DGS4 Phase 4-5 -- Biological Wing

[The Man in Red]

Persons Present:
Rebecca Chambers
Sebastian Moran
Sherlock Holmes
Albert Wesker

The corridor was mercifully quiet and clean after the gore and chaos just moment before. Lit with stark white fluorescent lightning, flickering occasionally with the seemingly damaged state of everything, it still maintained a comparatively quiet atmosphere, if not quite a peaceful one.

Further ahead, a set of doors slid open soundlessly at Rebecca's approach, revealing something that had probably once been an office, now turned into a partially fortified emergency bunker in the wake of whatever had been going on at this facility lately.

One wall was devoted to an array of monitors and displays, seemingly hooked up to security cameras and feeds throughout the biological wing. A profusion of different supplies, materials, weapons and the like was stacked haphazardly among a set of shelving clearly procured from elsewhere. A second set of doors across the room was currently locked, judging by the glaringly obvious red light glowing above them. And lastly, seated at the lone desk in the room, was...the man of the hour, who had just spoken over the intercom.

"Not a meeting I expected to ever have again," he murmured, slowly rising up from his seated posture. One of the lenses of his sunglasses were cracked, his dark suit was disheveled and scratched and torn, his labcoat was stained with blood and soot and ash and torn to ragged shreds at its hems...but it was unmistakable. Albert Wesker, in the flesh. "I must say...when the Man in Red's emergency protocols promised backup in the event of an emergency, I wasn't expecting the likes of you to turn up. He hasn't co-opted this into one of his ridiculous 'games' by any chance, has he?"

A faint smirk creased the self-titled god's face as he lifted a gloved hand to adjust his sunglasses. "....of course, all that aside. I imagine you have no shortage of questions, and maybe a few accusations to throw, if I remember you at all. Perhaps we should get that out of your system before we move on to the matter at hand?"

 

[Rebecca Chambers]

As Wesker rose to his full height, Rebecca froze like a deer in the headlights, her gaze locked onto the figure standing before her, sharply illuminated by the blue-tinged glare of the surveillance screens scattered about the room.

The memories came flooding back in a slideshow of horror, unbidden and quite unwanted.

Even so many years later, she remembered every inch of that godforsaken laboratory beneath the Spencer Mansion, could recall the moment her Captain had raised his gun and shot her, trying to end the last surviving member of Bravo team. She shivered as if a cold chill had run through her veins, as if the barrel of his gun were pointed at her heart once more.

A ghost of the past now stood before her, incongruous and yet so painfully familiar, a whole universe apart—tattered and holed up like a rat, seemingly left to rot in the wreckage of a facility she had reason to believe he was, at least partly, responsible for.

His eyes were hidden behind cracked sunglasses, but she could still feel the weight of his stare. Dread bubbled up within her, queasy and churning in her gut, the fierce ache behind her eyes only spiking in intensity.

But Rebecca was not that frightened rookie anymore. She was nearly two decades older, several degrees more under her belt, and more than a few bioweapons operations foiled.

With a slow, measured movement, she reached inside her medical bag, her fingers brushing against the various tools and supplies she carried. She was aware of Holmes and Colonel Moran glancing at her, though the latter appeared far more interested in the surveillance screens, and thus didn’t move to stop her like she might have otherwise.

"First of all," Rebecca began, her voice steady despite her nerves, "you look terrible, and I’m very unhappy to see you." She carelessly flicked the pair of black-tinted sunglasses she’d pilfered at him, the mirrored lenses glinting under the harsh fluorescent lights as they whizzed through the air.

Without missing a beat, Wesker snatched the sunglasses deftly between his gloved fingers, a sardonic smirk, almost a sneer, playing on his lips. "Aren't you the caring one, Chambers? And here I thought we might have a happy little reunion."

Undeterred, Rebecca reached into her bag once more, pulling out another find from the train—the PDA emblazoned with the S.T.A.R.S insignia.

"And secondly,” she insisted sharply, as if he had not spoken at all, and lobbed it underhanded at him. “You had better tell me what's going on here, who is still inside this facility, and why you’re not out there cleaning up that… that mess!”

Again, the so-called ‘god’ caught the device with ease in his free hand, his smirk only widening. He glanced down at it, gloved fingers tracing over the screen. "How very like you, always wanting answers. However—“

"Nope. No. Nuh-uh," Rebecca’s voice rose a little, her green eyes bright and flinty, her hand dipping into her bag for the third and final time. “There's one more thing, Wesker.”

"Oh?" Wesker arched an eyebrow, glancing up from the PDA, clearly intrigued.

In a swift, unexpected movement, Rebecca chucked her compass at his head—full-throttle, zero hesitation, the small, unassuming object slicing through the air sharp as a whip-crack.

CRCK! It smacked into his sunglasses, cracking the other lens before clattering, gloriously, to the floor.

“And that," Rebecca sniffed, lifting her chin as she primly reached up to tweak her glasses. “That was just because.”

PARTY MEMBERS: Rebecca Chambers, Sebastian Moran (Summon), Sherlock Holmes.
CURRENT LOCATION: Biological Wing/safehouse.
DESIRED LOCATION: We there.
ACTION(S): *CRAMS WESKER INTO LOOT BAG* Question Albert Wesker about what the FUCK is up. Deducing with Holmes might be fun?

FOCUS COUNT: 3/3
REBECCA STATS: REASON 9, STAMINA 10
INVENTORY: Profile Consumables, Survival Gear, Loot Listed Below.

STATUS: Spore incubation stage; contagious? Lethargy, loss of appetite, nausea, heightened thirst.

CURRENT LOOT:

• Whetstone.
• S.T.A.R.S. Captain PDA. (Given to Wesker!)
• Sunglasses. (Given to Wesker!)
• Voltage checkers.
• Battered old laptop (burnt out, but would love to return this to Wily! Lol.)
• Programming manuals.
• Technical AI documents.
• Pince-nez style glasses.
• Legal pad (Carnivale contestants' names listed).
• Psychology manuals.
• Site Seven notebook.
• Ring of Keys.
• Site Seven Emergency Response Protocols folder.
• Stun Baton.
• One Wesker, please.

 

[The Man in Red]

For a long, uncomfortable moment there was only silence in the room save for the quiet hum of so many monitors and electronics, and the lingering echo of the compass clatter. Wesker stood stock still, his freshly gifted pair of sunglasses in one hand and the PDA in the other, as small bits of darkly tinted glass gently flaked and crumbled away from the sunglasses he currently wore. The dim, red-orange glare of one of his cat-like eyes slowly became visible past the damaged lenses, seeming almost to outright glow, with the way it reflected the light of the many monitors in the room.

The uncomfortable silence was broken by the soft crinkling of paper as Holmes carefully crept about the room, rooting through this and that and everything else he could get his hands on.

"Hmm." That was all he said, at fist, as he slipped the PDA into a pocket of his suit and discarded his damaged glasses. He lifted a gloved hand to smooth back his hair, which had been positively unruly by his normally immaculate standards. "I suppose the answers you're after are...fair enough, given the circumstances." He flipped the fresh pair of shades open, and slid them carefully over his eyes. "Things have become quite the mess around here lately, I suppose."

He turned to slowly pace across the room, toward the bank of monitors. Whether he somehow failed to miss Holmes perched on his desk, heels delicately balanced right on the edge as the detective quietly and intently pecked away at the keyboard, or simply chose to pointedly ignore him was impossible to tell.

Wesker strode up to the monitors, adjusting his haggard lab coat as he went. A quick tap of a keyboard attached to the consoles caused the many disparate images to come together into one, using all the monitors as one large screen, and serving as an unspoken call for Rebecca to creep slightly closer to observe.

"The encounter you had in the hallway outside..." he murmured, cycling through the feeds until the pile of rubble outside, which had buried the electrically-charged monstrosity, came into focus. "....that was Subject V. One of several unfinished prototype designs we were working on at the behest of the Man in Red. They were as close to successful as we've gotten with his absurdly specific parameters...but still not entirely up to par."

"What on earth does that mean?" Rebecca furrowed her brow. "It looked like..."

"A Tyrant?" Wesker spoke up, with a hollow chuckle. "Yes. It did. Though the Tyrant project never quite reached the levels originally envisioned for it, it still proved successful...in a way. But no, this was no Tyrant. Merely something slightly based on it." Wesker sorted through the feeds again, until they settled on an image of a dark room. Within the room there were six of what looked to be some kind of holding tanks, eerily similar to the ones which had held the prototype Tyrants so many years ago. Of them, two were smashed open from the inside, while the other four...looked to have intentionally been opened.

"So that's what happened? You, what...set them loose as some kind of experiment?!" Rebecca demanded. It was exactly the type of thing that he would do, she knew that much.

"Set them loose?" Wesker laughed at that; a deep, cold sound that came from a place of no genuine humor. "Don't be absurd. Their physical bodies were under development here, in my department...other departments were responsible for other aspects of their creation." A light frown creased his lips. "Physically, they were whole...but not complete. Not yet fully matured, in a sense. Only one was close enough to not suffer any physical defects or complications, but it..." He paused, simply shaking his head. "Prey you never encounter subject F, miss Chambers."

"The fact of the matter is, I alone could not have released them if I wanted to. They required a security key from all four department heads involved in their creation to even generate an approval request to be sent to that ridiculous masked psychopath running this entire farce." He turned to stare at Rebecca directly. "Releasing them at all should have been impossible, without some manner of direct override. And I am many things, doctor Chambers...but I think you should know, a genius at computers to that extent is not one of them."

Rebecca frowned slightly, her gaze casting down slightly. As much as she didn't want to admit it...he was probably right. Wesker was damn smart, even without whatever enhancements the virus might have given him, but as far as she knew he'd never delved much into the computer sciences. Hacking or overriding such apparently complex safeguards would be beyond him, if he was telling the truth. "So...what happened, then? They were set loose to cause chaos in here?"

"In a sense." Wesker reached up to push his sunglasses up with one finger. "In normal operation...we would have had more than enough personnel and firepower to subdue and deal with even a combined outbreak of all six of them."

"....but this wasn't done during normal operation, was it?"

"Hardly. We're still trying to find the root cause of it all, but...something went wrong, somewhere. We were already being pressed by an unprecedented spread of sudden outbreaks of violence and destruction from the robotic and mechanical staff and AI-equipped machinery of this facility. We still haven't been able to do a full count, but...at least one quarter of the original staff also began to exhibit strange symptoms and slowly succumb to a similar degree of violent insanity. While we were dealing with that, trying to respond and contain the incidents, the core of this facility, the main project at the core of all these other projects, broke containment. The moment it did, several other things immediately followed in a cascading sequence. We were hit from every direction at once."

Wesker scowled. "....and the security captain of this installation elected to enact the emergency protocols for that containment breach, isolating us and leaving us in the state you've now wandered into."

"As for the reason I'm not out there cleaning up that 'mess', as you put it, doctor Chambers?" Wesker turned to regard her with a frown. "What makes you think I'm not?"

"You've been busy conducting your own research on some means to neutralize the rogue subjects without destroying them," Holmes finally spoke up, from where he had now moved to stand precariously balanced with one leg each on a different file cabinet, a folder open in his hands and held sideways as he scanned the documents within. "A commendable goal, trying to salvage something from this entire operation, but it's begun to move a bit past the possibility of that, I think."

For the briefest of moments, it almost seemed as if Wesker twitched, recoiling slightly from the accusation. "At this juncture, neutralizing them in any fashion is the first solution. They may lack same degree of tremendous durability and regenerative abilities of the Tyrant project...but they each have their other, unique factors according to the Man in Red's specifications that make them...difficult to confront more directly. As I'm sure you remember."

 

[Rebecca Chambers]

Rebecca's eyes narrowed, her jaw tightening as she listened to Wesker's words, the full gravity of their predicament sinking in with an alarming clarity. Her burning gaze dropped to the floor, fixating on the scuffed tiles beneath her boots, the reflective lenses of her glasses swimming with troubled, crooked shadows, her gun weighing heavily from her belt.

A small flicker of sympathy stirred inside her chest, even for someone as monstrous as Wesker. But it was almost immediately squashed by the overwhelming recollection of the atrocities he had committed, the lives he had so callously discarded in his pursuit of power. Was this so different? She couldn’t be sure, and that was what made her hesitate.

She’d trusted him, once upon a time—they all had, and they’d paid for it in blood. Her every instinct practically screamed at her not to trust his word again. And yet… she had come here, knowing what she might find. Who she might find.

Maybe she’d been a fool to come here.

The darkened room was filled with tension, not unlike a grand chessboard; each person cautiously positioned, watching their side of the board carefully. Holmes, ever the curious one, sifted through the files in his grasp with the faint, crisp sound of rustling pages, while Colonel Moran stayed close to Rebecca’s side, straight-backed and silent as death, her hand lingering near her weapon. The Colonel’s gaze was fixed on the surveillance screen, searching for any kind of movement from the rubble where Subject V had fallen.

"And what of the staff?" Rebecca asked at last, her voice quiet and wavering, clearly exhausted, but laced with a barely concealed edge. "The ones who were driven to… insanity, you said? Is there some hope of neutralizing and recovering them, or are they just collateral damage?"

Her former Captain’s gaze flicked towards her. His reptilian red-orange eyes burned in the shadows of the erratically lit room, glowing even brighter despite the sleek, tinted lenses of his sunglasses.

"An unfortunate, but unavoidable loss," he stated flatly, brushing off the bitterness in her tone like water flowing over a duck’s back. "In a facility tasked with containing such high-risk research, one must be prepared for… certain eventualities. Survival is not a right, doctor Chambers. It is a privilege—one that is earned."

Shaking her head fervently, Rebecca's hands trembled as she tightened her grip on her medical bag, the straps creaking under her clenched, white-knuckled fingers. She had seen too many people die, too many lives lost to accept Wesker's callous disregard for life.

She couldn’t, wouldn’t stand for it.

"I have to wonder, then… what about you? Are you just another victim of these unprecedented circumstances, Wesker?" she murmured, her words rife with sarcasm, made clipped by her impatience; an uncomfortable flash of heat pounding behind her eyelids not helping to boost her mood at all. “It seems to me that you're more concerned about your precious research than saving lives. Typical.”

As he tilted his head to regard her, Wesker's lips twisted into a humorless smile. "I am many things, doctor, but hardly a victim. My... situation is simply a setback. A temporary one. And as I stated before, due to certain factors, a direct confrontation would be… ill-advised.”

Crossing her arms firmly over her chest, Rebecca huffed. Her cheeks flushed red from indignation, and she pressed her glasses up from where they had slipped down her nose, determined to meet his gaze head-on.

“I’m not entirely convinced,” she accused, her forest green eyes sparking and bright with anger. “If there’s a quicker way to neutralize them that doesn’t involve keeping these experiments intact for future research, you need to cough it up. I… I won’t allow any more suffering because of your arrogance. But if you’re telling the truth, and that’s a strong if, I want to know everything about these rogue subjects of yours—starting with the one breathing down our necks.”

Wesker's pale face pulled taut into a grimace, his sneer practically dripping with disdain. She could feel the weight of his severe stare behind his sunglasses, piercing through her like a knife—or, perhaps more aptly put, a bullet. "Mind your demands, doctor Chambers. You would do well to follow my orders. You have no idea the magnitude of what you're meddling with here.”

“I never have, to be honest, and I don’t expect I’ll have the full scope of things by the end of this,” Rebecca stated, unflinching, and squared her tense shoulders. She ruffled a hand through her short brown hair, frustrated, crumbling bits of debris flaking off to patter against the floor. “All I know is that something named DAVE has breached containment, and now we’re all stuck dealing with the fallout. But I didn’t come here to play the unquestioning, dutiful soldier and act according to your… scheming, Wesker! I came here to—”

“Ah, yes,” interrupted Wesker with a scoff, a dispassionate curl to his lips. “You and your altruism. So righteous, coming to me with your sermons. Perhaps you would like to teach a seminar on ethics to your captive audience, professor?” He spread his arms, gesturing with a lackadaisical flourish to the cramped safe-house around them.

Before Rebecca could retort, Holmes interjected with a quirk of his eyebrow, holding up a crumpled folder with a flourish—the emergency response protocols folder they’d found at the communications tower, marred with water-stains from melted snow and smoky burns, but mostly intact.

“Ethical disagreements aside… it seems our dear captain of security had quite the contingency plan for this… DAVE’s containment failure,” he declared, casually rifling through the pages. “Disable all external data traffic, sever as many other communication lines as possible… seek shelter and hold out for reinforcements. And we are the reinforcements, are we not? Evidenced by the fact that the… ah… ‘ridiculous masked psychopath,’ as you so-called him, is among our number. If you would be so kind as to elaborate on our next steps, Mr. Head of Crisis Response?”

Rebecca's eyes flicked to Wesker, her brows furrowing with suspicion. She leaned in closer, her searching gaze dissecting his every feature, her expression conflicted—torn between her innate revulsion towards him and her desire to do what she felt was right.

"Your creation," she spoke lowly, her voice whisper-soft yet no less vehement for it. "The one you and your collaborators manufactured… he’s suffering out there. Begging for help, maybe even death. And as much as I dislike you for all you’ve done to me, I don't give a damn if it means helping you to help him. So, tell me, Captain: what are our options for getting him under control?”

PARTY MEMBERS: Rebecca Chambers, Sebastian Moran (Summon), Sherlock Holmes, Albert Wesker (???)
CURRENT LOCATION: Biological Wing/safehouse.
DESIRED LOCATION: We there.
ACTION(S): Questioning Albert Wesker about how to handle Subject V, attempting to collaborate, albeit veeerrrryyyy warily. Rebecca has a crap ton of science master skills, so if any could come in handy there, that would be great. Maybe more Holmes deductions to help things along?

FOCUS COUNT: 3/3
REBECCA STATS: REASON 9, STAMINA 10
INVENTORY: Profile Consumables, Survival Gear, Loot Listed Below.

STATUS: Spore second stage; contagious. Lethargy, loss of appetite, nausea, heightened thirst, headaches, vertigo, hot-cold flashes, itchy skin, dizziness, strange black veining starting at the arms and legs; easily concealed.

CURRENT LOOT:

• Whetstone.
• S.T.A.R.S. Captain PDA. (Given to Wesker!)
• Sunglasses. (Given to Wesker!)
• Voltage checkers.
• Battered old laptop (burnt out, but would love to return this to Wily! Lol.)
• Programming manuals.
• Technical AI documents.
• Pince-nez style glasses.
• Legal pad (Carnivale contestants' names listed).
• Psychology manuals.
• Site Seven notebook.
• Ring of Keys.
• Site Seven Emergency Response Protocols folder.
• Stun Baton.
• One Wesker, please.

 

[The Man in Red]

Wesker stared with unhidden venom for a long moment, the silence echoing almost deafeningly. "Fine, then... This situation has long since become untenable. There is something very...wrong about all of it, and we can no longer be certain of who has or has not been compromised in some way." His lips twisted into something between a scowl and a silent snarl as he turned briskly and strode around the office to his desk. He practically ripped one of the drawers open, retrieving something, the eerily familiar sight of his own personalized samurai edge glinting briefly in the dim light, before he set it on his desk. Some kind of card came out next, vanishing into an unseen pocket beneath his coat.

"If you want so badly to get answers and be helpful in this situation, doctor Chambers..." he murmured, stepping up to his computer and pressing several keys in quick succession, his movements a smoky, blurred shape. "....then we have work to do elsewhere." He picked up the gun on his desk, and proceeded to swiftly put several rounds into the keyboard, monitor, and the tower itself. Without a word further, he twirled the gun artfully and slid it into a concealed holster beneath his coat. In the blink of an eye he was across the office, at the formerly locked door opposite the one Rebecca had entered form. "This way, if you please."

It slid open soundlessly at his approach, and he stepped through without waiting for an answer.

Holmes quickly disentangled himself from his perch among the papers, and scampered across the office. "I believe he's in a rather foul mood, doctor," the detective noted with a touch of amusement. "But we seem to have galvanized him to action, at the very least."

"Yes...it looks that way," Rebecca mumbled, before quickly scurrying through the doorway after Wesker.

"The protocols in that folder.... I may have authored them, but they were not my plans in entirety," he admitted quietly, after the others had managed to catch up. "And that is a very good thing, in this instance. The others who contributed...we will have to count on them remaining ignorant to my being aware of their tampering. If we wish to salvage this situation at all, then we will need to deviate from those plans before they catch on."

"Deviate how, exactly? What would have been the next step?"

"There was no next step, doctor Chambers," Wesker growled. "We were all deemed expendable the moment those protocols as written were enacted. Our job was to keep this place in one piece, until that blithering idiot in a mask could arrive to salvage whatever was left." They arrived at an elevator, which a swift elbow to the security panel opened in short order. "I don't plan on dying so ignominiously, however. The root of this entire problem is this...DAVE project. Regardless of who planted that root, it must be ripped out to put a stop to this madness."

Rebecca warily stepped aboard the elevator, Holmes sidling in and leaning against the wall to gather a moment of rest. Moran slowly paced in last, her rifle rather pointedly in hand.

"....you also mentioned the employees of this facility, doctor?" Wesker murmured as he slid the access card he had taken into a reader in the elevator. The doors slowly slid closed, and it started upward. "They are a lost cause. Whatever happened to them was no viral or biological agent, of that much I can say with certainty. As long as they remain alive, they are a danger to everything here...but when they die, rest assured, they have very good death insurance." A faint smirk tugged at his lips. "The Man in Red does certainly offer a very...comprehensive benefits package, if nothing else."

"Ah, yes, and as for our friend, Subject V?" Wesker's mirth quickly vanished. "He is in such pain because he is...unfinished. He was by far the most complex project we had been working on. I suspect his own powers running out of control as they are...are beginning to kill him. You were on the receiving end of just a fraction of the energy coursing through him. He's taking the full brunt of it every moment of activity." Wesker shook his head. "His body wasn't finished enough to be properly insulated against his own electricity...and his mind isn't intact enough to consciously control it."

Rebecca's face twisted into an expression of horror. "Then, you mean he's..."

"Slowly burning himself alive from the inside out, yes." Wesker said it so offhandedly, so casually, it was almost sickening. "Unfortunately, there is nothing to be done for him. But that is why I said confronting him directly would be...troublesome. Merely staying too close to him for too long could prove fatal, to say nothing of the magnetic field he has begun generating. It is why so many of the lights and computers in the lower level were inoperable." He frowned darkly. "....and why so many of the security personnel had their weapons explode on them." He turned to look at Rebecca out of the corner of one eye. "The best thing to do would be to simply leave him be, and let him burn out slowly on his own. But if you truly wished to 'help him', as you said....then your best solution would be water. Submerge him in water."

 

[Rebecca Chambers]

Beside Rebecca stood Colonel Sebastian Moran, tall and immobile like a svelte statue carved from marble, her steely blue stare fixated on the sealed elevator doors before them. Her face was inscrutable, her eyes shrouded by the brim of her officer’s cap and the wispy strands of her blonde hair, but her mind was abuzz—swirling with brooding thoughts, calculations, analyses.

Sebastian, akin to a tiger skulking amidst reeds in her patient watchfulness, was a keen student of observation—a trait honed and tested in her former life as a soldier, a sniper, a hunter. She did not leap blindly into action, but instead calculated each move with precision, with caution. Every ounce of her being exuded a feline grace, a subtle, restrained simplicity to be found in her stillness and silence.

Yet, like the prowling tiger, there was an unmistakable tautness to her frame. A potent vigor coiled just beneath the surface of her skin, rippling underneath her crisp red-and-black uniform like the stripes of her greatest quarry, ready to pounce and strike with deadly force at a moment's notice.

The lift trundled upwards, a soft, mechanized hum filling the silence that had descended upon them as Rebecca dithered on what to do. Now and then, Sebastian’s glare would dart towards her so-called companions’ flickering reflections in the polished, mirror-like visor of her officer's cap, carefully weighing their circumstances.

Her gaze strayed to Dr. Chambers the most, the quiet sadness in the younger woman's eyes triggering a persistent, uncomfortable itch in the back of Sebastian's mind.

Rebecca was her charge, and Seb felt a sense of duty towards keeping her safe—though not entirely out of fealty to her master, but rather stemming from an… ingrained obligation that had long been set aside in favor of personal pleasure and other, less noble pursuits.

Perhaps it was the magic of the command spell burning in her blood.

Perhaps she was but a slave to the charms of a fair maiden.

Although this… Wesker and the other prick, Holmes, were certainly concerns, as well. Holmes was a buffoon, but a clever, wily one. Wesker, on the other hand… Rebecca’s visceral reaction to him said enough.

The Assassin-class contemplated, albeit fleetingly and with a tinge of longing, the prospect of attacking them outright. But, no… no. Better not. Such a thing would be highly distressing for Dr. Chambers, and Sebastian was unhappily and quite unexpectedly concerned with such paltry things… for now.

However, Wesker's suggestion of allowing the rogue Subject V to combust gradually did elicit a simmering disdain from Seb, detectable only in the reflective surface of her cap. It was not the disregard for life itself that repelled her, even in the case of such a deranged and tortured being as Subject V, but rather the way Rebecca’s features immediately crumpled in wretched sorrow, her expression clearly riddled with indecision.

She was as transparent as glass, as easy to read as the pages of an open book, her every thought and intention laid bare for all to see. Like a little bunny rabbit perched cluelessly before a pack of cunning foxes, oblivious to the grisly fate awaiting it in their sharp-toothed jaws.

By degrees, Moran's grip loosened on her weapon, her fingers drumming rhythmically against the cold metal, as if teasing the keys of a grand piano.

Their situation was precarious at best, hurtling towards an uncertain fate that felt more and more like a vise of steel closing in around them. Rebecca’s concern for Subject V was… inconvenient, but one could not dismiss the vexing complication that was Wesker, who would surely not offer the submerging-in-water solution without some ulterior motive in mind.

Alas, Sebastian was no mastermind, detective, or scientist… but she did have a rifle at her disposal and an iron nerve. And sometimes, she had surmised in all her hard-earned wisdom, vanishing to parts unknown to crawl after a man-eater in the putrid depths of a dank, sour ditch did wonders to avoid getting tangled up in muddled plots and dark designs…

...Not that she was considering such a thing, mind you. Certainly not.

ACTION(S): None, just getting some Moran POV. Next post pending.

 

[Rebecca Chambers]

Swaying on her feet, Rebecca leaned heavily against the cool metal wall at her back; her mind like a frenzied carousel, spinning wildly and uncontrollably. For a moment, she allowed her eyes to slip shut, the warm darkness behind her eyelids offering a much-needed reprieve from the lurching, sterile brightness of the elevator.

Water. A quick and far less drawn-out way to extinguish the electrical vortex raging inside Subject V, if Wesker was to be believed. It was a merciful end, but it felt like anything but—the implications heavy and suffocating, crushing Rebecca's chest as she struggled to come to terms with what she knew she had to do.

Rebecca swallowed hard, the acidic taste of bile rising in her suddenly dry, scratchy throat. With each thud of her heart, the persistent, throbbing ache inside her skull sharpened and burned all the brighter, sending turbulent, queasy waves of dizziness and nausea coursing throughout her body.

Suppressing a light cough with the back of her hand, she noticed the veins of her arm had a sickening, greyish hue, trailing up from her delicate wrist to her elbow. Darker than they should be. But her thoughts didn’t linger on the matter for long—she simply couldn't scrub the horrific image of that poor man slowly cooking himself alive from her brain, no matter how hard she tried.

The idea of leaving anyone, even one of Wesker's monstrous creations, to suffer such a fate was anathema to her. But could she do it?

Could she put this rogue subject out of his misery?

Tightly wound and trembling, Rebecca's hands clenched at her sides, nails digging into her palms until they drew tiny, blooming crescents of blood. She was a healer by nature, not a killer, and yet the world hadn’t been kind enough to offer her the luxury of such clear-cut moral decisions. She was no stranger to blood on her hands, had spent many a restless, terror-riddled night drowning in it, but this… this felt…

It felt so wrong. She hated that this was the kindest way to end things.

"Water, huh?" Rebecca echoed softly, her voice barely rising above a whisper.

"Yes, water," Wesker reiterated with a, quite frankly, shocking amount of patience. His tone devoid of emotion, as if discussing the projected outcome of an experiment rather than the execution of a living being. "It would fry his nervous system faster than you can say 'mercy.'“ Again, he glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. “That is, if you have the stomach for it."

Rebecca's gaze snapped up to meet his, her green eyes narrowed.

"Of course I do," she insisted, disgruntled, right as her glasses began to slip down her nose. She hastily shoved them back up. “I just—that seems… bizarre?"

The barest hint of a smirk tugged at one corner of Wesker's mouth, as if he found her indignation amusing. "Perhaps," he conceded, inclining his head just slightly. "But unless you have a better course in mind, doctor Chambers, I suggest you prepare yourself for what needs to be done."

Discomfort prickled at the back of Rebecca’s neck like the legs of a spider, an unwelcome guest considering her already fragile state. Slowly, she uncurled her fingers from where they’d grasped at the edges of her bulletproof vest—they’d moved practically of their own volition, trying to tug the stupid thing closer around herself, seeking to hide from Wesker’s glare.

Fighting the urge to claw at the weird, persistent itchiness spreading across her skin, the scientist sighed heavily, then turned to her other, more amiable companions.

“What do you think, Colonel?” she asked Moran, who stood at her side with the kind of stiff-backed rigidity of someone accustomed to blending into the background scenery of any room, no matter how austere.

The soldier lifted the brim of her cap, revealing somber, cornflower blue eyes. She tilted her head, a hound come to heel, and gave a small, tight-lipped smile. “No matter what path you decide upon, doctor, I shall faithfully follow. Though the idea of being fried like a haddock does not quite sit well with me, I must admit.”

“…Right,” said Rebecca, who had honestly been hoping for a liiiiiittle more feedback than that. Her gaze flitted to Holmes. “And you, Mister Holmes?”

With a few unruly tendrils of platinum blonde hair falling over his forehead, Holmes regarded her with a hint of weariness, his deerstalker cap knocked hopelessly askew atop his head. However, his emerald gaze quickly lit up with a spark of intrigue at her words. "Hm! So long as I am not too… intimately involved in the matter, in a proximity sense, I suppose that would be… manageable! But pray tell, where might we come across a suitable body of water?"

Rebecca side-eyed Wesker, who was blatantly ignoring her; presumably waiting for her to beg and plead for his assistance. She stifled a huff, then mustered up the nerve to speak.

"Wesker," she began, hesitantly. "Would you happen to have any… aquatic specimens? You know, like…”

PARTY MEMBERS: Rebecca Chambers, Sebastian Moran (Summon), Sherlock Holmes, Albert Wesker (???)
CURRENT LOCATION: Biological Wing/elevator
DESIRED LOCATION: Wherever the heck we're going in this elevator.
ACTION(S): Questioning Albert Wesker some more, attempting to drag him into our shenanigans, because let's be honest... it would be cool as fuuuck. Rebecca has a crap ton of science master skills, so if any could come in handy there, that would be great. Maybe more Holmes deductions to help things along?

FOCUS COUNT: 3/3
REBECCA STATS: REASON 9, STAMINA 10
INVENTORY: Profile Consumables, Survival Gear, Loot Listed Below.

STATUS: Spore second stage; contagious. Lethargy, loss of appetite, nausea, heightened thirst, headaches, vertigo, hot-cold flashes, itchy skin, dizziness, strange black veining starting at the arms and legs; easily concealed.

CURRENT LOOT:

• Whetstone.
• S.T.A.R.S. Captain PDA. (Given to Wesker!)
• Sunglasses. (Given to Wesker!)
• Voltage checkers.
• Battered old laptop (burnt out, but would love to return this to Wily! Lol.)
• Programming manuals.
• Technical AI documents.
• Pince-nez style glasses.
• Legal pad (Carnivale contestants' names listed).
• Psychology manuals.
• Site Seven notebook.
• Ring of Keys.
• Site Seven Emergency Response Protocols folder.
• Stun Baton.
• One Wesker, please.

 

[The Man in Red]

"FI-03." Wesker murmured. "Like Neptune, miss Chambers?" He shook his head. "We didn't exactly have the liberty and...freedom to work on whatever we pleased here." The elevator slowed to a halt, the doors slowly grinding open with a protesting of tortured metal and a small shower of sparks. "Aquatic specimens were very rarely among our granted research materials. However, there is perhaps one viable location..."

Wesker wedged one of his forearms between the stuck doors, and with a wrenching motion swiftly forced one of them open the remainder of the way. "The Aqua Ring. We used it as a....testing ground, of sorts. To simulate both underwater and other extremely damp environmental conditions."

"That...." Rebecca frowned, blinking her eyes several times as she tried to focus. "That sounds....like it would work. Where is it?"

"That would be the bad news, in a manner of speaking." Wesker's expression briefly twitched, a deep scowl etching onto his features. "It's in the engineering department. To get there from here, with the tunnels below no longer accessible....we will need to go through the upper levels of this department, then through either the central chambers or the robotics department to reach engineering."

"I can't fail to notice," Holmes spoke up, flicking his cap pointedly as he did so. "You seem less thrilled about this little trip than most other things thus far."

"The central chambers are...where the elevator to the core areas where DAVE is located reside," Wesker said flatly. "It is where the worst of that thing's chaos broke loose, and likely still the most heavily guarded and damaged." He adjusted his sunglasses as he stepped out of the elevator, purposefully striding down the hall and leaving the others to catch up. "Besides that....the head of the robotics department and I have never quite seen eye to eye."

"A clash of personalities, I take it? Not uncommon in such an eclectic workplace."

Wesker scoffed. "That's only the half of it. The man is also quite short." A smirk creased his lips. "Appropriate, given his lack of spine."

 

[Rebecca Chambers]

Hastily scurrying out of the elevator to catch up with Wesker’s long, loping strides, Rebecca stepped out into a dimly-lit hallway that mirrored the rest of the Biological Wing with how it was in utter shambles—ceiling tiles dangling precariously from the ceiling, exposed wiring and damaged light fixtures sparking intermittently in the darkness. White, faintly slick linoleum gleamed underfoot as she trotted quickly after him, the distant, electrical hum of unseen machinery and the hollow sound of drip-drip-dripping water ringing in her ears, only magnified by the eerie, smothering silence layered over their surroundings.

She clutched at the grip of her holstered gun, fingers jittering as she desperately tried to shake off the hazy fog that clouded her thoughts, white specks fluttering and dancing across her vision. A wave of nausea made her head swim, and she blinked rapidly as the horrendous ache in her skull bloomed into a bright lens flare, drumming against her temples in a relentless beat.

A firm, warm grip on her arm steadied her, grounded her. Eyes widening, Rebecca lifted her head to meet Moran's unwavering stare, the blonde-haired woman’s icy blue eyes scanning her from under the brim of her peaked cap.

She tilted her head to the side, a silent question.

With a shrug of her shoulders, Rebecca forced a soft, wavering smile, gently extricating herself. She turned her attention ahead, focusing instead on placing one foot in front of the other.

Quiet and serious, Moran stalked alongside her, occasionally throwing an intense, searching look her way—but eventually relented, turning her attention back to standing guard.

"Er, I suppose it's a good thing we're not… looking for a spine to borrow, then," huffed Rebecca in an attempt at levity, the corners of her mouth twitching upwards ever so slightly. "Sounds like he'd come up… short in that department…?”

Wesker came to a sudden stop, the abrupt cessation of his clipped footsteps bouncing off of the vacant, erratically flickering walls of the ruined corridor. He angled his head just slightly to catch a glimpse of her behind him, his eyes hidden by the ever-present barrier of his sunglasses, a hint of burning red glinting behind the lenses.

A peculiar expression flitted across his face, teetering precariously between… several emotions. None of which Rebecca could easily classify.

“…yes,” Wesker agreed at length, after a tense beat of silence. His attention lingered on her, briefly, before he pressed on, leading the way to… wherever they were going.

Rebecca could only hope it wasn’t to their deaths. Her mind spun round and round like a top, her green eyes narrowed intensely at their surroundings, weighing their options.

"So… about this robotics department," she began in a firmer, less tentative voice, pushing past the vertigo that threatened to send her tumbling to the floor. "It seems like the lesser of two evils, right? And with any luck, we might just avoid the worst of this DAVE’s fortifications and find what we need to… deal with Subject V."

She paused and sucked in a steadying breath, trying to ignore the itchiness of her skin—like tiny ants crawling all over her arms, god—competing for her attention.

"Robotics… Dr. Albert Wily," she recalled suddenly, her voice a touch shaky as she recalled all the documentation she’d wildly flipped through, hunkered down on the floor of the cargo compartment on the train. "I found an old laptop of his on our transport here! It was bricked by some outside hacker or something shortly after I accessed it, but I figured it might come in handy. He was the head of the robotics department at one point, right? What can you tell us about him?"

Wesker didn’t halt his stride for even a moment, glancing at Rebecca with a curl to his upper lip that suggested this topic was… a particularly sour one for him.

"He is a bumbling, hot-headed fool," he stated, his cool demeanor cracking ever so slightly to allow a sliver of distaste to creep through. "Far more interested in his grandiose robotic creations than more practical applications. It's no wonder that his pride, and his designs, have contributed to the predicament we find ourselves in.”

Wow, thought Rebecca, trying to keep the incredulous exasperation off her face, but not quite managing it. Did this place hire… nothing but bozos?

Holmes, having fallen into step on her other side opposite Moran, leaned in to speak quietly to her.

“Wily seemed inclined to entertain a meeting with us,” he murmured. His lips pursed, his face pensive as he cast a wary glance at Wesker’s turned back. “Not entirely devoid of cordiality.”

Rebecca bobbed her head in a short, crisp nod, her brows furrowing, thoughts turning inward. Good to know.

"Well… I certainly wouldn’t turn away his expertise," she offered magnanimously, readjusting her glasses on the bridge of her nose for the umpteenth time. "Besides, we need to get to the Aqua Ring, and if cutting across this robotics department is our best shot…"

Her words trailed off, lingering in the quietness of the hallway, their echoing footfalls filling the void-like silence left behind.

With each step, Rebecca's heart grew heavier, weighed down by the looming dread of whatever awaited them, in the robotics department or elsewhere inside Site Seven.

But she couldn't turn back now, couldn’t afford to stumble. Every second wasted was another second of agony for Subject V, another brick in the crumbling facade this facility represented. Even if the crushing weight of responsibility felt a bit too much for her to bear—even if it would’ve been way easier to just give up and leave this place to collapse in on itself, she just couldn’t do it.

Her hand discreetly slid beneath the flap of her olive-colored canvas bag, the tips of her fingers brushing against the cool, battered surface of Wily's laptop. The image of a black screen lingered in her thoughts, a void dominated by three glowing red dots, arranged in perfect triangular formation.

She’d never learned to leave things well enough alone, especially when there was so much pain and suffering tangled around the issue in question.

One way or another… she was gonna get to the bottom of this.