+ Reid +

The Ferber Compound was a truly massive complex. From the air, Reid could see four separate layers of walls and defenses that surrounded the entire area. Inside, there were two runways next to a sizeable aircraft hangar, which itself was then dwarfed by an L shaped building made of concrete and glass. A number of smaller structures dotted the landscape, including one mid-sized square building near the old main access road that Reid pegged as a hotel. It seemed that at one point, people were lining up to visit this place.

Now, many of the buildings were snaked with vines, and more than a few sported broken windows or holes in the walls. Sections of the forest and the grounds were burned, and bits of the ground appeared to be tilled, like a set of scars dotting the landscape.

He slowed his speed again, and waited until the projected voice came back into range.

"Wow. You're fast. So fast. I'm slow. I'm sorry."

"Hey, Bubbles - it's alright. We already agreed. You don't need to apologize to me, okay? It's fine. Everything is fine."

"Okay. I'm sorry. Right. Sorry for the sorry."

In all their travel towards the compound, Bubbles had stayed out of sight. She had also continued to be her profusely apologetic self. The girl was an odd one, and definitely seemed like she was going to need time and help to process some sort of trauma. She'd barely reacted to the mangled bodies near Reid's campsite, but had a tendency to fly into an apology spiral when she imagined she'd caused Reid the slightest inconvenience.

Reid ran his tongue over the inside of his teeth.

"Bubbles - I'm going to go inside. Do you think you'll be safer out here, or inside with me?"

"I... I-I'm not sure."

Reid nodded to himself. "If you want to go inside with me, you're going to need to come out and stick next to me. Are you ready for that?"

"No... Sorry."

It was worth a shot, at least. Reid had no doubt the girl was going to try and follow him in, anyway. With a few more words of warning, he flapped his wings, and rocketed forwards.

Randy wasn't going to get a four-step entry plan.

As he passed over the third outer wall and neared the second, Reid felt the prick against his ethereal self as multiple people hiding somewhere below attempted to identify him. He maintained his speed and lowered his altitude. No one stopped his movements. No shots or shouts or spells attempted to bring him to the ground. He passed clear over the final walls, and found himself inside the compound with no fanfare.

He'd expected... something. Someone to greet him or intercept him, like every other arrival he'd had thus far. Instead, he touched down in front of the L shaped building, peering in at the faint light and motion visible through the windows. Reid squinted. Near the top of the structure, there was a window with too many panes. Focusing his eyes revealed a man inside holding a long rifle mounted to a tall stand. After a seconds-long stare-off, the sniper waved.

Reid grunted, and marched himself forward to the glass doors. He entered a very corporate, affluent lobby. Tasteful polished stone made up the floor and the walls, and a pleasant young Vuxarinan woman wearing a silky set of clothing stood behind a high black counter. She put on an uncertain smile as her eyes flit up and down Reid's armored frame. Her voice barely betrayed the fear her face portrayed.

"Welcome to the Ferber Pharmaceutical Compound. If you are here to visit a patient, please sign in to your right. If you are here to check your own patient eligibility, you want the form on the left."

Reid slowly turned between the two clipboards, spaced nearly fifteen feet apart. He leaned forward and gripped the counter with one hand.

"I'm here to see your boss, lady. He's going to answer for experimenting on children."

The woman tilted her head, and furrowed her brow. "I don't understand. Are you here to bring him an award? I thought the terminal disease institute was shut down since the awakening thing."

Reid couldn't help his slack jaw.

"An AWARD? Why the fuck would I -? ... No. I'm not here to give him a fucking award. Call him, right the fuck now, and tell him I met Bubbles. Tell him he needs to get his ass here, now - or I'm going to go find him. And you don't want me to go find him."

The receptionist pulled an oval-shaped device out from a drawer, and turned around to do something Reid couldn't see. He was wholly ready to tear down the facility, but a receptionist wasn't inherently evil or part of the child experiments. That would be insane.

She perked up a few moments later with a wide smile.

"Great news! Dr. Ferber is making time in his schedule for you! It's an honor for him to accommodate someone like this. Come on, I'll take you there myself, and give you the tour on the way."

Reid steeled himself as she rose, and watched her movements carefully as she started a slow walk down the long section of the building. But she didn't try anything. Nobody jumped out at him from the shadows. He wasn't offered poisoned drinks or sedative laced food, and they didn't try to trap him. It was just an improbably normal walk with the same level of enthusiasm he'd expect from any corporate sycophant.

"...and, when Randall Ferber stood to inherit the family's work, he put a new focus on the pursuit of cures and treatments for terminal diseases. His best work has been on treating children, and the wall of awards you see to the left are recognition of his contributions. This one with the glass legs is my favorite. The Doctor received it after he successfully developed a fungus-based medicine that more than doubled the life expectancy for children with Pereatiuvenis Syndrome."

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Next to the award, a black slab of stone sat etched with dozens of names scrawled in silver text. The woman noticed Reid's stare.

"Ah, another reason to love the Doctor's work and his leadership. These are the names of the volunteers who gave their lives in pursuit of advancement and treatment for those with their condition. Dr. Ferber requires every volunteer to affirm their participation themselves, in addition to the usual parental waivers. He dedicates each award to those that enabled it, in his words. Truly a compassionate and humble man, the Doctor."

Reid did his best to keep his composure as the woman continued to expound on how virtuous the man was for doing scientific research that sometimes helped kids - when it didn't kill them in the process of reaching a cure. How he was so magnanimous for spending his time doing that, instead of just sitting around and enjoying the inheritance from his parents. How every non-hostile action the man ever took was proof of his kind and gentle heart.

Eventually, they stopped at a glass-enclosed elevator.

"Okay. He's waiting for you at the Possibility Level. Just hit the button with the floor name, and it will take you right there. Plan to keep your conversation to a half hour maximum, okay? That's how much time was blocked off for your visit."

Reid stepped inside the glass cube, and gave the dark and empty shaft beneath his feet a glance before he eyed the series of buttons with floor names that included 'Imagination', 'Dreams', 'Fun', 'Bravery', and 'Healing'. The receptionist was still putting on her best cordial smile.

This was nuts. They were nuts. Reid was nuts for getting into an elevator that seemed like it was going to plunge him into the belly of the planet, even if it was the fastest way to get a face-to-face meeting with Dr. Ferber.

He tapped the Possibility Level, and took a breath as the glass doors closed.

As the elevator descended smoothly into the depths of the Ferber Compound, Reid caught a flash of yellow motion following him down the shaft.

).-. Beatrice .-.(

"YES!" She pumped a fist, and turned to Uzochi, her aide. "Tell the exterior forces to collapse on that position. I don't care if they have to tear through the gods-damned walls. Our target is inside, and we just stopped the one hope they had."

She turned her attention back to the two feeds she'd invested in for the battle. One was in the hall space, looking out on her mass of troops filling the area and pressuring the locals. The other was a scout, placed at the edge of the top lip of the mine, and it kept a camera trained on the excavator the locals had already swarmed over like rats.

The machine had fallen far too quickly, and they'd caught her and her tacticians by surprise when they showed up in the crystal sorting room. It took dozens of lives to keep them penned into that room, and to turn the safety hall between sorting and processing chambers into a no-man's-land. It bought them enough time to shift forces to that area - enough to overwhelm the enemy.

The solitary figure in lithe power armor had given her a bit of a fright. Power armor wasn't supposed to be that nimble - or, when it was, it was also supposed to be equally fragile. More importantly, people weren't supposed to be able to move in armor like that without a decade of training or more. Upon further inspection of the recordings, her analysts reported that it was the same woman responsible for shoulder-firing the plasma cannon. Another oddity that had threatened to throw off her plans.

But not anymore.

They'd destroyed the cart, and pinned down the woman with a few well placed explosives. And that meant there would be no intact mana crystals for the tinkerer to leverage. Every moment brought Bea closer to victory. Closer to the target of this trap. Her troops waited outside the facility, ready to take him down if he tried to run. They were surrounded, and doomed. They just didn't know it yet. The locals fought on, returning fire from the bay doors to the sorting room in a futile resistance.

Everything was going according to her plan.

She bit the inside of her lip and steadied herself.

Bea had been surprised before by these enemies, and that meant she wasn't going to leave anything to chance - even a slight one.

The tiny tyrant was going to die today, one way other another.

She checked the last status from her failsafe again. They were in place in orbit, ready, with enough charge for three barrages. The math of the decision played through the front of her mind. The troops she would lose - and the real worth of the resources that had gone into making them more powerful.

Her troops slowed their approach as a hail of tiny contraptions were thrown wild out from the sorting room. They erupted in flame and shards of rock, created half-functional wooden walls and froze sections of the floor. A smile spread across her lips. This was the feeling she'd been missing. The one kept from her all this time. Their desperation played through their actions as they panicked, and used every throwable device they had left.

This was it. The creeping realization from the other side that they had been outfought and outplayed. The acceptance of truth - they were nothing in the face of Belar. They were nothing against her might and her mind. She reveled in the sense of supremacy as the hail faded, along with the enemy's hope. She caught glimpses of some running farther back into the sorting room - a final gambit at escape. They would find no safe way out.

Her troops surged forwards. Victory was a single ramp away. Bea stood from her chair, both fists clenched in anticipation.

A harsh whine spooled up, clearly audible over the din of battle. Her brow furrowed.

No. That wasn't possible.

They couldn't have gotten the thing here. Not without her teams noticing. Not through the chutes to the sorting room. Not unless...

Unless the tyrant had stored the parts, then managed to rebuild his ship-level weapon in the middle of a battle.

The short, ivory-covered form of the Tyrant stepped into view. One hand held a tube, and the other grasped a small control box. Bea's eyes went wide.

"Shoot him! SHOOT HIM NOW!"

Magic glowed and guns retorted as she leaned forward onto her desk.

He dropped the control to the ground and lifted the cannon's barrel with both hands. A pair of hard yellow eyes glinted as a vampiric mouth grimaced at her forces. The tyrant stomped the control, and the portable plasma cannon fired.

The spiraling green and orange beam vaporized the magics and projectiles intended to kill the diminutive demon, and carried on unimpeded.

Concentrated energy tore through her forces as if they weren't wearing armor at all. The energy beam bucked and shifted violently as the tyrant worked to control the outlandish weapon. Her troops were incinerated, bisected, and fatally wounded by the dozens, then the hundreds as the lancing beam of energy continued to fire. Only the rearmost forces made it through alive, and the beam sputtered to nothing.

The tyrant looked back into the sorting room, and activity erupted as a team of indistinct Vuxarinans hustled around a shadowed box. Jenna's blood went ice cold as she realized she was watching the enemy soldiers reload the weapon with another salvo worth of crystals.

She'd lost the ground fight. She sent half her fucking army for that sector of the planet into the mine, and it still wasn't enough.

Bea's fist crashed into and through her desk. She grabbed the left half, and threw it clean through the wall with a frustrated scream.

She dug her fingers into her scalp as her body shook with rage. Her teeth ground together as she spun to Uzochi.

Her order came out in a half-crazed shout as her hands vibrated.

"Obliterate him! Glass that fucking mine!"

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