Best of Intentions: Mr. Fear (ch. 31)

To my immense surprise, my arch-nemesis didn't immediately trust me enough to give me full unrestricted and unmonitored access to a laboratory. Which was both irritating and slightly reassuring that all this wasn't wasn't a case of the blind leading the blind. Or, rather, morons leading morons. 

I was escorted into what was once a dungeon based on the various shackles on the wall and medieval torture implements scattered about. It had since been converted into a modest laboratory filled with high-end equipment, and rather recently too because some of the torture implements still had dried blood on them. The lab was quaint compared to the tools that I usually worked with, but they were bleeding-edge as far as the rest of the world was concerned. 

“The man-thing is surprised, sisters,” Bela, one of my four prison wardens, remarked. 

“Did it think that Mother Miranda would work with the clumsy tools of ancient alchemists?” Cassandra returned, a twinkling but mocking laugh in her voice. 

“Perhaps it is disappointed that we won't get to play with it?” Daniela finished, the three conversing back and forth as I performed an inspection of the equipment. 

The three sisters were interesting. I had seen some weird fucked up experiments and countless abominations that managed to escape the petri dish, but I hadn't encountered anything quite like the ‘Dimitrescu Sisters’, as they had introduced themselves. They were beautiful, clad in old black dresses, with too pale skin, black lipstick and too much eyeshadow. If I was a younger man, that last remark of theirs would have been more true than not. 

Everyone had a weakness -- a personal kryptonite. Mine just so happened to be goth girls. 

But I was an older man. A wiser man, despite what my Wis score might say. Wise enough to know that when one of them remarked that they could ‘eat me up’, they were being quite literal.

Also, I drew the line at bug people. 

As if to prove my point, Bela collapsed into a swarm of insects, her flesh, muscle, and bone breaking apart as the swarm flew across the room so she would be sitting on a diffuser in the corner of my view, the black dress being carried and refilled in seconds. The process gave me a halfway decent look at the insects that their bodies were composed of, and the best descriptor I could think of was ‘carnivorous.’ 

“What will the man-thing do for Grandmother?” Cassandra asked, sweeping from behind a touch too close, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand. “What does it think it can do that Grandmother cannot?" There was a warning lurking in the back of her tone. 

“It thinks it is so clever. Smarter than Grandmother,” Daniela added from afar, stirring the pot. Yet, when my fourth guard shifted, their eyes went to him as I continued my inspection. 

Albert Wesker lurked in the corner by the door, his arms crossed and his gaze firmly affixed on me. If I didn't know any better, I'd say he was sore about the whole ‘ambushing and murdering him’ thing. But I did know better. Albert's body was currently floating in the astral realm along with a chunk of Antarctica. I'm not sure what this guy's deal was, but I knew that he wasn't the Albert that we killed. 

“This lab is a step above total trash, but it's a baby step,” I said, making the sisters’ gazes snap to me, taking the insult personally. The dungeon became filled with a buzzing sound that promised violence and, frankly, one of the worst ways I could imagine dying. And yet- 

“Enough,” Albert uttered, even sounding the same. The word cut through the tension like the knife, making the sisters look at one another, momentarily unsure what to do. But then Albert continued, “Mr. Rain. Stop provoking them so that we kill each other.” 

“But what will I do to alleviate my boredom?” I replied sarcastically, finishing the check-up and filing the interaction away. I was almost certain of it now. 

Oswell and Miranda were allies of convenience but nothing more. I was unsure the exact extent of their relationship, but there was a certain kind of tension between Oswell's forces and Miranda's that told me that while they might have a common enemy, they didn't have a common goal. That meant there was an opportunity to drive a wedge between them, but not yet. I needed to know what motivated Miranda before I made a play like that. 

Something she didn't make particularly easy. She had stood beside Oswell as an equal, her followers called her mother or grandmother, indicating a familial sense of loyalty, but the woman herself was a mystery. She said nothing during that meeting, simply watching it all unfold under a cynical gaze -- she made no effort to reign in her followers, to interject with Oswell, or to make her own case.

First order of business was learning more about her. 

“You work,” Albert replied flatly. I made sure he saw me rolling my eyes, even with those sunglasses that he wore indoors. God, what a tool. He was eerily similar to what I remember from the movies though, and that was worrying. 

Still, he did have a point. The equipment checked out, and now it was time to see what I was working with. So, I slid into a chair and booted up a computer and immediately felt annoyed that it took more than a second to warm up. I really had spoiled myself, huh? 

Using a mouse also felt clunky, especially when it was the old version with a ball that rolled around to guide the cursor. Very imprecise. No wonder so much of Umbrella went insane -- I was already annoyed with it. That soon faded when I brought up a folder containing the information that I was looking for. 

“The T-Virus? How droll,” I remarked to my guards, needling them just a bit to see how much slack I had on my leash. “Completely unsuited for what Oswell has in mind, you know. The infection rate makes malaria look like a genetic disease, but it mutates too easily. With it, its a matter of when, not if, it mutates out of control and kills everyone. And while I imagine Umbrella sees that as a plus, I certainly don't.” 

“There is a stabilizing agent,” Albert replied, but he made no move to elaborate. 

I scanned the data on the T-Virus to see that it was very complete. A complete history almost, that started from the first clinical trials to the various offshoots that Umbrella’s splinter organizations produced. That, I would make sure to study thoroughly before making my great escape. Lots of useful data in there. But I wasn't seeing the stabilizing agent, and I didn't have an AI that provided me with the relevant files, so I had to go digging with a shitty mouse and a screen that certainly wasn't a 12k monitor. 

These people honestly lived like savages. Might as well ask me to build a rocket ship by smacking rocks together. 

It took me a few minutes, but I navigated the mess of files to discover what he meant by a stabilizing agent. That data was far more interesting than the mundane T-Virus for a wide variety of reasons. Chief among them was that the notes began in 1919, predating the T-Virus by twenty years. 

“Mold, huh?” I mused, scanning the research and my interest roused when I saw who the notes were signed by. On every page too. “Miranda looks good for her age,” I remarked, realizing the woman was as old, if not older, than Oswell. She was also a classic narcissist. Seriously, who signed their notes detailing horrific experiments on villagers? 

The lab became filled with a harsh buzzing that told me I had touched a raw nerve. All the more so, when Cassandra arrived next to me in a swarm of carnivorous insects, grabbing me by the throat and pushing me until my chair slammed into a table. Her expression was livid, pure murderous rage pulled back her lips in a snarl of buzzing insects and too sharp canines. “Don't insult Grandmother,” she warned. 

“Or what?” I prompted, feeling the pricks of insects nibbling at my skin under her palm. There was a flicker of hesitation in her eyes when I wasn't immediately cowed or afraid in any way. “That wasn't a rhetorical question -- or what? You'll… kill me?” I started but tilted my head and narrowed my eyes, “No. I don't think so. You don't have permission for that. And if you had permission to actually hurt me, then you would have done it already. Meaning that Miranda wants me alive for something. Interesting.” 

Cassandra withdrew her hand as if she had been burned, pissed off to hell and back but embarrassed in equal measure, telling me I was right on the mark. She loomed, the insects that comprised her body shifting visibly, giving her an inhuman visage, yet she tellingly did nothing. 

“Right,” I remarked, making a dismissive shooing gesture at her, just to see if I could provoke her into action. What I got instead was a shriek of frustration that sounded like it came from a preteen girl who had never not gotten her way suddenly realizing that she did have limits before Cassandra burst into a cloud of insects and fled the basement. 

“Anyway,” I continued like nothing had happened, rolling back into place before the computer, ignoring the glowering glares of her sisters. “Viruses aren't like legos. You can't just snap them together.” 

“Are you claiming that it is beyond your abilities?” Albert questioned, earning a dismissive snort from me. And that was answer enough.

“I suppose I should be flattered you think so highly of me,” I replied, my tone indicating I very much wasn't. But with that, I turned back to the data on the mold. And it was at least new, even if Miranda seemed to have pioneered Umbrella's modus operandi of horrific human experimentation as a go-to option. I also saw why Oswell had discounted the mold as a method to achieving what he wanted. 

The Mold was strangely stable. Too stable, to the point that it actively resisted mutations, making it a real fight to introduce new adaptations. Something that Miranda had included in her research, though it was obviously redacted alongside a few other things. Weaknesses, mainly, but also the overall goal of her research. Oswell wanted to take over the world, but Miranda had carefully removed anything that would hint at her reason for spending at least eighty years experimenting endlessly with the Mold. 

Her successes were few, with her final success rate being around .0001%. She was either particularly ambitious and headstrong, or the experiments were something personal to her. But the successes she did have were by using the Mold to splice animal DNA into people, creating the superpowers that I saw. 

Heisenberg was spliced with electric eel DNA, which granted him his polarity powers via manipulating them with electricity. The Lycans that I saw before? Similar deal. The Dimitrescu siblings? Particularly gruesome in that they were consumed by the same insects their bodies were comprised of, with their consciousness spreading through the swarm due to the Mold's fungal hive mind. There was another success that I hadn't met, Salvatore Moreau, who seemed to be an experiment in cracking open the Mold's ability to mutate. 

But not all of her successes stemmed from creating hybrids.

Big Lady, Alcina Dimitrescu as her name turned out to be, had a genetic blood disease that turned her into what amounted to a nine foot tall vampire. Donna Beneviento, another success that I hadn't met, was something of a mystery given how censored her file was. Miranda clearly had a goal with her, but based on my presence, Donna survived the experiments but was deemed a failure. 

As for the Mold itself -- it had all the markers of the Progenitor Virus, though pretty much everything about how it was discovered was missing. But, if I had to guess, a fungal colony was infected with the virus, but due the frigid air and isolated nature of the mountains, it never managed to spread far. And I was assuming that the Mold originated here, otherwise Miranda would have moved somewhere more convenient for her experiments. So, I would need to find the original fungal colony and delete it from reality before I made my exit. 

“What exactly am I shooting for here?” I asked after a very long and very loud silence. “Tempering the T-Virus while maintaining its virility is obvious. What else?” 

“That isn't for you to know," Albert replied.

Interesting reaction. “So there is something else to know, hm? Going to give everyone superpowers? Oswell is living out those prepubescent world domination fantasies, so I'm guessing mind control is a must.” I said, fishing for a reaction that Albert refused to give me. The other two weren't much use there based on their shared glance that seemed uncertain. I'm not sure if they knew the full plan or cared enough to ask. 

“I'm not here to sate your curiosity,” Albert warned flatly. 

“But I'm so very curious. About a lot of things. Like… what are you doing here? Last time I saw you, you had more holes than Swiss cheese, and that was before I shunted you from this plane of existence,” I remarked, keeping the banter flowing. All the while my mind raced with the implications. 

That parasite I saw in Spain before my kidnapping. I wasn't entirely sure what it was, but I was certain that it was a piece of the puzzle I was putting together. Was it another branch of the Progenitor Virus? Something that specialized in mind control? Because those villagers had been mind-whammied, alive in the sense that their heart was beating but entirely puppeted by that parasite in their grey matter. 

I suppose that could be it. They wanted a stable version of the virus, then they would graft on that parasite as it wouldn't interfere much with the virus. 

That settled it. I needed to do some snooping. 

Albert, however, refused to answer me or entertain my questions. He seemed to realize that engaging with me at all was a mistake and decided to ignore me entirely. That was fine. How he came back from the dead/was cloned/was an evil twin didn't really matter considering that I fully intended to kill him again and toss his body into the astral plain right next to the last Albert Wesker. 

Which left me focusing on my work. And by that, I meant my real work of thinking up ways to remove the bullets to the gun being pressed to the world's head. The whole combining the T-Virus and Mold ideas was intriguing, and quite possible given that they shared markers of the Progenitor Virus -- but that was frankly busy work. 

My main concern was the threat against the world. That was something that I needed to defuse before I moved to take everyone here down. 

So, I plodded along with the sub-tier lab, making just enough progress that they wouldn't get fussy about me dragging my feet. Did that for about six hours before Albert decided it was my bed time, and I was ushered out of the lab and into the castle proper. The interior was pretty swanky -- very grandiose with a Gothic style. Rather warm too. Albert didn't say a word to me as I was then brought to a room several stories up, and it was a real medieval penthouse, complete with satin sheets and a nice view of the village and mountains. 

As the door closed shut behind me and a comical number of locks sealed me inside, I gave the place a look around before my gaze landed on a child sized doll on a chair. It was looking at me. “Creepy,” I decided, paying it no mind before going to the barred windows. I could open them, but I couldn't squeeze through. 

I imagine they thought me quite powerless without my weapons and armor. But, even as my tech advantage grew, I could never forget the days of being starved for resources in Raccoon City.

First order of business was to make sure I wasn't being watched, and to my faint surprise, there weren't any secret cameras set up in the room. “I suppose Oswell is trying to butter me up,” I reasoned, approaching the doll and double-checking each eye to confirm that it wasn't a baby cam. Still, even if he was trying to not be a creep by not watching me sleep, it felt like a pretty massive security oversight. 

I suppose it didn't really matter. 

Once the room was clear, I began my work -- the class feature Right Tool For The Job let me create tools for my tinkering, no matter what that tool might be, with an hour of uninterrupted work. However, that class feature got something of an upgrade with Adept Tinkering at Level 23. So, I scoured the room for bits and bobs to create an All Purpose Tool, which would let me take care of the bars on my windows. 

I could just rip them out, frankly. That's what the Belt of Fire Giant Strength was for. But that would make noise, and I imagine it would be rather difficult to explain in the morning once I snuck back into my bedroom. Within fifteen minutes, I had a diffuser torch, but before I made my escape, I tapped the pillow of the bed. Another way Adept Tinkering bettered my tinkering was it vastly increased the range of abilities I could perform with a quick tinker. 

Such as casting Minor Illusion on the bed to give the appearance that I was asleep. I completed the illusion with a second button that had an audio recording of me softly snoring. 

With that, I approached the bars with my torch and gave them a quick pass over. The covalent bonds became elastic, giving the iron bars the property of rubber, which let me bend them enough so I could climb out of them and they naturally returned to their natural state. That left me outside of the castle, on a ledge, and I walked it with confidence, if a light step. 

I was reasonably sure that even if they caught me they wouldn't kill me. They were probably expecting something like this, and if they weren't, then they should have. So long as I didn't really push my luck, they would just give me a finger wagging and throw me back in my room. Possibly without any supper. So, it wasn't that much of a risk, and it was a necessary one. 

I needed information. Who Miranda was. Where the Mold was. And what was their plan to infect the world as a Plan B? 

Once I was down the wing they dropped me off in, I opened another window and stepped back inside, brushing off some stray snow flakes that clung to me. Casing the room, I grabbed a few bits and pieces before stepping out into the main hall and started walking. 

I had an advantage in stealth because the castle seemed… very empty. Well cared for, but empty. And once I took apart a HAM radio for a vacuum tube, I had an even greater advantage when I cast Invisibility on myself, burning through another metamagic point to lengthen the spell. So, I moved through the halls completely unseen. 

I could use the opportunity to kill Oswell, but he seemed spiteful enough that he would deadman switch the apocalypse, so I dismissed that idea out of hand. However tempting it was. Instead, with the power of deductive reasoning, trope awareness, and a pinch of common sense, I guesstimated that they were keeping the stuff that I wanted to know close by, but as far as way from me as they could manage. So, considering that they had me working out of a dungeon, I figured that the good stuff would be located in one of the towers on the opposite side of the castle. 

The castle itself really was a swanky place. It had a rustic charm to it. I could see myself vacationing here once the world stopped needing constant saving. It really was a shame that I was going to have to toss it all into the astral plane. I just mollified myself with the thought that I could totally build a medieval castle on the moon during my retirement. 

My guesstimating proved correct because I found both Heisenberg and Alcina Dimitrescu standing guard outside of a door that led to the tower. And both of them looked like they were equally unhappy with the arrangement, seated across from one another with a very loud silence, and the tension was thick enough to cut. 

I didn't plan on getting between them, so I instead left the castle and found myself in the courtyard I’d arrived in. Approaching the tower from outside, I saw that there was a balcony around fifty feet up. 

Bending my knees, I jumped as high as I could, easily clearing fifteen feet thanks to my strength score, before I grabbed hold of the stone with my unnatural strength. Another leap, though smaller, brought me about halfway, but with a final jump, I grabbed hold of the balcony railing from below and pulled myself up. A door barred my way from getting inside, but I couldn't hear anyone inside after putting an ear to the door, so I picked the lock and welcomed myself in. 

I was careful to not make a sound as I stepped into what was certainly Miranda's lab. It was an odd mixture of old school alchemy and cutting edge tech -- with mortar and pestles next to a high-end analyzer. The walls were covered in bookshelves and they were overflowing with notes and textbooks, piles of them stacked high to handle the overflow. A quick scan of the room revealed that the room was empty before my gaze landed on something that laid in the center of a work table, attached to various equipment.

I nearly let out an audible groan the moment that I saw it. 

Amber. 

I was really starting to hate amber. It seemed that it only preserved stuff that managed to make my life a thousand times more complicated. Approaching it, I couldn't recognize whatever in the hell the amber had preserved this time, but I did recognize it from the parasites I saw in the brains of those people in Spain. 

Las Plagas according to the notes that I found on a nearby computer. Miranda's notes. The quick bullet points were that it was discovered a few months ago by some guy who actually used to own the castle that got blown up. However, Umbrella was quick to snatch it up as it was perfect for what they had planned, and it seemed to work generally how I thought it would. 

There was a queen parasite and drones -- the drones were controlled via a hive mind by the queen. It only took them a few months to make it infinitely worse by tempering the direct outright mind control just enough to leave the host personality intact, but leave the strong influence the queen parasite would have on the drones. In effect, they'd be puppets of the queen and never even know it. 

However, Miranda's notes were a bit more informative beyond that. And it became readily clear how little trust there was between Umbrella and Miranda, because I quickly found a few things on her computer that obviously weren't meant to be there. 

Such as Oswell's plans for how he would infect the world with the T-Virus, and he really had completely undersold the plan. 

“Infect every major city my ass,” I hissed under my breath. Oswell's plan was to outright virus bomb the world -- detonating virus bombs in the atmosphere at strategic points to ensure that the entire damn planet was infected, followed by the promised releases in all the major cities to ensure the most people were infected as fast as possible. By the end of the first hour… ninety percent of the planet would be infected. The rest would just be a matter of time. 

“You shall do,” I heard an unfamiliar voice observe from behind him and as I whipped around, I had just enough time to see that it was Miranda before she struck me in the chest. 

Feeling someone's hand on your heart was a decidedly weird sensation, I decided. Wasn't a fan. 

“Oswell was sure he required your cooperation," Miranda informed, her grip on my heart tightening. “I, however, do not require your consent.” 

With a yank, she pulled my still beating heart right out of my chest and I immediately collapsed where I stood. I fell on my back and as my vision darkened… 

The very last thing I saw was Miranda's expression of absolute bafflement as the heart in her hand collapsed into a pile of snow. 

“Heh.” 

Sucks to suck, loser.