phoenix.

The energy immediately disappears, and Barb is horrified to realize that Phoenix is sitting in the middle of the squished and pulpy remains of Barb-R-RAA-1. Phoenix looks extremely relieved to be free, and by way of thanks, he winks and points at Barb-2 and says, “Hey!... Don’t lose your head!”

Sinda watches all of this from about 20 paces away.

[RETCON: Should have been in the last move. Through everything else that happened, the hoverflat Tensor (a large hovering flatbed-bot) floated slowly across the clearing and around the building. The maintenance-bot K-ROL was laying on her side on Tensor’s flatbed with a couple of equipment crates next to her. Tensor and its load are now out of sight.]


OUTBACK

Sinda glances up trying to figure out how to get some sort of sign to Barb-2. She can't think of anything that won't also get the attention of that moron Phoenix. Sinda figures that pompus ass is the last one she wants hanging around her. If she didn't already want to end him for landing on Barb, just his damned hair would make her want to blast his ass.

"Ok, VLaD, we're getting the fuck out of here. Right now." She starts running as quietly as possible back into the poles, trying not to dislodge the little bot. She tries to formulate a plan as she runs, sending sparks and fire in the wake of her panic. All she can come up with is trying to circle round the back of the metal building structure and seeing what the deal is there. It's better than nothing and she can always adjust her course on the fly. As she runs, she hisses to VLaD, "OK bot, I'm gonna need you to tell me what happened with me, Expenda, and my blaster. I seem to have blacked out or something for a hot second when what's her name got smashed into neatloaf" She'll have to figure out some way to get back to Barb later, if she and VLaD make it to later that is. Sinda scans the thicket of whatever these are for Expenda as she runs. She knows she can't trust Expenda, but figures that finding her is at least a goal.

VLaD says, “It was pretty nifty, doll. She whacked ya upside the head with a billy club, then spun the barrel off your laser, neat as ya please, and then she was off across the clearing like a jack-o-bot while you just stood there grinning like she just told you ya won the sweepstakes. She got some moxie, that one.”

Sinda peers though the poles from the back side of the clearing, and sure enough, there’s Expenda standing behind the building, looking all soft and weepy. She’s with Jeth and Wilt and K-ROL. K-ROL is still lying on her side on the Tensor hover-bot. Jeth is just staring around looking dumb. The bots aren’t moving. This side of the clearing is closer to the building than the other. Sinda’s maybe 20 paces from Expenda and the others, but still (she thinks) fairly well hidden.

VLaD whispers, “K-ROL’s asking Jeth to help her stand up. Her tool arm’s trapped under her. I don’t think that sack of lug-nuts has any clue what she’s talking about.”

In the front…

Phoenix immediately starts gathering his gear from his dead clone as he starts asking, “First things first… is everyone oka…” He trails off when he finds his comb. “Oh dammit! My hair!” He spends about 30 seconds combing some goop into it before finally saying, “No really. So is everyone okay? Is anyone hurt? Do we have some sort of plan?”

Meanwhile Mal is spending this time shimmying underneath the bottom edge of the sliding door, on the side where it looks to have pulled up the most. He does his best “belly crawl,” like he had heard the military guys talking about, then moves along the inside wall of the building. This whole metal add-on building is just a single large room. The suits seem to be some sort of powered exo-suits. Three of them look to be complete from the outside, although it is hard to see where one would get into them. The other three are in various states of disassemblage. Huge pieces of each are missing, although it is hard to tell if they are being repaired, just being built, or are being stripped for parts. All six suits have dirt and varous types of scorch marks on the outside of them.

On the far side of the room are two large metal bins with various suit parts. Not all of them look to be of the same type as the ones Mal is looking at. On the back wall are racks of various tools.and other sundry component pieces. On the wall where Mal is there is a door that seemingly leads into the main portion of the building. There are no other doors or windows. The ceiling is high and peaked with just the skeleton of a set of rafters supporting it all.

Barb is also gathering her stuff and scanning around her for any sign of the others—especially Sinda. She doesn’t spot anyone but notices some kind of sparks or maybe small flames in the poles past the edge of the clearing. They come in small flashes that seem to be moving around the edge of the clearing and to the back side of the building.

Out back…

Expenda looks from Wilt to K-ROL to Jeth, waiting on orders. "We ought to find Malcolm," she says, wiping away tears and a runny nose with her sleeve.

Pam is using this time to carefully look at this portion of the structure, trying to see where Ultraviolet clones might have gone in. There is a back door on the brown portion of the structure, and more boarded up windows, but no other way in to the metal addition to the building. Pam keeps clear of Cadav’s corpse is stays aware in case his new clone comes crashing down near here.

Jeth is merely looking confused. K-ROL finally says, “Jeth, sweetie? Citizen? Is there any way you can do ol’ K-ROL a favor and help me sit up here?”

When Jeth turns to look at K-ROL, Expenda quickly picks up Cadav’s truncheon with its secret stiletto inside and tucks the whole affair into her uniform.

[Mike]

CHAPTER 7

LIVE DIE REPEAT

Expenda looks up when K-ROL speaks. "Kay, if we get you onto your wheels, could you open that door for us?" Looking past the bot, Pam notices that outside the clearing, just a few paces into the woods, it looks like there’s something on fire. [And that’s the last thing Pam knows. She is dead.]

K-ROL replies, “Oh, I’ve been known to open a door or two in my day.”

In the trees…

Sinda should probably be grateful that Expenda had merely knocked her silly and disabled her blaster instead of using it to kill her. Should be… isn't even close. "That lying, stupid, sack of shit!" She thinks. "She's fucking done" Sinda checks to make sure the barrel of her blaster is fully locked into place, leans out of her shelter, aims at Expenda' s head and fires. Expenda seems distracted by something off to the side and doesn’t even see it coming. The blast catches the infrared clone in the throat, and she goes down.

Sinda ducks back and thinks for a moment. Who knows what that simpering bitch told Jeth about what happened. Sinda needs to either disable him or take him out too. If she aims for his blaster arm, not only will he be unable to shoot her before she can explain herself but Wilt will probably keep him from causing any other issues. Shooting him outright would just leave a chance for two fucking clone delivery bubbles to avoid instead of just the one. She leans out again and shoots before good sense can convince her otherwise. She hits him, but in the wrong arm. His injured blue arm bursts into gorgeous green flames.

A new Cadav clone drops out of the sky in between the back of the building and the edge of the clearing, just as an energy field surrounds Expenda’s body.

Mal…

Mal looks around for some way to open the sliding door he just came through, and finds a single button on the wall next to the door into the rest of the building. Wiring from the button is stapled to the wall and clearly leads up to a door opening device on rails over his head. He presses the button. The door slides upward about half a meter, and then the warped metal catches on something and reverses direction. Before it can contact the ground, it catches again and starts upward once more. Lather, rinse, repeat. Ad nauseum. The accompanying grinding and clanking noise of the device’s motor and drive chain is extremely loud and annoying.


IN ACTION

Mal waits until the door is near the top of its repeating pattern and then presses the button again. The door stops moving.

In back…

"Fuck fuck fuck" Sinda hisses under her breath. Now she's gonna have to kill Jeth outright and pretend she didn't later or something. She needs to get VLaD fixed, and K-ROL is the only way. "Fuck" she says again to herself quietly. She decides that an arm on fire is probably a distraction too, and only has a few moments before a new Expenda shows up...and Sinda wants to be there when that happens (although not directly there, if you know what she means [GM’s Note: I do not.]).

"Ug, this suuuucks," Sinda thinks, twisting her nose ring. "If I'm gonna die, let's get it over with," she says sarcastically to the bot on her shoulder. She makes sure VLaD is securely on her shoulder, keeps her blaster ready and runs to the building, looking for a part that will prevent her from being smashed.

Her nerves are firing hard as she runs, trying to think of what to say when she arrives to defend her actions to Jeth. "Those flames are pretty damn impressive" she observes, panting as she approaches. "Sorry, about that though...my blaster somehow misfired when I was trying to shoot that bitch, Expenda. She fucking knocked me out… plus, she's fucking annoying as shit." She tries to determine the likelihood of Jeth shooting her, and wonders if she should use a water pill to put out his arm as a sign of good faith... and decides against it.

Up til now, Jeth has been mostly staring wide-eyed at the greenish flames rising from his outstretched arm. But now the flames are extending up past the bandaged blue part. Jeth’s t-shirt and coveralls catch fire at his shoulder, and Jeth starts yelling involuntarily as if in immense pain. He beats at the flames with his good hand, but that does not seem to be diminishing them in any way. Jeth is starting to panic.

"Hey," Sinda snaps at Wilt, "do something about that," she gestures at Jeth with her blaster, "while I get that thing back up and get this shit done. I'm so over this 'outside' bullshit."

Wilt replies quickly, “I’d love to, sweetheart, but I seem to be slightly immobile here until K-ROL can do some joint work. I could try, but it’s likely my arms will just fall off.” A small panel opens in Wilt’s chest, and two red lollipops come out of it at high speed, missing Sinda’s head by a couple of hand-spans and landing on the floor behind her. Wilt continues, “Give him one of those to help him relax. The other’s for you. Who doesn’t love a sucker?”


PATT-Y-CAK

Leaving the door behind for the time being, Mal turns his attention to making sure they are not in imminent danger from someone coming from deeper inside the building. He walks over the door that leads to the main portion of the building. With Vera slung over his shoulder and his LASER pistol at the ready, he grabs the handle to the door leading in, only to find it locked.

Out front…

Bored and unmotivated, Phoenix and Barb sit on the cement outside the big sliding door. Both have retrieved their gear and clearly have no idea what to do. After a bit of discussion, they decide that they’ll play Patt-Y-CAK (a clapping game for two clones named after the Yellow clearance clone who invented it). Turns out, they’re both pretty good at it.

In back…

Jeth continues to panic, howling and shrieking, stumbling about wildly. He trips on the uneven, unfamiliar terrain and goes sprawling onto the ground. Instinct tells him to roll around on the flames, but his coveralls are already on fire and it's not clear that flailing around is helping much. His screams are making a terrific noise.

Sinda is starting to get a massive headache from all the eyerolls these fuckers have been triggering, so she sighs heavily instead. She does, however, happen to have a massive secret fondness for lollipops, especially the red ones.

Sinda turns and scoops up the lollipops, popping one into her mouth nonchalantly. She glances briefly but warily up to the skies and reaches into her pocket. She pulls out a pellet that she tosses at Jeth, hitting him in the flaming arm. On impact, the pellet explodes into a gush of water and immediately douses what remains of the flames. The blue portion of Jeth’s arm seems little affected by the whole ordeal, but his upper arm and shoulder are a blackened mess. He grins/grimaces in relief. “Oh! Thank you!”

"Hey, VLaD" Sinda says, "let's try and get this piece of scrap K-ROL up so she can fix you. Keep an eye out for trouble from anyone, will you? Also, if you know how we can fix this, feel free to fill me in." she says blandly. Sinda works her way carefully around K-ROL, taking care to avoid turning her back to either Jeth or Expenda's corpse. K-ROL says, “Oh, dearie, I’m way too heavy for that. You’re gonna need a couple more of you to set me to rights.” And after a minimal amount of effort from Sinda, it becomes clear that K-ROL is correct.

While all of that is going on, Cadav takes in the scene and watches everyone carefully as he moves to his previous clone’s corpse. He gathers up his things and notes with some dismay that his truncheon and stiletto are missing. He surreptitiously touches the clone on the forehead as was done before creating the link with his zombie. He makes sure to draw his pistol and keeps a wary eye out. In the absence of his blade, he also arms himself with a crowbar he had taken from the equipment crates earlier.

Cadav has placed the grenade like device he received from the Dr. Preppers in the hands of his dead clone.

Cadav then comes around to the other side of Tensor where Sinda is working on trying to get K-ROL upright again. Cadav says, “You definitely need help. Where’s Barb? Where’s Mal?”

He mentally orders his zombie clone to stand up, move to the back door of the building, and then activate the device. It does so.

Looking at Jeth, Cadav exclaims, “Holy Blessed Friend Computer! Your arm is a mess, Jeth! I think I have some compresses in my bag, let me check.” Cadav kneels and digs in his bag and brings out his pistol and shoots Sinda twice in the chest then turns the gun on Jeth, all the while shouting, “This is NOT normal! Die you mutant scum! Friend Computer chooses you to DIE!”

Sinda is knocked backward and falls off of Tensor, dropping the half-meter to the floor and impacting hard. VLaD is knocked loose and lands motionless about a meter from Sinda, shouting, "Look out! He's got a gun!" Jeth is dead immediately and obviously (the pink bubble surrounds him immediately). Seeing that Sinda is still alive, Cadav steps around Tensor to where she is laying and charges her with a crowbar raised over his head.

Sinda’s spine hurts and the fall did nothing for her headache. Her chest burns terribly and she’s finding it hard to draw in a breath, making her kind of dizzy. She realizes that her reflec armor saved her life, but it probably won’t do so a second time.

A brief whistling prefaces the arrival of Expenda’s new clone. She lands further out in the clearing, near to where Cadav came in.

Through all of this, Wilt remains motionless.


LIKE FLIES

With that avenue exhausted for the time being, Mal turns his attention to the exo-suits. He walks over and closely inspects the one that seems to be in the best condition, to see if he can find a way to get into it. He manages to find a seam indicating where presumably the suit opens in the back and allows entry. In looking for a handle or switch, he quickly spots an access panel that opens up. Inside the access panel is a softly glowing screen that looks to by 15cm x 25cm… pretty standard. There is nothing to look at on the screen, and there are no controls around it. There are two holes just to the right of the screen just large enough to maybe poke the tip of a pencil in there.

Just outside…

Phoenix and Barb are Patt-Y-CAKing pretty well. They’ve gotten into a rhythm were they can build up a little speed, and both of them are giggling.

They hear two gunshots in rapid succession. The first shot kills Barb instantly, two holes appear on either side of her skull, a small one on the side facing away from the building, and a much larger and messier hole on the side facing the building. Phoenix’s brain doesn’t have time to process this information before he feels something graze the bridge of his nose and then spang off the metal garage door.

Phoenix has just enough time to panic. He screams, “Barb! NOOO!” and immediately scrambles on his hands and knees towards the opening under the large sliding door. The gunfire starts again, but now it is on autofire and a couple dozen bullets rip through Phoenix, spark off the concrete, punch through the door, ricochet underneath it.

Phoenix and Barb are both dead.

Inside again…

As Mal considers his options, he is startled by two gunshots in rapid succession from outside. One of them bounces off the metal door with a loud SPANG that reverberates in the enclosed space. Without thinking, Mal’s reflexes take him to the side of the room, where he finds cover behind a workbench. Vera is at the ready before he even thinks about it. Staying low, he peers outside through the gap under the door.

He hears Phoenix scream, “Barb! NOOO!” as he registers that Barb is on the ground with a hole in her skull. Just as the pink death bubble rises up over her, Mal can see Phoenix scrambling on his hands and knees towards the opening under the door, obviously seeking cover. The gunfire starts again, but now it is on autofire and a couple dozen bullets rip through Phoenix, spark off the concrete, punch through the door, ricochet underneath it.

Thankfully, none of the bullets come close to Mal’s hiding space, but there’s a hell of a noise as they punch through and bounce off other stuff. A hissing noise catches Mal’s attention, and he sees that one of the good suits (but not the one he had been working on) is venting a pale cloud of… something… from a crack in its shin.

Looking where the shots must have come from, Mal spots one of the white exo-suits standing brazenly at the edge of the clearing. It looks to be reloading a gun that could easily be Vera’s little sister.

Frustrated to no end, Pam sweeps the area for threats. Seeing nothing immediate, she fades back to the woods to reassess. Having secreted herself in the shadows, she freezes when she hears two gunshots, possibly from the other side of the building. After three seconds, the gunfire starts again, but this time on autofire, with at least two dozen shots rattling off in the space of a couple seconds. This is followed by a cacophony of pings and bangs from inside the metal portion of the building. Pam assumes that’s where most of the bullets ended up.

"Fucker!" Sinda yelps, sitting up fast before crazed Cadav's charge reaches her. She tosses a second pellet at Cadav which hits his neck and explodes into a huge gush of water, splashing up into his face and drenching the front of his uniform. Sinda takes advantage of the momentary distraction to finally work her pistol out of the holster and blast him. The shot catches him fully in the shoulder. Cadav’s armor protects him from the worst of the damage, but all the fresh moisture there boils rapidly away, scalding his shoulder, neck and chest and leaving him in intense pain. This only further fuels his rage, and with fresh adrenaline powering him, the crowbar (on his good side) comes down viciously on Sinda, knocking her gun away and likely breaking her wrist in the process. Realizing he has dropped his own gun as well, Cadav raises the crowbar again and repeats the process until Sinda is no longer resisting.

Cadav realizes that Sinda is dead when her pink protective bubble rises up to surround her and encloses him as well. He whacks at it a couple times with his crowbar, but this little two-meter wide hemisphere is just as impervious as all the ones before it. He is trapped until Sinda’s replacement clone arrives.

Wilt still remains motionless nearby. VLaD lays on the floor by the building. K-ROL is still helpless on her side. All three bots observe the scene helplessly.


TUMBLE DRY

Mal quickly glances around to see if there is an armory with other Vera-like weapons. Finding none on a quick look, Mal carefully takes aim on the exo-suit with Vera. Taking a deep breath and then slowly exhaling, he squeezes the trigger and fires at the exo-suit, worrying as he does so about what effect Vera will have on the exo-suit or its occupant, but believing (perhaps wrongly) that there is more up-side than down-side to this course of action.

The shot catches the exo-suited clone in the hip—Mal is thrilled that he hit the thing at all under these conditions—and Mal sees a few shards of white material break away and go flying backwards. The white clone, in an obviously male voice that must be amplified to be heard so clearly shouts, “No freakin way!” If an exo-suit could be said to look angry, then the body language of this one seems pretty pissed. The head swivels around, scanning the area, and ultimately fixes on the opening under the door. It takes a step towards Mal, but the damaged hip decides not to join in, and the whole suit topples face-first into the greenery of the floor.

“FUCK!” It’s shout echoes across the clearing.

Out back…

Cadav, trapped with a traitorous dead clone, is not yet resigned to his situation. Cadav looks for the Cadav-2-Zombie to see if he has completed his mission. It has and currently, the body of Cadav-2 is standing expressionlessly by the back door. Cadav-3 then kneels over the slain body of Sinda grabbing her weapons and making the neural connection that will allow him control of Zombie-Sinda. After Cadav arms Zombie Sinda with her own truncheon he directs her to move outside the pink bubble hoping this will “pop” it somehow and that he will have an armed minion on the outside. The battered body stands up obediently and starts walking perpendicular to the building. Cadav is engrossed watching the energy field simply stretch out to keep the corpse surrounded, even in a standing position. Once it starts walking, the filed follows, and apparently has no concern for Cadav’s position. As the field moves with the walking dead, Cadav is simply picked up and tossed head over heels behind the zombie as it walks away. The field never breaks. As soon as he catches his bearings, Cadav orders the zombie to drop prone and play dead again. And quickly the field returns to its standard bubble, with enough room for Cadav to sit comfortably inside with Sinda’s body.

Cadav looks around to get his bearings and spots Expenda a few steps away on the other side of the bots. She is staring at him wide-eyed, but he has no idea how much she just saw since most of what happened would have been hidden behind the Tensor hoverbot.

The bots, by the way… Tensor with K-ROL laying on top, VLaD on his back a little ways away, Wilt standing next to K-ROL… none of them have moved even a little bit through all of this.

Meanwhile…

"Mal must be having a great time with that rifle," Pam muses as she waits for counter fire. Aaaaaand… there it is. Just a single shot. This is followed by an amplified unknown male voice yelling angrily, “No freakin way!” followed shortly thereafter with an angrier, “FUCK!” All of this still seems to be coming from the front of the building.

Pam waits a few seconds longer before trying to head toward her last corpse to rearm. To her surprise, Sinda steps out from behind Tensor. Sinda is most certainly… wrong. She is battered and bruised. One arm is clearly broken in multiple places and most of her skull is collapsed in on itself on one side. She should not be walking. To add to the mystery, Sinda is surrounded by one of the pink energy bubbles that seems to be moving with her. Also inside the bubble is Cadav-R-USS-3 who is on the ground and tumbling along behind her. Then after just two steps, Sinda falls to the ground and stops moving. The bubble returns to its usual 2-meter diameter hemisphere configuration, and a confused-looking Cadav sits up in the bubble and looks around to get his bearings. He clearly spots Pam.

To finish the scene, Pam can see her previous clone in the grass just past Sinda and Cadav. Previous Pam is dead of a laser shot to the face, and still has her own pink energy bubble surrounding her. Off to the right, one-eyed Cadav-R-USS-2 stands next to the back door of the building, slack-jawed and staring vacantly at nothing.

The bots, by the way… Tensor with K-ROL laying on top, VLaD on his back a little ways away, Wilt standing next to K-ROL… none of them have moved even a little bit since Pam’s new clone arrived.

A new pink clone delivery bubble drops in. It hits the back of the building at an angle, tearing a wide hole in the back wall as it crashes to the ground a meter away from the back door. Jeth-2 emerges and stares at his teammates, oblivious to the three-meter wide hole his entrance just tore into the structure behind him.


TAKE THE PENALTY

Not knowing how long Vera will take to recharge, but knowing it will charge faster in the brighter light outside the building, Mal quickly decides to take advantage of the prone opponent on the ground outside. Shouldering Vera, he pulls his LASER pistol and sprints as fast as he can towards the downed exo-suit and its occupant. With his adrenalin pumping and his senses heightened, he keeps one eye on the prone exo-suit, so he can head for cover instead if it appears the person inside is getting up, and keeps the other eye out for any other opponents in the area that he may need to avoid. As he gets close, he can hear that the person inside is speaking. Mal starts making out words mid-conversation:

“…on the replay! I don’t KNOW!” Mal can’t hear the other end of the conversation, but after a pause, the clone continues, “I don’t care! FINE! I’ll take the damn penalty, you old witch!” At that moment, the exo-suit starts buzzing with an electrical hum, and the entire thing lifts up. It doesn’t change position or orientation, but now it is hovering bare centimeters above the floor. The greenery underneath it is turning an odd brownish, and Mal can smell a sickly burning odor combined with a strong blast of ozone.

Mal is so absorbed in this that he doesn’t notice the incoming clone bubbles until they slam into the floor on either side of the exo-suit. Barb-3 is on the left, Phoenix-5 on the right.

Barb and Phoenix are back. They find themselves standing on either side of an huge white exo-suit, maybe two and a half or three meters tall—hard to tell, because it’s lying down… or rather, it’s sort of barely hovering above the floor, but in a lying-down position. The exo-suit is humming loudly, and it smells like something is burning. Mal is standing near the head of the suit with a laser pistol in his hand.

They are near the edge of the clearing in front of the building. Their fallen bodies are in pink protective bubbles over by the garage door.

Phoenix immediately shouts, “Holy shit! Cadav’s a stinkin’ mutant! I got it!” and he runs to his old clone to gather equipment.

Barb immediately staggers back from the exo-suit as if it might bite her or explode or something. “Wh-wh-what is… I mean… should we be this close to it?” She’s looking to Mal for guidance.

Out back…

Now worried that she might fail her mission, Pam runs toward Cadav-2's body to grab whatever weapons he still has. It turns out that the body has no equipment on it, but as noted, it is standing by the doorway, and on close inspection, it is clearly dead. It’s one “good” eye is blank and lifeless, and there it has been shot through the head. However, as she searches it, the body actively maintains its balance and remains upright. Pam is unsure how to process this, but she notes Cadav and Jeth both watching her, so she jumps through the gaping hole in the back of the building to take cover.

She is in an open, multi-function room that appears to take up most of the first floor of the building. She is in what is probably meant to be a kitchen area, with a sink (or the remnants of a sink where the hole was smashed), a refrigerator and small appliances on what’s left of the counters. But this kitchenette opens into a larger room, with a large viewing screen against one wall and comfortable seating around it. There’s a table with six chairs towards the corner to Pam’s left. There is a huge area rug covering the middle of the room. Other than the building’s back door, which is right next to the hole she entered through, there are three other doors—two of them are on the left wall, leading towards the metal addition to the building that can be seen from outside, and the other door on the wall opposite Pam—presumably the front door.

The only out of place feature of the room is a comically large, double-barrel shotgun mounted on a tripod and aimed at the front door. It has some sort of mechanism rigged to the triggers. A glance at the dust and rubble around her indicates that a similar rig had been aimed at the back door but was toppled by the crash.

In a split second decision, Pam decides not to touch it yet, because she’s not familiar with the firing device attached to it. Instead, she dives over the counter that divides kitchen space from living space and takes cover there. For good measure, she cranks up her memory fog hard for Jeth and Cadav’s benefit. Both of them should still be well within range.

[Note that Cadav-3 is still alive and trapped inside a dead-clone bubble with Sinda, so there’s no getting to him someone else opens that thing up.]

Jeth takes the memory fog full force, while Cadav is unaffected inside the bubble. Jeth is aware of an abstract streak of black. He wanted to ask Expenda something, since she’s the only one here, but suddenly she’s just not there anymore. Jeth looks around in confusion and notices that there is a huge hole in the wall of the building behind him. It seems like a pointless hole, because it’s right next to the door, but Jeth can see in to what looks like a very cozy room, with a kitchenette and comfy chairs and a big viewscreen.

Sinda’s incoming clone bubble crashes down behind Wilt. The impact causes Wilt to topple over. He lays on his side next to Tensor, not moving.


I AM THE LIZARD KING

Phoenix grabs all his gear and runs around the building screaming like a madclone.

Mal is disappointed to note that the exo-suited clone still has a firm grip on his Vera-ish weapon. So he quickly checks Vera to see if she’s sufficiently charged for a kill shot. And she is! JOY!

Mal levels his large rifle at the fallen exo-clone’s head and drops a massive blast at almost point-blank range. The blast seems to spread out and engulf the entire suit. The humming gets much louder, and energy swirls around the suit for three or four seconds before dissipating. The exo-suit seems unaffected by the whole process.

By now, Mal has already reslung his rifle and drawn his laser pistol. Without looking at her, he says to Barb, “Get into the building underneath the sliding door. Go, NOW!” Barb bolts as if she was just waiting for the go ahead. Her previous clone is right by the door, so she grabs the corpse’s legs and drags what’s left of her under the door with her.

The exo-suit clone rises to a standing position. Mal takes a couple cautious steps backwards while emptying his entire laser barrel at his opponent, landing all 8 shots on the head and visor. The effect is merely a lesser version of his first shot.

Now standing, the white clone raises one arm and uses the other hand to tap his own wrist with one finger. “I’m still in time-out for about 90 more seconds.” The man’s tone is conversational—almost bored. “But my partner’s still free somewhere, so I wouldn’t go wasting time like this. No sense handing her a free shot.”

The Backyardigans…

Cadav orders Cadav-2 to “play dead” while he scans for other clones.

Cadav-2 suddenly drops to the floor and looks for all the world like a dead body.

For Cadav: Jeth and Expenda’s bodies are still out here near Tensor. Jeth is standing dumbly by the giant hole in the building. Other than Sinda and the bots, he doesn’t see the other troubleshooters from his team.

Then he orders Cadav-1 to exit the train car and to approach the building, but to stay in the ” brown pole” area and then hide by crouching or lying down. His mind feels a tickle that tells him that Cadav-1 is trying to do exactly that. He wishes he could still look through Cadav-1’s eyes and guide him here, but it should be simple enough.

Sinda is totally fucking over this shit. She's tired if these idiots and broken bots and "outside " there is no anarchy to be spread and the smell of hair gel whenever she's near Pheonix makes her rage. She pulls out her weapon, glances back at her body in the bubble. "I'll get my shit later" she thinks.

Sinda snatches up VLaD and positions him back on her shoulder. The spiderbot emits a sound like an exaggerated sigh and says, “Haha! Back on top!”

Wilt calls out, “Don’t worry about the rest of us. We’ll just stand watch right where we are.” His sarcasm module is clearly still in working order. Wilt still does not move.

Sinda gestures at Jeth as she passes him, clearly intended to climb through this giant hole in the wall to what looks to be a kitchen. "You coming, asshole,” she growls, “or are you gonna sit out here and wait for that nutjob Cadav to shoot us again?"

She’s keeping an eye out for Barb or Expenda (whom she would shoot on sight). She's also ready to shoot Jeth, for that matter, or anyone else who might want to cross her. Her nerves are shot, she's hungry as HEL-sector, and fresh out of fucks.

Cadav takes the laser pistol from Sinda’s corpse, and instructs her to stand still until Sinda approaches or the bubble pops, but then she is to attack the new Sinda grappling her and choking her. Again, conditional statements might be a bit much for a zombie with a collapsed skull, but Sinda-1 stands and appears ready. The pink containment bubble rises with Sinda-1, forming a sphere around her form. Cadav stands with her and stays mostly behind her from Sinda-2’s perspective. He keeps the laser pistol behind Zombie Sinda.

“Sinda wait!” Cadav calls out, “How do you like it when it’s you that gets whacked?!? Not so fun is it? You traitorous murderer! And best of all, you can’t even touch me while I’m inside this bubble. But this can be a turning point for you, Sinda. You see, Friend Computer has given me the gift of control over all the fallen clones so that I may purify the complex and purge the unfaithful from our midst. Only the faithful will be spared. Are you ready to repent and follow Friend Computer’s call to obedience and oneness of will?”

Phoenix comes running around the building from the north side (not the metal garage side). He is screaming angrily and waving his pistol. His yelling can be heard well before he arrives, “Where are you, you son-of-a-bitch! I figured you out, you triple-helix, zombie-lovin’, extra chromosome havin’, mutie freak bastard! Guys! Cadav’s a mutant! An abomination! He’s gotta die!”

Phoenix pulls up short behind Sinda and takes in the scene. His hair falls in his face when he stops. He rolls his eyes up to look at his own hair and seems to forget about his mission. “Aw dammit shit!” Phoenix holds his pistol under one arm while he quickly gets out his comb and gel. While he fixes his hair, he remembers what he’s doing. He combs and talks at the same time, a little out of breath, “I figured it out, Sinda. That boy’s a mutant! That’s why his first clone was up and walkin’ around and…” This is where Phoenix realizes that there’s another Sinda in the bubble with Cadav—a very zombie-lookin’ Sinda, too, now that you mention it. He trails off.

Just for Sinda: The smell of hair gel is quite strong right now.


NO—I AM THE LIZARD QUEEN

In the garage…

Barb is bumbling around among the suits. She had a thought to try to get in one of them, but whatever fumes were released from the previously damaged suit have filled the space, and Barb is very pleasantly high right now, and on her way to becoming sick. So more than anything, she’s stumbling around like a drunk and grabbing at anything shiny.

Mal…

Thinking that he’s probably dead no matter what, Mal decides to take a chance on a different tact: talking. (He also amps up his machine empathy in case the suit contains any machine intelligence separate from its occupant.)

Holstering his LASER pistol and raising his hands slightly and keeping them away from Vera, Mal says to the occupant in the exo-suit, “Sorry about that. Look, you know how it is: we’re just Troubleshooters sent here to complete a mission, and we were told this place was abandoned and to find an ultraviolet POD of the person in charge. Frankly, if I had my choice, I’d say screw the mission, and I’d join you guys. You have better toys, and seem like a hell of a lot more fun than the crew they stuck me with. If you wanna shoot me, t’ain’t much I can do to stop you. But if you want Alpha Complex to stop sending Troubleshooters against you, perhaps we should have a little talk and see what we can work out.”

There is the briefest of pauses, and then the occupant of the suit begins laughing. It is a deep, hearty, genuine laugh, and it takes the clone a moment to get it under control. “Alright. I get it. Why don’t you stick close to me then. Hopefully she’ll be distracted by your friends, and then… more points for me when the time-out’s up, huh?” The giant suit poses with fists on hips and one foot tapping, looking around idly—an exaggerated posture of waiting.

Backyard…

At this point Cadav-3 commands Cadav-2 to stand and approach him, but not to contact the pink bubble. Cadav-3 similarly calls Cadav-1 to join him with the same precautions, while avoiding engaging any other clones unless attacked.

Cadav-2’s body stands up again and plods over to the clone bubble where Cadav-3 stands with Sinda’s mobile corpse. It takes up a pose next to the bubble. Cadav glances meaningfully at his previous clone and then looks to the other side. But there is nothing there.

[For the record, Cadav-1 is unable to extricate itself from the tarp it is rolled up in. The concept of laying down and rolling out of it is far too complicated. But it has finally managed to wobble itself into a standing position next to the train car. It is still entirely invisible thanks to the experimental tarp. It begins hopping gamely towards the action. This will take a while—assuming it doesn’t fall down a few times on the uneven ground.]

Cadav-3 calls pleadingly to Phoenix, “I think you are mistaken, brother. I beg you to join us in protecting all clone-dom from the murderous traitors in our midst. Friend Computer has granted me, His servant, power over the fallen clones in order that we may complete this mission and overcome the ‘Outsiders’ as well as the traitors among us. There will be no more in-fighting among clones. There will be peace and unity.”

While Cadav speaks, Phoenix has braced himself with his pistol now gripped in both hands. He fires off three shots, which of course bounce harmlessly off the bubble. Phoenix tries kicking it weakly, but he’s been inside one of these things and he knows it’s not going anywhere.

Sinda gapes, horrified, at the sight in front of her. Between the sight of her reanimated corpse and the smell of hair gel, she retches, suddenly glad that her stomach is empty. She pulls herself together, and glances at Pheonix, "No, you’re fucking right he's a mutant! Hopefully he and, well… I… stay contained in that bubble as long as possible. And if it breaks? We shoot the fuck out of both of them." She backs towards the kitchen hole again...

"I'm going in there and find cover and hopefully figure out how to get out of this shit hole of ‘outside’. You assholes coming?"

Jeth stands by Sinda and seems ready to follow, but you never know. He’s so hard to read.

Phoenix is torn. He looks from the clone bubble where a certain mutant traitor is just out of his reach to Sinda. Maybe?

It's not her best decision, but Pam is determined to get control of the situation. She drops the Memory Fog. With an agile roll, she puts herself right next to the smashed-in section where Sinda looks to be entering.

When Sinda turns to the hole in the wall, Expenda is suddenly standing there. Where the hell did SHE come from?

Expenda catches the other clones off guard and, having the higher ground, expertly kicks Sinda’s pistol out of her hand before anyone can react. However, while she appears guarded and ready, Expenda is not aggressive.

In a commanding tone none of them have heard from her before, Expenda announces, "Don't enter this house! I am Pam-G-RIR-3, green clearance security agent on direct orders from Alpha Complex, and you will obey. Killing each other's clones will be considered a betrayal of Alpha Complex and will brand your clone-lines as Traitors!”

Pam spots a large white exo-suited clone emerging from the trees at the edge of the clearing and running in this direction. It is surprisingly silent, and with all their attention on Pam, none of the others seem to notice yet.


JUST BREATHE

Let’s start with Mal…

Mal takes up a position slightly behind and to the right of the exo-suit. “So what are you guys doing, anyways? Is this some sort of game you guys play: see who can take out the most Troubleshooters?”

The clone chuckles. “Deadpool. Is that morbid? Betting on the lives of others?” Without waiting for an answer, he snaps, “Time’s up!” and with a flick of his wrist, he bats Vera off into the woods. “No more of that,” he adds as he snatches Mal into a headlock. The joints at the suit’s wrist are painfully pinching the skin at Mal’s neck as the other arm comes around to start constricting his chest. He fights it, but with every exhale, Mal realizes that there will be no more inhaling. The powerful exosuit obviously could have crushed him already, but the ultraviolet clone is moving very slowly. “Sorry to drag it out. More points this way.”

Mal can see both of the white drones hovering above them, obviously recording the entire scene. Mal’s still got half a chestful of air, but probably not for long.

And also in trouble…

Cadav mentally commands his zombies to back away from Expenda VERY slowly and cautiously toward the brown poles as he watches to see what happens next.

Jeth's mind is reeling. It appears that Cadav is a traitor, a mutant, or both. The dead clones should be staying dead but are not, and it's all a bit terrifying. Jeth really wants to go inside the hole and get away from this horrible scene, so he nods meekly and prepares to follow Sinda, mumbling weakly that "outside is full of colors".

Suddenly, Expenda appears, kicks out at Sinda, and starts saying confusing things. Jeth gapes back at her. "Are you wearing green?" he stammers, boggling at her. "The outside carpet... we need a Green leader?"

"Hey, let us in," he adds insistently. "That guy's a traitor, you gotta help us!" He presses in toward the opening, looking pleadingly at Expenda, or... whoever she may be.

“I’m with the rest of ‘em,” Phoenix says, “That genetic monstrosity can rot in his little bubble,” he jerks his thumb over his shoulder towards Cadav, “We got shit to do. We’re coming in, Pamspenda.”

"What the ever loving fuck is going on now?!" Sinda thinks "this is fucking nonsense"

"Ok, Expenda, or Pam, or whomever the fuck you think you are...this guy," She gestures towards Cadav with her middle finger, "is reanimating us and you're telling us NOT to kill him!? You also expect us to believe…” Sinda stops there. When she turned to point at Cadav, who has been slowly backing up towards the edge of the clearing with his zombies in tow, she notices the large white clone in the scary looking exo-suit charging across the clearing towards the team.

The huge white suit is really fast and amazingly quiet. It pulls up to Cadav’s protective bubble and plants a whirling kung-fu kick on the zombie clone of Cadav-2, sending the body hurtling towards the metal portion of the building where it slams into the steel some three meters above the floor before sliding down behind Tensor and the other bots.

Cadav can sense that it is still responsive however.

In the same motion, the exo-suit clone reaches for Zombie-Sinda with both hands. The protective bubble falls away at its touch, and the suit neatly rips off Zombie-Sinda’s head. It lets the two pieces drop to the floor while shouting, “That counts, Sar! You’ll give me half!” The voice is female. She is now turning her attention to Cadav.

Cadav notes that the Sinda zombie is also still connected to him. As the last zombie he activated, he has a stronger connection to it than the others. Unfortunately, it is only the head that is still active. The body is gone.

Pam's eyes widen. "Change of plans! Leave that Cadav traitor out there to die," she says, tossing the Sinda’s pistol back to her. "We need firing positions." She shouts "Move your asses!" in the general direction of Jeth and Phoenix. Any trace of the mousy Expenda is gone from her demeanor.

She knows higher grades of REFLEC stop all lower grades and if the traitor is in Ultraviolet, the pistols are all but useless. The archaic shotgun could be an entirely different matter. It has cables attached to it, but they no longer seem to be connected to anything, so staying clear of the muzzle, Pam takes a chance and snatches up the comically oversized weapon. Pam takes up a firing position behind the counter.

For the others: Pam reaches into the rubble and pulls out a comically oversized shotgun. Double-barrels and ridiculously big. She takes up a firing position behind the counter.

Phoenix shouts in horror, “Oh! Bull! Fucking! Shit!” and scrambles through the hole into the kitchen as well, pulling out his pistol and digging through his stuff.

Jeth responds to fear and orders on pure instinct and leaps neatly up next to Phoenix, wondering what to do next.

Sinda’s feet are moving her in that direction before she can even process what’s going on.

Scene: the hole in the wall leads into a large single room. The side with the hole appears to be a small kitchen. There is a sink (or the remnants of a sink where the hole was smashed), a refrigerator and small appliances on what’s left of the counters. But this kitchenette opens into a larger room, with a large viewing screen against one wall and comfortable seating around it. There’s a table with six chairs towards the corner to the right of the hole. There is a huge area rug covering the middle of the room. Other than the building’s back door, which is right next to the hole, there are three other doors—two of them are on the left wall, leading towards the metal addition to the building that can be seen from outside, and the other door on the wall opposite the hole—presumably the front door.

The only out of place feature of the room is a comically large, double-barrel shotgun mounted on a tripod and aimed at the front door. It has some sort of mechanism rigged to the triggers. It is the twin of the shotgun that Pam is now aiming out the hole in the wall.

Someone is knocking on one of the doors to the left (the doors facing the metal side of the building), and Barb’s voice calls faintly through the doors, “Anyone home? It’s locked! I can hear youuuuuuu!” Barb sounds very un-Barb-like.


FINALLY! A MAP!



GET SOME

Mal…

In a desperate last attempt to save himself, Mal cranks his machine empathy ability to 110%, tries to grab for the access panel (assuming it’s in the same general area he saw on the other exo-suits inside the building), and tries to force the exo-suit to stop constricting him and to instead eject the occupant from the exo-suit. He also makes note of where Vera landed, so his next clone can retrieve her, if necessary. In which case, he’s going to make this guy pay for playing Deadpool.

But not right now. None of these efforts stops the ultraviolet clone from constricting Mal’s chest until he suffocates.

Seriously, I thought he’d turn his powers on the drones. We know they have guns. Oh well.

In the lodge…

Please note: The entirety of this post covers a span of maaaaaaybe ten seconds. All of this is very quick and overlapping. It is written sequentially, but this is really as much time as anyone has to react.

"Fuck" Sinda thinks, she catches her pistol, and then scrambles up into the kitchen. Hiding just inside the hole. She prepares to fire if need be, but wonders if there's any way to block the damn hole.

She is startled to hear Barb's voice, but it doesn't sound...right. "VLaD, does Barb sound off to you?" She whispers. To which VLaD offers a little chuckle, “Sounds knackered if ya ask me.”

Sinda wonders if Zombies can speak. She decides not to open the door--she wants to make sure she has enough laser shots to end Expamda and those other idiots if she has to, as well as whatever that white clone is. If Barb is fine, she can smooth it over later...if not, well, that's what Sinda gets for starting to trust someone. She twists her A ring with her non blaster hand, and looks for anything flammable in case she needs an exit fast and can keep it the fuck together. Note: Sinda doesn’t recognize that this whole structure is made of wood and plaster with wooden furniture and plant-based upholstery and carpeting etc, but she does know that EVERYTHING here looks flammable.

Through the door, Barb’s voice again: “Come on, guys! I can heeeeear you! It’s me! Don’t lose your head!” And then she starts laughing until it turns into a coughing fit and fades to silence.

Jeth scrambles around the counter, angling for the rigged up shotgun behind Expenda. The flooring is slippery and for a moment it feels like he's floating across it, so he grabs the counter edge to steady himself. "Oh, oh, oh, what's happening?" he wonders aloud. "Traitors, traitors! It's all very wrong!" Jeth tentatively reaches for the weapon while still steadying himself on the counter with one hand. There is a single cable connecting it to the door. So Jeth carefully grabs the cable and yanks it off the doorknob. Success! The gun looks like it’s free.

Amazed at the armored clone's attacks, she still won't let her kill the Alpha Complex team. She leans on the counter, bracing the awkward weapon in her hands. She plans to trigger both barrels with a shot at the other's knees if it turns toward them.

"Watch that door," she says, "Jeth, kill Barb if she comes through it." Pam is watching the fight between Cadav and the other clone, hoping her team holds together for a few minutes.

Phoenix finally fishes his tub of hair gel out of his stuff. “C’mon man! He’s open now! Let’s do this!” He has opened the top and jammed in a torn piece of cloth. Now he lights the cloth with a shiny metal lighter that is most certainly contraband, and heaves the tub of Dapp-R-DAN brand hair bonder in the direction of the white clone and Cadav. Phoenix screams, “HEADS UP MUTIE! GET SOME! GET SOME!”

The tub hits the ground just in front of Cadav’s feet, where it shatters, splashing flaming product onto Cadav’s legs, mostly centered around his left knee, but with flaming spatters as far up as his thighs. Cadav instinctively beats at the flame, but it just transfers flaming dots of napalmade onto his hands.

The exo-suited woman screams in anger, “You son of bitch!” and aims one palm at Phoenix, firing a blaster shot that takes a chunk out of the wall by his head and sprays smoking splinters into his mightily pomaded coif.

As soon as she turns, Ex-pam-da squeezes both triggers on the shotgun, aiming for the clone’s knees. A ferocious boom shakes the walls and temporarily (?) deafens everyone inside. The woman in white takes both barrels in the knees, causing the shell of her exo-suit to crack and splinter, with bits of it flying off in all directions. The cracked remains of the legs of her suit turn a vivid purple color.

A faint chopping noise catches Cadav's attention, and against the pale sky over the building, he catches a flash of a flying vehicle headed this way from the direction of the train tracks... from the direction of Alpha Complex, technically. For some reason, even in this horrible situation, Cadav's heart lifts at the sight.

[Mike]

Note that I posted 2 chapters at once here.

Three chapters left.

[Cazmonster]

So many horrible things happened in such a short span of time.

[Mike]

Chapter 8

FOLLOW THE LEADER

Mal’s new clone bubble crashes down right next to his last corpse. Mal quickly gathers his equipment, starting with Vera in the woods and then popping the bubble around Mal-3 in order to strip him of anything worthwhile.

The scene has not changed since he last remembers it, except that the ultraviolet clone is gone. There is a lot of gunfire and commotion from behind the building, and Mal can hear Barb’s voice echoing from under the dented garage door. She must be in there talking very loudly, which seems unusual for Barb.

Out back…

Pam ducks behind the counter, her weapon empty. "Take cover," she says as she's looking around for something she can use against the other clone.

Jeth finally steels himself to grab the giant shotgun off its stand, and it comes loose easily. Upright, the gun is taller than Jeth with barrels big enough for most clones to stick a whole arm into. Jeth seems unsure of what to do with it though.

Sinda's eyes widen at the blast and the gel splattered Cadav. "That shit's beautiful " She thinks to herself, of the chaos and flames. She doesn't know what the fuck to do, but she knows damned well that crossing Ex-Pam whatever is a bad fucking idea. She is seriously unnerved by the Barb sounds and plants herself behind the counter near Jeth and Pam and aims her pistol out the door for now, making sure all her senses are primed so she can make the most of any opportunity to figure out what the hell she needs to do to make it out of here with her life.

Barb (if it is Barb) is now yelling, “Open up guys! I’m feeling really dizzy!” Then suddenly her tone becomes very serious, “Don’t make me count to three!”

Cadav panics and drops to the ground rolling about trying to snuff the flames just like from Emergency Preparedness training.

While he’s doing that, Phoenix has pulled out his laser pistol and empties a barrel at him, “Yeah, you can roll, but you can’t hide, Mutie! I’m sending your bastard genome back to the rendering vats, you garbage DNA gene-stain!”

Lucky for Cadav, his low profile and erratic movements protect him as Phoenix’s shots go wild. Once the conflagration on his legs is reduced to a low smolder and Phoenix stops firing to reload, Cadav gets up and runs for the poles beyond the clearing. The broken corpse of Cadav-2 lumbers up from behind Tensor and manages a broken stumble to follow after its master. Surprisingly, even the head of Sinda-1 slowly rolls over the uneven green flooring to follow after him.

Wilt suddenly chooses the moment to start moving again, “Oh my circuits! Look at those legs! Cadav, you HAVE to let me operate! They’re beautiful! I can help you!” Wilt is following Cadav now as well, but doesn’t seem as fast as he used to be.

Throughout all of this, the white clone in the exo-suit has not moved. There is a shimmery field around her now. The legs of her suit are still violet. The floor beneath her seems to be burning as there is smoke rising from the edges of her feet. As the noise dies down a bit, she can be heard talking—she seems to be in conversation with someone: “Fuck you! You took one… I take one. Call it a wash. Yeah… FINE!” Her black visor turns so that she is facing the clones in the building: “I’m officially informing you bastards that you still have 80 seconds. 77 now.” Other than turning her head, she has not moved.


WHIRLIEBIRD

Mal makes a mental note to check on Barb. But first, he looks around for the airborne drones to see if they are still hovering within range. One is directly over his head, and he can feel it there. If he beckoned to it, he imagines it would come to him. The other one seems to be buzzing over the clearing behind the building. It’s too far to make any contact.

[To clarify, Mal’s power allows him a sort of empathy with machines. If he is within range, he can sense them and sometimes their general state of mind, and certainly he can influence them to want to like him. If he wanted information from them, he’d have to call them over and interact with them as he did when he got one to show him scenes on a viewscreen earlier.]

Mal runs towards the dented garage door. He peeks under it and immediately notices an odd chemical smell from inside. Fumes of some sort fill the area inside enough to make visibility just slightly hazy in the small space. He spots Barb immediately. She is banging on a door that clearly leads into the main part of the building. She sways a little as she moves, her gestures are greatly exaggerated, and her voice is extremely loud and boisterous—very un-Barb-like.

“Come on, guuuuuuuuuys! I can HEAR YOU in there!” She staggers back from the door slightly and spots Mal peeking in. Barb breaks into a broad grin. “MAL! MALMALMAL!” She suddenly drops and sits with her back to the door. Her grin disappears. “They won’t let me in. I think Sinda’s mad at me for throwing up on her.” She finishes by mumbling, “SuperMALafragilisticexpiMALadocious.” And then she giggles.

Their interaction is interrupted by a loud repetitive chopping noise from above and a downrush of air as a long double-rotor heli-transport flies over the building. It has come from the direction of the train tracks and is headed to the direction of the back yard (and maybe beyond?) It is at a low altitude and appears to be slightly larger than even their train car. The heli is painted entirely in brown and has various bizarre symbols haphazardly painted in red and yellow on its sides and undercarriage.

Simultaneously, the door behind Barb opens and a small black-clad clone is on the other side. Expenda.

Outback…

Cadav seeing an opportunity to divert some attention directs Cadav-2 toward the opening in the building to block the line of sight of Phoenix or any other clone inside.

Cadav-2 and zombie-Sinda-head change direction and head back towards the hole in the building and the rest of the team. zombie-Cadav waves its zombie arms over its zombie head as it stumbles a bobbing and weaving zombie path towards the building.

Live-Cadav, on the other hand, has disappeared into the poles at the edge of the clearing. He is startled to see that several of the poles are on fire. Their sparse greenery turning brown and crisping as flames climb upward and glowing orange embers float everywhere.

Sinda is flummoxed. "Pam, what the fuck is going on?! What does she mean 80 seconds? How can we defend ourselves if we don't know that?" Sinda shouts over the fun.

Sinda hates not having an exit plan and being trapped is making her edgy. She figures Wilt is gonna end Cadav and half wishes she could see that, but she's more concerned with how Wilt can all of the sudden move. "Are you mobile now too?" She whispers to VLaD, "Since Wilt is somehow over his paralysis."No.

VLaD ruefully whispers back, “I bloody wish! No. Wilt can’t resist a weeping sore. He’s pushing himself to total structural failure on this one.”

"Malfing Vat-slop! We've got to move!" Pam shouts. "Em Effing See only knows what she has to kill us with!" Pam scrambles behind the counter towards the door where Barb was growling. "The other room," she says, "We need cover."

Jeth, however, has moved beyond confusion and is fully panicked, clinging onto the large gun with both arms and even one leg to steady himself. "77 seconds TO WHAT?" Jeth shrieks in a panic. "What do I do with this thing?" He tries to swing the weapon around, but it has come completely loose from its mounting and no longer provides him with any stability.

Nauseous from the sight of Sinda's rolling head, he tries to hold down some rising vomit. He thought Barb was his friend. Why does Barb sound like that? Outside is a terrible, frightening place!

Pam looks at Jeth and his confusion, points a finger at the barrel-end and says, "Death comes out of that end, Jeth." And then she turns to open the door, revealing Barb on the other side.

Barb is sitting petulantly with her back to the door in a darkened room. The dark room is hazy with some sort of chemical-smelling fumes. Barb is mumbling in a sing-song voice, “SuperMALifragilisticexpiMALadocious.”

Jeth starts floating towards the ceiling at this point. His feet have completely left the ground, and he rises very slowly while still clinging to the huge shotgun with his whole body.

Outside, the air is filled with the sound of a huge double-rotor heli-transport flying over the building and hovering over an open spot in the clearing behind the ultraviolet clone. The chopping noise of the blades and the sudden downrush of air makes further conversation difficult. The heli is painted brown with bizarre red and yellow symbols hazphazardly painted across its side and undercarriage.

From what he can see through the poles, Cadav recognizes a couple of them as Prepper symbols—there’s one for “medical supplies available”, one for a particular “family” group that Cadav knows of but has never interacted with.

While he’s trying to make out the rest, Wilt pops up in front of him. “HAHA! I’ve got you! Get that leg up here before you get a bacterial infection!” Wilt is raising its tool arm with some sort of spinning ball attachment on it, but he is moving very slowly, and Cadav hears a blessed grinding noise from Wilt’s joints.


GANG SIGNS

Very disconcerted at the sight of her own head rolling towards them, Sinda screams to Jeth: "Shoot the damned dead things!" She turns and follows Pam towards the door.

Sinda sizes up Barb and decides that if anything, the other woman has been mis-medicated. She acts like she’s high. Otherwise, Barb seems to be unharmed. Sinda finds cover as best she can and struggles to think of SOMETHING, ANYTHING to do. She can’t focus with that helicopter sound. Ugh! She kinda wants to burn the thing to the ground along with everyone (other than herself and VLaD) in it. However, not knowing where Mal is, and not knowing what the fuck is out there behind them, and sure as HEL-sector doesn't want to face what's in front of her. She hopes that super POD the computer wants is worth this.

The couch bursts into flames.

Jeth clings with all his might to the gun, even though it fails to tether him to the earth. "Friend Computer, HELP US!" he bleats, barely audible above the whirring of the transport blades.

Floating with mouth agape, he takes in the confusing scene without realizing how quickly his head is nearing the ceiling above. Just as it's about to thwack hard, he's spared: with a great lurch forward over the gun, he sprays chunks of regurgitated VatPatties over the room below. It splashes across the counters and much of it lands in some sort of broken toaster over on the floor.

Barb screams up at Jeth, “WHOA! Don’t worry, Big Guy… ALL the shame goes away next time you die!”

Pam groans inwardly and says to herself, "Reds, they're just Reds, woman."

Pam/Expenda shouts at Sinda, "I don't know what she might have either, but getting yourself out of sight has to help. Good work!"

Pam steps over Barb to get into the metal room. The fumes here are intense, and Pam can’t quite identify them. To her right is the giant sliding metal garage-style door that faces the front of the house. It is badly dented in towards the room, causing the bottom edges to pull away from the floor, and leaving enough space for a clone to crawl under. There are a half-dozen of the white exo-suits in here in various states of disrepair. It is hard to tell if they are broken, just being built, or are being stripped for parts. A couple of the suits look complete from where Pam stands. In the dim light, it looks like this is some sort of storage/maintenance area, with large machines, hoists, hoses, tubes, extra parts, etc.

"Hey Jeth! There's plaid and paisley in here!" Pam shouts above the roar of the rotors.

In the weeds…

For his own safety, Cadav ducks under Wilt’s slowly swinging arm and decides to leave the poles. He puts away his weapons and heads toward the heli-transport not in a manner that would seem like an attack, but with purpose like a person would who expects to be picked up by their ride in kind of a ducking scurry to avoid the rotors. Using all the code words and gestures he can think of he makes his approach obvious so he is sure to be noticed. In his mind he is looking for possible routes to take should they attack him too.

Fortunately for Cadav, as the heli touches down, he spot DonCorl-Y-OWN-2 emerging from the vehicle along with a dozen other clones. None of them are in uniform. Instead, these new arrivals are all dressed in various shades of olive, brown, and camo.

DonCorl pulls Cadav in close and shouts in his ear, “Youse done good, kid!”

Mal…

“A brown heli-transport!” Mal thinks to himself. Barb can wait.

Mal waves to the nearest drone and applies a little juice, hoping the bot will follow as he heads towards the backyard as quickly as he can.

As Mal gets to the rear corner of the building, he peeks around for just a moment to take in the scene before pulling back again. It looks like the back of the house has been damaged—a hole blown in it or something. Hard to tell how serious it is from this angle. The Tensor hover-flat is near Mal’s position with the K-ROL maintenance bot laying on its flatbed. The heli-transport is landing in the open clearing back here. There is a clone in a white exo-suit standing a few meters from the copter, but the clone/suit is not moving. A dozen or so clones are emerging from the heli. They are not in uniform but instead sport varying shades of brown, olive, and camo. One of the new arrivals with an air of authority about him is pulling Cadav in for a hug.

The white drone drops to Mal’s level and displays a scouting report on its viewscreen, clearly showing Cadav emerging from the edge of the clearing to approach the heli (just seconds ago), then swinging the camera around to show a 3 meter hole in the back of the building, opening into some sort of kitchenette/living room combo. There are uniformed clones hiding in there… maybe the rest of the team. Something is on fire in the living room area.


HAIL AND WELL MET

Phoenix, who has been staying under cover by the hole in the wall, sees the open door where Barb and Expenda/Pam are and decides now is the time to make a move. He does an awkward dive/roll across the floor shouting, “GERONIM-O!” (the battle-cry of Festus the Cowardly Warbot—a popular comedy vid-show from several years ago). Phoenix ends up sliding head-first through the door, bumping into Barb, who seems immensely glad to see him. Smiling, Barb helps Phoenix to his feet and gives him a huge hug that seems to last way too long. Barb doesn’t speak.

The fumes here are intense, and Phoenix can’t quite identify them. To his right is the giant sliding metal garage-style door that faces the front of the house. It is badly dented in towards the room, causing the bottom edges to pull away from the floor, and leaving enough space for a clone to crawl under. There are a half-dozen of the white exo-suits in here in various states of disrepair. It is hard to tell if they are broken, just being built, or are being stripped for parts. A couple of the suits look complete from where Pam stands. In the dim light, it looks like this is some sort of storage/maintenance area, with large machines, hoists, hoses, tubes, extra parts, etc.

"Oh Ho! Equivalent firepower!" Pam almost laughs as she sees the powered armor. "Dibs!"

Breathing shallow, she scrambles over to a suit to get a better look and maybe strap in, if she can understand the mechanism. Three of the suits appear to be missing large sections. Three appear intact, except for one with a hole in the thigh. Pam works at those three but can find no seam or panel to get it to open up and let her in. When sealed up, they are very nearly some sort of power armor.

Cadav tells Don over the sound of the rotors, “I tried to save some of that team seeing as they were kind of innocent, but I got killed for my trouble. Go ahead and light up the whole place.” Cadav then relays the information his various clones have provided for him as to the location and strength of the forces in the building and a warning about the white armored attacker and the radio transmissions he overheard. He then asks, “What do you need me to do now?”

Mal hopes these may be fellow PURGE members, but he does not recall seeing Cadav sporting anything brown, and Cadav obviously knows these new arrivals, so perhaps they are affiliated with a different faction.

Mal appears from around the corner of the building and casually approaches Cadav and the new arrivals. Mal is carrying his huge rifle, but keeping it pointed at the ground. One of the white drones is following Mal, just behind him at about shoulder level. Mal raises a hand in greeting.

The heavyset clone conversing with Cadav brightens even more on seeing Mal. He slaps the back of his hand into Cadav’s chest in a friendly gesture and says, “Whoa! Purge is here already?” He yells over his shoulder, “Paul-Y! How comes you didn’t tells me you got a guy in the field?” He mutters to Cadav, “20 credits says the dumb fuck didn’t even know. Fuckin Purge.” Then all warm and friendly over his shoulder again: “Yo! Paul-Y! Come on!”

Reeling post-vomit, Jeth registers Sinda's plea for help and gropes for the big gun's trigger. As his body finally comes to rest against the ceiling, pinned in place by the heavy weapon, he aims it at the former-Sinda's rolling head and starts firing. Kickback on this thing could be a bitch, but at least he already threw up.

From the ceiling, Jeth starts fires that big shotgun of his, he is “laying” on the ceiling, and the kickback from the weapon causes him to slide backwards along the ceiling towards the door about half a meter. But as a result of his blast, the zombie-Sinda-head rolling around outside quickly becomes half-a-zombie-Sinda-head, while the other half dissolves in a spray of fine pink mist and skull chunks. The zombie-Sinda-head ceases rolling.

From outside…

There is a huge blast of some kind of large weapon fired inside the building. As a result, a big chunk of soil and grass about three meters away from Cadav and Mal kicks up, and all that’s left in the aftermath of the blast is half of the head of a Sinda clone.

The newcomers have been unloading heavy equipment from the chopper, and they all freeze at the sound of the blast. In the resulting silence, the white exo-suited clone on the other side of the heli says, “Zero. Time’s up.”

Mal notes that the mind of the drone behind him suddenly disappears. Just like last time, the drone is still there, but its mental presence is completely gone. No connection.


DID SOMEONE SAY HOWITZER

"This shit is fucked up" Sinda whispers under her breath as she steps away from the burning couch, which apparently no one has noticed. She's glad to see Barb is only slightly insane but fearing she'd also be hugged, she decides to retreat and find non burning cover. If she catches Barb's eye, she shoots her a wry smile and a wink as a sign that she's relieved to see the other woman alive, if not quite well.

She checks her service pistol and looks to see if there are any more big ass weapons around that she can snag. There are not. She notices all the hugging outside at this moment and is repulsed. Not normal, none of this shit is normal. Which usually is Sinda's favorite, but nope… this hugging is wrong. After a quick perusal, she looks for a back exit, if this place was about to be blown to HEL-sector, she needed to get herself and VLaD out. She can leave through the garage where Barb, Phoenix and Pam all are now; there is the front door next to the burning couch that leads to the front side of the building, or there is a door on the wall near her that looks like it leads to a closet or something.

"Pam, what is your plan?!" She calls, trying to keep the rage from her voice, and feeling a familiar tingle of heat through her body. She twists her nose ring in agitation with her non weapon hand. It doesn't help any more than the couch did. "We need to know if we're going to help rescue this shit show"

Right now every instinct was telling her to just kill everyone in here (herself included), and hope their next clones didn't show up until Pycho Mal, Cadav, and Biggie white guy over there had given up. She knew that was far from a likely outcome, and they were probably about to die anyway and this way everyone wouldn't be mad at her when their new clones arrived. She wasn't going without a fight though, and HEL-Sector, if she could calm herself down somehow, there might be some fun to be had. At least that was what Sinda was trying to tell herself so she could do the aforementioned calming of herself.

In response to Sinda’s calming efforts, the couch-blaze cranks up about a notch and a half.

Still gripping tightly to the big gun with both hands, Jeth's face registers an odd expression, as if he had just soiled himself. Suddenly, both he and the gun start floating back down from the ceiling like a balloon losing air. His legs go scrambling around helplessly behind him as they look for purchase somewhere. Once his body is about level with the countertops, gravity kicks in in full force. He drops the rest of the way ungraciously, landing on the gun, which refuses to break his fall, and instead ungratefully slams into his crotch as his hits the floor.

In the garage…

Pam is still trying to solve the machine in front of her and replies to Sinda with, “Trying to score us some serious ordinance out here.”

Phoenix is now up and poking at the exo-suits as well, but is having no better luck than Pam. Pam tries, "Voice activation, maybe? Please be voice activated." She tries a handful of short commands, like 'suit activate', 'suit open', 'recognize user' and 'authorize user'. At the last one, 12 lights come up on the suit’s chest, in a small 3x4 grid, clearly representing a number pad, but without the numbers on them. A disembodied voice rises from the suit, “Please enter maintenance code…” it pauses thoughtfully and in a slightly different voice continues, “…unrecognized GREEN citizen.”

Barb is startled. “What?! Am I green now?” She is looking at her arms. “I didn’t study!” She looks as if she may flee, but then suddenly sits back down on the step and cries softly into her hands, murmuring, “I didn’t study.”

Outside…

Like twinsies, Cadav and Mal drop to the ground, weapons ready and eyes scanning for signs of trouble.

Mal instantly falls prone on the ground in order to make a smaller target, Vera up and at the ready, eyes scanning for both the exo-suit, a good place for cover, and even the openings in the building for possible enemies. He also tries desperately to re-establish some sort of connection with the white drone, at the very least to make sure it doesn’t open fire on him, but perhaps to get it to open fire on the exo-suits.

Cadav goes to the prone position with weapon drawn and pointing towards the building, then looks around anxiously from Don to Mal to the white exo-suited clone to see what moves are being made so he can follow suit. He then looks at Mal and mouths the words “Why didn’t you tell me?” at him with a questioning look on his face.

Cadav stops Cadav-1wherever he is and makes him lie down and play dead then commands Cadav-2 to do the same, but using Cadav-2’s senses for more intel. The images are vague, but Cadav-2 has a better view into the building than Cadav does. There are no clones in sight right now, but it appears that a couch is on fire inside and burning quite briskly.

Several of the brown-outfitted newcomers begin firing weapons of various sizes into the gaping hole in the building. Bullets and laser beams pepper everything inside for about six seconds.

In the meantime, the white clone in the exo-suit is now hovering two meters off the floor while picking off the nearest clones one at a time. She has some sort of automatic slug-thrower that is now extending from the left forearm of her suit, and she is very carefully squeezing off just one bullet at a time, dropping clones with a single bullet through the head each as she hovers slowly closer to them. She kills four of them before they start to notice and panic sets in.

Once she is near enough, her amplified voice can be heard over the din announcing, “You just lost your lead, asshole! It’s like goddam fish in a barrel out here!”

To Mal’s surprise, the drone’s consciousness returns. Mal can feel it hovering there happily, looking to please. [Note, Mal will have to verbally give it commands or manually enter them into its control panel to ask it to do anything.]


BROWNCOATS

[NOTE: This entire post was lost in a tragic Saving accident. It has been reconstructed here from the various sent messages. My apologies if the tone is a little more uneven than usual.]

Kitchen…

Sinda winces at the gunfire, but seeing that she's still fine and no longer under fire herself, she keeps as low, and out of sight as possible and books it to where Pam and company are in the garage. Glancing at the couch in satisfaction as she goes, she's pretty sure that everyone will just think the gun fire caused that.

Barb stands up to run to Sinda, having now spotted her. Barb has tears in her eyes and yells, “SINDA!” But seeing that Sinda is headed this way, she chooses NOT to dash out into the open. Sinda gives her a quick hug in passing, but quickly composes herself so as not to make a whole scene about it. Barb seems genuinely happy about that.

When Sinda is close enough to see if Pam and the others are okay, she says to VLaD "any chance you know how these white suits work? Wanna use them for some fun?" Pam and Phoenix are each standing by a suit. Those two seemed to have opened up to allow them access. There is a third suit here that looks intact and handful of others that are in various states of disrepair. Overall this whole room looks like some sort of workshop/garage for the exo-suits.

VLaD says, “I can certainly try some of the old maintenance codes.”

Garage…

The gunfire from outside starts back up, but more sporadically—spasmodically. And it’s not clear where the bullets and laser bolts are going, but they are no longer coming into the building.

Pam looks back toward the main room, and is sure that Sinda and Jeth are dead. She is quite surprised to see that they are not—Jeth had been safely out of the way on the ceiling and now lays behind the counter, and Sinda is hiding behind a large kitchen appliance. However, there is a huge blaze consuming the couch out there and looking to spread.

Pam barks, "Barb, keep your head down. We're in trouble.”

Inspired by Pam, Phoenix states with supreme confidence, “Authorize user,” which earns him a light-up number pad on HIS exo-suit, accompanied by, “Please enter emergency override code, Phoenix-R-ITE.”

Pam's career has included hundreds of hours among technical groups. Some codes are more common than others. Pam tries one of the most common ones she can remember.

Phoenix watches Pam’s hands and tries awkwardly to copy the buttons she is pushing, but it hard to see from that angle.

To everyone’s surprise, both suits open up from the back—Pam’s just a half-second ahead of Phoenix’s—allowing enough space for a clone to climb in. The identical voices from the suits announce, “Access granted,” with Phoenix’s suit providing an echo to Pam’s.

The gunfire temporarily masks a high-pitched squealing sound that emerges in the aftermath, piercing and clear like a siren. The sound seems to be coming from behind the counter in the main room. Eventually it stops, replaced by low human groans. Jeth.

Barb stands up to run to Sinda, having now spotted her. Barb has tears in her eyes and yells, “SINDA!” But seeing that Sinda is headed this way, she chooses NOT to dash out into the open.

Sinda hugs Barb, but then quickly scuttles into the garage and takes in the scene. She is eyeing the suits and mumbles something to VLaD who is perched on her shoulder.

Back to Jeth in the Kitchen…

The gunfire temporarily masks a high-pitched squealing sound that emerges in the aftermath, piercing and clear like a siren. The sound seems to be coming from behind the counter. Eventually it stops, replaced by low human groans.

The gunfire outside starts up again, but more sporadically. A glance outside shows that the heavily armed newcomers are now turning their weapons on the woman in the white exo-suit.

Pam, Phoenix and Barb are all in the garage now, looking at empty exo-suits. Sinda dodges past Jeth to join them. The couch on the other side of the room is now completely ablaze, and the fire is starting to spread to the curtains.

Gunfire and mad shouting continues outside.

Outside…

Mal yells at the drone, “Hit the clone in the exo-suit with the strongest thing you have available!” He tries to send a mental picture of the white clone in the exo-suit, just to make sure the drone attacks the correct clone, if he’s able to attack at all.

The brown-clad clones seem very disorganized and unsure of how to deal with the exo-suited threat. Which is disappointing, because another clone in a white exo-suit is flying in over the top of the building and is using white laser fire to pick off some them himself. He starts with K-ROL and Tensor, and then sweeps his beam over towards the chopper getting a couple of clones before they even realize he is there. The exo-suited female continues to use her slugthrower to drop clones with regular bullets.

Several of the browncoats mob the white female and attempt to bring her down with hand-held weapons—clubs and shock-sticks mostly—while others scatter and shoot at her and her new friend. Still others try to hide in the chopper or behind crates while one makes a break for the treeline.

The white surveillance drone sweeps up to the level of the female exo-suit and reveals that it can do more than surveil: twin lasers spring out and begin firing on the flying woman. She is startled by this and drops just low enough for a few browncoat hands to get ahold of her ankles.

At the same time, Mal takes aim with Vera at the same white clone, taking a second to aim for the hip area where he damaged the previous exo-suit, in an attempt to disable the exo-suit for even a few moments.

Cadav stays low. He asks Mal “What happened to you? Where did you go? Man, I am so confused, but at least I was able to get a little bit of work done before everything broke loose. Also, who are the white exo-suited clones? Friends of yours?”

As he fires, Mal stage-whispers to Cadav, “I almost told you. And no--no friends of mine, but I have some suspicions.”

Mal hits her square with his big-ass gun. Almost her entire suit has gone violet as every hit and impact on her causes the suit to purple up like a horrible bruise.

[Gamemaster note: it is too hard on me to have to keep finding ways to refer to the various clone out here without using their names, so I’m going to use their names just for convenience. The two white clones in exo-suits are Sar-U-MON (male) and Medd-U-SAH (female). The clones that flew in on the chopper, I’m referring to as browncoats, just because they are dressed in lots of brown (but also camo and other stuff as well). Browncoats is a term of convenience and does not refer to or imply any particular group or secret society.]

Sar-U-MON is laughing. And he must have it on some kind of loudspeaker, because his laughter can be heard over the chaos out here. He is obviously walking his laser fire towards the chopper.

Medd-U-SAH stops moving, and she drops out of sight into the gaggle of browncoats below her.

The “surveillance” drone also stops moving and drops out of the sky, crushing a browncoat beneath it.

Mal can no longer feel its consciousness.


EASY PEASY LUV

Mal says to Cadav, “I don’t know if there’s enough gorram time for Vera to charge, but we gotta stop that exo-suit from taking out the chopper, or it might take everybody with it when it goes.” Vera is apparently Mal’s name for his big-ass gun.

Cadav knows he has the weakest weapons in the fight and if he just sits there he’ll die again for sure.

He turns to Mal and says, “Well, I have a plan, but it is only a desperate plan. Save my place ‘til I get back! Cover me!” Then he jumps up and starts a zig-zag pattern across the battlefield towards Medd-U-SAH.

He sends Cadav-2 into the building to look for weapons, but isn’t sure if the zombie is still functional. He also commands Cadav-1 to leave cover and come to the building. To his surprise, he can still get inside Cadav-1’s head, and he gets a brief flash of what Cadav-1 is looking at. It’s disorienting, because Cadav-1’s POV looks like it is about five meters behind Medd-U-SAH and is slowly hopping towards her position where various Preppers are still piling on to her and wailing away. But when Cadav himself looks in that direction—he’s headed directly for the white clone, after all—he can’t see Cadav-1 anywhere.

[Zombie-Cadav-1 is, in fact, about five meters behind Medd-U and closing, but it is still wrapped in the experimental invisibility tarp, having finally hopped all the way here. Cadav gets flashes of its POV, because Cadav-1 is the last functional zombie he has going.]

Mal takes careful aim with Vera on Sar-U-MON, trying to give Vera as much time as possible to charge, but wanting to open fire before Sar-U-MON gets too close to the chopper. He waits until Sar-U-MON’s shots are within [X] meters of the chopper [where [X] is one quarter of the distance between where Sar-U-MON’s shots were at the beginning of this turn] before squeezing the trigger, hoping that was enough time for Vera to charge.

It was.

Vera unleashes a mighty blast on Sar-U-MON, or more specifically, on Sar-U-MON’s crotch, which turns the whole midsection of Sar-U’s white exo-suit violet. Sar-U drops to the ground and says, “Aw hell no,” and his suit quickly shifts back to white. Sar-U stomps towards Mal and bellows, “Give me the gun, Mal!”

Meanwhile, Mal desperately reaches out with his mind, cranking his ability to full strength, to see if he can contact his drone again, or any drone, or hell, even Sar-U-MON’s exo-suit itself… anything.

The chopper fires up again. There are clones aboard, but no one piloting. The chopper swings around so that it is facing Sar-U-MON with Malcolm directly between them. The booming basso profundo of the chopper intones, “Can I help you, brother?”

Mal can feel that the chopper is addressing him.

Cadav finds himself crawling onto what is clearly the corpse of Medd-U-SAH. Her armor is quite resilient and has kept the preppers from looting the body much—not that they haven’t tried. But now the approach of Sar-U-MON and the sudden voice from the chopper is causing them to scatter again. There are gaps in the armor, however, where one could conceivably reach in and touch the body.

Garage…

Sinda momentarily considers killing Pheonix to give his suit to Barb, but quickly decides against it. Pam would likely just kill her without a second thought. Instead she nods to VLaD, "Let's do it then, get ourselves suited and booted and see if we can get one of these for Barb after."

VLaD replies, “Right. I’m your bot. Be right back.” VLaD’s lights go down, and Sinda can only presume his mind is elsewhere.

While VLaD works, Sinda motions Barb over to where the three of them are so she can hopefully get to work on her own suit. Sinda keeps her temper, stress, and pistol in control ready to unleash any and all of them in any direction as need be. She can't help but be excited about this suit though, looks like all kinds of fun. She keeps her eyes moving, from the outside to where she thinks Jeth is, to Pheonix and Pam, and to Barb. Trusting her little bot friend to do them both proud.

With a grin, Pam slithers into her exo-suit while Phoenix, on the other hand, hesitates. “Would you look at the clearance in that helmet? That’s squishin’ the hair for sure. And all my product’s gone!” But ultimately, Pam gets settled in and starts scanning controls and displays, and she looks so badass that Phoenix grudgingly follows suit.

Pam says, “Suit, activate.” Phoenix shouts, “Yeah! Rock and roll!”

Both suits light up and begin humming and then electrocute their occupants for no less than 10 seconds. Pam and Phoenix are dead.

With a hiss, the suit in front of Sinda opens neatly for her and a disembodied voice says, “Access granted.”

VLaD’s lights come back up and he says, “Easy peasy, luv.” And then, sensing Sinda’s lack of enthusiasm and the look of horror on Barb’s face, VLaD adds, “What’d I miss?”

Kitchen…

Jeth realizes it’s time to get away from the fire which is now consuming the better portion of the room. He knows he doesn’t want to move into the ongoing melee/firefight taking place outside, so he crawls to the garage door.

In the garage are a half-dozen or so white exo-suits. Three look complete, while the others are all in various states of disrepair. The rest of the room (with its safe metal walls) is filled with maintenance tools and equipment. A huge, dented sliding door takes up one wall, and it has a gap under it big enough to crawl out of.

Pam/Expenda and Phoenix are both inside exo-suits, and Sinda looks to be opening up the third one with Barb by her side. Jeth is about to speak when the two occupied suits light up and then electrocute their occupants, killing Pam and Phoenix. Then Sinda’s suit opens up, and VLaD the spiderbot (perched on Sinda’s shoulder) says, “Easy peasy, luv. What’d I miss?”

[Mike]

Chapter 9

SMOLDERING SPLINTERS

Garage…

"VLaD", Sinda says without taking her eyes off of what remains of Pam and Pheonix, "you are a badass, the absolute shit, and I'd be lost without you. However, in light of whatever the fuck just happened with those two, I say we make a change of plans. Barb, let's make a run for those poles outside, and find a place where the three of us can make a decent plan to get us back home in one piece. Screw the mission and whatever the fuck the Computer wants us to do"

Barb smiles a very shaky smile at Sinda, her eyes darting around the room as if taking it in for the first time. “I’m so sorry,” she says in her familiar quiet voice, “I don’t know what happened, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to throw up again. And I really don’t want to throw up again.”

Jeth shudders in horror at the sight of the exo-suits, takes a moment to get his bearings, and then continues crawling toward the sliding door. The gap underneath it looks tight, like someone his size might not fit it. "Sinda, Barb… over here!" he calls. "I'll help you through the hole!" Maybe if Sinda can fit through, so will he.

Sinda makes sure that VLaD is secure on her shoulder and that Barb is beside her and they join Jeth by the main door to Outside. Barb goes first, followed by Sinda and VLaD. Jeth brings up the rear, just barely squeezing his bulk under the sliding door.

The three of them (four with VLaD) find themselves in front of the building. The main (not-metal) portion of the building is clearly on fire: flames can be seen licking out of several windows, and gray smoke is seeping from various seams and holes.

There are bodies here—messy bodies. There’s a Barb and a Phoenix here on the cement in front of the door. There’s a Mal over by the front door of the building, with smoke billowing out from under the door just above his body. There’s another Mal off in the grass by the pole-line directly across the open clearing from here.

True to her word, Barb rushes to the edge of the cement and empties her guts into the greenery beyond. She is sweaty and pale.

A tall, imperious-looking clone in white is striding quickly towards the team from across the clearing. She is wearing some sort of white skinsuit that clearly functions as armor. She has a white laser weapon strapped to each hip. Her hair is extremely long—past the middle of her back—and it is a brilliant blue that shimmers with lighter and darker strands mixed in. This is notable, because not only is blue not a regulation color for hair in Alpha Complex, but no one here has ever seen a clone with hair longer than a few centimeters. When she is close enough, her badge can be read: Medd-U-SAH.

Medd-U is not reaching for her weapons and does not seem interested in any of the assembled clones, but she IS heading this way.

She is distracted when the main portion of the house blows up. The metal garage the team just exited seems mostly intact, but most of the rest of the structure has just exploded into a cloud of smoldering splinters.

Medd-U-SAH utters a very dispirited, “Oh, god dammit.”

Out back…

Cadav reaches into the exo-suit, working his fingers around the face-plate so that he can touch the corpse of Medd-U-SAH on the head. He manages to do so and is thrilled to feel the body respond. She is fully active inside that exo-suit, and looking through her eyes—taking over her body directly—Cadav sees an intimidating array of displays and controls. The core of it is very simple, and easily recognizable by most Alpha Complex clones: movement and basic functions controlled largely by head and eye movement. But the more complex controls at the periphery, not to mention whatever switches and buttons might be in other parts of the suit, are completely foreign.

At this moment, Zombie-Cadav-1 trips over Cadav and Medd-U. With a new zombie connected, Cadav can no longer see and feel through Cadav-1, but it is clear that the body is wrapped in some sort of large tarp than renders it completely invisible. Cadav orders it to lie still, and then spreads out as much of the tarp as he can over all three of them to hopefully provide cover while he thinks.

At the same time, back to Mal…

“SWEET! Open fire on Sar-U-MON, but make sure you don’t hit me.” Mal sends the chopper a mental image of Sar-U-MON in his exo-suit, and Mal lying prone on the ground, pointing his weapon at Sar-U-MON as well. In the meantime, in an effort to keep Sar-U-MON’s attention away from the (hopefully) attacking helicopter and provide more room for the chopper to take him down, Mal jumps up to a crouching position, slings Vera over his shoulder and draws his LASER pistol, then begins to slowly walk backwards while firing his LASER pistol at Sar-U-MON.

Sar-U-MON is no longer fucking around. A white beam of laser energy emerges from his palm again, and with the beam in continuous mode, he simply sweeps several times over the battlefield, cutting clone after clone in half, and then dicing those pieces further when he sweeps back the other way. In the time it takes for the chopper to line up its weaponry on Sar-U-MON, the white clone has managed to take out pretty much every still left in the field, including Mal.

Sar-U is focused on Mal, “Damn you and that gun!” He stalks over to Mal’s body and proceeds to stomp mightily on Vera just as the chopper hits him with everything it’s got. The heavy machinegun fire is peppering the white clone as two missiles slam into him and carry him backwards into the burning building, resulting in a ferocious explosion.

The metal garage portion of the building is still mostly standing, but the main portion of it is now a cloud of smoldering splinters.

Cadav and his two zombies are untouched by the carnage, and a glance tells him that at least three or four Preppers made it to the (relative) safety of the treeline. Some others, it seems, took refuge in the chopper, which is untouched.

The chopper now slowly begins rising into the air.


GET BUTCH BITCH

Out front…

Jeth rushes over to Barb. "Are you okay?" he asks, before adding with more conviction, "You're okay, you'll be fine! We're okay."

Sinda is pretty sure (or at least hopeful) that the gorgeous firey explosion was at least partially her doing. She feels she should probably do something to comfort Barb, yet seeing that comfort is not really in her wheelhouse she settles for walking up to her and saying, "No one's mad at you, Barb, but as the saying goes, it's time to get butch, bitch, and prepare ourselves for whatever Miss Blue Hair over there might do."

"Jeth, are you good?" She adds, as an afterthought.

Jeth is staring at Medd-U with his mouth hanging open. He manages to gasp, “Uh huh…”

Barb forces a chuckle and wipes her mouth with the back of her arm. “I guess vomiting is just going to be my thing, then. There’s worse thing to be known for.” Then she blushes with her face down and mutters, “That was stupid. Of course there’s not.” However, Barb doesn’t run away and in fact seems more comfortable in the protective triangle of team members.

Sinda realizes that Medd was probably heading for the house and not them when she heard the muttered "god dammit." She makes sure her weapon is still ready, but figures it's probably worthless against whatever body armor the UV clone is wearing.

Sinda hisses to her companions "I say we play nice with this one," realizing the irony of that statement coming from her. "Unless either of you has a better idea, I have a feeling we want to be on her good side." She finishes, swallowing down some bile herself at all the shit that has gone on. She twists her nose A nervously. This is chaos, why doesn't she feel better about it? She stomps down that concern into the fire-laden pit of her soul and stands her ground, partially blocking Barb with her body and making sure she still feels VLaD tight on her shoulder.

Jeth repeats, “Uh huh…”

Two pink energy bubbles drop from the sky a few meters away. Phoenix-R-ITE-5 and Pam-G-RIR-4 emerge. Pam is actually dressed in a standard green uniform with accompanying laser pistol, reflec armor, etc.

Medd-U spares just a glance over her shoulder at the new arrivals and then steps swiftly past the team and ducks under the door into the garage.

Out back…

Cadav pops out from under the tarp and signals the chopper, using the internationally understood sign for “wait just a moment, please,” then ducks back in to his zombies.

Cadav tries to give more generic commands to Medd-U-SAH to get her to stand up as he tries to keep the tarp over her. The zombie struggles but manages to finally stand. Cadav experiments and finds that she can shamble after him, but if he wants to use any of the finer controls in the suit (or try to, at least), he’ll need to possess her entirely. He gets Cadav-1 to follow and stand in close proximity as he tries to get a feel for this new ally. Finally with an educated guess he tells Medd-U-SAH to seek and destroy Sar-U-MON, who is presumably in the remains of the building.

Cadav looks to see if the chopper is waiting. It is not. At all. It is well beyond his reach now, but moving unsteadily and still hovering about 10 meters up in the general vicinity.

He now looks to the war-torn building and says two words: “For Mal….” The Cadavs move in unison with Medd-U, tarp in place, toward the building, Sar-U-MON, and his destiny. As they occasionally step over various Prepper bodies, Cadav is sorely tempted to reach down and add to his zombie army, but if he does, he knows he’ll no longer be able to inhabit Medd-U, and he has a feeling he will need to to work that suit.

The metal garage portion of the building still looks mostly intact, but the remainder (mostly wood, although no one is familiar with wood) is a charred husk. The roof is entirely gone, the scraps of wall and furniture that remain are all burning. The floor is largely gone, revealing a room or space of some sort beneath. What the space may have been is unclear as it is now blasted and filled with burning and smoking wreckage from above.

Malcolm’s new clone pod (Malcolm-R-NLD-5) arrives in a rush, punching a hole straight through the slowly fleeing chopper as it does so. The chopper wobbles and veers backwards away from the building, ultimately crashing in a ball of flame at the tree line.

Mal emerges from his clone pod in the midst of a smoking battlefield. There are bodies everywhere. All those brown-clad newcomers are scattered about, some in many laser-dissected pieces. Ahead of him is the remains of the building. The metal garage portion seems mostly intact, but the main portion of the building seems mostly a smoking crater. Behind him at the treeline is the wreckage of the chopper. It looks to have just crashed there seconds ago, with a wavering trail of black smoke marking its path through the air to its current resting place. No one is moving. There is no sign of Cadav, Medd-U-SAH, or Sar-U-MON. No sign of the drones. No sign of any of his team actually, except for Sinda’s head over there, but Mal’s pretty sure that was there already.

Nearly at his feet is the body of Mal-4. Cut in half by a laser, it seems. Next to the body is Vera which has been crushed flat to the floor. The ground absorbed some of the impact, but Vera’s body is obviously crushed beyond Mal’s ability to repair it out here.


WARM AND HEARTY

"Well," Sinda thinks to herself as she watches the two clones arrive "Pam obviously isn't as much an expert as she wanted us to think she is."

"What do you say we follow Miss Hair over there?" she hisses to Barb and Jeth. "I have a feeling if Pheonix saw her, he'll follow too to find out how she keeps her locks so shiny." She adds sarcastically.

Jeth is already ahead of Sinda. He is down on his stomach looking into the garage again, and shimmies back inside in an instant. His eyes never leave Medd-U’s shimmering hair as she whispers a voice code into one of the suits (the one complete suit that doesn’t contain a fried clone).

As if on cue, Phoenix exclaims, “My hair!” He fumbles in his pockets until he finds his comb and tub of product. “Oh! Thank the Circuits!” he says as he starts styling his hair into its familiar pompadour while ignoring the remainder of the team.

Barb stays close without speaking, obviously ready to follow Sinda’s lead. Sinda follows Jeth into the garage with Barb behind her. Sinda wants to maintain a comfortable distance between her and Medd. She isn't thrilled with being back indoors, but has no idea what else to do, plus she's really curious about why there are such high level clones in a place that's supposed to not even exist, plus there may be some fun contraband she can acquire in here.

Medd-U has one of the complete exo-suits open (the only one that doesn’t contain a fried clone). As she climbs into it, she spots the red clones following her and rolls her eyes. As the suit seals up around her, she fixes her gaze on Sinda: “Jesus, clear out. The game’s over. I like you, kid, but your whole group is getting’ on my nerves.” Just as the faceplate locks into place, she add, “At this point, I’m not above grabbing some bonus points, so just fuckin’ go.”

Pam's rocked back on her heels a touch. She hasn't seen anyone of UV rank in the field, ever. That being said, she still doesn't know, except for that traitor, Cadav, who's been chewing up her sector's resources. She taps Phoenix on the shoulder. "Come on. We should check on the rest of your team. See what we missed."

“Hold on,” he replies testily, “just about done.”

With that, she heads toward the others to check in, but only spots Barb’s feet disappearing under the garage door, as it seems the whole lot of them has decided to follow the ultraviolet clone. Echoing from the other side of the door, she can make out an unfamiliar female voice speaking (presumably the UV clone—Medd-U): “Jesus, clear out. The game’s over. I like you, kid, but your whole group is getting’ on my nerves. At this point, I’m not above grabbing some bonus points, so just fuckin’ go.”

Now Phoenix is behind Pam, “So? Uh… what’s up?”

Out back…

Mal looks around one last time. He leans down and gathers his belongings from Mal-4, places the brown wristband back on his wrist, and gathers the pieces of Vera and places them in the bag he usually uses to tote her around. Then, without saying a word, he heads towards the metal garage hoping to find the rest of the team. As he walks he keeps his eyes open and manages to snag a few salvageable items from the carnage on the lawn: an automatic rifle, a couple of laser pistols (one orange, one red), and a belt with two non-standard and unidentified grenades attached.

Cadav, glad to see his comrade, moves from underneath the cloaking effect of the tarp and tries to get Mal’s attention and motions him toward his position. He orders Cadav-1 to lay down and play dead, so as not to shock Mal too much.

Before Mal gets too far, he spots Cadav, who appears suddenly from some hidden position near the remains of the house. Cadav seems genuinely happy to see Mal and is waving him over. As Mal spots him out of the corner of his eye, he swears he gets a flash of something white near Cadav, but it is gone when he turns to get a good look.

Believing the white flash portends the arrival of an ultraviolet clone for either Medd-U-SAH or Sar-U-MON, Mal breaks into a sprint towards Cadav. As her runs, Mal pulls from his pocket one of the pink camo tarps he took from the crate on the train (NOT the one used to wrap Cadav’s dead clone in). When he reaches Cadav, he tackles him to the ground and pulls the tarp over both of them, exclaiming as he does so: “I saw something behind you! I think one of the ultraviolet clones has just returned. Let’s see if we can get him before he gets back in one of those exo-suits.”

Cadav quickly realizes that Mal has thrown an invisibility tarp over them for protection, and he laughs. A warm, hearty laugh like… well… it’s hard to say what it’s like, because warm, hearty laughs are not a thing in Alpha Complex.

When Mal looks confused (and more than a little wary), Cadav lifts up his own invisibility tarp by way of explanation, revealing that under his tarp, he has the body of Cadav-1 lying motionless on the ground, as well as the body of Medd-U-SAH, still standing up in her exo-suit. Medd-U and her suit are clearly battered and broken, but they are standing. Her eyes are open, and there is no doubt she is dead.

Mal instinctively raises his auto-rifle and aims it at the white clone, even as he knows it would do little good if the thing were actually threatening him.

Cadav says, “Mal, just as there are things about you that I do not know, I have a few surprises of my own. Namely, I can hack this suit by hacking the dead mind in that body. So if you are okay with using a UV clone to hunt a UV clone then we should be good.” Cadav looks into the soul of Mal as he asks, “I have already been assassinated twice out here and I prefer straight talk to duplicity, so I want your answer. Are we good?”


BRAAAIIINS!

Front Yard…

Pam replies to Phoenix, "What’s up is we protect the team. It already sounds like Medd-U will shoot you and your friends. Give me a moment and I'll try to get them out of there."

Pam looks around for any other entry-ways to the garage. She'll trot around to the back of the house and see if she can still get in through the kitchen. She's alert for any other threats as she goes, hand on the butt of her laser pistol. Phoenix jogs along after her, smiling.

Garage…

Jeth looks around. He needs to find a bot. Sinda is looking like she’s going to listen to the blue-haired clone and leave, and nothing is making any sense, and Jeth needs to find a bot. He’s looking a little panicky right now.

With a start, Sinda realizes that this clone was more than likely the cause of the assorted clone bits outside and it's probably best for her health to follow the blue -hair's instructions and get the fuck out. "Idiot!" She shouts at herself in her mind. (She's grateful that the creepy head voice from back in the briefing room was gone. She didn't need two people criticizing her). She does not want it to look like she's just following orders, however, she has her fucking pride after all.

Sinda stands up and brushes off her pants, she likes her pants as black as her heart after all.

"You know what? You're right, we don't need this shit, and you don't want us fucking up your shit. I get it, we're out." She bends down to exit with as much dignity for her and VLaD as she can muster. "Cool hair, by the way," she says over her shoulder as she leaves, mostly sincerely and mostly to make it look like she wasn't about to shit herself.

After she is clear of the garage again, she pulls herself up, adjusts her gear, and stalks off towards the brown and green pole line, gun out.

As she leaves, Jeth realizes: Sinda has VLaD on her shoulder. VLaD’s a bot! He could answer Jeth’s questions.

Jeth scrambles quickly out of the garage as well, jogging and trying to catch up to VLaD to ask him a question, “Excuse me… hey I’ve got… I was wondering… cuz you’re…” But jogging and questioning at the same time is really hard, and Jeth is frustrated that he can’t seem to get the words out.

Meantime, as soon as Barb realizes she’s alone in the garage with Medd-U, who is acting for all the world as if Barb doesn’t exist, she mumbles a small, “eep,” and promptly goes invisible again. This causes Medd-U to smile a little, but she doesn’t do anything about it, and Barb doesn’t notice. Barb scrambles back under the door and hurries to catch up to Sinda and Jeth.

Sinda's paying close attention to her surroundings as she moves to the treeline, but is trying to look like she isn't. Sinda's immediate plan is to find a way back to the inside and her fucking bunk and to pretend this shit never happened. The freaking Leopards can fucking send… GAH! Suddenly Jeth’s babbling is too much. The giant oaf is RUINING a perfectly good inner monologue!

Just before the tree-line, Sinda stops and whirls on Jeth. “WHAT?! What in the name of bot-shit could you possibly want!?” Jeth is at least a head taller than Sinda and twice her weight, but in that moment she seems to tower over the larger clone for the briefest of moments, such is her anger.

Behind Sinda, one of the poles starts burning.

Jeth stops sheepishly and says, “Oh! Not you, sorry.” And then facing Sinda’s shoulder, he continues, “VLaD, what was the shimmery lady talking about? What game are we supposed to be playing? Did we lose? Do we even have a part?” Jeth’s sincere confusion is rather pathetic and almost (but not quite) endearing.

In response, VLaD starts to laugh. Softly at first, but then louder. If VLaD were flesh and blood, this would be the sound of hysteria. Jeth and Sinda wait a beat for VLaD to compose himself, but the laughter goes on just a little too long. And then keeps going.

Out back…

A wide grin slowly spreads across Mal’s face as everything clicks into place in his mind.

“I’ve been killed 4 times today by these damn UV clones. I’m all for anything that takes care of them without putting us at further risk. We’re good. So what’s the plan?”

“OK then,” Cadav replies, “I will try to guide this thing in search of the other big white one. I am not sure how the controls work, and I can only hope the weapons will function.”

Cadav now focuses his attention on using Medd-U-SAH and learning the controls for movement and weapons. He tries to make her talk and call out to Sar-U-MON and ask for help hoping to lure him into an ambush since Cadav is pretty sure that the exo-suits aren’t stealthy.

Cadav, Mal, and the Medd-U-SAH thing stand where the wall of the building used to be, staring down into the crater than used to be the cabin’s great room. Amidst the wreckage below (looking down into the basement level) they can now see what remains of Sar-U-MON. His entire exo-suit is now a splotchy violet color where it isn’t scorched black. It is hard to see the condition of the body, but the charred stump of his torso where his legs were sheared off seems to be a good indicator that he’s dead.

As if to instantly confirm this, a brand-new, impossibly clean Sar-U-MON clone appears in the bottom of the crater from off to the left—as if emerging from somewhere under the garage (which is still relatively intact). He approaches his fallen clone brother without looking around and without caution.

Cadav is distracted, but apparently his previous efforts on Medd-U had an effect. Zombie-Medd in its exo-suit lurches down to one knee and then bellows into the crater, “GGgrrrrrnuhh! Harrrrrng! BRAAAAAAAAIIIINS!” This pulls the tarp along with the zombie, exposing the rest of the team.

[Okay, it doesn’t really say Brains, but I sooooo wanted it to.]

Sar-U looks up at the noise and spots them. He puts his hands up, “Hey! It’s cool. Game’s over.”

Pam-G-RIR comes jogging from around the corner of the garage towards them. Cadav and Mal both note that Pam/Expenda is actually in an official green troubleshooter uniform now. Phoenix is tagging along behind her amiably. She slows down when she sees them and approaches cautiously, but not threateningly, surveying the scene around her.

When Sar-U spots Pam, he keeps his hand in the air, but he rolls his eyes patronizingly. “Seriously? That was YOU the whole time? What else could fucking go wrong?”


SAFE WORD

Mal whispers to Cadav with a half-jesting/half-serious tone, “Can we just waste all of them and get the hell out of here?”

Turning half towards Pam/Expenda and Phoenix, and keeping an eye on both them and Sar-U, Mal says to Pam, “I see you’re not the helpless infrared clone you were pretending to be. So what’s the story here?”

Pam replies to Mal, “All in good time. First thing’s first…”

Pam's impressed. She was trying to think of a way to save the three that went inside, but here it seems like Cadav and Mal somehow handled an Ultraviolet all on their own. She turns her attention to the Ultraviolet citizen in the crater. She's ready to take cover and laser down anyone who attacks her, but for now, she's looking to get some information.

Pam says, "What did you expect Sar-U? My Mistress was tired of your interference and sent the team to put an end to it."

A side door from the still-standing garage opens above the edge of the crater. There stands a brand-new Medd-U-SAH clone in a brand-new gleaming white exo-suit. She looks down into the crater and calls, “Time’s up! Urse’s little twat is here, and I am NOT looking forward…” She trails off as her eyes track where Sar-U is pointing. She spots Mal and Cadav and her zombie clone. Then she spots Phoenix and Pam. “Well shit.”

Phoenix is remaining mostly unobtrusive, but here he chuckles, “Huh heh! Ain’t that a kick in the shorts?”

Cadav looks to MAL and says, "I don’t know Mal, what do you want to do? I am good with chilling them all but we need to act together and I am pretty sure the element of surprise is long gone."

Cadav maneuvers Medd-U-Zombie to be both shield and (hopefully) weapon if it all goes south.

Medd-U leaps down into the bottom of the crater, landing nimbly next to Sar-U. She growls, “Just hold on.” Sar-U pretends to swoon, “Oh! My hero!” But he also grabs on tightly to the exo-suit.

The other guys…

After waiting in stunned silence for a bit too long, Sinda glares at Jeth. "You fucking broke my damn bot, you piece of shit!" She yells as loudly as she dares. She almost shoots him but decides that she doesn't want to draw the kind of attention that a clone delivery pod was sure to bring. "We need to get out of here first, fucker, and ask dumbass questions later!”

She takes VLaD gently, almost lovingly off her shoulder and looks him in the "face". "VLaD, this is real crap timing to lose your fucking mind" she hisses almost kindly (which is hard because now she's furious AND freaked out at her hysterical bot) as she searches for a reset switch somewhere on him. "Have your breakdown when I get you someplace safe." If the bot had been a fellow clone she would have slapped him hard in the face or shot him (depending on how much said clone annoyed her), but she didn't want to destroy VLaD because she rather liked him, and although she wouldn't admit it to him, Jeth's questions were really fucking good ones. She liked to think she'd have come up with them herself once they were safely away from assholes in exosuits.

Sinda finds a small button set recessed into a tiny hole on VLaD’s undercarriage, right between his middle set of legs. She tries pushing it, but her finger is just barely too big. Instead she tries with her little finger, hoping to get purchase on this button that simply HAS to be either power or reset. As she wiggles her finger in there, she stops to look behind her and whispers, "where the fuck is Barb??"

Without warning, Barb literally materializes out of thin air not half a meter from Sinda’s face. “Sorry! Right here. Didn’t mean to do that.”

Sinda screams way louder than she feels is dignified and nearly drops VLaD.

VLaD (who is no longer laughing) says, “Hey! I didn’t say to stop. But, y’know, we really should have a safe word.”


NATURE BOY

Out of the woods…

After a moment, and VLaD's comment, Sinda regains her composure, although not in the least, her temper.

"So," she thinks "Barb is some kind of mutant too. Well, at least she isn't reanimating corpses, so I guess, if anything, this could be fucking useful intel." She decides to pretend not to be surprised by the manner of Barb's reappearance. As well as she can, considering her reflexive initial response. No one will know that Sinda is embarrassed at shit. As for VLaD…

Sinda rolls her eyes at VLaD. "I'll get you off one way or another later, bot," she says, with an almost imperceptible wink and smirk at him followed immediately with a scowl in the general direction of the others.

Jeth recoils submissively as Sinda yells at him. "I didn't break... I didn't mean to..." he mumbles, before recoiling again as Barb suddenly appears. "Whoa! Don't sneak up on us like that!" he pleads. "We have to figure out what the game is. Are we supposed to be playing? I think those big suits were part of the game equipment, but not for us. What are we supposed to use?" He gestures around helplessly. "Maybe we're in the wrong place. This could be the place where they put on suits to play."

Sinda is simultaneously frustrated with Jeth’s whining, but grudgingly impressed that the idiot seems to have a good point. She puts on that happy face again:

“Good thinking, Jeth.” Sinda says, “And here is definitely NOT the place for us to figure it out.” She places VLaD back on her shoulder securely, and takes off through the poles, calling back in a hiss, "Jeth, Barb, come ON!" Sinda is heading for an open space full of light up ahead.

And it turns out they are back where they started… it’s the huge clearing with the train car. Jeth is excited, as there is still all sorts of equipment scattered around near the door of the train. Jeth immediately starts sorting through stuff, and all of a sudden, all the foam-core weapons and paintball guns make a bunch of sense. Jeth holds up a foam sword and a paintball pistol and triumphantly yells, “Yes! It IS a game!”

Sinda is angry. She takes VLaD down from her shoulder again and holds him out where everyone can see and hear him (although Jeth’s attention may be a little shaky). "Ok, VLaD," Sinda says, "time to fucking spill it. Tell us what the fuck is going on here, this game or whatever, and as much as you can about how in HEL-sector the four of us are getting out of here and back to our bunks with our hides."

VLaD says, “Bollocks! I would trade three of my legs for a projector right now. K-ROL is feeding me the scene from the back of the cabin… or what’s left of it. Expenda-Pam is back there with Phoenix. And Mal and Cadav are there with a zombiefied Medd-U in an exo-suit. The two Ultraviolets are standing in the bottom of a crater where the cabin used to be. According to K-ROL, they recognize Pam and they’re trying to leave. K-ROL and Wilt have put it together, and they think this whole mission’s a fake, and their game is to see who can kill the most clones.” He pauses and clicks twice, “And they’ve disabled all of the bots. Don’t know if we count or if we’re just collateral damage.”

The crater…

Mal says to Cadav, “I’ll keep an eye on Pam and Phoenix, but I think they’re okay. You be ready to waste the two in the crater the instant they try to take off.”

“Mal, it looks like the choice has been made for us.” Cadav says as he now gives the command to Medd-U-Zombie to ready an attack on Sar-U-MON, going for disabling moves since the weapons are unfamiliar, but body movements are not. The Medd-U zombie steps up to the very edge of the crater.

“Running this zombie takes all my concentration,” Cadav tells Mal in a tone that suggests he wished he could do more. “I’m gonna be kinda helpless up here.”

Pam slides over near Cadav and Mal, “We have the same goals. I’ve got Sar-U.”

Medd-U is in her exo-suit and definitely shielded, but Sar-U is just wearing white form-fitting body armor with no helmet. Pam pulses her Memory Fog power to the max, and hopes it's enough to momentarily distract one or both of them.

Pam drops to a shooting position on one knee and lasers Sar-U in the head, emptying the barrel to do so. Both ultraviolets seem to be hesitating for some reason, so it’s hard to tell if Sar even saw it coming.

Simultaneously, just as Sar-U’s head turns to mist, Zombie-Medd-U screams a hoarse, “Whooooooooo!” and does a diving crossbody slam from the rim of the crater, catching the still stunned Living-Medd-U in a torso-to-torso slam that tumbles them both end over end towards the far side of the pit. Living-Medd scrambles to her feet and her suit begins glowing with a faint orange light, but whatever she was planning is cut short as Zombie-Medd catches her in the throat with a knife-edge chop.

Throughout this, Cadav is standing motionless on the edge of the crater. His eyes are rolled up into his head and showing only bloodshot whites.

Phoenix screams, “Damned mutant bastard asshole!” and charges past Pam and Mal with a machete gripped in both hands. He is clearly intent on taking Cadav’s head off.

From the pit, through his zombie's ears, Cadav can hear someone yelling, but the words make no sense, and the live Medd is bringing up some sort of arm-cannon.


SWEEP THE LEG JOHNNY

At the edge of the pit…

Without any warning and quick as lightning, Mal steps between Cadav and Phoenix, raises the ORANGE LASER pistol he scavenged from the field of battle, points it at Phoenix’s head.

At the same moment, Pam throws her pistol in a low spinning trajectory at Phoenix’s ankles. “You fool! The threat is the Ultraviolet!” she shouts as she charges at him. Pam is two steps behind Mal but is also moving to intercept.

Pam’s thrown pistol manages to trip up Phoenix who falls headlong onto his own machete, as Mal’s first shots go over his head. There is a sharp crack that is presumably some bone or other in Phoenix’s leg or ankle as he slams into the rubble, causing his right foot to rotate about 70 degrees more than seems healthy. Plus, the pointy end of his blade is protruding from his own back, having started that journey from his belly, one imagines.

Neither Pam nor Mal is foolish enough to think this is a reason to let up one’s guard, and both continue to press their assault. Although, they are now reading each other as well as the situation and clearly will coordinate better at this point.

Mal adjusts his aim and continues to empty his pistol into Phoenix’s back and shoulders as he skirts around the prone troubleshooter to place himself between Phoenix and Cadav. Pam has put herself in a flanking position, standing warily over Phoenix. She is seemingly unarmed, but is no less fearsome for that fact.

“YOU MOTHERFUCKERS! I FUCKIN GET IT NOW!” That rage-filled bellow rises from Phoenix, who manages to fling himself about four meters up and in an angle away from the pit. Hopefully, someone recorded this for later study, because that ankle is still busted and crunches sickeningly again as his lands nimbly on his feet some five meters from his teammates. AND, his right hand is still white-knuckling the handle of the machete he is impaled on. So what limbs he exactly used for the self-flinging is still an open question.

In addition to the grotesque gut wound, Phoenix is sporting blackened laser burns on his shoulders, back and neck. These are clearly visible as his shredded armor and t-shirt have almost entirely fallen away. It should be noted… and maybe this is just a trick of the lighting or perspective… but Phoenix also seems to be nearly half a meter taller… and wider. His face is contorted in agony and anger as he pulls the machete from his torso and says (completely without irony), “GODDAM MUTANT SCUM ALL OF YOU! Working together!” He instinctively runs his blood-covered hand through his hair, spiking his pompadour up even higher and streaking it with viscera as he adds, “I WILL CLEANSE THIS PLACE AND DESTROY YOU ALL!”

In the pit…

Zombie-Medd grapples the weapon arm at the end for better leverage and attempts to point it towards Medd-U’s body while he plants a leg behind hers and shoves hard, slamming her to the ground. Living-Medd-U uses the momentum to grab her zombie doppelganger with her free hand and flip her over herself to land a couple meters away. Both of them scramble to regain their feet, and they hear the bellowing of some monstrous creature above them on the edge of the crater.

A glance up, and they can see Cadav’s form still standing motionless near the edge of the crater. Pam and Mal are both near him and seem to be fending off a hulking, burned, half-naked giant of a clone who is screaming about cleansing and mutant scum and who knows what else. Only by the giant blood-streaked pompadour does Cadav (looking through Zombie-Medd’s eyes) realize this three meter tall pile of muscle must be Phoenix.

Near the train…

"Fuuuuuck" hisses Sinda under her breath, then after a beat "Thanks VLaD, you're fucking awesome, now any idea if they need this train to leave? We could stay in there, out of sight, maybe Barb can help with that?" She muses, throwing a glance and half smile at the other woman.

"Jeth", she adds, "I'm pretty sure those fucking toys are just here so we'd believe the moronic story about needing special gear out here." She scowls, "you can keep playing, or you can try to help us save your useless ass." She fingers her weapon, just to know it's there and ready. "Unless anyone else has got any brilliant ideas?" She adds, as an afterthought.

Barb says sheepishly, “Didn’t they… uh… didn’t they say we needed to find the missing Ultraviolet POD to tell the train to take us back?”

VLaD says, “Seriously! Why do I NOT have a display screen? K-ROL says Phoenix is about Jeth-sized now and trying to lop some heads off. Bloody brilliant!”

[Mike]

Chapter 10

OH SHIT I’M DEAD

At the train…

"Pissflaps!!" Sinda hisses through tightly clenched teeth, she cannot handle even more seconds of this fuckfest. She forces herself to take a breath, no need to burn. "Ok, Barb, what do we think the odds of the shitlaced UV POD *actually* existing? VLaD? Do you know? If it ever did, it probably got melted to slag in the building explosion. I fucking refuse to believe that we are stranded here, with one of our" Sinda snorts "teammates turning everyone into fucking zombies and another beheading everyone!"

She takes another breath, trying to calm her shattered nerves and her temper which was even more destroyed.

"Jeth, Barb, VLaD, let's see if we can figure out how to make this cocksucker move" she says tossing her head at the train car. And stomping her steel clad foot in impatience and fury. "Although," she thinks to herself "I'm pretty sure we are dead clones walking here", but she is fucking sure that Sind-R-ella-2 is NOT going down easily.

Jeth's face slowly falls the more Sinda talks. Things aren't going to be okay after all.

"By Computer, you're right," he answers, rubbing his forehead with both hands. "Okay, we need to hide somewhere, and we need to find an ultraviolet POD. Where would we find one of those? How big is it? Does it look like that tall lady's hair?"

"Uh, I don't want to go back over there," he adds, pointing a thumb towards the high poles. Instead, he heads to the open car. "Should we get in?" he asks, motioning to the others.

Barb is already climbing aboard the train, so Jeth boosts her up and starts to follow. Barb mutters, “I was just going to try my own POD. I mean I know it’s probably stupid, but…” she trails off. But she does slot her POD into the opening in the control panel by the seats. The panel speaks in a soft, almost sultry, feminine voice, “I’m terribly sorry, citizen. Your clearance is insufficient.”

Barb quickly snatches her POD back and looks embarrassed.

Out back…

Mal quickly grabs the tarp from the ground and throws it over Cadav, to at least hide him from Phoenix so he’s not as much of an obvious target. Cadav disappears as the invisibility tarp settles over him. He yells, “Hurry up, Cadav!” as he does this. Mal then transitions to his automatic rifle and begins to fire at Phoenix while moving sideways around the pit, trying to draw Phoenix’s attention away from Cadav for the moment.

"Come on then, Phoenix, let's see what you have," Pam taunts him. She makes a little 'come hither' gesture as well. Taking a long step away from Mal to split his attention, she's ready to defend herself to the best of her ability.

Monster-Phoenix is a hulking mass of flesh on a mission however, and he brings his blade down on the spot where Cadav was moments ago, even as Mal’s bullets tear through his grotesquely bloated muscles.

In the pit, the Cadav-controlled zombie-Medd has living-Medd in a headlock, and the sounds of their power-suits grinding and bending against each other (not to mention the associated hissing electrical discharges) is very disturbing, to say the least.

Phoenix’s blow was not dead center. As the tarp is rent in two, Cadav reappears again, and it looks like the machete entered above his right shoulder, continued on through his crotch and then shattered against the rocks at his feet as Phoenix completed the extremely impressive follow-through. The two portions of Cadav tumble together to the ground.

Pam is applying her mind fog to Phoenix as heavily as she dares, hoping to confuse him and slow him down.

Phoenix whirls, his hands flailing out to grab either of the other two, but he seems dazed now. He gibbers meaninglessly as Mal puts the last of his bullets into him. Phoenix slowly seems to be returning to normal size, and it now becomes apparent exactly how damaged his body has become. Phoenix is dead before gravity even thinks to claim him.

Mal looks to Pam, and she looks dazed. Both of her eyes are bloodshot. She opens her mouth to say something, but then looks angry and frustrated and says nothing.

Pam has over-extended her abilities. The backlash has left her with the worst headache she’s ever experienced. She recognizes Mal and the bodies of Phoenix and Cadav. She knows it’s a good thing that Phoenix is dead, but she can’t remember how it happened. Mal is looking at her with concern. She tries to explain, but finds she can’t figure out how to put words on the ideas and images in her head. She is completely unable to speak, although she knows this is a thing she should be able to do. She scowls and closes her mouth again.

As Mal and Pam gape at each other, zombie-Medd-U-SAH leaps out of the pit and lands a couple meters away from them, it’s exo-suit is hissing and creaking more than it should but is still functional. It has the bodies of Medd and Sar thrown over one shoulder. Medd (now dead) is no longer in her own exo-suit. In a voice like a shouted whisper, the zombie chokes out, “We should go!” The zombie then spots the body of Cadav on the ground and adds, “Oh shit! I’m dead!”


THUMP THUMP

Mal looks sympathetically at the Cadav/Medd zombie. “Yeah, sorry about that. I tried to hide you and distract him, but Phoenix was pissed and hell bent on killing you.” As he says this, Mal runs to the edge of the crate and looks down to survey the aftermath. “Damn,” he says, “That other suit’s trash now. Ah well, where to now?”

Pam follows his gaze and nods in agreement. She points back from where they came into the clearing, back towards the train car that brought them, and then shrugs with her hands up. This seems to take a lot of concentration for her, as if she’s in pain.

Meddav nods in its exo-suit and struggles to spit out words through its dead vocal cords, “Yeah. We go… back now.” Shifting its load, the zombie begins walking around the bombed out house and back the way they came.

The train…

Jeth lumbers forward, "Don't worry, Barb," says Jeth quickly. "It was worth a try. Maybe we should try mine too." He places his own POD in the panel and unsurprisingly gets the same result.

Sinda, who has scrambled in behind the others and seen Barb and Jeth's attempts with their PODs, exclaims, "Dude!, Barb, you may be a fucking genius!" She pulls VLaD from her shoulder and sets him on one of the seats near the panel. "VLaD, you're a wizard at shit like this, can you hack in and reprogram one of our PODs to seem like it's a Ultraviolet one??"

VLaD clicks, and some internal fan whirs up loudly and then back down again. “Yeh,” he replies, “Could be. Yer gonna hafta root around in me under-compartment to find the right adapter cord. But definitely could be. Definitely.”

Sinda looks at him doubtfully, but then flips him over and opens the only panel there. "It may be our best and only chance,” she observes as she pulls out a tangle of what might be three or four or seven different cords, all with different ends.

Jeth rubs both hands on his head for a moment, thinking hard. He feels a little lightheaded and puts a hand down on the console to steady himself. "Maybe an ultraviolet POD is the same size as ours, just a different color. Like the hair. I don't think the lady with the hair is going to give us hers. Maybe she put hers down somewhere so she could play the game. But I don't want to go back there. Can't we hide out in here instead?" he says to Barb, pleadingly.

Barb mumbles something about VLaD, and sits down without making eye contact.

Outside, there is the familiar sound of an incoming clone replacement impacting with the floor. It’s immediately followed by an identical sound from a second clone replacement. *THUMP* *THUMP* A glance out the door reveals brand new Cadav and Phoenix clones, both looking slightly confused.


ROUND PEG ROUND HOLE

As Meddav begins wandering off, Mal holds Pam back and asks if she’s okay, looking her over for any signs of injury. “If Medd or Sar clones return, we may need you to be able to help fight them off.”

“Yeh, I’m alright,” Pam replies, “just give me a minute.” Pam stoops down, and Mal is surprised to note that they are practically standing on one of Pam/Expenda’s previous corpses. Pam quickly strips some equipment off the body, wasting no time. As she stows it away, she exhales, “Yeah. We’re good.” She strides off after the walking dead.

Not to be outdone, Mal casts around until he spots an exceptionally large rifle on one of the brownshirted bodies. With a satisfied smirk, he shoulders the oversized ordinance and brings up the rear of this march.

As they emerge from the forest of poles, they find themselves back in the clearing with the train car. Things don’t seem to have changed much. As they are staring at the back side of the car, shots ring out—at least two laser pistols being emptied by the sound of it. The noise comes from the car.

Train car…

Phoenix says, “Well all right then! Finally we’re getting the heck outta here. C’mon! Somebody boost me up and lets git on home!”

Sinda scowls. She sets VLaD upright, drops the cables and picks up her blaster. "We don't have time for fucking zombie crap right now, Jeth,” she hisses, “Barb get ready to slam that fucking door shut. If you can't then you'd better be prepared to cover my ass so VLaDy-bot and I can get this shit done." Sinda aims carefully and shoots at Cadav and Pheonix.

Cadav has already drawn his weapon and shoots Phoenix-R-ITE-6 immediately. Head shots.

Phoenix is dead and drops quickly, and that’s when Cadav realizes Sinda seems to be shooting at him as well. He hits the ground and finds cover behind a crate. But then the large door on the train slams shut.

Cadav can see under the car that multiple people (maybe three?) are emerging from the woods on the other side of the car--from the direction of the cabin.

Inside, Barb is breathing hard and still white-knuckling the door handle. “Will this stop him? I can’t find a lock.”

Sinda turns back to VLaD. "Quickly, which of these cords do you think it is?" VLaD replies, “The one with a long metal spike on the end and a red band halfway down the spike. Jam that one into hole on the panel with the little headphone symbol on it.”

Sinda is thrilled to find that all of that makes sense. She rams the spike into the headphone jack, and realizes that there’s a reason it was all so easy. Because of course the connector does not fit. The metal spike is just barely too big for the indicated hole, and no matter how much Sinda stabs and wiggles and swears, it quickly becomes obvious that it’s not going in.


MAKING CONNECTIONS

Outside…

Cadav watches the door slam shut, and decides he needs reinforcements. He drags Phoenix-6’s corpse closer and makes himself a new zombie. For good measure, he puts out a mental call for his other zombies to join him. He can only feel one of them out there, but there is something wrong with it that he can’t quite figure out. Whatever it is, he realizes it is not going to obey him.

"Get cover where you can, I'm getting us support," Pam says in a low, curt voice. She low-runs to the corner of the rail car and gets cover behind a set of wheels. There, she pulls out the black POD, fires it up, and dashes off this message to Dewan:

2 WHITES to blame. Medd & Sarr playing most dangerous game out here with us. Send help.

Immediately, a blinking icon indicates that Dewan (or whoever manages his messages) has seen her plea.

With that, she pulls the knife from her boot and gets ready to take out threats that come around the corner.

Mal holds his rifle at a ready-to-fire position, aimed at the car. As he approaches, he stays on Pam’s flank and whispers to himself, “I wish I had taken the time to test-fire this weapon first.” Just in case it mis-fires, he makes sure he has a LASER pistol ready as a backup. He quickly checks his six o’clock position to make sure there’s nobody coming at him from behind out of the trees.

Zombie Medd/Cadav simply strides past them, making no effort to remain hidden.

On the other side of the car, facing the train’s big door is Cadav-R-USS-4, looking fresh and ready, hunkered down behind a crate for cover. Next to him stands the lasered corpse of Phoenix-R-ITE-6, clearly zombified and waiting. Cadav’s eyes go wide when he spots the exo-suit-clad zombie, and he cracks a nervous smile.

A white-clad clone in an exo-suit comes around the corner from behind the train car, carrying two other ultraviolet corpses over its mechanized shoulder. The one in the exo-suit is Medd-U. Or rather… it used to be Medd-U. It is a zombie now—his one remaining zombie (other than zombie-Phoenix here). And now he gets why it isn’t listening. The zombie looks surprised to see him, and in his head, he hears his own voice… well, Cadav-3’s voice… saying, “Well shit. I guess this means I really AM dead. Welcome to the party, brother.”

Behind zombie-Meddav, Cadav spots Pam and Mal with weapons ready crouching at the corner of the train car. The three of them seem to be together.

Inside…

Barb stares at the toes of her boots, still holding the door handle and mumbles, “Well… he finally went and lost his head.”

Jeth gapes in horror at Cadav shooting Phoenix, and Sinda shooting at Cadav. He feels queasy and suddenly light on his feet and grabs on to the nearest large thing for support, which happens to be the seat bolted to the wall next to him. Sheepishly, he unclenches himself and tries to figure out what Sinda is doing.

Sinda whispers, “Fuck,” and releases the cords to dangle beneath VLaD she glares in puzzlement at the bot in her hands, grasping for the next step.

Watching Sinda struggle with the connector, Jeth realizes this is his chance to show off his talent. He's good for more than lifting crates; he has an artist's eye for detail and might as well apply it to the problem at hand! Carefully he rolls the ends of the other cords across his large hand, looking for one that seems to be exactly the right size.

After a moment, he holds up a round connector with five little prongs jutting out from the tip like a star. He proffers it to Sinda, "If this works, I hope we don't get in trouble for not bringing back the real POD!"

Sinda is sure this can’t be the right one, but she takes it anyway, and when she slots it into the panel, the prongs all fold neatly backwards, and then audibly click back open after they are inside. A perfect fit.

VLaD says, “Oh right! The FSDI-70 connector! I never should have deleted my user’s manual.” One of his internal fans whines loudly. The bot comments absently, “Yeh… that sounds good. Don’t rush me. This is an odd bird.”

That makes Barb giggle for some reason.


PENULTIMATE

“This should be interesting,” Mal says to himself, looking between zombie-Medd/Cadav and Cadav-4 to see what will happen. He keeps some distance away from Medd/Cadav, and in between glances between the two Cadavs, he keeps scanning the tree line and checking his six to make sure nobody is trying to ambush him. “So what happened with him?” Mal asks Cadav-4, pointing his rifle at the fresh corpse of Phoenix-6.

Cadav surprised to see Meddav-Z says to it, "I guess we are soul brothers or something. Cool. Uh… by the way, how did our body die?" Then, realizing Mal and Pam are there too, answers Mal’s question. "Sinda is in the train car, shooting anything that moves... so uh…, is our mission complete?"

Mentally he contacts Meddav-Z, "When this is over we will be terminated or so the rumor goes. It is hard enough being a mutant, and I probably have enough points for termination of our genetic d-train. Do you want to try living here in the outside with me. Maybe we can make a life for ourselves. Maybe there is something beyond this area. I just don't have a good feeling about going back to the complex. We can go out, fight Sinda and then head deep into the pole area. What do you think?"

Meddav thinks back, “Way ahead of you. I was just delivering these bodies for evidence or whatever. I’m never going back. I don’t know how long this body will last, but we’ve got the skills and I think we can scrounge enough from the wreckage here to get by. I’d feel better having you join me.”

Meddav drops the bodies of Medd and Sar and grunts at Pam, “Yours!” And then turns to walk slowly away towards the trees… possibly to sad and lonely Hulk music… but then it pauses.

Cadav thinks to it, “Not so fast. I’ll join you in a minute.”

Pam replies, “Thank you, citizen.” And then, “Good shooting Cadav,” Pam says, coming to her feet. “You’ve done some great work for Alpha Complex; you both have.”

Cadav and Pam reach for zombie-Phoenix’s pistol at the same time, with Cadav saying, “No sense letting this go to… oh, sorry, sir.” Cadav backs off and allows Pam to have the gun.

Pam takes a step or two so she can address everyone. “You have my sincere thanks. But that may not keep you alive. You’ve learned things far above your clearance - things you can never share with another Red back home. I will vouch for you. I will do anything in my power to keep you whole and free.” She has a wry smile at the word free. “I might be able to make certain people ‘forget’ about you, if things go bad.”

With that, she holds the black POD up. “Dewan knows what we did. I hope he’s sending us help.”

Cadav says, “No worries for me. I think I kinda like it here. I think we’re planning on staying.” His statement clearly includes zombie-Medd/Cadav as well. The exo-suited zombie is nodding.

There is a far off rumbling noise, and the black POD flashes. Pam glances at it and says, “Transport inbound. Looks like our ride is almost here.” She then hands Cadav Phoenix's pistol and says, "I'll get a better one when I get home." Cadav takes it gratefully.

As if on cue, the train car starts slowly rolling back along the tracks at this point.

Inside…

"Well, well, well," Sinda thinks, "looks like Jethykins isn't totally worthless after all, now I'm glad I didn't shoot him." Sinda figures she should probably give him some credit, as much as she HATES it…

Sinda says, "Thanks...uh, Jeth… look, if we get in trouble for not bringing back the right POD..." she rolls her eyes, clenches her teeth, and with a grimace mutters, "I'll take the fucking blame, OK?"

"And," She thinks "I'll make anyone who wants to 'punish' us, fucking burn!"

She adds, "Let's keep that fucking door closed while hot circuits over there saves our collective asses by getting us out of this shit storm, right VLaD?"

Sinda runs over to help Barb with the door, "We got this," she mutters to her... friend?

"Hey VLaD, you fucking genius, let us know if you need us while we keep zombie boy out, I got your back."

“BINGO!” exclaims VLaD. “We’re done.” The train starts rolling back along its tracks from whence it came.


OUT STANDING IN HER FIELD

Cadav gives Mal a bro-hug and says, “We have plenty of room out here and you would be welcome to join us. If you need anything, you know where to find us. As for us,“ he says gesturing to Meddav,” we are family.”, then he gives some sort of salute to Pam, grabs his gear and heads toward the forest with his “soul brother” Faint conversation between them can be overheard, but not enough to make out what is being said, but to any onlooker it would be obvious that something resembling actual happiness is on the face of Cadav-4.

Mal glances at Cadav, then looks towards Pam. “I think I’m with Cadav; I’ll take my chances out here rather than going back to Alpha Complex. You’re right that we’ve seen stuff above our clearance, but I’ve also seen what I have really been looking for: the possibility of a life without the Computer dictating my every move and whether I live or die.”

Mal waits for a moment, then shoulders his rifle, turns, and walks towards the trees. The Cadav Brothers turn and wait for him to catch up.

Pam waves at Cadav and Malcolm as they head over the hills. Hopefully, they can manage out here.

With the corpses of two Ultraviolets at her feet and the sense that she has done right by her people, Pam works on presenting them for Dewan. She straightens them out as best she can, taking a minute to cut a sample of flesh from each of them for later genetic scans.

The train has disappeared, and the rugged survivalists are blazing their own trail. So Pam stands patiently alone in the field when the battered gray and yellow hover transport arrives to bring her back to civilization. The green-clad extraction team sweeps the clearing quickly and loads up a few smaller pieces of equipment as well as any corpses within sight. One of them sets up a beacon of some sort and leaves it blinking and beeping as the transport lifts up and then jets back to Apha Complex.

On arrival, she spends several dull hours in quarantine, with no entertainment, no POD service, and no contact other than automated meal delivery. But when the time finally comes, Pam is ready with her report, which she delivers directly to Dewan. She weaves a believable tale of betrayal by Phoenix, describing how he was a secret plant for Medd and Sar back in Alpha complex. She makes it clear that Malcolm and Cadav were instrumental in stopping the Ultraviolets and their plans, spending clone after clone in loyal service to the Computer. Any data that the Ultraviolets had stored in the low-tech complex was unfortunately destroyed during the operation. The robots that were assigned to the mission are also missing at this time, and their status is unknown.

"Sir, I have never had the honor of working alongside two more selfless citizens. Malcolm and Cadav were vital to the mission," she says when the time in the debrief is right, "I will remember them."

Meanwhile…

"Yeah!" Jeth exclaims, congratulating VLaD on getting the train rolling again. He takes his seat with a grin, but after a few minutes of travel it hits him: Outside is behind us. The strange and wonderful carpet full of colors and tiny bots, the vast bowl of blue ceiling, the thick clusters of useless but beautiful poles everywhere - he'll probably never see them again. His grin slowly dissolves and for a while he sits in grim silence.

Once the train is well underway, the others hear Jeth heave a great sigh. "Everything makes sense now," he says mournfully. "This is why we can't have all the colors at once. It's dangerous - clones start killing each other, exploding everything... Nothing makes sense." He looks pointedly at Barb. "Beautiful things are dangerous. Art means... suffering." Jeth holds his forehead with his hands and doesn't move.

Sinda slumps to the floor on the train car in relief, however, it's fairly short lived as she almost immediately begins trying to think of some plausible deniability to let her avoid any blame and the diminished team any punishment. She does NOT want to go back to being a fucking Infared lout. Sinda ponders grumpily, until finally she gets an idea. Not a perfect one, but hopefully it'll do.

"Ok, you" she is about to say Losers, but quickly changes her mind, she needs them to have her back on this, "…guys, here's what I think we should say when we get back."

She waits a moment to make sure they are listening. Barb is attentive and moves to the seats near her teammates now that the train is underway. Jeth is still sulking with his head in his hands, but Sinda is pretty sure he cocked an ear in this direction. She continues…

"When they ask us where we got this POD we just tell them that that crazy haired bitch gave it to us along with the adapter and told us to leave ASAP and bring it to Friend Computer. We poor lost simpering Reds just did as we were told as our *friends*"--she narrowly avoids choking on the word--"were dying left and right. If they give us any shit, or point out that it's my POD or that someone messed with the adapter, we play dumb. Crazy Hair… Medd, or whatever… must have done something to my POD without me knowing or swapped it after she gave us the right one. We've never seen a UV POD so how the fuck would we know, right??"

She looks at them for affirmation. Barb is nodding. Jeth is being disaffected. VLaD says, “Okay, now I’m GLAD they didn’t give me any recording devices. This’ll be fun!”

Sinda continues, "It’s our word against Medd-U's—IF she’s even got clones left somewhere--so if we don't break, even the fact that she's a UV shouldn't matter, and if it does...well, we'd probably be dead either way."

She sighs, "I'm just glad to be done with this bullshit. VLaD, if there's anyway you could convince them that I'd like, do my job better with you around or whatever...that wouldn't suck." She hesitates and mutters, "You guys too, I guess" mostly to Barb, with a petulant smirk.

And that’s the way the debriefing goes. They are immediately separated on their return, and after 24 hours in quarantine, they are each taken separately for debriefing with Dewan. Pam, along with Urse-U-LAA, and two other violet level citizens that Pam was previously unfamiliar with, monitor the debriefings from behind one-way glass. Pam watches without comment as first Barb and then Sinda weave tales of mayhem and betrayal. Everyone seems down with throwing Phoenix under the bus, but otherwise, they do a convincing job of playing naïve, innocent red citizens overwhelmed by the big wide world. If Pam didn’t know better, she’d almost believe Sinda’s tears when she describes how they lost so many good citizens in the explosion and cabin fire.

On Jeth’s turn, he offers little more than, "We went there, we did what we had to do, and we came back.” When asked specific questions, his responses are uneven, as if he has trouble understanding what is being asked. His existential angst has clearly not gone anywere, and he responds with comments like, “It's safe here. Nothing is exploding," and, “Too many colors aren’t safe.”

When the debriefings are finished (VLaD’s debriefing, if any, takes place elsewhere), one of the violet citizens behind the glass turns to Pam and asks, “Does all of that work with the story you are telling?” She waits for Pam to nod and then says, “Good. I expect three copies of your report as well as a Justification of Expenses by end of business tomorrow.”

POSTSCRIPT

And that’s it. Pam continues in service to Urse-U and is clearly being fast-tracked to a blue level training and command position.

Jeth retains his red rank, but spends two weeks in intensive emotional therapy. At the end of treatment, he is medicated nearly to the level of color-blindness. He is removed from troubleshooter service and instead goes back to lifting and moving stuff as a Senior Asset Management Technician.

Barb and Sinda are both promoted to orange clearance, remaining in troubleshooter service. They are not assigned together, but do get to hang out in their off hours in the fancy orange clearance rec center and dining hall that’s waaaaaaay better than the crap they put up with as reds.

As for Cadav and Mal and the zombies: if we want them to have a happy ending, we should imagine that they met up in the woods with some of the other Prepper members from the heli-transport who managed to escape. We need to further imagine that they were able to get Wilt working, and with his help, removed the vitals monitoring systems that backs up memories and alerts Alpha Complex when it’s time to send out new clones. Heck, I’m sure they scavenged more than enough from the cabins and various wreckages to get them a start in the wild. And if we’re going that far, we might as well imagine that they recognized the blinking, beeping beacon in the clearing for what it was and managed to be far far away when four FB-5 Vulture jets screamed through the area and fire-bombed the whole region.

Yeah… I’m sure they’re fine. Good luck, guys!

[Phoebe]

Favorite moment:
The booming basso profundo of the chopper intones, “Can I help you, brother?”

[Ronster]

It was nice to see what else was going on, who killed Cadav and why