V S M Klowdi, Part Two

[Optix]

“And so I was like ‘omigosh your hair has so much bounce!’ and the elf was like ‘yeah it’s lembas conditioner’ and I was like ‘cool, where can I get some?’ and she was like ‘oh past 23rd street’ and I was like…”

Heidi drones on in a high pitched whine. The beautiful blonde girl is sitting on the edge of a billboard for prosthetic tusk implants for orcs, twirling a pigtail, kicking her feet a few stories above the street.

Across from her is a twelve-story building made of solid grey stone with no windows, secured behind a huge stone wall tipped with electric razor wire. In the front is a gate manned by a pair of guards.

She appears to be speaking to the thin air, and does not stop for breath.

“... and then Skribl was like ‘Heidi can you shut the fuck up for one second!’ and I was like ‘I’m trying but your rescue plan is so boring when do I get to shoot people?’ and she was like…” the girl continues.

“Wow Heidi, that’s very interesting,” comes the dreamy voice of Optix, wafting telepathically through Heidi’s brain. Optix sounds sincere, as she always does. “I would very much like to try that conditioner. How is the mission going, by the way?”

Heidi sigh. “Boooooriiiiing,” she says in her squeaky voice, scrunching her face into a pout. “I’m just sitting here waiting for Skribl’s signal.”

Heidi can feel Optix nod telepathically. “Remind me Heidi, what was the signal again?”

“Uhm…” Heidi says intelligently, before scowling. “Oh frick, I forgot! What was it? Something about uh… she likes paint, right?”

“I believe,” Optix says, her telepathic thoughts radiating patience. “You are to wait until Skribl sabotages the transformer, and the lights go out.”

Heidi giggles. “Oh yeah!” she squeaks. A few long moments pass while Heidi twirls her pigtails. She looks down at the pitch-black below her, chewing bubble gum, popping bubbles with a loud echoing crack.

“Heidi,” comes Optix’s words. “Are the lights already out?”

Heidi pops another bubble. “Yeah huh,” she says. A few more moments pass before Heidi realizes what she said. “Frick. Ok Optix, I will talk to you later!”

“I am sure you will,” comes Optix’s amused reply. “Have fun Heidi!”

“I will!” says the blonde girl, her eyes narrowed.

***

Heidi lands on the sidewalk on one knee and one fist, leaving two deep cracks. She whips her head up, her pigtails bouncing, and rises. She adjusts her pink halter top and smoothes out her little black skirt. She cracks her neck with a loud snap, and then cracks her knuckles. She attaches a silly fake mustache to her upper lip, and walks across the street to the checkpoint in front of the huge stone building.

At the gate are two guards, one on each side, each holding a large crossbow with bolts that glow with purple, arcane light. Their faces are covered in black bandannas and black goggles, and they are covered head-to-toe in tactical armor, but bear no insignia. They are each inside a small outpost in front of a control panel.

Heidi saunters up confidently to the guard on the left, who immediately levels his crossbow at her head.

“Good day, fellow guard,” Heidi says in a terrible imitation of a man’s voice. She twirls her mustache masculinely. “As you can clearly see from my mustache…”

“Put your hands in the air, and step away from the gate!” the guard barks, his voice magically distorted by the bandana to come out low and intimidating.

Heidi hangs her head and sighs. Skribl was right; the mustache didn’t work. Time for plan B.

The blonde girl launches herself through the window, pinning the guard against the back wall of his glorified cubicle with her right hand. Arcane bolts of light shoot from the other guards crossbow through the window at a shocking rate of fire. Some explode harmless against the wall behind them, but one grazes Heidi’s arm, causing her to yelp.
Heidi whirls and fires her machine machine pistol back through the window, pumping a hundred bullets into the other guard.

“Oh god!” screams the guard she is holding.

Heidi ignores him and continues firing as the body body slumps back against the wall under the sheer weight of bullets.

“You’ve killed him you psychopath!” the pinned guard screams.

Heidi does not let her finger off the trigger, and the hot shells begin to collect on the floor, radiating heat.

“He’s...yeah he’s definitely dead!” the pinned guard cries anxiously.

The stream of bullets continue.

“Uh…” the guard says hesitantly. “Yeah he uh, you definitely got him…”

After a few more seconds, the bangs stop, and Heidi’s pistol is spent.

The pinned guard cowers as Heidi turns to face him with wrath in her eyes. A moment later, the look has passed, and Heidi is smiling sweetly.

“Where were we?” she asks, seemingly to herself. “Oh yeah…”

She drops the guard to the floor, and steps on his crossbow, snapping it in half. She clears her throat.

“Good day, fellow guard,” she says in a terrible imitation of a man’s voice. “As you can clearly see from my mustache, I too am a fellow guard as well. Please be so kind as to open the front gate, allowing me access to our secret compound that we pretend is for making dangerous potions but which is actually used for smuggling drugs and weapons and slaves? I have a meeting with Mr. Bossmeister about spreadsheets and synergy!”

The guard whimpers as he crawls over to the control panel and presses a four-digit code. With a buzz, the front gates slide open.

Smiling cutely, Heidi picks up the guard and headbutts him into unconsciousness.

With a satisfied smirk she walks through the front gate; she knew the mustache would work.

***

 

[Optix]

***

Alarms are screeching within the Arcadian Alchemical Research Facility. Perimeters have been breached, all units are reporting to the first floor for emergency defensive positions.

Four floors below them, beneath concrete cells with drains in their floors, beneath screaming patients shackled to medical gurneys, beneath crackling vats of arcane chemicals, is Klowdi.

The elf is wrapped in shackles glowing with a soft purple lights, chained to a steel chair in a small concrete room. Her wispy blue hair is stuck to her face with sweat, and her nose leaks silvery blood. Her eyes have rolled back in her head, and she seems to be unconscious.

Surrounding her are three of her captors. One of them, a hunched over figure in a black hooded robe, crouches in front of her. His hands crackle with arcane energy, thin wisps of purple light the same hue as her chains course from his palms through her temples. He is absorbed in his work.

The other two pay them no mind, their attention on a series of security monitors. One is a hulking brute of a humanoid, a blackish-blue monstrosity of cybernetic machinery interwoven with pulsing, genetically modified muscles.

The other is the woman in the red scarf.

The woman and the brute watch the monitors silently as a blurry blonde figure rips through their perimeter defenses like paper. She guns down the guards at the front gate, then the first patrols to respond, her machine pistols drilling through their platinum plate armor. They watch her pick up a war horse and toss it, tumbling through the air to crash into a squadron of cavalry, scattering them like leaves in the wind. They watch her defeat Hiroshi Sweetleaf in single combat, snapping the neck of the elven ronin as easily as she snaps his ancient katana. They watch her take a frontal hit from a ballista, dust herself off, then charge it and smash it to splinters in a single blow.

And they watch as, one by one, their security monitors wink out, until just one remains.

“Is that who I think it is?” rumbles the hulking monstrosity. The woman in the red scarf snorts derisively.

“Who else would it be?” she hisses back, her arms crossed, staring at the single remaining monitor.

“I didn’t expect them to bring out the big guns so early,” the gargantuan figure admits, his voice like wet gravel. “Should we evacuate?”

The woman in the red scarf shakes her head, her eyes glued to the last remaining monitor. It shows the entrance to the Arcadian Alchemical Research Facility, a set of massive steel doors. A grinning woman in blonde pigtails approaches calmly, looking into the camera. She smiles and blows a kiss into the camera, waving.

“Not until the extraction is complete,” she says, inclining her head back towards where their interrogator is still running arcane magic through Klowdi’s temples. “The fortress will hold.”

Outside the facility, the intruder is pressing the intercom button.

“Hiyaaaas!” comes the perky voice through the speaker system. “It’s meeee, Heidiiiiii! I came to get my friend. Can ya lemme in please?”

“Against that beast?” says the hulking monster with incredulity. “I don’t know that there is any fortress in Erde Nona that can stand against her.”

The woman in the red scarf lets out another strangled hiss of annoyance.

“You have heard too many stories. She is not the real danger, and is by no means ‘the big guns.’ She is a distraction, admittedly an excellent one. They are coming for the elf, and we would be fools to believe that they would risk it all on a frontal assault. But we need time. Go and welcome her, Kagrash.”

The monstrosity sighs. “As you command,” he says, cracking his neck sickeningly. As the hulking thing opens the door to the interrogation room, his officer leaves him one parting command.

“Do not fail me.”

***

Outside, Heidi is buzzing the intercom repeatedly, but with no response. She shrugs cutely.

“Hellooooooo,” she says in a sing song voice. She begins to ‘knock’ on the door, pummeling it, leaving fist-size dents in the thick steel, but the doors hold.

“Fine,” she says irritably, blowing one of her pigtails out of her face as she backs away. “Last chance. We can do this the easy way, or the fun way.”

She pulls out a rocket launcher, the neon pink tip glinting in the floodlights.

“You have ten second to nevermind I’m bored!”

The rocket blast lights up the night sky.

***

On the south side of the of the Arcadian Alchemical Research Facility, a young woman in a pink mohawk waits silently behind a barbed wire fence.

She hears a bang, and the ground shakes with the force of Heidi’s rocket.

Skribl hops the gate.

***

 

[Optix]

She is over the gate, fluid like water.

She is running across the battlefield, quick like lightning.

She is pressed against the wall, flat like a shadow.

She is slipping in the back door, quiet like a mouse.

And just like that, Skribl has penetrated the Arcadian Chemical Research Facility.

Skribl is one of few outside the facility that is aware of the true horrors within. Massive, shadowy financial groups use it as research and development for everything from makeup to military weaponry. While they line their pockets, their unwilling ‘test subjects’ suffer excruciating agony in the labs deep below the surface.

And these are the bastards that took her sister.

Skribl wonders if Klowdi recognizes her at all. It was only a few short months ago that Klowdi began to have vivid lucid dreams of strange women engaged in a war for freedom that seemed as nonsensical as it was fierce. Only a few months since Optix noticed her wandering through the Dreamscape, confident and powerful and ignorant. Only a few months since Skribl had made first contact.

Klowdi was a natural. Shockingly powerful within the dreamscape, striking down nightmares with a ferocity unmatched even by Heidi. But truly it was her loving and caring nature that caused Optix to offer her membership with PSUP.

Optix had warned them that Klowdi would likely remember very little of her encounters in the waking world, perhaps only a vague sense of something more beautiful and real beyond the realm of the mundane. Klowdi was hesitant to give up the life she once knew and loved to join them in their eternal war that even Optix seemed to barely comprehend.

And while Klowdi wavered, her enemies struck.

In the ACRF, Skribl has her back pressed to the wall as a group of guards run past her in panic. They are hurrying upstairs, to the lobby, trying desperately to stop Heidi’s rampage.

Skribl deftly pulls her spraycan from the holster at her hips and points it at the stairs. She presses down, and a thin iridescent mist of paint coats the steps just as the guards reach the highest point, and the group falls down the stairs in a jumble of screams and broken bones as an a slippery substance coats the stairwell.

The tagger quickly darts in the crowd of moaning and crumpled bodies, snatching a keyring, and disappearing deeper into the bellows of the ACRF.

***

Heidi is come to the ACRF.

Within the lobby is hell.

The bang of gunfire echoes loudly off the marble walls. The air is filled with alchemical smoke and the screams of dying men. Bolts of arcane light fire in all directions, and bullets zoom back at shocking velocity. Through it all, Heidi’s taunts and giggles penetrate.

The lobby of the ACRF is two storied, with large marble staircases leading up from the left and right of the entrance, and long balconies overlooking the foyer. In the middle of it is a massive fountain, once displaying a statue of the founder, now crushed to rubble. Heidi is gleefully drowning one of the guards when a bolt of arcane light whizzes by her neck, and she spins and shoots with a delighted cackle, her pink machine-pistols spitting a line of bullets back at her attacker and causing him to fall from the upper balcony with a sickening splat.

A bolt of lightning nearly engulfs her, and then Heidi is running; she doesn’t like wizards. Guards try to halt her advance as she barrels up the marble staircase, but she pushes through them like a rhino. Each strike from her fists crumbles ribcages and snaps necks, and she sends the guards flying over the handrails to lie on the floor of the lobby. As she reaches the top, a jet of fire engulfs her body, and she screams in pain as she pushes through it. She runs, head down, screaming her high-pitched war cry, until she slams into the black-robed wizard like a ballista, her tackle lifting him off his feet and throwing him through the air to slam against the wall behind him in a heap.

Heidi crouches down, shaking the fire out of her pigtails, breathing heavily as she listens for the next bolt of arcane energy, but it doesn’t come. Her fierce snarl instantly give way to a cheerful grin as she stands up and smoothes down her skirt. She hums to herself as she hops down.

She looks around at her handiwork, the dead of dying bodies of the ACRF guards, twisted and mangled, bleeding and bled, and grins. She scratches her head idly with the barrel of her gun, wondering how to start more trouble.

“Hey girlie,” she says, seemingly to no one. There is no response, and the blonde frowns. “Optix? You got eyes on me?”

Still no response, either external or (as Heidi is used too) within her head. Heidi shrugs; the facility must have some magical way of interfering with Optix’s communication. It wouldn’t be the first time.

After a moment of deep thought, Heidi decides she is bored, and wants to go deeper into the facility. She hums as she wanders up to a massive oak door with shrapnel stuck in it, raises a single mighty leg to kick it down, and then stops.

A moment of hesitation that nearly saves her life.

She rolls out of the way just as the door is kicked to splinters from the other side.

A monster stands before her.

He is huge, easily twice her height and ten times her weight. Some construct of machinery and muscle, with tubes pumping alchemical juices throughout its body. It wields a mace and shield, and it’s feet are cloven.

It sees Heidi, and sighs.

“Hello, Heidi,” it says, it’s voice exasperated. “I cannot say I am satisfied with your decorations. While I doubt you would be amenable, I find myself compelled to offer your life in return for your immediate departure from this facility. You are trespassing, and you will remove yourself front eh premises, or I shall. I can bill you later.”

Heidi’s face scrunches up in adorable rage. “Suck my dick!”

The monstrosity sighs again and lumber’s forward for battle.

***