Progenitor:

Chapter 15

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A/n: Sorry for the delay and how sparse this chapter is.

The two of us stood in front of the elevators in the main lobby. All in all, we were quite the contrast. I was currently a young, tall, muscular caucasian girl with pale skin, freckles, and decked out in enough leather to run a biker gang. Aunt Hannah beside me, on the other hand, was a comparatively short, bronze-skinned, woman with a runner's build decked out in olive green unpowered light armor, combat webbing, and enough star-spangled glory to run the fourth of july.

I walked up to the door, namely the keypad, while Aunt Hannah looked pensively at the secure slabs of metal. I wasn't sure what she was thinking, either if they were intimidating to her, suspicious, or wondering how much boom she could get away with using to knock it down before someone chewed her out for it.

"So…" I began, " I was going to see if I could trick the biometric sensor into thinking I'm Max Anders since I figure if anyone would have access it'd be the big boss,"

Then I caught the ghost of a smile on Aunt Hannah's face and frowned.

"What?"

"Nothing," she waved it off.

I held my gaze for another moment, before shrugging it off. "Anyways, I figure I can get a good enough estimation of his DNA, and I could probably match his voice and appearance perfectly if I wanted. The real problem would be trying to match fingerprints."

I hummed as I tapped my bottom lip, thinking through the problem again. Already my neural net was burning through solutions. "See, your fingerprints aren't tied to your DNA, they're shaped by your life experiences. So's a lot of things, actually, like height. Even identical twins can grow up to have different heights and prints based on diet, exercise, and basic wear and tear through life."

"Still, I did manage to get a couple of partial prints off his penthouse down the block. It's not perfect, but it is a basis to work with," I continued as I walked up to the panel to inspect it closely. "You know if I'm lucky I might even be able to grab a couple of prints off this thing."

I leaned in closer, modulating my eyes to pick up finer details of close up objects. Picking apart the details in the dust on top of the glass, I could get something, but it was looking like they were far from well preserved. I wasn't surprised, I'd barely gotten anything from his penthouse and that hadn't just been the scene of a firefight.

Still…

"I might be able to cobble something together," I said, reaching out with a finger to pick up the dust and get a reading. "At the very least, I might be able to get a base to start working on some combinations. Shouldn't take me more than a few thousand tries to get."

I turned to the number pad, where it looked like there a few more. All the better, really. "Just sit tight and I'll-"

Clamp

I jumped, jerking up at the sound, only to notice a strange disc-like object attached to the doors. With a few clicks, it expanded into a series of rings attached to the door at roughly the height of a person.

I opened my mouth, "What's-"

Aunt Hannah cut me off by yanking me back away from the panel. She pressed some kind of trigger-like device in her hands, and the rings on the door began to hum. She looked down at the screen wrapped around her forearm. As she worked on it, the door began to heat up and glow, the waves of superheated air radiating off it distorting the light. After tapping a few buttons and manipulating the screen for a few moments, she shrugged and pressed the trigger.

The door exploded inwards in a blinding cloud of superheated gas, vaporized metal, and plasma. As my eyes took in every scene, the radiation forcing me to replace the cells just as fast as they burned out from the intensity, I could see the cloud of plasma deflected away from us and pushed back into the door and elevator by field of distorted air emitted by the rings.

When it was done, the rings hung in the air for another moment, before collapsing to the ground with a clatter, unharmed by the small sun it'd created. The elevator, however, was a different story. A neat hole had been melted into the once pristine platinum doors, ringed with white-hot metal. The inside of the elevator was little more than cooling slag, even the floor had been melted away and dripped down the shaft.

For a moment, I was at a loss for words.

"Come on, Amy," Aunt Hannah said, patting me on the shoulder again. The ringed device on the ground disappeared in a flash of green light, and some kind of oversized grapple gun mated with a harpoon gun appeared in her hand. "We're gonna need to head down."

"What the hell was that?" I finally said.

"What, that?" she answered nonchalantly, "Just a breach kit."

"You're telling me the way you guys open doors is to make a fucking star?" I exclaimed.

"Don't be melodramatic, Amy," she waved me off, "This is for special and heavy ops, and it's a variable yield smart device. It scanned the area and found no traps or alarming sensors, so I decided to cut out the middleman with the most expedient method."

She gestured to the now missing floor of the elevator. "I knew it'd clear out the area, and it gave us our route down."

Aunt Hannah walked up to the door and planted her feet. She braced the gun against her shoulder and fired it at the floor with a powerful Thump. The massive spike slammed into the ground, it's tip buried in the marble floor, then it began to hum and vibrate. As it spun up, the spike moved like a drill and dug it's way deeper into the floor.

When it was done, she tested the anchor with a few tugs. Satisfied, she backed over to the door and looked down the hole.

"You need a ride down?" she asked as she attached the cable to some kind of harness on her combat webbing.

I sighed, forcing the weirdness and discomfort away from me. Aunt Hannah lived in a different world from me, dad, or even Aunt grace. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised how much of a different outlook it'd all given her. I'm not sure even Mom had lived anything like her life.

"No," I said, already dissolving into a swarm of fireflies. "I'll be fine."

As she looked at my growing swarm of glittering lights, I saw a genuine smile stretch across her face. The way the edges of her eyes crinkled ever so softly, her lips pulled into a gentle grin, the glow of my being bathing her sun-kissed skin in warm light, it all reminded me of happier times. The smell the ocean breeze and barbeque, the sun sitting low on the horizon and the fire illuminating the night, and the sound of laughter and joy.

I pushed the memories away before the pain became too much.

"Well, then, here we go," she said, then jumped back.

And down we fell, into the depths of hell.

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At the bottom of the elevator was another heavy security door. I briefly considered trying to open it myself in an effort to show off in front of Aunt Hannah, but looking over my stores I wasn't really up for it.

I couldn't get tired, not precisely as humans meant it anyways. I could get bored, and I suppose I wasn't immune to a certain level of mental fatigue from doing stressful or repetitive things, but truly natural human exhaustion and tiredness were trivial things for me to cycle out of my system. I could, however, run low on resources. Biomass in particular, but there were other inorganic compounds and elements that I liked to have stores of to utilize at a moment's notice.

With Aunt Hannah having disintegrated about half of me, and roughly half of my stores along with it, I was running low. I wasn't in danger of death or anything, and I still had plenty enough mass to maintain the shape of Amelia Hebert, but anything outside that was stretching things a bit. I had very little wiggle room and I didn't feel like pushing it if I didn't have to.

Besides, watching her blow doors down with a ball of plasma wasn't getting old anytime soon.

As the glowing edges of the ring rapidly cooled when exposed to open air and the breach kit clattered to the ground again, I decided to comment on the decidedly unsubtle approach we'd gone with.

"I sure hope no one heard that,"

Aunt Hannah just shook her head and chuckled. She flexed her fingers and the breach kit disappeared in another whirl of green light. It flowed back to her like a loyal dog, reappearing in her hands as what looked like a spec-ops version of the standard military gauss rifle. It was shorter than most of the others I'd seen, and had another barrel slung under the primary one, along with a variety of other attachments I couldn't begin to guess at.

"Come on, Amy." She gestured a hand forward and I followed her up to the simmering hole in the door.

We stepped through the hole and immediately I knew something was wrong. The lights were off, so we couldn't see much, but the molten glow from the breach gave me something to work with. Shifting the rods and cones around in my eyes allowed me to fine-tune my vision to suit the dimming light, not that there was much to see.

We were in a hall. A long hall that slowly sloped downwards until I couldn't see anything but a dim red glow at the end. By our right was a guard shack with what looked like gun emplacements, and by our left was what looked like a small monorail that followed the hall with a trolley designed to hold packages, but not people.

The walls were made of, from what I could tell, concrete and the floor was a kind of sleek tile. There were defunct cameras in the corners, vents along the tops of the walls, and dead lights in the ceiling. A sleek strip of paint labeled this area sub-basement 2, and pointing down the hall was an arrow labeled, "Hazardous Biological Experimentation Lab 1 & 2".

That was disconcerting enough on its own, but I could also smell something. Various body fluids, ammonia, grease, oil, battery acid, and most notably, honey and sickening sweetness. The scent was faint, but it was definitely much stronger than anywhere else I'd gotten it in the city.
Aunt Hannah took another step forward, but I held a hand out to stop her.

Most worryingly of all were the tiny divots and scratches in floor, along with various holes punched into the concrete. They were small and precise, but deep, likely from some high-velocity gauss weapon of a low caliber if I had to guess. There was no pool of blood or anything where we were standing, in the entryway, but the blood I could smell from the shack and further down the hall didn't exactly make that a good thing.

"Careful," I said, frowning as I continued to break down the chemical composition. I decided to let the worry show on my face so she'd know I was serious. "I can smell the chemical I've been tracking down here. I don't know if the drug's airborne or how it'll affect you, but I can't recommend getting a lungful."

"Plus…" I continued, taking in another strong whiff just to make sure, "...There's blood. Lots of blood. And I think something shot its way through here."

She held my gaze cooly for a moment, her eyes searching my expression for something, but eventually nodded carefully. She reached into her combat webbing and pulled out a band of bent metal about the size of a thick and wide hairband. She pressed a button and it expanded into a segmented metal mask. When she placed it on her face, the metal segments expanded and contracted to conform to it.

After a moment of reformatting, a silvery liquid metal flowed out of specific ports along the side and covered the front of the mask in a shimmering, flawless, almost mirror-like surface. At the edges of it, though, my eyes could pick up what looked like tiny cameras, sensors, and even ventilation along the jaw.

"Alright," Aunt Hannah said, her voice coming through with an ever so slight digital effect, "Hud's not picking anything up right now, but I'll trust your judgment, Amy. I should be good with this, whatever we find down there."

I nodded in agreement. "I should probably go first then, just in case."

"Just in case?" she questioned.

"Well, I'm the tank here. You're the squishy ranger."

"What?"

"It's…" I sighed. "I'm the regenerative brute/striker...thing. You're mostly just a bog-standard human that's also the 3rd most powerful blaster in the world. I can get shot in the face and make the guy who did it eat the bullet. You still need bandaids."

"...Fair point." She stepped back and allowed me to take point with a sweep of her arm.

I nodded my appreciation. "Thank you for letting me be the bullet sponge."

She swiped her hand along the jaw of her mask, and the liquid metal face of it rippled. Aunt Hannah's smile appeared, not merely a facsimile or a basic smile, but picture-perfect replication of Aunt Hannah's smile with everything from her dimples to the pores of her skin appearing in the silvery surface. It was there for a second, the equivalent of her flashing a grin at me I supposed, and then it was gone, the mask once again a featureless matte grey surface.

I just shook my head and started moving down the hall.

At this point, I was feeling pretty much numb regarding Tinker shock. It was always such a surprise whenever I was hit so bluntly with how advanced Ladon was by now. Most people couldn't afford the good stuff from them, which wasn't surprising considering they were basically a Tinker/Supergenius STEM think tank that also happened to work to turn a profit. The Government, on the other hand, was their biggest customer. People like the PRT and DoD got all the fanciest toys from Hero.

I'd heard it said that compared to the rest of us, they were working with tech at least 30 years ahead of our time. A gap that was growing every day. The fact that so much of it required an infrastructure base that didn't yet exist on a scale to feed their needs was probably the only reason everyone wasn't running around with Disintegrators and such.

Which reminds me…

"Hey, Aunt Hannah?" I spoke up. I didn't bother turning around while I kept up my pace, I didn't need to when I had eyes in the back of my head. "How does it feel to be able to pull more tinker tech out of your ass than Armsmaster?"

She twitched in that way which meant she was suppressing a snort. "It's not tinker tech," she pointed out with a smile in her voice.

"I mean." I shrugged. "It's technology made by a tinker so…?"

"Not by themselves," she countered, "it's Ladon tech, made by the best human minds and tinkers working together to break boundaries."

"Ok, yeah, that's the company tagline, but I mean...come on."

"Well, as far as my power is concerned, it's not tinker tech."

"A disintegrator rifle isn't tinker tech?"

"If you want, I could spend the next five days explaining in painful detail how each part was manufactured and it's function in disintegrating any and all biological material," Aunt Hannah answered dryly, summoning the weapon with a swirl of green light.

"No thanks." I cringe, gently nudging the barrel away from me." Getting half vaporized was more than enough detail for me."

Aunt Hannah was quiet for a moment, probably for a wince. "Sorry about that, again. Are you sure you're alright, Amy?"

"It's...well, it's what I get for trying to shoggoth all my problems." I tried to shrug it off. "I'm sorry for ambushing you like that."

She nodded, and for a long moment there was almost total silence. Just the sound of our feet plodding along the long sloping hall to keep us company. As comfortable as it was, something about it felt off, like it had come on the wrong beat or it was out of line with the script. I kept wanting to say something else to fill the silence, but it always felt like it'd been too long since I'd said anything and I couldn't just pick up where I left off without being awkward.

And what if Aunt Hannah wants the silence? I thought, chewing my bottom lip where she couldn't see me fidget just to make myself feel better. I mean, she's the professional here. Silence probably makes sense for all that tactical stuff.

"...You know…" Aunt Hannah eventually said, breaking me out of my thoughts.

I struggled not to whirl around with my jaw slack and go "Huh?"

Instead, I just twisted my head so I could look at her from the corner of my human eyes.

She tapped her mask again, a faint smirk briefly appeared, "Armsmaster does love to whine about all the toys I can pull out."

I chuckled. "That's hilarious. I can already imagine the salty Armsmaster mem-"

A tile shifted under me.

Click

Then the world went blank.

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A/n: Right, so again, sorry for the delay.

And I'm sorry for how sparse this chapter is. It was supposed to be roughly twice as long, but I've been working on it for more than two months, and I realized that this is the end of February right here.

This is as much to get something out there as it is for me to get some kind of momentum in my writing for Progenitor again.

So I'm sorry this is all I got.

However, the good news is that the next chapter is...well, it's at least planned out. I say it's written, and it technically is, but Trav has some points about it that i need to fix, and I need to get the tone right, and it's this big whole thing.

I'm going to try and get it done soon, but I make no promises on when it comes out.

Again, sorry I can't deliver more sooner, and I'm sorry this whole thing is getting dragged out. At this point I'm mostly focused on making

any forward progress as opposed to solid leaps and bounds.

Hopefully, you'll allow me that at the least. And hopefully I didn't miss anything major in my rush to post.