Chapter Text
Steel double doors slammed open, groaning on their hinges. Quick strides and long legs allowed the segment to cross the space of the huge pale laboratory in seconds.
“Prime,” he said, urgency colouring his naturally level tone. “Prime, an unexpected variable has occurred.”
His voice barely carried over the noise of sparks catching on metal. A man hunched over a body on the table straightened, pushing back his welding mask. ‘Prime’ Dottore squinted at him against the harshness of glaring laboratory lights, dark circles hugging his eyes. He grunted, rubbing his aching shoulder.
“This better be worth my time.”
Segment Gamma (technically Gamma build 3.0 but Dottore had long since stopped keeping count), curled his lips with displeasure. “It’s the Descender. She has…developed some sort of unusual illness.”
Arching a brow, Dottore sighed, removing his welding mask and putting his tools back in their usual spot on a sleek tabletop beside the surgical table. His latest incomplete segment laying on the surface would have to wait. “What are you babbling about? Have you buffoons monitoring her neglected your duties so much that-”
“It was no fault of mine!” Gamma protested, raising his chin. “Delta and Theta were-”
Tired red eyes slid to him. “Don’t interrupt me when I’m speaking,” Dottore said softly.
The segment stiffened, glancing at his ‘brethren’ lying on the table like a slab of forgotten meat. One thought from Prime and it could be him lying there- his parts repurposed.
Tugging off his gloves and massaging his aching back, Dottore rounded the table. “Well? Out with it then. The Descender falling ill should be impossible, considering her ridiculous biological fortitude. What symptoms is she displaying?”
“A fever that has lasted almost 24 hours, with no signs of breaking,” Gamma moved to match his stride as Dottore walked out of the operating theatre.
Prime massaged his forehead, pinching the space between his brows. He really needed coffee. “And you failed to inform me sooner?” he sneered. “What else?”
Gamma closed his mouth, looking unusually reticent as they walked down a cold steel hallway together. “She’s secluded herself to a room. Refuses to leave. She also will not allow us come near.”
“That’s not atypical behaviour. She’s still quite wary of this place even though she decided to accept the invitation to join me. It’s barely been a month.”
“…The level of aggression and defensiveness was atypical,” the segment muttered grimly. “She took Delta’s arm.”
Dottore blinked. His steps subconsciously faltered. “Is she trying to back out of our agreement?” He asked, his calm tone not managing to mask the underlying bite in his words. That would be less than ideal. The Omega segment in Nod-Krai had worked so hard to pursue her.
“No, she’s barely coherent. I would liken her to a raging Rishboland Tiger. It's almost as though the fever has made her…baser instincts take over.”
His curiosity was undeniably piqued. Prime followed his segment into a gloomy control room, joining his newly created segments since his encounter with Sumeru's God. Theta 2.0 and Delta 4.0 looked at him as they entered, Delta’s black beak-like mask hiding the extent of his alarm, but little tells told Dottore all he needed. His segments were extremely capable,. They wouldn't have disturbed him if they weren’t stumped.
Across all camera feeds displayed on the screens before them, was her.
The Traveller- or Descender as he so affectionately called her, currently curled in on herself. Audio caught her pitiful whimpers and cries. Her legs were drawn up tight to her torso, breathing quick.
Perhaps most disturbing of all was that she was hugging Delta’s severed arm in her sleep.
“When you said she took an arm, I didn’t think you meant she'd kept it,” Dottore couldn’t help but grin darkly, glancing at Gamma.
“She’s unstable," another voice cut in with a level tone. "We should incapacitate her and hook her up to a feeding tube. She’s also approaching dangerous levels of dehydration, considering the amount of sweat and…other fluids she’s producing at an alarming rate.”
Dottore turned to the ever calm Delta, who handed him a chart. “Other fluids? My, my. What else did you neglect to tell me, Gamma?”
Gamma twisted his lips into a disgusted expression, refusing to face him. Dottore noticed his ears were tinged with red.
“Muzzle, zoom in on her. Now, enhance the image.”
Muzzle, or ‘Theta’ had been a rushed job. Dottore hadn’t had time to fashion him a mouth or lower jaw when he’d fled Snezhnaya, so the bottom half of his face was covered by a black mask that fit nicely into his mechanical components. His crude red mechanical eyes (two instead of the cyborg-like one implanted into his other brothers) blazed with bitterness.
Dottore leaned in on the console, squinting at the screen. See-through, sticky fluid was leaking out of the space between her legs at an alarming rate. It wasn’t urine.
Looking at the flushed redness of her face, the way she panted and moaned, subtly rolling her hips, it was almost like…
Dottore straightened, turning to Theta. “Did you slip her an aphrodisiac?" he asked, sharp teeth flashing in the cold artificial light.
Theta narrowed his eyes and shook his head. He then pressed a few buttons on the console, pulling up captured still images of the Descenders’ neck and wrists. They were a raw, red, angry colour. Hitting a button, Theta showed a timeframe of 12 hours- how the areas steadily worsened, becoming puffy and enflamed. The Descender was shown regularly rubbing and itching the areas, also squirming her thighs together with discomfort.
“She is producing a sweet smell, too,” Delta added. “Our physical reactions to her were somewhat alarming. We became aroused the moment we entered the same room as her.”
Well, it wasn’t like that was an unusual reaction when it came to the Descender.
“Show me the footage of how she took your arm,” Dottore said, taking a seat in a leather chair and rubbing his forehead. He could feel the beginning of a headache coming on.
Camera feed blinked onto multiple screens, all depicting the Descender in her early stages of distress. She fled into the random storage room near the stairs, not even her bedroom, and locked the door.
“No, no, no, no,” she was muttering to herself. “Not now. Please not now.”
It was so unusual seeing her like that. Wrong, somehow. His Descender was a strong. She'd faced down Archons with a defiance that would leave other, weaker humans shaking. Now here she was, huddling alone in a dark room and whimpering like a frightened child.
His teeth pressed together, jaw clenching. Something about it...irritated him, though he couldn't pinpoint why.
The footage fast forward, her body collapsing against a wall as she panted, hugging herself. Delta was the first one to approach her door, knocking. “Are you well, Descender?”
“Leave me alone!” she snapped, seeming to startle even herself. “I-I mean, please leave me be for a few days. I don’t feel good.”
“In case it has escaped your notice, you happen to be in the company of several unlicensed doctors,” Delta chuckled to himself.
In the control room, Dottore and the other segments chuckled softly.
“I can help you. Allow me to enter and I’ll be more than happy to lend my assistance,” he continued in the footage.
When she kept refusing, Delta left her alone for a time. After the footage was sped up to skip two hours, his figure could be seen returning with several weapons floating mid-air about his person. They resembled large floating needles, thicker and longer than human arms in size.
“Forcing open the door like that likely didn't help matters,” Dottore grumbled.
Delta wisely chose not to comment. For one of his calmer segments, Prime grimly noted that experience was always more valuable than personality traits. Greenhorn segments were such a pain to teach. He watched Delta flick his wrist- the needles sinking in- tearing open the door like butter and tossing it aside with a screech of steel.
The Descender was immediately different. Alert, wild. She snarled, bearing her teeth, bending low over her makeshift bed. The closer Delta moved toward her, the more she growled, limbs locked, spittle foaming from her mouth and running down her chin like a feral animal.
When he took a step too close, she lunged. Her speed was too quick for the footage to capture. Between one moment and the next, Delta’s arm was missing.
“She didn't use a weapon,” Delta murmured in the room, glancing down at his stump. “I felt her bare hands and teeth, seconds before it was ripped off.”
The woman in the footage reappeared holding his severed arm. Dottore’s segments didn't bleed unless Prime went to the trouble of inserting a complex valve/bloodstream into them (a rare occurrence), but distressed pulsing white veins appeared on the limb.
She appeared to delicately sniff his arm, before discarding it like a used toy. Delta at this point, chose to withdraw, looking somewhat pale.
Dottore flicked his gaze from the old footage to the current feed of his Descender sleeping. She'd now tucked her face into the palm of the severed arm, nuzzling it slightly as if pretending someone was there with her, cupping her cheek.
“It's like she's gone completely insane,” said Gamma.
“Her sanity was only a perk of collaboration, not a necessity, surely,” Delta shrugged apathetically.
Prime stiffened subtly. His lips tugged downwards, fingers twitching. “You're both short sighted fools,” straightening from the console, he kept his gaze on the woman sleeping in the camera footage. “The entire reason I put so much effort into working with the Traveller is because she's worth more as a lucid participant. I could have detained her easily, but she'd be nothing more than an anatomical mannequin.”
With a dismissive wave to turn off the machine, he turned with a sharp pivot, heading for the door.
“Where are you going?” one of his segments said, he wasn't paying attention enough to differentiate their similar voices.
“I'm going to pay her a little visit.”
“Are you certain that's wise?”
Dottore Prime stopped. He turned slightly, levelling them with a mocking grin in the face of their caution. What fools. “Field research always involves getting your hands dirty.”