When the duo had first been led to the showers, there had been some doubt amongst them that the rickety device would work at all. It looked abandoned, as if it hadn’t been used in years, and when the doctor escorting them first tried to power the apparatus up nothing seemed to happen. After a few minutes angrily flipping a switch and banging on the wall, though, the lights inside the small built-in shower turned on and the doctor excused himself with a smile.
Left alone with the so far malfunctioning shower, neither Jake nor Alice felt particularly inclined to test the barely functioning piece of equipment. Having watched Dr. Lewis’s struggle to get the piece of ancient machinery functioning again they now found their desire to bathe greatly diminished. Still, they didn’t know when they would next have a chance to comfortably… well… semi comfortably bathe like this so they needed to take advantage of it while they could.
Stepping forward to take the first crack at wrestling with the confusing and often malfunctioning controls of the shower, Jake left Alice to sit alone, wrestling with the facts presented by the doctor. Her body shivered reflexively when she thought of the doctor, his fake smiles and over-friendly gestures flipping through her head. She didn’t trust him, not a bit. She felt some relief to know she wasn’t alone in this, to know that Jake hadn’t fallen for whatever act he was trying to sell the two. Still though, as he took more and more blood from the two with a promise hanging in the air that more ‘Samples’ would be collected soon, she couldn’t help but shiver with unease.
She hated the idea of playing into the smiling doctor’s hands, playing along with his whims. It brought up memories of the chamber, dancing along helplessly to the voice''s commands powerless to resist. But there was little the two could do. They were trapped, locked in a lab he solely controlled with no hope of help or escape. Forced to dance to the doctor’s tune. Hopefully this time there would be a reward at the end of their subservience, yet in her heart of hearts, Alice greatly doubted that would be the case.
Still, though, this feeling of unease was almost welcome to her. The growing feeling of discomfort and paranoia that was beginning to set in the longer she stayed in lab 458, the disgust that crawled across her skin as the doctor took her blood. All welcome distractions from the horrid facts of their crash. She didn’t know what to think, what to trust.
She wanted more than anything to believe their accident had miraculously ended without anyone getting hurt, without any lasting damage. But Jake was right. That was too good to believe. Especially considering the source of these rumors of a safe crash. Alice doubted the doctor even remembered their names, hell, she wasn’t even certain he asked. He wasn’t trustworthy. Just another jailor to deal with, this dilapidated lab just another prison to wait in till morning.
As she sat curled on the floor, mind growing increasingly uneasy, the door to the shower opened with a noticeable amount of noise. It took a minute to fully open, giving Alice plenty of time to stand upright as Jake removed himself from the shower. His prison jumpsuit clung to his body, dripping with water and looking rather uncomfortable. His long black hair hung down over his eyes and into his face, wet and stringy.
“How was it?” She asked with mild interest watching as Jake trudged out of the shower and plopped to the floor.
“Terrible,” He said, voice somewhat muffled by the damp curtain of hair hanging over his head, “Pressures way too high and there’s no way to control it… it just starts. Also, there’s no towels or dryer so I’d expect to stay wet if I were you.”
“Lovely…” Alice said, a sarcastic edge lacking from her voice as she walked toward to shower in a haze of melancholic gloom. Stepping into the metallic chamber of the shower, Alice stood a moment unsure what to do next.
“Push that button there, the red one next to the door. None of the others did anything so don’t waste your time trying…” She heard Jake call behind her through the still-open door. Turning back to face the doorway she found a small metallic panel carved out next to the door frame. Thin and indented into the wall, it was easy to miss. Running her finger down the panel she stopped soon as it rested across a bit of metal, square and red, jutting from the panel.
Certain this had to be what Jake was talking about; she pushed down on the button. With a click, it sank into the indented panel. It did not pop back out like she’d expected it to. Instead, it remained intended and flush with the panel around it. A blaring alarm rang out around her, surprising both her and Jake who covered his sopping wet ears in surprise at the sudden sound.
“PLEASE STAND BY: WATER CYCLING: WATER CYCLING: WATER CYCLING: WATER…” A voice repeated this command over and over, echoing unbearably loud around the shower''s confined chambers. A few seconds later though the sound stopped and the door to the shower slammed shut with a loud sound of scrapping metal that set Alice’s nerves on end. Then, she found herself blasted forward by a sudden jet of water from behind.
She didn’t even have time to fully slam into the compact wall in front of her before an equally strong blast of water slammed into her front. Then from every direction jets of highly pressurized water slammed into her with enough force to leave her battered and bruised.
Despite Jake’s warnings, the sudden shock of the water left her dazed and confused as she struggled to find her footing, slipping amidst the cacophony of pressurized water. She felt her hair whirl around her face, caught in the whirlwind of water as all at once the prison jumpsuit she wore was soaked to the bone. She hadn’t thought of taking it off even after seeing how soaked Jake’s had become. She regretted that now.
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Managing to find a small gap in the barrage of water jets Alice fell forward slamming into the wall of the shower, her body shaking as she struggled to recover. The barrage of water still blasted into her from behind. All at once, however, the jets of water hitting her felt far away as pulsing pain rippled throughout her body. Sliding down against the wall to her knees, she coughed a cascade of blood up to the shower floor as her body felt like it was tearing itself apart.
She could feel the strings winding throughout her body tense, growing tauter and tauter as power struggled to vibrate throughout creating painful aftereffects that shook her body. She could feel the tangled knots of string that interwove themselves within screams in protest as another splattering of blood freed itself from her body. Her limbs, already screaming in pain, began to bleed, small dollops of blood leaking out and staining her jumpsuit as it mixed with the flow of water around her.
She could hear pounding on the door of the shower, the faint muffled cries of Jake on the other side drowned now by her continued cries of pain and the sound of the shower jets pounding her head endlessly, threatening to drown the screaming girl. Then, moments after the pain started, as Alice was bracing herself for the unending sensation of the taunting strings to worsen, the pain seemed to fade just as fast as it had come. She could feel the strings within slowly beginning to loosen, the collected power recirculating itself slowly and carefully as she was left gasping in pain on the shower floor, struggling to breathe amongst the deluge of water that fell around her.
Eventually, the pressurized streams of water slamming down upon her stopped. How much time passed as she simply laid there on the floor struggling to breathe she didn’t know. As the shower cycle came to an end, the door to the metallic chamber opened slowly with the same grinding sound as before. Jake forced his way into the confines of the shower before the door could even finish opening. Kneeling down next to her collapsed and shivering form, he took stook of the blood still staining her in diluted splotches.
“What happened?! Are you alright?” He asked, panic clear in his voice as he tried to help her upright.
“Fine… I’m fine, I think. I don’t know really. I thought I was Crumbling but… it was way too short. Way to tame…” Alice said as she allowed herself to be pulled upright into a seated position. Leaning against the slick wall of the shower behind her, she added, “It should be getting worse each time it happens, lasting for longer and longer. This time… I’ve never heard a case of the Crumbling improving with time.”
“Isn’t that good then?” Jake asked, some relief in his voice as he sat back from the panting form of Alice now safely propped upright. “Doesn’t that mean the work we did with the book so far has been helping?”
“But why?!” Alice asked, surprised herself at how desperate she sounded. In truth their work so far in trying to understand the Crumbling had mostly been guesswork carried out when they weren’t busy fighting to stay alive. They still really didn’t understand anything about it.
“Hey, you got me. I’m not a magician. But it’s working, and if the Crumbling is improving now that just means more time to figure it out, right?”
Alice opened her mouth, glancing up above Jake prepared to say something else but froze in her tracks. There leaning against the wall opposite the shower was the intern, Simon. He had a look of utter boredom on his face and clutched in his hands was a series of folded bundles of cloth.
“Oh, don’t mind me!” Simon said, noticing Alice had made eye contact with him. “Dr. Lewis just thought you may need these.” He unceremoniously dumped the bundles upon the two, watching as they jumped in surprise, pushing back away from the intern further into the shower. “There just some towels, the shower heater probably doesn’t work so… sorry about that. Go ahead and dry yourself, I''ll take you to a place where you can rest. Won’t have much time to rest, we still have some tests to run before you leave, but better than nothing right?”
Smiling an empty smile toward the pair, Simon strolled out of view leaving the two to dry off in silence.
<hr>
Simon smiled to himself as he stalked across Lab 458. They definitely didn’t trust him. I mean, the looks in their eyes when they spotted him. If looks could kill! Their trust in Dr. Lewis probably wasn’t any better. It was harder to confirm that since the topic hadn’t come up. What had come up though, left Simon deeply fascinated.
“…Crumbling…Magician…” he muttered to himself as he stalked closer towards Dr. Lewis’s workstation. The doctor was absent from it now. Busy preparing the data collection chamber the two would breach from. There was a lot to do to prepare this chamber, new sensors to calibrate, programs to update, cameras to install, etc. etc. Simon expected he’d have to break his back working overtime to help with getting it ready but instead Dr. Lewis had given him a much different set of instructions.
He was currently tasked with going through all the pairs belongings, categorizing them, and taking samples. He was also expected to take further biological data from the two when the time came. He’d even be expected to examine the water collected during their shower. All of it was mind numbing work, degrading to someone like him. Though he may be an intern on paper, in practice, he served as the Lab’s only remaining researcher. He shouldn’t be relegated to such idiotic work.
Still, though, there was a silver lining to be found in the doldrums of his assigned tasks. Picking up one of the many vials of blood the doctor had collected, Simon turned it over in his hands till the small print label was visible to him.
“SPECIMEN 2: GENDER – FEMALE – VIAL – 2:5”
He found his mind wandering back to the first time he’d encountered the duo in prison. They’d seemed utterly unremarkable, a pair of morons over their heads arguing and begging for mercy. He could hardly believe the importance they held. Only one thing had stood out to him the entirety of his visit. The woman, her skin was cracked. Covered in scars that seemed to break the skin like glass, leaving her flesh peeling in massive cracked chunks. He’d never seen anything like it.
“Not biologically different, huh?” Simon asked himself with a light chuckle, mocking Dr. Lewis’s assessment as he pocketed the vial of blood. Five vials would be nowhere near enough. Not for the tests he was planning.