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Bunkerkampf (Mortuus Orbis Part Two)	By : Sparrow & InBrightestDay Category: -Misc Video Games/RPGs > Crossovers Views: 1831 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the franchises, characters, or anything else from the settings in this collection. These include Street Fighter, Marvel, Sailor Moon, Kill La Kill, and others. I made no money from this work.

Chapter List
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Satsuki opened her eyes. The bright fluorescent lights above sent pain lancing through them, and she grimaced, covering her face with an arm. She felt awful, wracked with chills despite the blankets covering her, blankets that were soaked with cold fever sweat from the past night. Peeking an eye out from the crook of her arm, Satsuki looked around, taking in the empty cots, Báthory’s desk, and finally the operating area itself, the stainless steel table and the heavy light fixture hanging above it. Scowling, she tried to sit up, wondering why everything felt so heavy, and why her head span with nausea the moment she moved.
Satsuki Kiryuin - Kill La Kill (https://i.imgur.com/9Aa3t2V.jpg)
Lying back down, Satsuki went over what she knew. It had been more than a week now since every able-bodied inhabitant of the bunker had come together to bring down the monster that had somehow found its way in. They had lost five people in the creature’s initial rampage, but Satsuki had managed to coordinate a response to it, involving not only their most capable fighters, but also their new ally, an alien named Night Eyes. It had been a risk, but fortunately the plan had succeeded with no casualties, and only minimal injury.
Looking around the infirmary, she sighed.
Or at least, so she’d thought. About five days later, she had nearly collapsed in the middle of exploring the area around the bunker’s entrance. When the others had got her back inside, Báthory had discovered Satsuki was running a fever of nearly a hundred and eight degrees, and the massive acid burns on her torso were badly infected. Satsuki couldn’t remember why she had thought herself fit to go outside in that condition, or indeed remember much of that day at all.
The possibility of pathogens native to this charnel house of a city had been alarming, but Erzsebet had done some bloodwork and confirmed that the infection was far more mundane and perfectly treatable. As such, Satsuki had spent the better part of the last week in the medical bay, on several different courses of intravenous antibiotics. Her fever now was down from “life-threatening” to merely “horribly unpleasant”, especially when she tried to sleep.
The dreams were the worst part, she thought, trying to find a square inch of blanket that wasn’t already soaked with sweat that she could wipe her face with. Especially the one she had had that night. Something about being wrapped up so tight she could hardly breathe, let alone move, while someone called her name from far away.
Satsuki’s rumination was interrupted by the door opening, and the sharp sound of heels clicking on concrete. Báthory came in holding a tray, her shoes clopping loudly on the floor, a sound Satsuki had come to know well these past few days. Satsuki grimaced, only her and Báthory wore heels in this place, and she only wore them because they were part of Junketsu. Báthory, on the other hand, had insisted that Kyle show her the clothes store he had appeared in, once he had arrived, and had returned with several pairs of stiletto heels, of all things.
Báthory certainly seemed very pleased about something, practically skipping as she carried the tray over to the wheeled bedside table. Her white blouse had several of its buttons undone, and the material was thin enough that Satsuki could quite clearly see she wasn’t wearing a bra underneath it. She wondered if the older woman was making some sort of dominance display.
“Good morning!” she trilled, leaning over to help Satsuki sit up.
What’s so good about it? Satsuki wanted to say, but instead asked:
“What’s the time?”
“Nearly ten o’clock. I looked in on you earlier but you were still asleep, so I thought I’d leave you be. How do you feel?”
“About as well as can be expected,” Satsuki said. Then, seeing that Báthory was evidently waiting for more, rolled her eyes and continued. “I’m covered in sweat, my muscles ache from shaking while I was asleep, my burns hurt whenever I sit up or breathe in too quickly, my head spins every time I move, and generally I feel terrible. Thank you.” She looked over at the tray. “Is that breakfast?”
“It is indeed,” Báthory said, pulling the table over. “I got it out of one of those American ration crates. The can had ‘Breakfast’ written on it.”
In her own world, Satsuki’s breakfast usually consisted of several freshly-baked croissants with her choice of fruit preserves or cream cheese, half a grapefruit, and sometimes an eggwhite omelette, with a pot of very dark tea to go along with it.
Here, today, breakfast consisted of several round crackers, a square of some brown substance wrapped in cellophane, a small bag of candy-covered peanuts, some painkillers, and a tin mug of what, judging by the smell, was instant coffee.
“...I think I’d rather go back to sleep,” Satsuki said, shooting a look at Báthory to see if this was some kind of joke.
“Oh, I wouldn’t suggest that,” the blonde said, smiling. “That brown square is chocolate fudge… apparently.” The two looked at each other for a moment.
“You need to eat something, Kiryuin. I’ve got another bottle of antibiotics for you later, you’re going to need some kind of strength for that.”
Satsuki said nothing, instead looking down at the meal. She had been preparing for war since she was five, had mastered a superpowered sailor-suit through nothing but sheer force of will, had fought off an assassin with a kamui of her own, and had faced a monster with a bulletproof hide and blood that could eat through concrete. She could probably handle the square of potentially-chocolate and some old instant coffee.
Probably.
Deciding to postpone that particular bit of culinary exploration, she picked up one of the crackers instead and took a small bite. It was dry, had a faint metallic taste, and was otherwise far too sweet. Not the most appetizing thing in the world, but better than nothing, she supposed. Maybe dunking it in the coffee would help.
As she ate, she looked back to what Erzsebet was doing. The doctor wasn’t taking any action too far out of the ordinary, just tidying up her desk and moving a few surgical tools from the sink back to their proper containers, humming a small tune to herself as she worked, and looking noticeably happier than usual.
“You seem to be in a good mood,” Satsuki muttered, taking another bite of the cracker.
“Mmm,” Erzsebet hummed, looking over her shoulder. “Perhaps it’s the relative calm in here at the moment, or maybe something else. Whatever the case, I feel somewhat more... well, myself today.”
Slipping the medical supplies into a drawer in her desk, she changed topics. “Did you sleep well?”
“No,” Satsuki said curtly. “Between the fever dreams and the cold sweats, I woke up wishing I’d died in my sleep.” Erzebet pouted in a faux-horrified fashion, coming over to the bed.
“Don’t say such things, young lady,” she laid a hand on Satsuki’s arm. “There are people here who-” she was cut off as Satsuki, skin crawling, smacked her hand away.
“Get. Off.”
Erzebet held her hands out, as though trying to calm her, though her amused grin said otherwise.
“Who seem to look up to you,” she finished.
Satsuki scowled at her, before looking away, eying the coffee as she worked up the courage to see what it would taste like.
After the creature had killed Ash, it had been her plan that everyone had followed to trap and destroy it, and afterward there had been some signs that the inhabitants of the bunker might see her as being in control. It was only natural, but it was still a little strange being in command here, as opposed to back at Honnouji. The circumstances were unfamiliar, but…
Whatever course her thoughts might have taken, they were interrupted when the door slid open, revealing Isabeau. The aristocrat didn’t say anything immediately, merely walking into the room and approaching Satsuki’s bed, and her expression was its usual, carefully controlled self, but there were hints of strain; of worry.
“Good morning, Miss Kiryuin; Erzsebet,” she said, nodding to each of the women. “How are you today?”
Isabeau d’Argyll - The Order: 1886 (https://i.imgur.com/VosQ3iD.jpg)
“Very well, thank you,” the doctor said, smiling. Satsuki finally brought the can of coffee up to her lips and braved a sip. It was hot, at least, and it was, technically, coffee. That was hardly her favorite drink to begin with, but it would suffice for now. Setting the drink down, she focused on Isabeau again, the British woman not saying anything more, but that trace of worry unmistakeable on her face.
“Is something wrong, Isabeau?” she asked. The brunette looked back and forth quickly from Satsuki to Erzsebet.
“I am sorry to trouble both of you,” she said, “but we may…” she shut her eyes and took a deep breath before continuing. “We may have another disappearance.” In spite of the blankets covering much of her, Satsuki felt a chill pass across her body.
“Who?” she asked, “and how long have they been missing?”
“I have been… unable to locate Miss Makoto,” Isabeau said. “I went to the room she sleeps in to ask if she would like to join me for breakfast, and found the room empty. That would not normally be cause for alarm, but I searched the common room, the kitchen, the showers... I could find no sign of her. Unless…” At this she looked hopefully back and forth between the other two women, “unless either of you have seen her?”
“I just woke up, I’m afraid,” Satsuki said, and then looked to Doctor Báthory. “Erzsebet?”
“No, I haven’t seen her,” she replied. “Is there anywhere you haven’t looked yet?”
“I’ve searched every room in the explored area of the bunker,” Isabeau said, looking and sounding slightly annoyed, “including the storerooms. She is not in any of them.” Satsuki and Erzebet shared a worried look. None of them wanted to think that yet another monstrosity had found its way into their shelter.
“Have you checked the surface access point?” she asked. Isabeau nodded.
“The door is secure,” she said. “I’ve also examined the water main, and there is no evidence of any new creature emerging from it: no wet footprints or mucus trail.” Satsuki nodded.
“Well done,” she said. “That only leaves the vents as access points. Gather a team and start checking them; see if anything has forced any of them open. Take April, Kyle and Chun-Li—”
“Miss Xiang is on the surface at the moment,” Isabeau corrected, “along with Kyle and Spinneret.”
“Search and rescue,” Erzsebet added, and Satsuki nodded in acknowledgment.
While Satsuki hadn’t agreed with some of Ash’s decisions, the search and rescue teams were one she had always approved of. However they had all ended up here, it was clear that it wasn’t over. Erzsebet had been here first, then Ash, Satsuki, Isabeau and still more. Chun-Li, Cindy and April, among others, had arrived later still. Given that, it made sense that people would continue to appear in the city, and as they did they would need to be rescued. They couldn’t afford to lose resources like that. And beyond that, these were people in need of help.
Satsuki hadn’t abandoned her world to the Life Fibers, and she wouldn’t abandon these new arrivals to the monsters outside.
“Very well,” she said, focusing on Isabeau again. “For the moment, take April and check all of the vent covers. When the others return, they can help.”
“Understood,” Isabeau said, and began to move toward the door, but stopped and turned back.
“Something else occurs to me. We discussed the resources this structure provides, and the unexplored levels beneath us. Makoto was always so frustrated at being unable to help. She lacked the abilities to go along with the search and rescue team, so she may have taken it upon herself to...explore.” Satsuki sighed, realizing the truth in Isabeau’s words.
“Was there any evidence of the blast doors being opened?” Erzsebet asked. Near medical was a set of heavy doors that they had opened once before, revealing a very long hallway, its endpoint unknown. Given limited resources and manpower at the time, Ash had decided to close the doors again and reserve exploring that area for another time.
“No the doors are sealed,” Isabeau said, “but there is a large hole in the floor in the water main room, one that leads down to the level below.” She looked back at Satsuki. “Given your discovery that the warehouse beneath has crates someone could jump down to, it is possible she climbed down.”
“That’s true,” Satsuki said. She looked down at the coffee can in her hand, again, thinking, and then back to Isabeau. “Alright. Take April for now and check the vents. After that, you can begin searching some of the lower levels.”
“When the team returns, they can help you.”
Johnny was fairly certain the alley outside the club hadn’t looked like this before.
Johnny Silverhand - Cyberpunk 2020 (https://i.imgur.com/0vt0T5b.jpg)
Granted, Night City could be an unforgiving place. Things broke, cyberware malfunctioned, and life under the actinic glow of the hard lights could be harsh on the grey matter, so it wasn’t exactly too far out that you’d see something, especially if you’d just had a particularly hard night. Johnny was pretty sure his eyes weren’t malfunctioning, though, given that the imagery was all as crisp as he could expect. Things were just different.
The door he’d just come through was now a brick wall, for instance. That was different.
He did a quick check of himself, making sure everything about him was normal. His leather jacket with its customized logo was still where he’d expect, eyes still worked…
He held up the Hand. Its chrome plating gleamed even in the dim light, clear enough that he could see his reflection in it, dark hair, the beard he hadn’t got around to shaving off yet. Servos whirred as he bent the elbow, fingers extending and curling back up with an audible clicking of metal on metal.
Everything seemed normal there.
Lowering his cyber-arm, he took a moment to ponder his next move. This was a new scene; no idea where he was, so the best bet was to head out to a wider area and see if the view would tell him anything.
Leaving the alley took him almost directly into a wall, which was a little awkward, as he had to slide through the narrow gap between the alley and the building it apparently just ran into to get out to the actual street, which risked damaging the guitar slung on his back, and damn it, there were priorities here. Still, holding it up, he eventually managed to work his way out into the open.
The intersection was quiet, not just compared to the usual, but really quiet. Light levels were low, fortunately something his eyes could compensate for, but the blackout combined with the silence was unnerving. Even if there’d been some kind of serious corporate dispute here, or maybe a Netrunner who’d really pulled something off, the whole city wouldn’t be on mute like this. Johnny had been in his fair share of nerve-jangling situations, mostly involving punks who were either strung out or wired wrong, but this was bigger than anything he’d seen before. It was legitimately creepy. He stifled the impulse to call out. The vibe of this place was all kinds of bad.
Instead of trying to call anyone, he advanced through the intersection listening. There was no way this place could go full ghost town, not a city this big. No, he had to listen, and if he did…
There was a noise. Somewhere ahead, a sound of metal shifting came from down a sidestreet. It wasn’t exactly friendly, but it was something at least. Johnny kept walking until he was within about twenty feet of it before talking.
“Anybody down there?” he asked, his voice sounding louder than it really was due to the lack of background noise. “I’m not completely sure how I got here, but…” he trailed off as the source of the sound appeared.
It was a dog, or at least, it had been. The thing’s black fur was stretched over powerful muscles, and above all it was big, with broader shoulders than a normal dog would have and legs clearly built for speed. Under normal circumstances Johnny would assume it was modded heavy, but there were no signs of that; the eyes were red, but they weren’t any kind of implanted LED’s, and there was no evidence of servos or synth-tendons in the limbs. Whatever this thing was, it wasn’t friendly, and Johnny knew the proper response to situations like this.
He went for the Malorian, its heavy weight dropping from the holster into the Hand like he’d practiced it. The gun was a chrome-plated monster, bigger and heavier in all regards than his old Walther, and so far he’d never actually had to shoot anyone with it. Which was just as well, considering that even after all this time he wasn’t a particularly good shot. A light flickered in the corner of his eye as the gun interfaced with the Hand, metal fingers closing tight around it.
“Now I’m not looking for trouble here, Fido,” he said, taking a step back and slowly raising the handgun. “You just be nice and frosty for me, and we can both go our separate ways here.”
The hound didn’t seem particularly interested in leaving. Instead, it came toward him, growling loudly. Its lips curled back enough to reveal some particularly brutal teeth, and Johnny trained the gun on its head. His cyber-arm locked into place in preparation for the shot. When the thing snarled and burst into a run, he fired.
The Malorian’s report would have been startling for anyone else, but Johnny was too inured to the sound of gunfire to flinch. The bullet punched through the dog-thing’s left shoulder and blew chunks of flesh and bone out into the air. The creature stumbled and fell for a moment, but then instantly regained its feet. Its shoulder was a crater of pouring blood and shattered bones, rendering its front leg unusable, but the thing seemed determined to get to him anyway. It threw its head back and released a fearsome howl that seemed to echo off the buildings, and then came at him again. Even with its injury, the thing was still fast enough that it closed the distance before Johnny could fire again, and he stepped back, bringing the Hand up to block the attack.
The hound’s slavering jaws closed around the chrome cyber-arm, and for a moment it hung there, jagged fangs grinding against the metal. Planting its three working feet, it pulled back, yanking on the arm and trying to pull Johnny over, but that wasn’t about to happen. The Hand sprang open, letting him catch the Malorian in his free hand, and then he twisted the cyber-arm a little, changing the angle so he could grab the thing by the side of its neck. The Hand’s powerful servos brought the metal fingers together, squeezing the flesh of the hound’s neck until it yelped and let him go. Lifting it up, Johnny whipped around and threw the beast through a nearby storefront, sending it crashing through the window and landing among some displayed clothes and a rain of shattered glass.
That really ought to have put it down, but Johnny’s eyes widened as it began moving again. Somehow, the God damned hellhound was actually getting back up. Rising back onto its feet, it shook the glass from its fur, snarled and lunged, but Johnny already had the Malorian locked onto it.
This time Johnny wasn’t shooting to wound, and the second bullet struck it in the head. One of those reflective eyes was ripped apart, and the back of the dog’s skull exploded. The thing collapsed in a dead, twitching heap, but it had gotten back out through the window and had made it surprisingly close to Johnny before he’d put it down, especially considering how hard the Malorian hit. This had to be something new, some kind of corporate bioweapon, or maybe a closer examination would reveal the hardware under the thing’s fur.
There wasn’t time for that, though, since at that moment the dog’s howl was answered by another, and then another, and then still more, the replies coming from different streets. Swearing, Johnny did a quick head count of how many bullets he had for the Malorian. If he could hit them all center of mass, he might be able to put down enough to make the rest think twice.
As the canine shapes emerged from the shadows or came around corners, eyes burning and strings of drool hanging from their jagged teeth, he realized he may not have had enough rounds.
All of the creatures came charging at him, and Johnny snapped off shot after shot, the bullets finding their marks and more and more of the hellhounds dropping lifeless to the ground. It didn’t slow the others though, the monsters frightened neither by the sounds of gunfire nor by their packmates dying.
After the fourth monster died, the gun clicked empty.
Johnny ejected the empty magazine and went for another, but the remaining five dogs were almost on him, and the nearest one released a sound, something between a bark and a roar, and sprang toward him, claws outstretched and jaws wide.
And then it slowed to a stop in midair, jaws snapping closed short of its target. It was yanked backward, and Johnny realized there was a line of translucent thread attached to it, like a spiderweb. At the other end of the web was a red haired woman in a black and white bodysuit. Taking a step back, the redhead swung the hellhound around in a wide arc, slamming it into the concrete wall of a building, the sound of its bones shattering audible even over the roaring of the remaining four growling. As two of those rushed her, she jumped up off the ground and stuck to the wall, somehow climbing straight up the sheer surface, rapidly moving up out of the dogs’ reach. Taking the opportunity the newcomer had just given him, Johnny slammed a fresh magazine into the Malorian and chambered a round. Taking aim, he fired two shots into the hellhounds still coming after him.
The two trying to reach the wall-crawling woman were abruptly redirected when one of them took a bullet from someone other than Johnny. The shooter, a young man with an overcoat, carrying an assault rifle, advanced down a connecting street, firing again to finish off the hound he had just wounded. The final monster charged him, but before it could get to him, the last member of the team stepped forward, an Asian woman in blue jeans, a button-down shirt and a leather jacket, her hair done up in little buns.
Placing herself in the hellhound’s path, the woman settled into a martial arts ready stance. As Johnny watched, the monster snarled and leaped at her, and when its arc brought it into range, the woman swung her whole body into a roundhouse kick that connected with its head, catapulting it across the pavement. It wasn’t dead, merely temporarily stunned, and Johnny moved to finish it off, but before he could the Asian woman drew a massive handgun of her own, took aim and shot the beast through its misshapen face.
As the last of the monsters went still, the Asian woman approached Johnny. Holstering her weapon, she smiled and extended a hand. Johnny said the only thing appropriate under the circumstances.
“What the hell is going on?” This actually prompted a small laugh from the woman.
“Believe me,” she said, “I know how you feel. Come with us and we’ll explain what we can.”
“Spinneret,” Chun-Li said over the radio, “what do things look like from up there?”
Spinneret - Marvel (Earth-18119)- (https://i.imgur.com/YA3RrlB.jpg)
“You’re clear so far,” Mary Jane replied. She was perched about six stories up, watching the streets to see if any more of the dogs were coming their way. “The gunfire got the zombies’ attention, like Kyle figured, but you guys have time to move. Head...um…” She would normally have given a direction at this point, but she realized that with the constant cloud cover, she couldn’t exactly say where North, South, East or West were, and obviously she couldn’t exactly use street signs.
“From where you’re standing,” she finally said, “follow the street just to your right for about half a mile, and I’ll get up ahead and get a better idea of how to route you around them.
Post-apocalyptic GPS, she thought, unable to keep from smiling. Not the kind of job I expected to have growing up. The thought caused the smile to disappear. As she swung from building to building, MJ couldn’t help but think about everyone back home. How was Peter doing without her? Was he struggling to take care of Annie? As she landed on the side of an apartment building near the intersection she’d sent the others to, she couldn’t help wondering about how she could get home. She hadn’t been in this city too long, but it had become clear that no one actually understood how they’d all gotten here, and no one in the group seemed to be working on finding out how they had or how to reverse it.
One day at a time, she thought. We have to stay alive now before we can figure out how to get back. She tried to push the worries from her mind as Chun-Li and Kyle approached, followed by their rescue. The new guy’s arm was clearly some kind of advanced cybernetics, which made MJ wonder about the world he had come from. Was it advanced enough that he’d be able to help them figure things out here?
Then again, the Winter Soldier had had an arm like that, and he hadn’t been the kind to breach dimensions.
“Okay,” Chun-Li said. “Where to now?” Mary Jane held the radio up to her mouth to speak again, but then stopped when she saw… something.
“Hold up, guys,” she said quietly. “I think I see something in the building across from me.” One of the buildings on the other side of the street seemed to have caught fire some time ago, the lower two floors having partially burned. The windows were open now, none of the glass remaining, and the uneven burning resulted in irregular bits of blackened wall sticking up along the window frames, providing cover for anyone inside.
On the second floor, something human-shaped was moving behind that cover. The lithe form was low to the floor, moving on all fours. The only humanoid things MJ had seen since getting here were the gargoyle monsters that occasionally passed overhead, forcing all of them to take cover lest they draw the attention of a group of the things. This was different; something she’d never seen before. In the shadowed recesses of the burnt out floor, only its general shape could be made out.
Its general shape and the two pinpoints of its glowing green eyes, locked onto the trio down below.
Not today, MJ thought. We’ve lost enough people recently.
Firing a line of web at the other building, she let go of the wall she was on, swinging down and passing through the missing windows, feet extended to drive a kick into the monster.
Just before she entered the building, however, those green eyes, pupils slitted like a snake’s, caught sight of her, and the thing in the shadows recoiled, vaulting away from her just before impact and landing in a crouch about six feet away.
As it evaded her attack, the thing passed nearer to another window and into a patch of light, and Mary Jane realized it looked very human. The woman was clad in tight, form-fitting attire for unimpeded movement, with long pants and what looked like a vest as a top, covered in brown and red patterns that almost resembled snake scales. The partially opened zipper revealed the inner slopes of the woman’s breasts and a chest covered in intricate black tattoos. Her blonde hair was cut very short, and a stripe of black color, almost like a domino mask, covered the area around those vibrant, reptilian eyes. Aside from the eyes, she looked completely human.
Well, not completely.
MJ wasn’t sure if they were part of the elbow-length gloves she was wearing or not, but the index and middle fingers on both of the woman’s hands extended into long, threatening claws.
Still, dangerous appearance aside, she looked far more human than anything they’d seen in the city thus far, and there were no signs of decay like with the zombies. It occurred to Mary Jane that she may have made a mistake.
Before she could open her mouth to say anything, though, the other woman hissed at her and lunged.
Her spider-sense kicked in just before the attack, and MJ twisted out of the way, one of the woman’s clawed hands just missing her. She immediately fired a burst of webbing at her, but the other woman ducked behind a support pillar and evaded the snare.
“Hang on a sec—” MJ started, but cut off when the other woman attacked again. The redhead evaded the claws again, and this time grabbed the arm used to attack her, pulling on it and yanking the other woman off balance. Before she could recover, MJ swung around behind her and grabbed her other arm, pinning both behind her back.
“Now just calm down,” she said, but instead of answering, the strange woman dropped down, pressing her legs together and sliding them through Mary Jane’s, the sudden shifting of weight knocking her off balance now, and in order to avoid falling on her head she was forced to release the snake-like woman and catch herself with her hands. Immediately she rolled out of the way to avoid another claw strike. Gaining some distance, she got back to her feet, the two women regarding each other.
Okay. Hard way it is.
As the snake woman prepared to attack again, MJ snared a chunk of debris, what looked like a half-melted chair, with a strand of web and slung it at her. The other woman ducked under the chair, but that put her in place for MJ’s next attack. She shot out two lines of web, anchoring each line to the wall either side of the stranger. Yanking hard, she slingshotted herself straight at the other, drawing up both legs and kicking the snake woman in the abdomen hard enough to knock her sprawling. Mary Jane moved in to bind her with webbing, but the infuriatingly nimble woman lashed out with her claws, and while the spider-sense allowed her to dodge, the redhead was still kept back enough for the snake woman to flip over onto her front and launch herself forward, slamming into MJ’s stomach and knocking her to the floor.
Landing atop her abdomen, the snake woman brought her claws forward, aiming for MJ’s face, but the redhead seized her by the wrists and rolled, flipping them over and reversing their positions. When the stranger tried to push back up, Mary Jane let go of the arm she’d been holding with her right hand, and gripped her opponent’s throat, pushing her back down. The arm she’d released came up, but Mary Jane’s face was high up enough that she was able to avoid anything more than a few scratches. It hurt, but it would hardly be lethal.
“Now, for the love of God, let’s talk.” Beneath her, the snake woman smiled, her reptilian eyes meeting Mary Jane’s.
“Demasiado tarde, ya estás muerta,” she sneered, and then, suddenly, their positions changed again. The snake woman’s left foot pushed off the ground, raising her hips up enough that she was able to wrap her right leg over Mary Jane’s shoulder and push her off, holding onto the arm at her throat and trapping the redhead in a vicious triangle choke.
MJ squirmed, trying to break free, but her overextended arm was being bent agonizingly back on itself, and the snake woman’s legs were closing tight over her throat, leaving her little room to breathe, making the snake comparison unpleasantly accurate. She was strong enough to break out of it; she was more than strong enough, but there was another problem.
The scratches on her face had begun to sting. Mary Jane couldn’t see them, but from the burning sensation she wouldn’t be surprised if they were turning red. It went beyond that too. She was able to keep enough of her airway open that breathing should still have been possible, but she was struggling to pull any air in. It wasn’t that her windpipe was closed. In fact, as it became harder and harder to breathe, the snake woman was actually relaxing the hold on her neck, though her grip on Mary Jane’s arm wasn’t lessening at all. No, the problem was much bigger.
Mary Jane’s heart was racing, blood thundering through her veins, but when she tried to breathe in, nothing happened. It was only with great effort that she managed to drag a breath in, audibly wheezing as it felt like an iron band was constricting around her chest. Each breath she managed to take was smaller and smaller, her lungs burning as she tried to get enough air. Thinking again of the burning scratches on her face, she drew the logical conclusion.
Poison.
Yes, the voice inside her head said. MJ was struggling to break free, even to just stay alive. She didn’t have the strength to keep the symbiote under control.
What is it? She thought.
We can taste the poison in your blood. It is working on your muscles, paralysing your diaphragm. You have less than a minute before you suffocate.
MJ half expected the alien thing to be mocking her, but it wasn’t. In fact, it sounded almost frightened.
We can purge the poison from your body, it said quickly, but you must release us! We cannot stop this while you hold us bound like this.
That was a trick, and she knew it. She was holding the monster by the tail, and the second she let go it would take her over, just like it had when she’d first been given the black suit. She wasn’t about to let that happen again.
She tried to get up, to throw off her attacker, but now she could barely move, the lack of oxygen weakening her muscles to the point that she would never be able to overpower the snake woman.
The strain burned yet more oxygen, and now darkness crept in from the corners of her vision, squeezing in on reality with the horrible certainty of death itself.
There was no way to do this; no way out.
She was going to die.
Her family would never see her again.
Mary Jane released all control over the symbiote.
The reaction was immediate. The darkness began to retreat from her vision, and the next time she ordered her muscles to work, they did, air rushing back into her lungs. The feeling in her limbs, which she hadn’t even realized had been numbing, came back full force.
Even more surprising, when she ordered her limbs to move, they followed her directions. She had expected to find herself a prisoner in her own body, but she was still in control.
In control and with more of her strength returning by the second.
Turning her head, she looked over at the snake woman, whose expression was rapidly shifting from triumphant to puzzled, and then to frightened.
“¿Que?” she asked, just before Mary Jane made full use of her returning strength. Turning over, she used her extended arm, the one being held, and simply threw the other woman as hard as she could.
The snake woman’s surprised state caused her to lose her grip, and she was flung across the room, bouncing along the floor before coming to a stop just in front of one of the pillars. Shooting a line out to the pillar itself, MJ pulled on it hard, launching herself across the room and bringing her other arm out, catching the rising woman on the chin and clotheslining her. She dropped to the ground, momentarily dazed, and MJ seized the opportunity. Her hand snapped out and she webbed the woman’s legs together, and then to the ground, before pinning both of the woman’s wrists underfoot, stretching herself into a split that would’ve made an Olympian proud in the process. Finally, she seized her by the throat with one hand, pinning her head to the ground.
The snake woman bucked and squirmed as best she could, but she was completely helpless beneath Mary Jane, her luminescent green eyes bulging in shock.
“Now,” Mary Jane said, wiping her hair out of her face. “You are going to calm down, not try to kill me, and we are going to talk.”
“If you think Makoto might have climbed down,” April O’Neil said, “then why aren’t we following her route?”
April O'Neil - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles- (https://i.imgur.com/d5c77nz.jpg)
“Makoto may have climbed down from the water main room,” Isabeau said, “but that is likely not to be our best approach. Miss Kiryuin and our... unusual friend were able to ascend from that room, but they have abilities we don’t. It would be wisest to descend using a route we can also take back up.”
April nodded. That makes sense, she thought.
“And on top of that, you could fall while climbing down through the hole, and I do not wish to spend precious time ferrying you back to the medical ward.”
That… also makes sense. Could have phrased that a little more politely, though.
The two of them had just finished checking every vent grating in the bunker, or their level of it anyway. None of the grates were warped, save for the one in the storeroom that had been bent out of shape by the… giant octopus creature they had found dead in the room, and none of the screws used to anchor them to the wall had been broken off, so they hadn’t been popped out and then put back.
That left searching the lower floors as their best bet to find their missing person, and it was down to just Isabeau and her now.
April wouldn’t have minded Night Eyes being with them. Aside from the alien’s high tech gear and likely ability to kill just about anything that might be down here, it simply wasn’t every day you got to talk to somebody from another solar system.
Granted, April was on good terms with four humanoid turtles and the rat man who served as their master, so this wasn’t quite as weird as it could have been, but it still would have been nice.
It wasn’t possible, though. Night Eyes had stayed with them while he healed, but eventually his wounds had closed, and three days ago he had left the bunker. Apparently he had picked up traces of others of his species in the city, and he’d gone out to resume looking for them. April hoped he’d find them, and that they’d be friendly.
You need all the friends you can get around here, she thought, looking again at the Victorian woman walking just ahead of her.
As the two continued through the hall, they eventually reached its end, the area where the acid-bleeding monster had apparently been hiding while it healed from being burned. Here, in the left-hand wall, was a set of metal double doors, a button set into the wall beside them.
“I had hoped there would be a lift,” Isabeau said. “Very good; we can use this to reach the level below.” Thankfully there were no mechanical issues or power failure, and the doors slid open at the push of a button. Stepping inside, April checked the panel next to the door, and tilted her head.
“Huh,” she said. “That’s kind of weird: an elevator that only goes down one floor.”
“It makes perfect sense,” Isabeau said. “This is likely a military structure. The limited range of the lift ensures that if the upper floor is taken, enemies can be stopped here. Simple enough.” April gritted her teeth somewhat. There was nothing condescending about what she had said, but how she had said it was another thing completely.
She was trying to figure out what to say next when their short trip down came to an end, the doors slid open, and both of them suddenly had other things on their mind.
“Holy shit,” April said.
“Mind your language, Miss O’Neil,” Isabeau said curtly, and April took a small amount of satisfaction in her irritation.
Simply put, the floor below was bigger than the one they’d been living on. Way bigger. The elevator doors opened in a corner, at the intersection of two long halls. One stretched out directly ahead of them, running straight and unobstructed for quite a ways until it came to an end in another door. It looked tiny from here, but to April it seemed like there might be another elevator at the far end of the hall.
The second hall stretched off to their left, appearing to run about as far as the first, and yet another apparent elevator door was visible at the far end of that.
The walls were the same near-featureless concrete as above, though there were doors set into them along the length of the hall. April also noticed that on the wall away from the doors, something had been painted on the concrete. There had been something painted near the elevator on the upper level as well, “SA-NW”, but here there were actual words.
“Level One,” April read, and then blinked. She and Isabeau looked at each other for a moment.
“Level One?” both women said at the same time.
“How big is this place?”
“Larger than any of us suspected, to be sure,” Isabeau said. “At any rate, based upon where we are, and where the water main room was in relation to the elevator…” She looked up at the ceiling, no doubt envisioning the floor above, and then began moving with a sense of certainty to her. Most of the doors were on one side of the hall, but there was one by itself on the other side, and the knight went straight to it.
Thankfully, at least on Level One—Level freaking One, April thought again, shaking her head—no complex security measures were in place to keep doors closed, and they sported the same type of switch that they had on the upper floor. With a simple twist, the door slid open, and as April and Isabeau stepped through into a massive storeroom, easily eighty feet from one wall to the other.
“We are beneath the water main,” Isabeau said. She was looking up at the ceiling, at the hole leading up to the floor above, but April had confirmed their location another way: the spots near the door where the concrete had been burned by acid when Satsuki and Night Eyes had killed the monster.
The body was gone, of course. Night Eyes had helped transport the thing up to the incinerator, as none of them had wanted to risk it starting to regenerate again. Nonetheless, even without the carcass, here was no mistaking what had happened here.
Proceeding into the room, the two women swept it one aisle at a time, calling for Makoto as they went. No one answered, and while they ran across old signs of the battle with the creature, there was no fresh blood, no scraps of torn clothing and, thankfully, no corpse.
That wasn’t to say they didn’t find anything of interest. During the fight, some of the large wooden crates had been knocked free of the stacks they were placed in and had broken open upon impact with the floor. April wasn’t sure what she’d expected to find, but there was food in here. Real food, not the stuff from the military rations they’d been eating so far, but rice, pasta and all manner of canned food, the makings of a far more appetizing meal. Judging by how many of the crates there were in the room, and assuming each one contained similar supplies, there were years worth of food down here.
At one end of the warehouse were metal doors, distinct from the elevator, and immediately recognizable to anyone who’d been to a butcher’s shop or a large grocery store. Sliding them open revealed walk-in freezers filled with frozen meat and vegetables. No ice cream, April sadly noted, but that probably would have been too much to ask.
“Well there’s a silver lining to this whole thing,” she said, looking at Isabeau. “Looks like we can make some real dinners from here on out!” She thought Isabeau would be pleased, as the aristocrat had never made a secret of not liking the military food they’d been able to find upstairs. Instead, the attempted levity seemed to make her more upset.
“Miss O’Neil,” she said, audibly frustrated, “I understand this entertains you, but we have a missing person to find. Now, if you don’t mind, Makoto obviously isn’t here. We should continue our search.” She spun on one heel and headed for the door.
April sighed. She was doing her best to understand. The other woman came from a different time, another country… and she was worried. Makoto was her friend.
Makoto is her friend, April corrected herself. What did it say about this place that as soon as someone went missing, she assumed they were dead?
Still, even keeping all of that in mind, Isabeau was pushing her, and there had to be some kind of a limit to what she was going to put up with.
Leaving the warehouse behind, the two of them moved to the next closest room. April hadn’t really paid attention to the words just outside the warehouse door, but here she did, noting the word “library” just before Isabeau opened the room up and they went inside.
It was somewhat smaller than the warehouse, but nonetheless the library was massive. Shelves filled with books stood nearly twelve feet high, with the odd sliding ladder attached to them, and the combined effect created a maze, making the large room feel uncomfortably closed in.
Then again, that may just be because of where they were. Back in New York, April probably would have found this cozy. When flesh-eating worms, giant octopuses and acid-bleeding monsters could come out of the vents or around the corner, cozy became claustrophobic very fast.
“Stay beside me,” Isabeau said, and for whatever issues April might have had with the woman, she wasn’t about to protest.
Makoto wasn’t in this room either, but like with the storeroom and freezers, there was a lot to be found here. Winding their way through the bookshelves, they eventually came to a more open area with chairs, a screen on the wall, and several electronic devices arrayed through the room.
April caught Isabeau looking curiously at the machines, and pointed to them.
“Those are a microfilm projector and a microfiche viewer,” she said, and at the other woman’s puzzled look added “they’re like photographs, but a lot smaller, so you need a special device to look at them.” Isabeau sighed, nodded and kept moving. April followed her to the end of the viewing area, taking one look back. That look made her hesitate.
Something was wrong. She didn’t know what it was, but there was something...off here. She made a mental note of it, figuring she’d get back to it later, after they’d explored more of the floor or found the girl.
Deeper into the library was something April was honestly a little surprised to see: a computer terminal. So much of the stuff in here was really retro, but then again there was a microwave up in the kitchen...or at least there had been before the Spoon Incident.
Moving on, they finally reached the end of the room, and with no sign of Makoto, Isabeau took a deep breath and turned to head back to the door. April moved to follow, but once again, something caught her eyes, something far more obvious this time.
In one of the aisles between bookshelves, there was a box on the floor. Nothing like the massive crates from the warehouse, it was the sort of thing you could pick up with both hands and carry. It shouldn’t have seemed so strange, but there was nothing else on the floor anywhere in the library, and April found herself drawn to it. Walking down the aisle, she crouched down next to the thing and lifted the lid off, finding glass bottles inside. Her eyes narrowing, she picked one of them up, then another and another, reading the labels on each of them.
Amoxicillin, doxycycline, metronidazole…
She’d done a few reports on hospital conditions, and she knew that amoxicillin was another name for penicillin, just about the most famous antibiotic there was, but hadn’t they run out of those? Chun-Li, Kyle, Spinneret and Isabeau had all gone out to the hospital just to find more of them, but there were more of them here?
They would never have been stored here in the library, and that meant…
“Miss O’Neil, we have to go,” Isabeau said from behind her.
“Hang on a minute,” she said. “I found this box, and I think this is something im—”
“There is a person missing. I don’t care about a box.”
“Listen to me here. This is strange, and—”
“Miss O’Neil, I am aware that the Irish are not burdened with an abundance of self control, but is it too much to ask that you focus on the problem here?”
And there was the line, the limit to what she was going to put up with. Fine. Isabeau didn’t want to hear about this? Then she wouldn’t. Whatever was going on here, April would figure it out herself, and then maybe this stuck up Victorian bitch could hear about it.
As she followed the other woman out to continue their search, her thoughts returned to the sense of wrongness from the projector area. Nothing had been broken; nothing had been displayed on the screen. As she thought about it, it had to do with the chairs themselves, the ones set up for viewing. It was a little thing, and for other people it was probably insignificant.
April O’Neil, however, was a reporter. In her line of work, little details always meant something. After an interview, she would play her footage back, watching the expressions on the subject’s face when she asked her questions. The little details, the flickers of emotion, the mechanical control exercised to keep any tells from showing, they were all clues, hints that a humanitarian was pocketing charity money, that a politician was having an affair, or that a local business might be front for the mob.
The little details always meant something.
And that was why she was focusing on the chairs. They had all been neat and tidy, as had everything in the library, like the place had been carefully cleaned and set up for them before they arrived. All of the bunker had been like that, as far as she had heard from the others, and the chairs were no different, all spaced evenly apart, all aligned ruler straight.
All except one.
One of those chairs had been slanted somewhat, as if someone had pulled it out to sit in, and then had put it back just a little out of alignment.
Someone had been down here before them, someone who had wanted those antibiotics hidden.
April had a pretty good idea who that might be.
Isabeau was finding it difficult to maintain her calm as she walked back into the medical area with April. The fact that there had been no sign of Makoto on the lower level, but also no sign of a body, placed her in a deeply upsetting limbo, caught somewhere between hope and fear. She wanted to believe they hadn’t found a body because the girl was simply somewhere else. It was, in fact, entirely possible.
But in this city, with everything they had borne witness to, it was so very hard not to assume the worst.
However things turned out, Isabeau D’Argyll could not show her worry. It was her responsibility to keep others from fear, and remaining calm, at least in front of others, was a vital part of that.
That was why, as she approached the bed where Satsuki was waiting, she took a slow, deep breath and released it gradually, taking care that when she spoke, her voice was level and controlled.
“The vent covers remain in place,” she said. “There is no evidence that anything new has forced its way into the bunker.”
“Very good,” the girl replied. “What about your search of the floors below?”
“Our search is far from complete,” Isabeau said, “but there are still no signs of Miss Makoto.”
“I’m sorry, Isabeau,” Satsuki said, and Erzsebet, walking back over to the bed to change the bag attached to Satsuki’s “intravenous” line as she had called it, nodded.
“It’s always terrible when someone goes missing here,” the doctor said, “especially someone so young. Still,” she said with a reassuring smile, “she could turn up, especially since, as I understand it, you haven’t found any evidence of violence.” Isabeau shook her head.
“I know you didn’t find Makoto,” Satsuki said, “but what did you learn about the lower floors?”
“The floor below is pretty huge,” April said, “but there’s a label near the elevator that says ‘Level One’, so this place is even bigger than that. We didn’t want to go any further down without backup, but at the same time there’s a lot on Level One. There’s a pretty serious library down there, with books, projectors for microform stuff and a computer system of some kind, though we obviously didn’t stop to check that out.”
April went on to describe some of the other features of the level they had found, like the exercise area, but did not mention the box she had become so fixated upon in the library. Isabeau decided she must have felt embarrassed for becoming distracted as she had, and she decided that if the woman had learned her lesson, then she wouldn’t chasten her further by bringing it up. One thought did bring a smile to Isabeau’s face, though.
“You may be pleased to learn one thing,” she said. “Given your brave endurance of what passed for breakfast this morning, it may interest you to know that the storage room you and our alien visitor slew the creature in contains a substantial amount of far more palatable food.”
Satsuki didn’t say anything, but her prominent brows rose hopefully.
“It is still dried or sealed in tins, but nonetheless, it should make for far more enjoyable meals in the future.”
“Well,” Erzsebet said, “it looks like this situation does have a silver lining.” Isabeau nodded, glancing over at April, and pausing for a moment as she saw the woman looking intently at Erzsebet, as if deep in thought. Isabeau was tempted to ask exactly what she was thinking about when she caught the distant rumbling of the surface access door opening. All of the women looked at each other for a moment.
“I’d best go see to that,” Isabeau said. Leaving the others in Medical, she turned the switch, went through the door and headed down the corridor toward the entrance.
There were times Isabeau wished there were an alarm of some sort when the heavy door opened. At present, the bunker was protected by the fact that it took some searching to discover the hidden switch that opened the door from the outside, but some of the creatures they faced were smarter than others. If there was anything outside like the black monster they had recently killed, then it would be nice to know it was coming before it made it to whatever room you were in.
For the moment, though, Isabeau had done her best to familiarize herself with the sound the door motors made when they were activated, so she could be ready should anything...unpleasant be making its way in.
Fortunately for her, nothing had found the door switch yet. Instead, it was their search and rescue team that came down the stairs. In addition to Chun-Li, Kyle and Spinneret, there were two new arrivals, a man with a strange, artificial arm, a guitar of some make hanging from a strap on his shoulder, and a costumed woman wrapped in Spinneret’s webs. The woman looked understandably displeased, slung over Spinneret’s shoulder as she was, her green eyes moving rapidly as she took in her new environment. As they met Isabeau’s the knight realized the pupils were elliptical, like those of a cat, or perhaps a snake, and for a moment she considered the thought of reptilian half-breeds, but then dismissed it. The Order had never seen such creatures, and if the woman were a half-breed, Isabeau imagined she would have transformed earlier, making the group considerably less likely to bring her in.
Whatever the case, greetings were in order.
“Welcome back,” she said to Kyle. “I see the search proved fruitful.”
“Looks that way,” he said. “Had a bit of trouble with this one, as you can probably guess,” at which he indicated the woman. “Not entirely sure she understands what we’re saying, but we did still decide to bring her with us.” Isabeau nodded.
“Is the lack of understanding why you felt the need to bind her?” she asked. Kyle, Chun-Li and Spinneret all looked at each other, and there were a few rueful smiles.
“It wasn’t the best of meetings,” Spinneret said. “I’ll explain later.” At that point, Isabeau heard the sound of footsteps from behind her, and a glance back revealed April coming down the hall.
“Well,” she said, looking at the group, “it looks like you guys did okay today.”
“Any day we can bring people back is a good one,” Chun-Li said. “Don’t want anyone lost out there.”
The phrasing was, Isabeau knew, innocent enough, but it brought her back to what was happening inside the bunker, to the lower levels and to the girl they still hadn’t found.
“Miss O’Neil,” she said, turning to look back at April, “as you observed, we have some new arrivals, and the team’s experience in the city has obviously not been without stress. You pointed out some of the goods we found downstairs. Now that we know Level One is secure, perhaps you would be willing to fetch them something to eat.” April looked somewhat puzzled, but nodded and headed off.
Isabeau sighed, just a little. Sending April away meant one less person around her, one less pair of eyes watching her, and she felt like maybe that would help her keep control of herself. It was, after all, her responsibility to remain calm.
No matter how hard that might be.
Chun-Li had gotten used to eating the instant military food they’d found on their level of the bunker, and had even begun to convince herself that she was enjoying it.
All of that effort was ruined when April passed her some food she had apparently found while searching the floor below. It turned out the giant storeroom Satsuki and Night Eyes had chased the monster into was full of stuff like this. It wasn’t much, just baked beans and sausage extracted from a can and heated up on the stove, and it definitely didn’t measure up to the food she liked to pick up from the vendors in Hong Kong, but compared to what she had been eating, this was incredible.
Her enjoyment of the food was almost enough to make her forget to introduce the new arrivals. They had all gathered in the common room—even Satsuki, looking significantly worse for wear still, her pale skin glistening with fever sweat, had managed to make her way over from medical, an IV stand rolling along behind her— keen to see for herself who the search and rescue party had brought back.
“So, this is Johnny,” Chun-Li said, pointing to the man with the robotic arm, who was currently seated with the rest of them, his guitar resting up against the wall behind him. At the mention of his name, he leaned forward, extending his more normal hand out for April to shake, an easy smile on his face.
“I love your arm,” she said. “Looks like some kind of robotics.”
“Yeah,” he replied, a slightly bemused expression crossing his face. “What else would it be? It’s your standard cyberware, top of the line, natch. Got the ripperdoc to do a custom chrome job, though; makes kind of a statement, and you should see the way it looks under the stage lights during a show.”
“You mean a concert?” April said, and Chun-Li smirked, remembering her eager questioning of Tania last week. April had said she was a reporter, and she definitely had the personality for the job.
“Yeah, I actually just played a show,” Johnny said, pointing back at the guitar. “I was heading out when I ended up here.”
“How did you end up here?” Satsuki asked.
“Not a hundred percent on that,” Johnny said. “I walked out of the gig and right into this place. Figured maybe a Netrunner had jacked a huge part of the city and turned it all dark, but then when I went exploring these dog-things came after me.” He laughed, grinning broadly as he became more animated. “There was something up with them; looked like they’d been bred or wetwared deep in some corpo lab, and none too friendly. I flatlined a couple of ‘em with my piece here,” at this he indicated the handgun in his shoulder holster, “but the ammo ran dry and they just kept on coming. Looked like I was gonna end up bagged and tagged and then these folks…” he gestured to the team, his speech becoming more energetic, “...showed up and things got completely unhinged! Spider-Woman here is climbing the walls, Morgan fucking Blackhand over there,” he pointed at Kyle “starts flatlining everything that moves, and then your Nomad here,” he waved his silver hand at Chun-Li “kicks one of them down the street!” He paused for breath, grinning. “I gotta say, I’ve been in my share of Friday Night Firefights, but that was something else.”
Chun-Li couldn’t help but smile a little as she watched Satsuki work through Johnny’s vernacular. They’d all had to do that on the trip back.
“What year is it where you’re from?” the girl asked.
This seemed to give the musician pause for the first time. He cocked his head at Satsuki, puzzled.
“2020?” he said in a quizzical tone. Chun-Li watched Satsuki blink, and then shake her head and just go with it. They’d all come to accept by now that people weren’t just from the past or future, but that they could be from any possible past or future. While the policewoman knew it was possible that her world would eventually become Johnny’s, what she’d heard so far didn’t seem to indicate that was the case.
Granted, Chun-Li found herself thinking of where Kyle had come from, and thinking she’d rather that her world turned into Johnny’s than Kyle’s.
The memory of their talk in the dorms last night brought a little blush to her cheeks. She looked over at Kyle, and he gave her a little smile in return.
“Who is our second guest, then?” Isabeau asked, nodding in the direction of the woman they’d brought back. She was still restrained, thick bands of Mary Jane’s webbing wrapped around her upper body like a straitjacket, and even around her ankles. Mary Jane had insisted on it when they started heading back, and had hoisted the blonde onto her shoulder with one arm as though she weighed nothing at all. Chun-Li still wasn’t entirely sure if the relatively slight-looking woman warranted such measures. Nonetheless, while no weapons were pointed at her, they were still keeping an eye on her.
“Spinneret found her in a burned out building while we were on our way back with Johnny,” Chun-Li said. “She wasn’t in the friendliest mood.”
“We had a talk,” Mary Jane said.
“Yeah,” Kyle added. “We could hear the talk from down on the street. It sounded like the kind where bullets get exchanged.”
“It got a little heated,” the redhead acknowledged, “but we worked it out. Now we haven’t gotten an actual name yet…”
“Te llamas Spinneret,” the short-haired blonde with the snake eyes said. “Yo no creo que ese nombre, sea tú nombre verdadero.”
“She says that she doesn’t believe ‘Spinneret’ is your actual name,” Isabeau said, prompting Spinneret to shrug and nod.
“Yeah, no duh. Tell her to tell us what her name is,” she said.
“¡Yo no tomó ordenes de una perra como tu!” the blonde barked, once Isabeau was finished asking.
“She is… not pleased by your line of questioning,” Isabeau answered, though Chun-Li couldn’t help but think from the expression on the aristocrat’s face that that wasn’t precisely what the new woman had said.
“¿Cómo se llama, por favor?” Isabeau asked next. The new arrival half-smiled.
“Normalmente me llamo la Víbora Cobriza.”
“She says that usually she’s known as ‘Copperhead’.”
Copperhead - Batman: Arkham Origins (https://i.imgur.com/B3i8jr2.jpg)
Still looking at the new woman, Copperhead, Isabeau asked “¿Habla inglés?”
“Oh yeah,” Copperhead replied. There was a collective groan from the members of the search and rescue team, and Kyle slapped a palm to his forehead.
“You could understand us the whole time?” he asked the woman. “Why didn’t you say that?”
“In my line of work,” Copperhead replied, “when someone beats you and ties you up, it’s usually better if you don’t cooperate.” Chun-Li thought that sounded familiar. Copperhead turned to Isabeau, green eyes gleaming.
“Where did you learn Spanish?”
Isabeau frowned slightly. “Spain, why?”
“I thought so. You sound like you have a mouthful of marbles. Castellano is so ugly,” the short-haired woman said brightly, a crooked grin on her dirty face.
“What is your line of work?” Mary Jane asked quickly, as Isabeau prepared to retaliate. Copperhead looked at her, like she was thinking about answering, but unsure.
“You work for the underworld,” Chun-Li said. When the others looked at her questioningly, she shrugged. “I work...or worked for Interpol. I brought in a lot of people who worked for international crime syndicates, like Shadaloo or others. They always figured it was better not to talk, because if they did, their bosses would come after them. Is that about it?” Copperhead shrugged.
“Kind of,” she said. “I’m freelance; I don’t work for any one group.”
“You’re a Solo,” Johnny said, before noticing the puzzled expressions in the room. “You know. Fighters; bodyguards, assassins, that sort of thing.” He seemed almost confused by their uncomprehension. “All the big corpos have some, basically their private armies, but there are a lot of ‘em who work freelance.” He looked at Copperhead more closely. “You don’t look quite like the kind I’ve seen, though. They’re usually ‘borged up to the eyeballs. You’re…” He trailed off, his eyes having gone a little lower than they should have. Chun-Li noticed Copperhead didn’t seem to mind, merely raising an eyebrow as she caught his wandering eye.
“I mean, you don’t look to have any hardware on you,” the cyborg finally said, “except maybe for the optics.”
“Oh, these?” the assassin said, blinking a few times to emphasize her eyes. “No, I might have had a little work done, but these are all mine. Helps with the image,” she added with a little grin.
Johnny smiled crookedly himself. “I dig it.”
“I just assumed she was part reptile,” April added, causing more than a few of them to stare at her. “What? I could tell you some stories about what goes on in the New York sewer system.”
“I take it that your ‘image’ is at least in part for what you mentioned earlier,” Isabeau said, “concerning your clientele not being entirely trustworthy?”
“It’s not just about the clients turning on me,” Copperhead said. “I just moved into Gotham, and that’s a town where there’s not much of a difference between the cops and the crooks.”
“I don’t know if this is good news or bad news,” Satsuki said, “but you are not in Gotham anymore.” Copperhead snorted, nodding a little.
“Kind of figured,” she said. “Gotham’s bad, but it’s not this bad. I had to stick to the shadows even more than normal after the first few people I found tried to bite me.” She frowned. “Or maybe they were going to do something else.”
“Yeah, they act like that,” Kyle said. “We’re still not entirely sure why; some kind of disease, maybe.”
“At any rate,” Satsuki said, “this place is secure. We’ve done our best to gather supplies and rescue other survivors, as well as to learn more about the city and how we might have gotten here.”
Copperhead nodded slowly, looking around at all of them. There was a brief moment where no one said anything.
“So… can you guys untie me now?” Chun-Li did her best to suppress a smile at the question while the bound woman looked again from one of them to the others. “I can’t feel my fingers.”
"I'm sorry about poisoning you,” she said to Spinneret. “I thought you were a monster. If you guys untie me I won't do it again."
“You just said you worked ‘freelance’ for criminal organizations,” Spinneret said, “and you didn’t disagree when Johnny mentioned bodyguards and assassins. We can read between the lines.”
Copperhead sighed with frustration.
"Okay, yeah, I've killed people. A lot of them didn't deserve it. I did it for money, to defend myself, or just because they pissed me off. But I'm not an idiot. If you can't trust me to be a good person, which I wouldn't either, really, then trust me not to be stupid. Why would I kill any of you when you're my best chance for staying alive?"
They were all quiet again as they considered her argument. Part of Chun-Li was weighing the odds. She was a killer, a self-admitted one, but at the same time, assuming she was sane, she didn’t have any real motivation to start picking them off. Moreover, she had gotten to the point rather quickly, which was kind of impressive.
“I say we untie her,” the policewoman said.
“This a gut feeling?” Mary Jane asked.
“I’ve done my fair share of interrogations; I’m pretty good at telling when people are lying.” She looked at Copperhead and added “and I don’t think she is.” As so often happened these days, all eyes eventually turned to Satsuki, who was regarding their new guest levelly. Eventually, she nodded.
“I agree,” she said. “Cut her loose.”
There was a moment of silence, during which the various members of the search and rescue team looked at each other.
“I...don’t think we can do that,” Spinneret said.
“What?” Johnny asked, looking back and forth between them. “Come on, you guys decided to cut her loose here; don’t back out on that.”
“Does anybody know how to do that?” Chun-Li asked. When Kyle shrugged, she looked at Spinneret. “This was your stuff. How do we cut through it?”
“Peter and I…” she scratched the back of her head, smiling nervously. “We’ve never actually had to do that. It does disintegrate after a few hours, though,” she said, looking at Copperhead, “so it will come off eventually.”
“You’re really not winning me over here, Red,” the assassin said, decidedly nonplussed. “C’mon guys, you’ve got to think of something. I really need to scratch my nose.”
“I don’t suppose my knife will be of much use here,” Isabeau asked, and Spinneret shook her head.
“Well maybe the Doc can do something,” Kyle suggested. “Maybe she can work up something that’ll dissolve the webbing.”
“Erzsebet is a medical doctor,” Isabeau said, “not some manner of omnidisciplinary scientist.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Chun-Li caught movement. As the debate over how to free their new guest continued, Satsuki shook her head and stood up, holding onto her IV stand with one hand as she walked over to Copperhead, her other hand holding the sheathed katana—Chun-Li blinked at the realization that even when bedridden and reduced to a hospital gown, she still had the sword on her—and stopped. Releasing the medical device, she popped the lock on the scabbard and drew the weapon, and then with a single fluid motion, slid it over the threads binding Copperhead’s arms. The webbing may have been tough, but the black blade slid through it as easily as it did the air, immediately freeing the woman.
“Thank you,” Copperhead said. Satsuki nodded and, without a word, sheathed the sword again, walked back over to her former position and sat down.
“Well,” Chun-Li said, looking over to Kyle and grinning sheepishly, “I guess that solves that problem.”
Copperhead moved over to Johnny, sitting down on the same crate he was, evidently wanting to stay with her fellow new arrival. Johnny shot her a smile, before looking back to others.
“So what’s the plan here?” he asked. “I mean, I really appreciate the save out there on the street, but I do have some things I need to take care of.”
“I don’t believe you’ll be able to do that,” Satsuki said. “At the moment, the plan is to integrate you two into the team here. We will need to learn about what skills you two possess, and see how they can best be used for our continued mission here.” Johnny shook his head.
“Look, I understand you have something big going on here, and I’m not asking you to escort me across town or anything, but I do need to get back to my section of the city and—”
“You’re not in your city anymore,” the girl said, “just as Copperhead isn’t in Gotham, Isabeau isn’t in London and I’m not at Honnouji. We aren’t entirely sure where we are, but we’ve all come here from different worlds, be they different times, different places or both. No one we’ve spoken to so far has recognized this city, and we're beginning to suspect it may not be any ordinary city.”
“Okay…” Johnny said. “So how do we get back?”
“We don’t know,” Spinneret said gently. “Believe me, we all want to,” she said, her expression somewhat pained, “but so far no one knows how we got here, so we don’t know how to get back.”
“We need to get our feet under us first,” Chun-Li said, meeting Johnny’s eyes, “and picking up as many new people as we can is part of that. I figure the more people we have, the better our chances of figuring out how this happened and getting back.”
“Thus, our mission,” Satsuki said. “Survive.”
The pictures I used in this chapter are from: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/zqmeD, https://www.deviantart.com/spiritius/art/Order-1886-Igraine-519308640, https://tinyurl.com/j8e7jt47 and https://www.artstation.com/jekowekow
If anyone wants to leave a review or comment on this story, please do so on this thread here: http://www2.adult-fanfiction.org/forum/topic/69143-mortuus-orbis-discussion-thread/
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Bunkerkampf (Mortuus Orbis Part Two)