Naturally, when one gets blasted with cold water, she gasps and shakes in shock. Despite not coming anywhere NEAR as bad as the agony ripped out of her by this lunatic, it was still bad, leaving her shivering and cold. Even this made her feel like she was losing herself a bit more from just that, the incident earlier frightening her still... if she escaped, would there be anything of her left? If today was any worse, could she keep a hold of herself?
At that point, a few tears did escape her eyes. Would she ever escape this hell?
The man hoses you down first, then takes out a long-handled brush, one of those old-fashioned back brushes, and brushes pretty much all of the viscera and blood off your body after lathering the brush up with soap. He is quite meticulous, and the process is rather uncomfortable, and also quite odd, but it's done quite quickly, so there's that.
"Now, isn't that much better," the man says, and takes about twenty more minutes to put away the hose and get his tools in order, the very process of the latter making you quite queasy, as you are unsure of what the man will try today, though you have suspicions. He doesn't say much this time around, not offering you food or drink, or anything much at all. He looks a bit more absent today, less involved. Maybe worried about something else? Not that you get to find out more, as it is today that your tormentor gets out the bonesaw.
"Right, so, today we check for limb loss," he says in a more businesslike manner than usual, and immediately gets to sawing along your knee. There are a few false starts there as he seems to start from the wrong side, but he ultimately decides to go from the back of knee, and finds it a bit easier - as the saw rips through your knee joint, you scream and try to thrash, but the man pushes your abdomen into place with his elbow as he leans over the table to make you keep still, and works quite impatiently. It takes the better part of a half hour for him to get through, being inexperienced at limb removal just as much as at any other type of surgery, but he gets it done, unbuckling your severed leg and throwing it aside. And then follows the injection - a small one, it seems. It closes the wound, but does little else, at which the guy pulls a doubtful face, then injects more. And that's when the real pain starts, small tendrils of tissue forming out of your knee, knitting together, growing rapidly - bone juts out of the healed stump, and bleeding resumes several times, then stops as tissues form - you are screaming the entire time. Bone goes through all the essential stages of formation, starting out very cartilaginous and elastic, wrapped in fresh muscle, and developing further.
Strangest of all, though, is the neural formation. Your new leg goes through a myriad sensations, brand new nerve endings confused as to the nature of the information given to them, centers of pleasure, pain and other feelings firing strangely in your brain before the leg adapts, and returns to a general state of soreness as it finishes forming. You attempt to move it, but it feels incredibly heavy, and you only get a moment of freedom in the limb before the man buckles it in again. He pauses a moment in what he's doing and takes the severed lower leg he already has, regarding it strangely for a moment, then looking at you. You go silent despite the residual pain. He takes a syringe, fills it up to the brim, then injects it with the regenerative stuff. The leg twitches reflexively, and the kneecap begins to reform itself, the thigh slowly regaining shape, followed by the formation of the hips, and a bit of the other leg. At this point it seems to run out of juice, and merely seals up the open wounds and loose ends that have formed. The man sits it down on a nearby box, the thing evidently becoming a little too heavy to hold comfortably.
"Well, uh, that's a thing," he says, a bit surprised. "Weird shit, huh?"
You would tend to agree, naturally, but he does not stop there, taking another syringe and injecting the fragment of you with it, both him and you watching it grow further. The single complete leg begins to twitch as the spine begins to form, bone growing faster than the neural core within it, ontogenesis repeating itself before you. The other leg forms similarly to your missing limb, albeit on a larger scale. The process goes on as the man watches, going much slower on the torso than on the limbs. The formation of the gut is especially strange to watch, the small intestine standing up a little as it knits together, then laying out appropriately as sections finish forming, the inner membrane extending upward to cover the outer layer. Both you and the man stare transfixed at the scene, until somebody starts banging on the door.
"Konicek, what the fuck? Get out here! We have to move out already!" a high-pitched male voice on the other end goes. The man gets up and slowly walks to the door, opening it.
"Fuck that, come in here. Look at this," the man says, and ushers in the other guy, a tall, skinny man with thick sideburns, a large nose, mildly slanting eyes and rather big hair, wearing all leather.
"Good God," the new guy says, staring straight at you, and at the bloody part of the table where the man apparently named Konicek sawed off your lower leg. "What the fuck have you been doing in here?"
"Uh, well, research. The regenerating shit, you know? Gotta make sure it works."
The new guy looks you in the eyes again, then looks back. "Well, does it?"
"Like a charm. Organs, broken bones, knife wounds, severed limbs - works on fucking everything near as I can tell," Konicek explains, gesturing at you without looking.
"Where'd you get the girl?"
"Well, remember when I hung back a little after the big fight back in the burbs?"
New Guy gives you another look, suddenly filled with recognition, then at Konicek. "Konicek, you stupid piece of shit! You just had to kidnap a fucking wholesome white girl from the suburbs, right? She's all over the local news, you shithead! Couldn't you get, I dunno, somebody black? Preferably a prostitute? A gigolo or something? Nobody'd fucking miss a gigolo!"
Well, at least people are looking for you, you think. That gives you some chance of escaping this hell.
"I don't know any black gigolos... well, none that wouldn't be real leery of coming over to my place, anyhow," Konicek says, giving the matter some thought.
"The point is, you've got shit for brains, man. We've got to do something! I can't believe I even need to tell you this, dammit! Seriously!"
Konicek nods to himself thoughtfully. "Hm. Well, I guess. But dude, check this shit out over here," he points to the other you growing a little distance away. The growth appears to have stopped somewhere around the chest area.
"Oh, what the fuck. Did you pick up someone else?" New Guy asks.
"No! Shit, man, I can't describe it. Just watch," Konicek says excitedly, filling up another syringe and injecting the body with it, at which point the thing starts to rebuild once more.
"Oh," New Guy says, grimacing. "That is the most disgusting thing I've ever seen."
The body continues to form, bones and flesh intermingling as both rebuild themselves. Arms grow out of the top of the body similarly to the legs, and the body twitches as the regeneration goes up the neck, the skin forming first like a strange little skin balloon, inflating as it begins to be filled out with bone and sinew, the head lolling forward as the skull forms and grows beneath, then straightening out slowly like a growing plant. It's your head, right down to many of the details. All the birthmarks are there, all the little bodily abnormalities. It's you, basically, staring right at you as it forms, eyeless, hollow sockets slowly filling out with ocular tissue, forming brand new eyes, your eyes. You stare in horror as the head fully takes shape, with even the hair beginning to grow wildly as the regeneration enters its final stages.
"Holy fuck," New Guy says, watching intently.
"I know, right?"
And just like that, there's you. The hair's longer, the posture is slumped, and the general look feels... wrong, though it's only because you've really only examined yourself in detail while staring in a mirror so far. There's pictures, sure, but that's a little different. This is in the full three dimensions, more real a depiction than anything you've seen before. You can do nothing but stare dumbly at it. And then she blinks once, twice, three times, and you become disconcertingly aware of the fact that she's been breathing since about the point she formed a medulla oblongata, which was but a few minutes ago, her belly expanding, then deflating in a manner that was blissfully imperceptible previously.
"Well, uh, say hi to your new sister," Konicek says, tapping you on your shoulder.
"This is so very fucked up," New Guy says, shaking his head.
The other you glances at the two men dumbly, then at you, then at the light up above before choosing to intently stare into a corner. She opens her mouth limply, then closes it. She doesn't seem very good at holding her head up of her own volition, considering the way she seems to have let it rest on one of her shoulders.
Think about the justice system.
The justice system certainly exists, yes. But it is not in and of itself a problem. Or at least you have not until this point believed yourself to be the sort of person who earnestly thinks that. After all, the justice system is one of several good reasons why you haven't been stabbed yet this morning, along with human laziness, desire to fit into society and more. It's not a perfect system, of course, but perfection itself is impossible when the demands made of the system are ever-changing.
"Jake, thank God you are all okay. What happened?" His father asked, moving over to stand by his bed.
"That weather controlling parahuman went on a rant. You must have done something to piss her off." Jake responded, readjusting himself in his bed.
"Dissent. I've said it over and over, the PRT needs to ship that whole Project Ed lot off to the Birdcage, or prison for their cronies. All they do is put people in danger with their cries for attention. I'll bring it up again at the meeting tomorrow. At least you three got out with minimal injuries." His father noted.
"Yeah, I guess we got lucky. But I think the house is gone." Jake commented.
"That's fine. We can get another house, and we can stay at a hotel for now. What's important is that you three are safe." His father remarked, glancing toward Nick and his wife.
Your father walks over to socialize with Nick and your mother after a moment, and you're not really privy to their conversation, since you can't be bothered to get out of bed and walk over to them presently, still being tired and sore. Eventually he leaves, and then the hospital stay becomes quite routine once more. You listen to the radio, which informs you of the happenings of yesterday, claiming that the attack was "unprecedented in power" and that "observed happenings included a magnitude 6.0 earthquake, hydrofluoric acid rain, ball lightning, localized telekinetic storms and spontaneous flashes of fire". Apparently seven people died, two of them children, and four more are unaccounted for. The neighborhood's seemingly been leveled, and the phenomena stopped around three hours after you were taken away from the scene. It's obvious that the culprit is Dissent, it seems, and the radio informs that she is considered a wanted criminal now because of the incident, just like Taproot and apparently One-Eighty. Guess it's off to the woods with her as well, then, if that's really the case.
At any rate, in the morning there's a few complications. Not for you - you're generally fine, miraculously enough. It's mom and Nick. Both seem to have breathing issues, though Nick's are apparently more pronounced, and both of them seem to be experiencing impaired sight. It really hurts to watch them, in a way, but they're nothing compared to your two neighbors - parts of their skin have begun to shrivel and turn bright white, chemical burns manifesting despite the best efforts of the doctors.
No remorse, just confusion. "Are... you aware that you are a parahuman?" She thought that the fact that they were in a PRT van made that fact kind of obvious, but the man didn't seem to be all together mentally. Especially because he wasn't trying to fight his way out with super strength and durability.
Carrie stops and examines the other people in the van, alongside any other vehicles nearby.
Carrie decides to make a point of regularly checking her surroundings in astral/spectral form.
You get a rather good look at Edwardstown in stills - the crappier areas outside the center in particular, complete with glances at the lives of the people within the low-income housing and an exploration of the local sewer system, after you discover that you're not really bound to the horizontal plane around you. You've never had a chance to properly appreciate these little slices of life, having always had to rush somewhere, you think as you return to your body for the tenth time already, the process becoming so routine that you forget the final push out of reckless familiarity. Your arms feel oddly free at the moment, though the heaviness of the body is still palpable, and you move them in front of you to check it out, only to see that you still seem to be in ghost form. You then hear a strange plinking sound as the chain of the handcuffs disintegrates behind you, your real, physical arms moving to take the place of your ghost form's. You gasp as the PRT guards immediately react, one backing off to point a gun at your head while the other two restrain you. Whatever superhuman power just did that, though, is completely gone when the arms return, and they manage to pacify you with ease. The push, which you forgot to perform, seems to have happened all on its own in the space of half a second, and the harsh grab of the PRT people hurts you quite a bit. You force your eyes shut and wince, hoping they don't shoot you in the face. They, fortunately, do not, but the rest of the trip you do not dare to move or use your power, since the PRT are watching you very closely now, making it very clear that they will not hesitate to actually shoot you in the face if you try that again.
Once you reach the PRT headquarters in Edwardstown, a very small affair with only three parahuman holding cells, you are jailed without much ceremony. A quick check with your powers informs you that the PRT operation here is limited to the first floor of one office building - upstairs there's a call center, above that there's a small-time marketing agency that gets two floors, and further above that somebody seems to have converted the office space into a half-finished apartment. Below there's a basement filled with utilities stuff you're not sure about the nature of, and also a janitor's humble quarters.
After a short wait, a PRT officer, a broad man with a narrow, feminine face comes over to interrogate you about the specifics of, well, what even happened back there.
"Well, yes. It still felt strange though."At this point Alex would stop talking and quietly wait to reach their destination.
The way is fairly uneventful aside from the girl trying something, maybe by accident? You really don't care that much, though it's kind of funny how the PRT treat her as way more dangerous than you
after that little incident. She might even be way more dangerous than you, since you don't even know how your powers work. They don't seem like very experienced types, in all honesty. Eventually you are taken over to a cell, where you sort of languish. You would languish, really, but the surreality of the situation you find yourself in is far too much for you, and your mind just seems to disconnect from the very concept of caring much.
Soon, a PRT officer, a small, smiling fellow with a very punchable face comes to see you and ask what was happening with that whole business in the factory, you know?
Nothing is what he would tell them, nothing with a side of truth to make it go down easier.
"Im sorry officers but im afraid i won't be of any help to you."
"The only things i remember from last night are running into those skinheads, being beaten senseless and then waking up in the construction site with the truck having been overturned."
Glazing over the fact that hed been privy to the conversation about them wanting to biry him alive Steven continues to answer their questions vaguely at best and over the course of the interview drops subtle hints indicating that a parahuman vigilante must have appeared on the scene and allows them to piece it together themselves.
The interrogation, thanks to your general attempts at misdirection, goes swimmingly. They do not seem to suspect a thing, as a matter of fact, and you get off eventually, getting back home after a while. Goddamn, you are so very, very tired now. You didn't get much rest in the hospital, what with the stitches you got, setting dislocated parts into place, addressing sprains, making sure nothing's too badly fractured, listening to lectures about what you should and shouldn't do, and the interrogation was no picnic, either. You limp home, several casts richer from the whole experience, the adrenaline and joy from freedom and revenge having completely subsided by now.
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Topic: Worm: Edwardstown (Read 135531 times)