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6,670 posts
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I'm not going to say it was damage, but it was damage.
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Apr 27, 2024 17:48:03 GMT
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Post by Robot on Dec 18, 2017 15:09:35 GMT
After piling the mess in the Jalopy, he wipes the sweat and grime from his brow. Christine had cleaned him up good while he was out cold, but he supposed that was part of her job. Infection would've only set in worse if he'd been left to wallow in it. Those sorts of interactions with her were always odd, but he supposed that was what it was for an encounter to be clinical instead of intimate. The caring was there, but she was more concerned with his health, a different means of making him 'feel good'.
The days labors complete, he felt surprisingly fulfilled. Putting the mutants to rest that had passed, then taking his frustrations out on the hulls of the cars with Fender's help had been tiring and cathartic. Granted a measure of closure to that part of himself that railed behind his eyes. He looked down at the little walking ball of steel as they trudged back into the elevator together, having since letting his other 'Mon rest. "You did good. You all did." The tinking of metal and a turn of it's head, it quietly regarded him with those large blue eyes. "Yeah, feels weird, but sometimes you need to hear it, you know?"
This place was still a mess, even well lit. Cecil considered it as the elevator doors opened again to the cool underground. With Horachne gone, he felt a little more comfortable rifling through the remnants of her chambers, she had gotten what she wanted. She was free. After a few twists and turns in the hall, he considered the room filled with cocoons. "There'll always be more bodies." He mumbled softly. Something for another day, and another time. They needed to get along on their way. He started deeper into the compound to find Christine and Katora.
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Feb 27, 2023 22:33:22 GMT
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Post by Seya on Dec 18, 2017 17:25:11 GMT
Kat wasn't expecting the pain, holy hells the PAIN, and by the time the machine decided to reboot, even her throat felt like it was on fire due to the fierceness with which she'd been yelling.
She couldn't pull herself up from the floor--when had she dropped?--and took deep, heavy breaths, trying to accustom to the sensation of... of whatever it was that had just happened. She felt less sturdy than she'd been, maybe as a result of the shock, but maybe something deeper, instead. The idea scared her. She tore the device off and just barely resisted tossing it across the room.
Kat clutched her head and shuddered.
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Post by DataNinja on Dec 18, 2017 18:49:19 GMT
Almost immediately after the high pitched noises, things got a lot worse, with Kat's screams echoing throughout the hallways. Caution is thrown to the wind as she runs towards the lab section, just intent on reaching the surface girl. Something has clearly happened. They might have missed a Pokémon. Or something might have gone off...
Rounding the last corner, she sees Kat on the floor, clutching her head. "Kat? Kat!" She asks, concernedly, bending down next to the other. "Are you all right?" Judging by the screams earlier, the answer would probably be 'no', but she's just hoping for any response at all.
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Feb 27, 2023 22:33:22 GMT
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Post by Seya on Dec 20, 2017 3:57:51 GMT
Kat can hear Christine calling her name-- Christine, good, she generally knew what to do about pain.... right?
It was subsiding, slowly, even as Kat heard-felt-saw the medic kneeling nearby. One side of her face felt strange to the touch of her palm, and her right eye had a strange, barely-noticeable greenish filter that she couldn't understand. She blinked it a few times but it didn't go away.
"S...sorry," she muttered, her voice hoarse. "I thought I could just see what, ah, what that thing was all about, y'know? But hells abound, that hurt a lot more than I expected." She winced as she pulled off her goggles, massaging her temples. No, something was certainly wrong.
She looked up at Christine, poking her own cheek cautiously, still grimacing in pain. "I think it gave me a shock, or a burn, or s-somethin'. How bad is it?"
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Post by DataNinja on Dec 20, 2017 4:12:49 GMT
Christine relaxes a little when Kat starts responding. It's coherent, and isn't too weak. That's better than she was expecting, if she's being honest. But when the surface girl looks up at her, she lets out an involuntary shriek and recoils. "What... what did you do?" she asks, unable to keep her composure, "Your... your face. It's... it's glowy. What the hell happened?" The only thing that she'd ever seen before like this were those pictures of the people with the Pokémon infusions.
Panic rises in her throat again, as this is far, far outside her experience. The only relief is that Kat seems to be more-or-less okay. Even so, she takes a deep breath, regains her composure, and puts her hand gingerly on the girl's face, trying to feel the changes, while she waits for a response.
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I'm not going to say it was damage, but it was damage.
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Apr 27, 2024 17:48:03 GMT
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Post by Robot on Dec 24, 2017 21:43:00 GMT
A strangled woman's cry and he froze. It was husky and pained, and rasped at his raw consciousness with unbidden visions of atrocities committed both in these buried halls and abroad. Pale and sweating, his head pounding, Cecil hastened along the corridors, frantically checking each room he passed until at last he found them. The portable unit had been disturbed, Christine was fussing. Both of these things were completely normal, but Kat...
Katora.
Bracing himself against some debris, his brow creased and folded, displeasure, confusion, and uncertainty mingling with the constant head-pain he wore on his face. Many more emotions roiled beneath that surface, but to acknowledge them would be to give Sampson footing. The boy's jaw tightened and he only observed Kat and Christine's interaction for now, trying to piece together just what this was.
ZdpoFAFZ6d6 Gen Edu (Tapping Sampson's genetic sciences knowledge.)6d6
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Post by Lockdown on Dec 29, 2017 6:12:05 GMT
As Cecil wracks his brain, bits and pieces of knowledge stolen from Sampson rise to the fore. The girl seems to have been afflicted with some form of genetic infusion, a low dosage that had received an inadvertent jump-start due to the overwrite machine's energy flow tripping off some sort of reaction. Possibly a security function that he'd installed in order to wipe the minds of any particularly powerful subjects, making them easier to control. Katora, while thankfully seeming to have escaped the complete cerebral reformatting, appears to have become what some of his colleagues had referred to as an "Elementalist"; people able to deeply tap into a specific pokemon element and channel those powers themselves. It had been one of the original tasks of the vault to create a crop of Elementalists that could breed true, to supplement the United States' armed forces with whole platoons of veritable super soldiers.
As Christine feels Kat's face, she finds that the texture of the patterns feel very similar to calloused skin, slightly harder than the normal skin around it, but still warm and with some give. Though Kat's eyes are dilated due to the shock she's received, she's still able to follow your movements without issue, even with one of the orbs blazing a luminous green. She notes that Kat actually appears to be slightly thinner, perhaps a side effect of whatever this is having burned off a large portion of calories to fuel the change?
The pounding in Kat's head is starting to fade properly now, letting her really experience the seeming expansion of her senses. Her thoughts too are beginning to slow, unjumbling from one another, and letting the young woman really try to see if there's anything that feels "wrong" in her thought processes now.
At the security station, Amber finally manages to crack the cipher that had been used to encrypt the files. While they had been individually encrypted, whoever had secured these files had used the same form of cipher for each one. It was simply a matter of finding the correct starting point. The files appear to be detailed notes from Sampson, a combination personal experiment log and journal. It seems that the man had been planning to co-opt the Vault experiment from the beginning, and had been working on retroviruses derived from Miltank and Lucario DNA, along with some subtle suggestions for the staffing of the Vault security and research staff. A lot of the details regarding the Joy and Jenny projects are highly technical, using what you think are obscure medical terms. Of course it could be another cipher altogether... Oh, and he had a portfolio of image files labeled "failures" and one labeled "successes", because of course he did.
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Nov 22, 2023 15:48:27 GMT
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Post by Slytherclaw on Dec 31, 2017 17:42:39 GMT
Amber is delightfully unaware of the crisis happening elsewhere in the vault, distracted as she is in the computer room. She pulls back after a time of furrowed brows and muttering to herself as she finds the files she needs."Bring men back, huh?" She wrinkles her nose, thinking on some of the details she did pick up from this mess of technical terms and nonsense. "I guess that's smart--keep yourselves from spreading into the overall population and sterilizing everyone on accident. I feel like I should be a little more morally offended by the whole thing, but after this vault, I just..." She shrugs, and pauses as the last file opens up to reveal image folders that she has very little interest in examining.
"Well, here's...something." She says, sitting back and not looking up from the screen. "I don't know what you're looking for, and I don't understand all of it, but--does this help? I can let you look over stuff, if you want, maybe find Christine to see if she can help with some of this. I don't know if you'd want to look at these pictures, but..."
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Post by Lockdown on Jan 8, 2018 19:40:21 GMT
Kat seems to be in a daze still, her senses apparently on overload as she shields her eyes and whimpers at the sounds of people talking. With some coaxing, she's brought back to the safe room to try and regain her equilibrium.
Back in the security outpost, Joy shakes her head, looking queasy. "No, I think I'd rather not see what he thought of as "failures" and "successes". I'd like to be able to keep my lunch down." She turns and gives Amber a hug, smiling widely. "Thank you so much though! With this information we may be able to figure out a way to really help my family and friends!"
Releasing Amber from the hug, she'll quickly shut down the computers. "Now that it's been decrypted Christine can just load it into her Vault-Dex to look everything over! Let's go show her!" With Joyce tugging the smaller girl along, they quickly meet up with the others, and the pink-haired young woman wastes no time in telling the medic what they'd found.
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Post by DataNinja on Jan 8, 2018 22:06:05 GMT
Christine frowns in concern the entire way of getting Kat back to the safe room. Hopefully the surface girl would be able tell them what exactly had happened in time, but, as for now... well, she seems to be stable at least. And whatever had happened to her face didn't seem to be spreading. So, hopefully waiting until she felt a little bit better wouldn't prove to be an irreversible mistake.
There's soon some good news, though, as Joyce and Amber come to reconvene. She listens with a smile as Joyce recounts exactly what had happened prior, before saying, with a little trepidation, "Alright. I'll take a look at that data, see what I can do. Hopefully with all the equipment here, we should be able to get something. I... can't guarantee anything, though. But I'll do my best." Loading the data into her Vault Dex, she begins to look it over.
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6,670 posts
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I'm not going to say it was damage, but it was damage.
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Apr 27, 2024 17:48:03 GMT
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Post by Robot on Jan 9, 2018 14:43:50 GMT
Katora had developed the same coloration and hexagonal scale patterning that Sampson had, though her changes were overall far less pronounced it still gave him cause to worry. Rather then voice it, he bit down on those protests and hard. Christine had enough on her plate without him adding to it, so he found something to keep himself busy.
"Amber, I let Horachne go on the surface, you want to fix my VaultDex now, and maybe help me clear out the cocoon room? We were planning to keep this place right?"
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Nov 22, 2023 15:48:27 GMT
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Post by Slytherclaw on Jan 14, 2018 0:51:09 GMT
Amber follows peacefully after Joyce, Ruby out at her back and skittering after as an afterthought. She's fiddling around on her vaultdex, not really paying attention to what's going on, until Cecil calls her name. She glances up, frowning.
"Fix your--oh, the signal? Yeah I can take...a...look..." She pauses, Kat's presence and appearance suddenly clicking. She's silent, staring at the green patterns before flicking her attention back to Cecil.
"Cecil," She asks, forced calmness audible, "Why is Kat green?"
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Post by DataNinja on Jan 14, 2018 0:55:43 GMT
"I... I don't know," Christine answers instead, her voice low in shame, "I found her on the floor in the same room as the machine that teaches you stuff. She... seems stable right now, but, well, I'm just waiting for her to wake up and be able to tell us what happened. I don't want to risk doing anything, but at least it doesn't look like... whatever it is... is spreading."
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I'm not going to say it was damage, but it was damage.
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Apr 27, 2024 17:48:03 GMT
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Post by Robot on Jan 14, 2018 18:08:13 GMT
"Funny that I'm the one asked the question when I didn't cause the problem for once." Cecil muttered dryly, keeping his attention off Kat. A success for the wrong man amidst all the horrors and failures, completely by chance. Science all right.
"If I were to hazard a guess with what I've seen, and what I know." The boy paused to scratch at his bandages, making a face in the process. "The cell sample we found in the labs that was all dried out? There were live individuals swimming in that mass Sampson had surrounded himself in. If she was exposed at any point, I'd say it took to her biology symbiotically to improve it's life expectancy. Unless she starts exhibiting negative symptoms, it can't really be called a bacteria or virus. From the size of the sample, it almost might've been a Pokemon at some point?"
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Feb 27, 2023 22:33:22 GMT
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Post by Seya on Jan 17, 2018 21:27:45 GMT
Now in the relatively safety of the "safe room", Kat's still fumbling about in her own mind, trapped in the weird new experiences and knowledge she finds herself surrounded with. She makes little sounds whenever she hears her name, acknowledging hums, but it isn't until she realizes just what her memory's gotten that she swallows nervously, and speaks up.
"It's gonna be fine," she says, still sounding a little loopy. "It's... all funny in here, y'know? Things are the same, but all... shifted-like. I feel..." she chews her lower lip for a second, and curls and uncurls her fists. The action is familiar, thankfully, but there's a bit more behind it now; something inside her wants to unfurl down the length of her arms and lash out through fists or weapon, whatever it is it can. She decides not to tell them that until she can understand it better, though. "I feel pretty good. Stronger. Does that make sense? Can a mind-fucker-thingy make you actually stronger?"
She hesitantly reaches out to the nearby wall, and slowly draws her nails down it with a squeak. It still takes a fair amount of pressure, but she leaves notable lines; her nails feel like absolute diamonds compared to what she remembers.
"Huh," she says, once again getting a bit of a dazed look.
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6,670 posts
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I'm not going to say it was damage, but it was damage.
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Apr 27, 2024 17:48:03 GMT
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Post by Robot on Jan 18, 2018 22:02:20 GMT
"There you go, a cell sample and a neural trigger and she is an elementalist. Good luck recreating it or reversing it." Cecil pinched the bridge of his nose and whipped his attention off down the hall. "I'm going to get back to hauling bodies, and herding Pokemon out of the vents topside. You all let me know when you're good." A bristling irritation held in his voice.
Squeezing his temples, he shook his head and forced marched himself back towards Horachne's former chambers to start searching cocoons.
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Post by DataNinja on Jan 19, 2018 4:12:29 GMT
"Wait, wha-" Christine starts to ask, but isn't able to actually collect her thoughts properly before Cecil whisks himself out the door. She considers going after him... but, really, there wouldn't be much point. He's in a testy mood, and if what he says is true... "Oh, god, Kat," she says, turning to the surface girl, "I'm so sorry. I... I should have been there... or... or something. I could have done something then... stopped this from happening." She feels ashamed of herself. She wasn't able to protect them. That's her whole job, to keep them healthy... and she can't even succeed at that...
Quietly, blinking away wetness in her eyes, she turns back to look at the data that Amber and Joyce had, unable to meet Kat's eyes. Hopefully she understands something in here, so she can be of some use...
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Post by Lockdown on Jan 20, 2018 18:57:03 GMT
Unfortunately for Christine, the data is just so densely packed and technical, that while she recognizes maybe a third of the words the sum total of its meaning escapes her. This is advanced genetics and physiology, not simple general practice. At the level she's at currently she simply can't comprehend what she's reading.
Kat, you're beginning to really get your bearings back now; the power in your limbs seeming to be like you're riding the greatest adrenaline high of your life... except it's not affecting your ability to think, and it doesn't seem to end. Even your leg seems stronger, though you can still feel the twist in the bone where it had shattered and never set quite right. Your mind is sharpening as well, and you seem more aware of movements, especially of the people around you. A sharp tug of possessiveness and greed, familiar emotions but never this strong, spikes through you as you watch them.
Cecil, in the cocoon room you find precious little of value. More name tags, some scraps of cloth preserved in the strands of silk, and lots of bones. The freshest ones all seem to be from various pokemon; and with the Vault's lights working again you're seeing fewer and signs of most of the creatures. It seems that whatever Amber did had opened up paths for many of them to escape this place, driven out by fear of the things that looked like the terror that had stalked the halls for time immemorial so far as they were concerned.
Joyce is looking hopefully at Christine, an expectant smile on her face. Amber, there's plenty of time to sit and tinker with whatever you wish in the interim, it seems that no one's going to need your assistance with much right now.
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Post by DataNinja on Jan 21, 2018 5:09:25 GMT
Christine does her best to get through everything on the Dex. She really does... but it's just not like anything that she's ever had to deal with before. But, she can feel Joyce looking at her, and keeps looking through, seeing if maybe something would spark in her brain. But, there's nothing. All she gets is a rising feeling of frustration, panic, and emotion.
Eventually, it just gets to be too much. She slams her arm down on the table in frustration, which is quickly followed by her dropping head, tears beginning to stream down her cheeks. For a good few minutes, she just sits like that, eyes closed, just letting it out, before slowly working towards getting herself back together. She turns around to face Joyce, whose eyes she can barely meet before she buries her face in her hands. She's no stranger to being the bearer of bad news... but not like this. Nothing like this. "I'm... I'm sorry," she chokes out. "I couldn't..."
That's all she can get out for a while, before eventually sitting up, sighing. "I... since yesterday, I've just been falling apart." She isn't addressing anyone in particular, just getting things out there, looking at the floor. "Before then, I always knew what to do. Follow my parents into medicine, do that until I died, and, somewhere along the way, find someone with compatible genes and raise my replacements, just like my parents. And I knew how to do all of that. Hearing the call for volunteers in the vault... I knew I had to do that, too... find the parts and return to the vault. Now... I... I don't know what to do. I'm not human anymore. I might be a carrier. I can't contribute properly there." She looks up at the others. "And the things I am sure of... I just haven't been able to do." She looks at Joyce. "I couldn't help you." She then turns to Kat, "And I couldn't protect you or Cecil from that machine..."
She trails off, lost in thought and anger at herself. But one thing keeps coming to mind, bolstered by what Kat said earlier. About strength. She looks up, before locking eyes, tinged red from crying, with the others. "I... I want to go to that machine. They must have tapes that could give me the knowledge to understand this. I'm sure that's how they made most of their researchers here. Even if something bad happens... well," she glances towards Kat, "I'm already less than human. And I haven't been much use lately, anyways."
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Feb 27, 2023 22:33:22 GMT
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Post by Seya on Jan 21, 2018 14:20:29 GMT
Kat isn't quite sure what to do when Christine starts breaking down, but a reassuring tug at the back of her mind tells her that the girl needs this, as a way of sorting out who she is. A familiar feeling, after all. That strange sense of pride and possessiveness urges her forward to wrap her arms around Christine, pulling the taller woman into a firm hug.
"You're all speakin' like the changes in you are a bad thing," Kat murmurs gruffly. "You, with those freaky bandages that help you protect 'n keep people safe. Isn't that revolutionary, doc? Doesn't it just make you even better at what you do? Just between us, this thing that happened to me, I'm kinda glad it did. I'm seein' things clearer, figuratively and literally. Don't treat it like some kinda disaster, 'cause whatever lets me protect my... my family is a step in the right direction, if you ask me." She reaches up to touch the rougher skin around her eye. "Sure, the makeover's maybe a bit much, but who am I to complain? Once I might've thought this was a tragedy, but, doc... Christine. If we can help the others better like this... then bein' a plain-old human is a bit overrated." She winks.
She picks up the mobile machine, looks it over, and hands it to Christine. "I ain't gonna stop you, it's your life. But keep that in mind when you're fiddlin' with stuff in your head. Maybe it ain't really as bad as you think."
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