Seacate stared at the hole in the anthill with a keen eye, she watched the black insects scurry in a panicked rush around the gap in their home. With a flash, a pair of tweezers darted into the hole. The ant was pulled out with surprising gentleness, its wiggling quickly put to an end as it was dropped into a jar. With practiced speed Seacate nabbed over a dozen of the small creatures, depositing them into the jar before tightening a breathable lid over top and walking off.
The streets she passed were rundown, their pavement cracked, grass and ferns growing stubbornly in the fractured concrete and thin layer of dirt. The young lady skipping over the ground while humming an of-tune but still, jaunty tune painted a strange picture. The slightly baggy but still fashionable yellow wool sweater and made-up face of an astonishingly short woman was a sharp juxtaposition to the run-down and overgrown area around her.
Seacate almost looked childish, as she joyfully meandered the street, the people looking out their window at her however did not see a childish woman on that street. No, they instead closed their shutters as fast as they could and went quiet until the girl was long passed.
Seacate kicked a stone along the road until she came across a three-story stone building where she promptly knocked the rock away and pushed the door open quietly. Stepping lightly she looked around, puffing her cheeks out she grumbled as quietly as she could to herself before her eyes lit up. She snuck from room to room pushing open just a couple of doors before finding the one she was looking for. She slipped into the just barely cracked door.
The room was a medium sized with the only things in it being a chair and something like 20 monitors. There was a man in the chair who was only paying attention to one of the monitors, that being the only one that wasn’t a camera feed, but instead, a colorful match three game. She tiptoed through the room in exaggerated movements that almost made her giggle aloud until she was right behind the chair.
Seacate lunged at the man sitting in the chair, her arms latching around his arms, chest, and shoulders in one smooth bear hug with a childlike squeal.
“GERARD!!!” The man in question, Gerard, jumped straight up in alarm bringing the much shorter woman over two feet off the ground when he stood straight up. The man attempted to swing around with his elbow before he realized the one he physically couldn’t move his arms, and second who the young lady hanging off of him was. His back went ramrod straight as he stuttered out a greeting.
“M- Ms. Fullbody! Um- listen I’m sorry it won’t happen again!” The powerfully built man was visibly shaking when talking to funko pop of a girl hanging on his shoulder. Said funko pop's smile turned into a sharp imitation of the childish glee of moments before.
“For shame Gerard! How many times do I have to tell you to call me Cate.” She pouted with a drawl. “Butttt… well that aside, I do happen to believe in second chances, you’re right this won’t happen again because if it you’ll be spending some time in with the ants, the fun ants.” she hissed into his ear before her face snapped back to the childish glow of before. “Besides I can hardly blame you, this one can be just addicting!” As the small woman dropped off the tall man, her 4’11 sharply contrasted with the giant 6’5 man in front of her. She turned to the screen, Gerard jumping away from the diminutive girl the moment Seacate turned her attention away.
Seacate walked towards the game and made a series of three moves before watching as the entire screen cleared itself of the gummies on it in one fell swoop. “Thought it would be mean to leave that level incomplete!” she smirked at the practically cowering man, “And for the love of god where are the guards that are supposed to be at the entrance? Doesn’t matter, send them the mushroom room as soon as you find them alright Gerard?” Gerard nodded frantically dashing back over to the console and starting to type away.
Seacate wandered towards the elevator and rode it down into the basement floor two, wandering down that hallway before she wandered into a room that looked like it was made of terrariums every wall covered in elaborate and huge structures of glass, filled with dirt leaves, and wood. She walked to the largest one filling the entire back wall, this one was filled with almost three feet of dirt. The sole human in the room pulled open a hidden drawer before she twisted the cap of the jar off and shook the ants, argentine in species, into the drawer, shutting it and putting the jar on a shelf behind her.
Pushing back out of the door she walked down the hallway just in time to see a man and a woman each holding the arm of another man and pushing him into a room. The man was struggling and pleading with the two holding his arms before he caught sight of Cate and paled, redoubling his effort to get away but to no avail.
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Cate let out a cheer and sprinted towards the trio. “Ohhh Steve! Were you supposed to be on guard duty today! Oh, that's amazing! Why did you skip it.” The sudden tonal shift in that last sentence made everyone in earshot flinch. No response came from Steve so she just darted past them into the room, “doesn’t really matter!” she called back towards Steve “We gotta make examples of those who don’t do their jobs!”
Soon Steve was tied tight to a surgical bed frantically looking around at the room around him for a means of escape. The only thing he found were wracks upon wracks of various mushrooms, and in one gap, a scalpel and other surgical implements hung on a wall. Steve tried to restrain a flinch as Cate's face popped into view.
“Say Steve, you’re relatively new so you might not know what we use this room for right? Well as you know we sell drugs, but we don’t buy the shitty stuff that people grow in their backyards, no we sell the good stuff, you could even say homegrown and natural!” as she tittered at her joke, she hid her mouth with her hands the wool sweater covering them to the thumbs. She looked like a college girl wearing her boyfriend's oversized shirt, the cute image was undercut by the scalpel she was twirling.
“We like to experiment here Steve, see if we can come up with something new, more potent! One of the ways we do that with our ‘shrooms’ is to change what we grow them in, but we discovered that some species can grow right in the body! You can see where this is going now right? I’ve heard the process is quite painful ~ you can even have a seizure from the chemicals in the shroom! Are you ready to be our experiment, Steve?”
Cate pulled the sweater over her head, she wouldn’t want to ruin it after all! The black Mockneck she had underneath flattered her well even as she took a scalpel to Steve’s arm, the picture of innocence even as she sheared a man's flesh off of his bone, completely unaware of the spores she was exuding while she indulged in the carnage.
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Christopher Pennanalet ducked under the punch before sending a vicious uppercut into his sparring partner's jaw that sent the man staggering back and spitting blood onto the floor of the square. His sparring partner, Kyauta, held his arms in a ‘T’ shape to signal for a timeout.
“Good god Chris, I swear your punches are stronger than they were yesterday, let alone a week ago! Are you taking roids or something man? You know those are bad for you.”
Christopher let out an indignant squawk at the notion. “Course I’m not Kyauta, honestly I’m kind of offended you would think that man. Honestly, though, you are right, I’m faster and stronger than I was a week ago. I think I’ve hit a PR on every machine every day this week its crazy! These aren’t even small leaps either, my new bench press PR is half again what it was this time Monday. Hell, I hit 400 yesterday!”
“Maybe someone roiding you in your sleep or something.” Kyauta proposed with a chuckle.
“Or something.” Chris agreed as he shucked his boxing gloves. “By the way how the mouth? Saw you spit blood earlier.”
“Oh, I bit my cheek a little with that last punch that's all. You wanna head out for dinner?”
“Nah, I’m gonna try and do some lifts. You go on ahead.”
“If you’re sure.” Kyauta nodded and walked away from the ring. Chris walked in the other direction, towards the weights area. Stopping at the dumbbell rack he went for the 30-pound ones, his standard warmup weights. Chris almost flung the dumbbells into the air when to his surprise they seemed to weigh nothing. The lack of weight made him fling his arms into a surprise shoulder press.
Chris stared at the dumbbells in his hands, gently putting them down before going for the 60-pound weights. Once again it was like they weighed no more than air. A third try this time with the highest weight they had the 110-pound dumbbells he had barely managed to lift them last time he had tried but once again they felt like feathers in his hands!
“The hell?” Chris muttered to himself. He tossed the dumbbells into the air before catching them again. Putting the weights on the rack he walked over to the deadlift area and began pilling weights onto the bar. Once he had reached nearly 700 pounds on the bar he stopped.
Squaring his stance he reached down and lifted. The bar was weightless, just like the dumbbells the only struggle he noted was the standard squatting feeling in his legs. Before Chris put the weight down he noticed something odd; the bar wasn’t bending. Normally with as much weight as he had but on the bar it would start bending towards the ends, yet this one wasn’t it was perfectly straight.
Chris dropped the weight half a foot off the ground making a thunders crash that had others looking over at him. That restricted his plastic weights theory at least. Chris theorized any and all answers as to his apparent super strength.
In one final test, Chris walked over to the punching bag. He got into a standard boxing stance before sending a standard right hook into the bag. Nothing happened. Well something happened, like Kyauta had said his punches had been getting stronger by the day, but it was nothing when compared to his feats with the weights.
‘Okay, what the hell is happening.’ was the only thought in his head as he stared at the swinging bag.