After assessing the severity of her dire situation, Lyn found herself at odds end with no discernable way to escape from her trapped location. Beside her were two small towers upon closer examination, led to no exits or escapes. But, after hovering her vision beside the right most tower, she could see the entrance to a bottom floor of 452, discernable from her location. She realized she needed both momentum and skill to reach the platform, wondering how she would be able to do it.
But there was something deeply wrong with her, which limited her ability to think properly. It was something that was never registered in her mind before, prior to the start of her presumed life.
She was lonely.
And her tether was severed.
Lyn collapsed on the ground with both of her palms on the cold metal floors, shaking as the anxiety and desperation of her situation began to consume her alive. She started to rotate herself so that she could sit on her buttocks, but her rapidly decreased vision and tension in her wobbling arms made it a much more hefty task than normal. As soon as she managed to stay physically stable, she couldn't stop thinking about her friends that were left behind.
Blade... She repeated in her head, placing her fingertips on her temples. At least you're safe. At least they're all safe, I hope.
Resting her hands beside her, Lyn began to panic. There's no way out of here. Is there?
She hastily pushed herself up off the ground once more, revisiting the two towers to see if there was anything that she missed. Yet the outcome was the same; nothing had changed. She revisited it again and again, searching for potential new ways to escape, but it was all just the same, no matter how much she did it.
Lyn slopped back onto her seat, spiraling her mind out of control as soon as she tilted her chin upward to gaze upon the ceiling.
Are they... okay? Lyn's mind endlessly wandered until she could visit every nook and cranny into their potential lives. Blade's worried about his father. Ardine... Ardine wants to know the truth about what happened to his family. Claire's upset about Blade and wants revenge. What about me? What do I want?
She coughed momentarily and came back to thinking yet again.
Everything that Krin has said so far all makes sense. I'm a mortal immortal. I feel at moments, yet I become the exact opposite of that at others. It's uncontrollable. I cannot change that.
The iron bust of the Mother of Rot revisited her mind once again, as if Claire had never destroyed it in the first place.
Who are you, exactly? And how exactly can you "save" METIS?
Eventually, Lyn gave up. Her exhaustion and fatigue from her previous fight began to make her numb. No doubt it was from her severed tether, she thought. She wanted to know how she could make it happen. Was it an unconscious feeling? Or was it a self-imposed trait that could activate itself?
I don't even want to think about it, Lyn concluded. She slumped back on her shoulders and rested her eyes, gently closing them to bring about a sense of harmony inside her. Despite the whirring sound of the dim ceiling lights flickering upon her, she found some sense of calming silence after focusing on it even further.
It must have been around another hour or two when she awoke herself, out of pure normalcy. Nothing had changed in the timeframe when she was awake versus when she was asleep. But she was somewhat well rested compared to when she was originally stranded. In that moment, after using her elbows to pin herself up, an unsuspecting weak voice came to her abruptly in her head, triggering her senses to stand up.
Hello.
Lyn bolted up and shifted her gaze rapidly around her to find the source of the voice. It seemed deeply embedded within her skull, as it was a voice that had no discernable location based on the silent shifting volume. It seemed to be coming directly from her ear, making it almost impossible to trace.
Hello.
"Who's there?" Lyn called. Her voice echoed in through the platform of emptiness. She swiftly shifted her feet around to continue searching for it, to no avail. "Who are you?"
I see you.
Lyn rushed toward the end of the platform, looking up and down to seek the origin of the voice. But still, there was no sign of anyone. "Where are you?" Lyn's voice rose in volume.
Come to me. I want to see you.
Suddenly, from above Lyn's head, a dangling cable rope from a barely visible location fell beside her, marking a potential escape route. As she rose her head up, she could barely make out a shadowy figure moving away in the darkness to shroud their presence. Lyn curved her eyebrow after scanning the cable rope, contemplating on whether or not she should have trusted the voice inside her head.
It didn't take long for her to make her decision. Lyn jumped on the cable and wrapped her thighs around it for support. She then hauled herself upward little by little, noticing the muscles on her body were beginning to weaken the more she pushed herself up. Her tether was still severed, and with that, she had an incredible disadvantage over the effectiveness of her stamina.
Nevertheless, she continued to pull herself up, for even a single inch of mistake would have cost her meters of distance and progress. After what seemed to be a significant amount of distance covered in her arduous trek, she began to see the top of where cabled rope came from; it was a single girder platform with the rope forcefully attached and tied to on the ground's grid, stabilizing it in place. It was a definite sign of a human interacting with it, which made Lyn worried that she wasn't alone.
After reaching the top, Lyn forcefully pushed herself up to the platform. But the mounted pressure broke a section of the platform that held the rope together, sending it down to the abyss after Lyn pushed herself. She wondered briefly if she would have been the victim to her own demise if she had been a second late.
She was greeted with a pitch-black corridor with dim flickering lights providing only a minor sustenance to her vision. Aged droid carcasses with splattered dry blood decked the cold floors, with wriggling maggots and hungry varmints seeking to make a quick meal out of their decomposed corpses. The varmints, upon seeing Lyn approach the corridor slowly, gazed at her briefly with their blood-shot and infected eye sockets, gouged out entirely by the unknown.
It could have been anything that caused them to be like this. Prolonged age, lack of oxygen or food, but it mattered not. They scurried away with a sharp hiss, hiding from Lyn as she continued to press on forward.
After her leg briefly brushed against the severed arm of a battle droid, she noticed a dulled-out wrist-attached sawblade on the ground, rusted to the point of being completely unusable. Yet it was the only weapon she had at her disposal, so she attached it to her wrist immediately after, ignoring its poor conditions.
It wasn't long until she reached the end of the corridor, noticing more human corpses at the end of another hallway that was gloomily lit by weak lighting. She slowly approached them and kneeled toward one of them slumped against the wall, checking to see if there was any identification or a journal to read, much like the survivors in the bunker.
She found a pouch by the corpse's shirt pocket, reading it after smearing blood off of it. It belonged to a Qliphos Station employee, and she took it in case she needed it to access anything on the floor.
A clacking sound in the distance made Lyn turn her head toward the opposing direction. She trailed down it, while examining the walls of the corridor. Most of the walls were detailed with specific directions of the establishment, chipped away with the age of the paint. Although most of the walls were painted with more blood, which was a recurring sight that Lyn seemingly had gotten used to.
But now that her tether was severed, it was an entirely different story for her mind. There was an encroaching tension from the blood that made her queasy, remembering that her mortality was a problem now that her tether was severed. She frequently stuttered in her movement, stopping in her tracks to regain her willpower to push forward.
After navigating through what seemed to be an endless maze of darkness and dreariness, Lyn stopped at a dead end, noticing two doors sandwiched between her position. The door on her left was sealed tightly, requiring employee identification to enter, while the second door was splattered with blood, opened slightly from a station employee that was propped up between the door. The door was automated, so it kept attempting to shut itself despite the corpse sandwiched between. As a result, the door kept smashing against the corpse's flank repeatedly, to no end result.
Lyn ignored the second door, turning her attention to the first door. She pressed the keycard against the door's scanning device, unlocking it when an automated voice above her stated "Welcome, Employee 49." The automated door unlocked itself, sliding open after successful identification.
Her eyes were nearly blinded by the ultimate exposure of multiple neon white lights being projected in a expansive laboratory. The door behind her closed entirely. As she entered after adjusting her eyes, she was at wit's end with one of the most unfathomable sights she had ever witnessed in her life.
It was a three-section white laboratory; one section on the far side was filled with corpses of humans forcefully bound onto medical stretchers, another was dedicated to several computers and files dedicated to something, and the final section was filled with experimental vials containing different colored liquids, metal droid plates, wiring couplets, and small pounds of rotten flesh. A large extensive whiteboard with a backlight revealed several X-rays and eerie black and white photographs detailing time-lapses of experimentation.
Lyn, although queasy at the beginning, approached the whiteboard. The rotten pound of flesh tinged her nostrils, making her eyes tremble by the pungent odor. Upon first glance at the flesh, it was shaped like a round ball, seemingly all pounded together to form something that resembled gelatin. At first, Lyn did not understand what its intention was, but after scanning through the photographs, her knowledge drastically changed.
One of the first photographs resembled a pile of Qliphosian civilians in a comatose state, lined up together and covered in excruciatingly tight blankets that seemed to suffocate them. All of them were peacefully asleep, either deceased or unconscious. A cursive text was written on the bottom of the black and white photograph, stating "beginning process."
"Beginning process," Lyn voiced out. Her voice was the only sound in the laboratory. "Of... what?"
The next photograph was somewhat impossible to make out. The best she could see though, was the internals of a large tube-like machine with blurry subjects falling inside the tube. There was a large lens flare that made it difficult to make out any other detail. The cursive text scribbled below was "transformation process."
Black marker separated the previous photograph into two sections with arrows detailing it. One of the arrows led to another photograph with the same type of rounded flesh on a countertop, only bigger, and stained with blood. The text below read "after one week."
The second arrow was the most shocking revelation of all to Lyn. Masked workers that resembled hospital employees took the pounds of flesh and attached it to the droid's metal plates, attaching several wiring around them to bound it together. A second photograph beside it detailed a suited individual wearing long robes pointing at a battle droid prototype, and it wrote underneath in fine detail "transformation phase 1."
"What..." Lyn whispered to herself, looking away for a split second. The same photograph was split apart into three more photographs, all appearing even more grotesque than usual. One of the photographs detailed a much more gigantic round ball of flesh with someone's head sticking out from the top; the eyes of the head was rolled back, revealing white pools of death. The same large mass of flesh was shown in the next photograph, attached and coupled with strong wiring to lift it up into a droid's chest plate. The final photograph detailed the specific head that was inside the pound of flesh, revealing that the white pools of eyes was not rolled back at all; it was the head of a Qliphosian.
Lyn looked at the small round ball of decomposed flesh beside her. She couldn't believe her eyes. They took the innocent lives of civilians... to make weapons?
Sprawled across the table beside the pound of flesh were transport logs detailing the names of civilians, their ages, weight, and which specific transport they were being kept at. Lyn backed away from the table and moved toward the computers, holding her stomach in to help herself from being sick. Although, it was a useless endeavor.
None of the computers were working at the time, so she scanned the notes and files on the table. All of them were dedicated to members of the Qliphosian Council, signed off by multiple unknown doctors. She picked up a journal written by one of the station employees, and read it carefully.
21:09 - the council visited the laboratory for the first time to help guide us to a path of immortality. we are lucky to not be a part of this. i understand their motivations. the weak will die while the strong remain. the gift that their god gave them will transform our nation into perfection. and we will remain the strongest. for mother
"There it is again," Lyn spoke to herself, eyeing the final word. "The Rot Mother."
As she traveled to the final section of the laboratory, she anticipated the absolute worse. There were three large glass chambers that acted as cells for prisoners, all protected so that a single person would be unable to shatter it from both inside out. It was an impenetrable fortress of problems, to which Lyn examined closer by pressing her face against the glass.
She immediately jolted back after being greeted with a Rot parasite in the shape of a lamprey eel. Upon further examination after collecting herself, she discovered a lamprey Rot parasite attached to several wires, bursting out of a male Qliphosian patient who was extremely pale and lifeless in the skin. Arteries and blood vessels, along the the length of the lamprey Rot were cryogenically frozen in place.
Lyn had no words to describe her uneasiness. She moved onto the second glass chamber, seeing a collapsed battle droid prototype chained to the wall with a pale human corpse lying on a hospital bed. The final glass chamber was contained with several pounds of flesh attached to wires, which were then attached to bladed weapons or firearms.
After pushing herself off of the glass chambers, Lyn tried to make sense of what was happening. Although it was self-explanatory, Lyn couldn't believe how the higher-ups at Qliphos were innocently expressing their need to seek a sense of immortality through mechanization. It was unfathomable to her, making her stumble toward the exit without a single conscious or reason of why they would do it.
It was all for Mother.
Just as Lyn opened the door, the second door in front of her was now wipe open, revealing a flickering room much like the same laboratory she visited. She held her sawblade up as she entered the establishment, and this time around, the Rot's corruption had spread through it. Dead tendrils, rotten fungus, and dense air surrounded the area.
Yet the first moment she stepped in, a loud breathing sound caught her off guard. She slowly turned her back until she faced the ceiling; a frail human with dull burgundy hair, wrinkled and shriveled skin, and pulsating orchid eyes smiled fiendishly at Lyn. She wore a laboratory coat. Before Lyn had any time to react, the human leaped onto her and shoved her back against a rolling chair. She slammed against the edge of a table as the frail human rushed toward her, covering her mouth with her bony palm.
"You... You... You came!" The whisper of the frail human made it seem like she hadn't eaten in days. "You finally came! I knew you would. I... I knew you would. I knew someone would come to help me... to save me!"
After releasing her palm against Lyn's mouth, the terrifying presence of the unknown human forced her to retaliate. She kicked the frail human's stomach, shoving her to the ground were multiple files remained, flying all over the area upon contact. Lyn ejected herself upward and sheathed the dull sawblade, pointing it at her with a punitive expression.
"No, NO!" The frail human begged, curling herself into a fetal position. "Please, don't hurt me! I would never hurt you, Gemma! Never to you, Gemma!"
"What?" Lyn whispered, realizing that the one in front of her knew part of her true identity. Despite this, she kept her guard up, pointing the blade ever further at the frail human's neck. "Who are you? Explain yourself! It was your voice earlier, wasn't it?"
"Yes, yes!" The frail human said, nodding uncontrollably. "Look! Look!"
Lyn watched as the human tore off her laboratory clothes, targeting the entire section of her left upper arm, revealing her shriveled and wrinkled skin. Tattooed upon it were the remnants of a faded combination of letters: "NIABB66."
"You're..." Lyn begun, dropping her sawblade to the side of her hip. She looked at her own left upper arm, remembering that it was tattooed with the letters LYNBG52. "You're... like me?"
"Please... don't kill me," The frail woman continued to beg, sheltering her head with her limp arms. "I know who you are. That is why I could speak to you. You carry the code as well! On your arm, on your arm!"
"How do you know all this? Who... are you?" Lyn repeated, frustrated at the person's inability to respond to the only single question she had on her mind.
"The abscess," She began in a heightened voice, standing up from her fetal position. "The abscess will take me soon. But there is still time... yes, there is still time!"
"Time?" Lyn asked. "Time for what?"
"I've been searching for years... yes, years... for the truths," The woman said, moving beside Lyn. She stared off alertly at an irrelevant location in the laboratory, almost mimicking the alertness a cat would have when in the presence of danger. She jerked her head and twitched her eyes, looking upon Lyn's facial features and body. "You're so beautiful, Gemma. I wish I was just like you, yes, you! But poor old Nia... could never be."
"Nia?" Lyn voiced out. "Is that your name? Nia?"
"Oh... it was so long ago..." The frail woman named Nia trailed off in a different tangent. "I want to experience it all over again. The light. The balance. My birth... all over again. Before Mother came here! Before Mother defiledus!" She hissed.
"Mother..." Lyn repeated after her. "You know who this Mother is?"
"SHH!" Nia hissed, shoving her palm against Lyn's mouth once. "Don't speak so loudly! She... is always watching. She is ensnared in our roots!"
"Okay," Lyn whispered back, trying to remain as calm as possible to ensure that Nia would not retaliate toward her worrisome aggression. "Can you answer this, Nia? How do you know my name? How do you know the name 'Gemma?'"
"Oh..." Nia begun, wrapping her hands around Lyn's tattooed arm. "I see you. I can feel you inside my head. We are all connected! We are."
Krin wasn't lying.
"I want to show you!" Nia exclaimed, releasing her grip on Lyn's arm.. "I need to show you the truth about me. And I am excited to see the truth about you!"
"Truth?" Lyn continued. "I don't know what you're talking about-"
"Come on!" Nia shouted, pulling Lyn's arm toward the exit to the laboratory. "Come on, come on! I'll show you! I'll show you!"