Author's Note/Updates:

Heyo, here's Chapter 3. I don't know if you've noticed, but it's been a lot longer than a week since the last chapter. I got a summer job, so the time I thought I would dedicate to writing this story was taken up by working, and I just in general had less time to think about the story. I also realized my pacing was super messed up. I was planning to have them be out of the facility in only 7 chapters. Could you imagine? Anyways, I took some time to (hopefully) fix the pacing and rethink a couple of the key moments, and also you know, do my job. I think this chapter came out a lot better than it would have originally, which is always nice. I'll try to keep to the chapter a week schedule, but don't be surprised if chapters come a bit late. Anyways, thanks for reading, and hope you enjoy.

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I stared at the short woman across from me, who was dressed in a slim blue tank-top and a pair of pajamas.

She stared back at me, her eyes blank, her mouth unhinged.

“You are now a loyal dog. Come over here and sit at attention.” I ordered.

The woman in the tank-top got down on all fours, shambling over towards me in what I can only guess was her best impression of a dog. When she arrived about two feet away from my location, she assumed the position and stared up at me, her tongue wagging back and forth. I stared back intensely, searching for something, willing her to do something. Anything. Scratch your ear with your foot. I thought and ordered within my mind.

She continued to sit there, unperturbed, content with following the order that I had spoken aloud. I sighed. Looks like it wouldn’t be that easy. I walked over to Ilana, who was propped up against one of the trees within the training area. The atmosphere around her seemed alive with colorful forms of energy, their various auras floating around her body as she wrote within a large journal. Her reddish-blond hair seemed to flutter about around her, despite the lack of wind. I suspected those energies had something to do with the ‘magic’ she performed, but Ilana didn’t seem prone to share much about her abilities, at least not when we talked at the lunch table.

“Hey Ilana, I’m done with her. You can do your thing.” I pointed behind me at the lady still sitting at attention, finding myself a place next to her at the tree.

She nodded towards me once, continuing to scribble into her notebook. I tilted my head forward, getting a brief glimpse at what she was writing. I was surprised that I could immediately tell it was a language I was most familiar with. Gibberish. While there seemed to be pictures, most of the actual writing seemed to be in various lines and scratches, coming out as weird symbols that seemed to have no visible pattern or distinction. I guessed it was some sort of code only she could understand, but it seemed like a lot of effort just for a notebook. Being the curious fellow that I am, I decided I might as well just ask her about it.

“Why all the secrecy in your notebook?” I asked. “If it’s to document your powers, I don’t see why you need to be so super secret spy about it. Dr. C himself said we are the first test subjects. No one else can use your abilities.”

She turned towards me, a look of derision clear on her face. She continued scribbling a bit, before closing the notebook and focusing on me. She opened her mouth, and I steeled myself for another one of her usual rants, but instead, she just closed her mouth, a frown forming on her face. She stood up and dusted herself off before turning back towards me. “I know you are dumb, but stop expecting me to explain how the world works to you.” She paused to take a quick glance at Dr. C, before continuing. “We are prototypes made to fight an enemy, Mao. You should really stop. Sit still. And think about what that means.” She then turned around and walked back over towards the woman I had left sitting on the ground. To kill her. And raise her from the dead.

I slumped further down the tree, my eyes locked on the forms of Ilana and the woman as she went about her grisly business. I never learned the woman’s name. In fact, I had not learned any of the names of the people that had died once we began our ability training a few weeks ago, and it was specifically because I had not tried. I already had nightmares of dead people floating through my head, I didn’t need nightmares where I could place the names of each and every one of them. Ilana brought her hand towards the woman’s head, a ripple in the air and blood spurting from the woman’s neck the only indication that anything had been done to her. The woman slowly slumped over, and I watched her eyes regain reason, her desperate rasping filling the air, before her eyes grew dim again and she expired. Ilana checked her pulse to make sure she was truly dead, then proceeded to work her magic. I closed my eyes. I had resolved myself to watch all of them die, but it was always… difficult to watch the things stand back up again.

By this point, I had come to see many shambling corpses stand up again, and my notion of the sanctity of death had long since shattered. It had been a couple weeks since that man had died on my–no, on the orders of Dr. C-and been brought back to life. It seems like Dr. C just wanted to see if he could force me to kill, because he never told me to order another person’s death again. In fact, he explicitly ordered me to instead make all the people I controlled with my hypnotic vision become submissive when I finished my training, so Ilana could easily kill and reanimate them for her own training. I didn’t know if I should be humiliated that a woman was doing everything I couldn’t help but be squeamish about, or grateful. The look I caught from Dr. C every day when Ilana and I did our little ‘trade-off’ helped me figure out which.

Unfortunately, I no longer had the time to mope about and feel bad about myself. The training was progressing smoothly, which was both good and bad. The good of it was, I was growing more accustomed to my powers. I now realized that these powers would most likely be essential in escaping this high-tech facility. Being able to use my powers effectively gave me a much higher likelihood of making it out of this place alive. The bad of the situation was the fact that if the training proceeded too quickly, and I didn’t have time to sufficiently plan an escape with the others, there would be no escape, and even less of a chance of killing Dr. C. I needed to do both if I wanted to escape from here with some mental peace, and the safety of my family ensured.

I opened my eyes and got up from the tree, my mental break over. I walked out of the forest area, into another area that was just as surprising to find in an indoors facility. It seemed to be some sort of flat fighting field, encircled by a moat. The fighting field itself was quite large, comparable to the size of a fairly large gymnasium. On the fighting field was a lot of the equipment we had been using before for our basic military training, but there were also some new additions, specifically the robotic training dummies.

I walked across the bridge onto the field, where I saw Donte was already sparring with one of the robots. It seemed like regular sparring for the most part, except when Donte began shifting parts of his body. I watched his fist as a shimmer formed around it, and then a gigantic dragon claw appeared in place of his fist, ripping through the air towards the dummy.  The dummy dodged the blow by shifting to the side, just scraping by his attack. Donte’s fist slowly regained its human qualities and size, and he flexed his fingers, staring down the robot. He grinned, and began to let out a flurry of attacks.

Although the attacks themselves were pretty basic, what made them dangerous was the random transformation of various parts of his body into gigantic dragon appendages. He feigned transformations at one moment, then released an onslaught of transformations at another, his seemingly useless punches and kicks converting into sizable obstacles. A regular human fighter would most likely have already been caught by surprise by some of his moves, and been taken out. These dummies however, were anything but regular. The robot seemed to dodge all his movements by just a hair’s breath, as if it had perfectly calculated all his attempts. I waved towards him, and decided I would try and get a little conversation going before I began my own training.

“Hey Donte, what’s up?” The classic opener.

“Nothing much. Training.” The classic response.

“So, how’s the training going?” Conversation master here.

“Fine.” I should get an award.

There was an awkward silence, as I reveled in my ‘amazing’ conversation ability. I tried to think of some clever thing to ask, but I still felt mentally drained from dealing with Ilana and the corpses. Feeling the silence had been awkward and long enough, I walked over to one of the dummies to begin my own training. I was about begin when I noticed the sound of Donte’s fighting had stopped. I turned towards Donte, and noticed he was staring at me.

“What’s up?” I asked.

He looked at me for a bit longer, his eyes filled with questions, and the growing afro on his head comically jiggling in the breeze. He eventually just turned back towards his training dummy, and continued practicing with it. I took that as a hint that the conversation was over, and began my own training.

The thing that I had to admit was cool about these training dummies, was the fact that they didn’t just sit there and get hit. They responded in turn to how we tried to fight them, and blocked, dodged, or counterattacked as necessary to make it feel like we were trying to hit a real opponent. Of the training I’d witnessed, none of us had managed to score a single solid hit on one of these things. While it was good for training, it also made the bodybuilder robots a lot scarier, because they would most likely have all the fighting capabilities of these robots, and no qualms about fighting back.

I balled my fist and threw an uppercut at the robot. I doubted that it would manage to hit, but that wasn’t my real goal. If it connected, that was well and good, but the uppercut was meant as a feint to block the robot’s vision so I could attempt a sweep of its legs. The robot pulled its head and torso back, barely dodging my uppercut. I then put my weight on my left leg and swung out with my right, making sure as much as possible to hinder the robot’s vision. I don’t know if it heard the motion in the air or if it was just using the cameras mounted all around us, but it jumped over my sweep at the same time as it kicked me in the face, sending me crashing off balance.

“Oh, Mr. Roboto. You are going down today!” I yelled in the best angry voice I could muster as I pull myself off the ground. I probably could’ve been angrier, but I’d already made the same claim multiple times, so it was hard to convince anyone, much less myself. But, it wasn’t like this was meant as just a hand-to-hand training. It was also meant to train our abilities. I inhaled, exhaled, and then utilized my next ability, my supernatural speed.

Now, let me get rid of some misconceptions you might have about my supernatural speed, so you don’t wonder why I haven’t just sped myself on out of here. My supernatural speed seemed to do nothing about my perception of time, so even though I was moving quickly, I saw myself the same way everyone else saw it in the moment. As an incomprehensible blur. It became more like controlling my body remotely. I would input an action, concentrate, and then it was like the action had already occurred, and I had to determine what the next best course of action would be based on any minute changes that may have occurred while I was speeding. It was quite dizzying at first, and even now it was less that it had stopped being dizzying, and more that I had managed to get used to battling under its effects. If I used it too much however the nausea often became too much to handle, which meant I had to quickly understand my limits.  

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

That’s not to say the ability wasn’t useful however. I paced backwards, getting about 20 feet of distance between me and the robot. The robot stopped and tilted it’s head at me curiously. You’ll understand soon enough Mr. Roboto, I thought to myself. I caught my breath, then crossed my arms in front of me, forming an X. I started running towards the robot, and then when I was about 10 feet away, activated my super-speed. Everything around me seemed to elongate towards the back of my vision, becoming lines of color, and then just blurs, merging together into a sea of color.

Feeling your body moving so quickly is a sensation that’s hard to articulate. The best thing I can attribute it to is if your whole body is both covered and filled with phones set to vibrate, and you are receiving constant text and calls from the world over. The feeling was unsettling, but I didn’t absolutely hate it. Anyways, eventually the blurs began changing from colorful lines in my vision back into recognizable objects. This all occurred in what felt like less than a second, and I flicked my eyes back and forth, trying to grasp what happened, and why Mr. Roboto wasn’t laying on the ground, defeated in front of me.

I glanced behind me, and saw the form of Mr. Roboto, seeming to glow with satisfaction as he just sidestepped my most powerful move.

“AARAH! BOWWOW!” I yelled like a madman as I charged Mr. Roboto. I made a cross of my arms again, and began ‘speeding’ back and forth across the battlefield at him. When I exited my speed-state, I would figure out where he was, pivot towards him, and then charge him again. Mr. Roboto just continued to sidestep all my attacks as I kept getting dizzier, and my muscles began feeling a lot more like jelly.

I began contemplating what I needed to do next to win this fight. I need an opportunity. He can perfectly predict my attacks, so there must be some tell I’m sending him. I’ll just have to fake him out. I could feel myself reaching my limit, as it was taking me longer to adjust back to normal after exiting my speed state. This attempt would most likely be my last. Even if he could predict my attacks, he was not as fast as I was. If I could get him to predict the wrong attacks, there was little to no chance he would be able to completely dodge my attack. At least, that’s what I hoped.

So when I next left my speed state and figured out where Mr. Roboto was, my course of action was slightly different. I charged towards him again, activating my vampiric speed, but instead of actually moving, I just jogged in place. Of course, I wasn’t simply jogging in place. I was jogging in place really fast. Anyways, the point was that I didn’t actually change position. I waited for my vision to return to normal, and as I thought, Mr. Roboto had been in the middle of moving out of my predicted path. I grinned, bellowing from the top of my lungs, “I GOT YOU NOW ROBOTO!”

I sped towards him, my vision blurring. I thought that maybe I had missed again, but then I could feel my arms make multiple collisions. I grinned as my vision returned to normal, ensured that I had finally shown Mr. Roboto who was boss. As I regained my bearings, I realized two things almost immediately.

One, I had been successful at hitting something, and I had obviously caught that something off guard, because they were sprawled on the ground in front of me.

Two, the something that I had knocked over seemed to be Donte.

I turned around, and saw that the robot had once again sidestepped out of my way.

I carefully raised his upper body off the ground, checking his body for wounds. Crashing into him at super-speed was nothing to joke about. Combined with my super strength, hitting anything like I did would most likely cause damage. My stomach turned. I tapped him on the head, and began checking his pulse. I was getting more and more worried until his eyes flittered open as he groaned. I sighed in relief. At least he wasn’t dead.

I asked him in as cheerful a voice as possible, “You alright? Sorry about, you know, flying into you. Not exactly used to the powers.” I dusted him off a bit as I talked, hoping he wouldn’t be too mad.

His eyes flicked towards me, before groaning again. I kept checking his body. I wasn’t finding anything, until I reached his back. Lifting his shirt I saw a bruise had began forming on his back that looked a lot like an X. I touched in gently, and he hissed slightly, obviously in pain from the contact.

“Guess X really does mark the spot.” I said aloud.

Donte's eyes rounded in shock, and we both stared at each other for a bit. Then he began sniggering, and I smiled. He was probably all right if he could still manage his usual snigger. Thinking about my joke again with his sniggering in the background, I started chuckling as well, and soon the fighting arena was filled with the sound of our hysteric laughter at my terrible joke, and probably the fact that we were still managing to laugh about it. This went on for a couple minutes, the sound of Ilana and Zaida still training filling the background.

Eventually we found enough sanity to stop laughing, and I realized I was still holding Donte in my arms. I laid him back on the ground, and laid down myself as well, the adrenaline from almost killing him disappearing and being replaced with the fatigue of a day of training. I sighed, staring up at the ceiling and just enjoying the moment’s rest after a good laugh.

“Why do you talk so much?”

“Eh?” I looked over towards the source of the voice, which turned out to be Donte.

His voice came out again, his tone firm. “Why do you talk so much Mr. Talbott? Everyday you seem to strike up conversations with the other patients. You do it to Ilana, you do it to me, and you even talk to Zaida, though she doesn’t seem to respond. Why do you do it?”

The fact that he had noticed all that, meant he was not only doing his own training, but he was also paying attention to what was going on around him, or at least, to what was going on around me. I couldn’t see his eyes, which were still staring up at the ceiling. I pondered whether they were filled with childish curiosity, or the light of dangerous intellect. I scratched my head, seriously considering telling him the truth.

“I just want to get to know you all.” I started, a smile reforming on my face. “We’re all trapped in this place together, so we might as well get to know each other. Who knows? We might even manage to become friends if we try hard enough.” I took a quick glance at Donte, but he was still staring up at the ceiling. I continued. “The worst thing for human beings, is solidarity. It can quickly change ordinary men into deranged psychotics, rip us of our hard earned knowledge, and remove our empathy for the actions of others. And it’s not like it takes actually being alone to be in solidarity. Everyone can be an island by themselves if they truly wish to. I don’t want to be in here by myself however, and I’m sure none of you do either. So let’s be in here, together.” I raised my fist after this, letting it hover in the air between me and Donte.

He still faced the ceiling, his face unreadable. He opened his mouth and said something under his breath, but I wasn’t able to catch it. I started getting a bit nervous. Maybe I had messed up? There was a long and awkward pause, before he turned towards me, bumping fists.

“Sure. Let’s be in this together.” He finally said, a large grin on his face. I sighed inwardly, glad that he bought my speech. Of course, what I had said was true, and I was worried about the two kids being affected negatively by the whole thing, but it wasn’t close to the whole truth, and didn’t include my plans to escape. I mostly wanted to get to know them all so I could find out what drives them, which would be essential to motivating all of them to leave this facility together with me. But I was fine with misleading Donte like this, and it seems I had been wrong to consider his question more than curiosity.

After all, he was only a child.

After that, we started making some heartfelt small talk. Asking each other about favorite foods, hobbies, good vacation spots we’d been to. We avoided topics like what kind of families we had, and specifics about what we were doing. Although I eventually needed to reach the stage where Donte was willing to share such things with me, touching those topics on the first day after he opened up to me was a big no-no. We eventually reached an interesting topic tailoring to our immediate situation, or rather, Donte began to talk about one of our fellow patients.

Donte sighed as he let his feelings flow. “I keep wondering what’s under that curtain of hair Zaida always keeps in front of her face. I gotta know whether she’s cute or ugly as a witch under there, you know?”

“I see.”

“Like, she has to be ugly right? Only reason she would keep her hair that long and guarding her face.”

“Maybe.”

“Wait, have you seen her face? I feel like every time I try to sneak a peek, she knows I’m trying to.”

I thought back on my interactions with Zaida before answering. “Yeah, I’ve seen her face. While you were practicing ‘flying’ in your dragon form on the first day, I got a pretty good look at it.”

Donte sat up, staring at me in excitement. “Well what did you think Mr. Talbott? Was she a unicorn? Or an ugly hag?”

I grinned. “Not telling.”

His face froze in shock, transforming into annoyance, and then his expression became coy, a slight smile forming on his face.

“Come on. You know you want to tell.” He entreated, poking me in the ribs a couple times. “Who’s it going to hurt? Come on, didn’t you say we were all in this together? What’s telling a comrade how one of their fellow comrades looks eh? Come on.”

“I’m not telling specifically because you want to know so much.” It was nice to be playful again, in the midst of the training.

“Argh.” He threw his arms up behind him in frustration, muttering to himself. “Guess I’ll just have to figure out myself. Just you wait, Zaida, you can’t hide your looks from me forever. I’m going to-“

The rest of his muttering was cut off by the sound of the fighting arena shifting around us. The room began to shake, and as we looked around for the source, I noticed that a couple of the training objects were floating in the air. They quickly began shooting up into the sky, and when I looked up, I noticed what looked like a gigantic vacuum tube, suspended in the ceiling, sucking all the objects up. My eyes flicked over to Mr. Roboto, just as he also lifted off the ground, and into the vacuum. I patted myself down, wondering why me and Donte weren’t flying up as well. Eventually though, the whole arena was cleared, and I saw Dr. C walking towards us, a big smile on his face.

“I was listening to your conversation, Mr. Talbott, and I have to say, I’m glad you guys have decided to get through this. Together.” He put a lot of emphasis on that last word, as he walked over towards us. He pushed up his monocles, and everything about his posture said he was thoroughly amused. Which was bad.

“I am soooo glad that my patients are willing to work together, that I’ve decided to introduce the next part of this training early. You are next going to fight against your fellow patients, so you truly understand the strength of your new abilities, and also, where your true strengths and weaknesses may lie.” His smirk grew immensely. “Donte, Mao, I admit I must admire your enthusiasm, you are already on the battlefield, ready to go.” We each looked at each other, our grimaces almost matching.

“What you are doing still sitting on the ground?” Dr. C chuckled. “Get up and get ready to fight.”

My feeling of playfulness had long since disappeared.