Point of Documentation - Dr. Frieda Vintaile

Dr. Frieda Vintaile was a level headed woman who enjoyed the simple things in life. Contrary to her job, education, and proclivities at work: she was never a person to overcomplicate things. She woke up at the crack of dawn and would start a nice cup of coffee brewing in the larger-style of brewer that was a simple fill-up of water and grounds and a button press to brew. Sure, it needed cleaning every once in a while, but it was a simple thing to take out the brewing mechanism and wash it down. The thought crossed her mind that maybe having one of the more complicated machines would allow her to set a timer and not even worry about her morning.

The thought was dashed aside when she looked from the kitchen’s counter where the machine sat to the table that held her holo-pad. A sophisticated electronic that was rare in any condition, and even rarer in good condition. But the machine itself wasn’t the point of interest that arrested her mind. Instead; it was the contents on the pad. A firearm that had been liberated from a brutish man they had brought in was on the screen, the parts of it laid out in electronic format and torn apart on her screen. She strode over to it, coffee in hand, and sat at the table to look closer once again.

When she and her colleagues had been studying the beast on the lower levels, she had been presented some equipment from a captured man who had assaulted some of her employer’s goons. Yeah, she was fine calling them goons, as they were nothing but brains with flat features and muscles that suffocated the nervous system. Their engagement with this man had robbed him of his gear and his freedoms in one fell swoop. Her team had gained the gear, and Sinclair’s team had gained the man himself.

The man had been regarded as an oddity and Frieda had no provocations to agree. He just seemed like a normal man sick with the Scourge. However, after looking over some of his gear and what he had been doing with it, Frieda had started to come around to the notion of the man being unique and special. His firearm, the item of conscientious, meticulous observation, was a plasma caster built into a large-caliber pistol. The fact that the plasma caster could just generate fuel for itself by moving through the air was one thing, but the fact that the firearm didn’t melt and destroy itself was another.

Then there was the suit. They stripped him to his undergarments, unremarkable as they were, and ended up with a suit for their troubles. It had markings all over it and pieces of technology that they hadn’t seen in anything not of military design in the old relic-sites. Atmosphere stabilizers, gyroscopic and gravity naturalizers, mini-spaces that seem to be slightly larger than they should be, and so much more. The man had a suit like this, and had just been taken out by a homeless man with a needle? Frieda shook her head and darkened the holo-pad.

She set down her now empty mug and exited her apartment. The underground access tunnel wasn’t the most luxurious of designs. An old hospital that had a fallout shelter in the basement that stretched five stories under, it was the perfect base of operation for Petrov and his men. Frieda was one of the researchers that worked for him, though one of the better paid and more looked after ones. She wasn’t a ‘head’ per say, but she was working her way to staking out her claim to be in charge. Approvals went through her, and her coworkers looked up to her like a boss would have her employees do.

Yet, even with that goal and levity, she still had to stay in this underground area for ‘safety’. Her eyes wandered to a crack in the wall and scoffed. “Safety my ass…” she mumbled to herself.

A mumble that was answered by another voice behind her. “Problems with the decor, Dr. Vintaile?”

Frieda spun around on her heels to see who had snuck up on her so thoroughly and laid eyes upon her guard. The man’s form was brutish, but she knew why the voice was so nasally and impish. After all, she had saved this man’s life years prior from a terrible infection. “Mick! Oh, you bastard. I need to strap a bell around your neck one of these days!” Her mock outrage was followed as she looked the man over. “How the hell do you move so quietly with all that gear on anyways?”

The guard, Mick, shrugged. “Cloth, spacing the equipment, and not having a lot on me. I also walk on the balls of my feet. But that’s dodging the question: nervous about the decor again?”

Frieda sighed and gestured for him to follow. One of the other researchers exiting their apartment down the hall made Frieda want to continue her movement and remain out of earshot. “As always. This place makes me nervous. Whilst not being completely run down, the fact that this place sits under a half-destroyed hospital tells how decrepit this place is. The walls and foundation are cracked from weathering, and the place feels like it could collapse at any moment. Petrov claims that supports were added to the building, but I’m not sure how much I buy that it’s going to make a difference.” She sighed as she neared the stairs.

“Dr. Vintaile, I would not appreciate this being your routine every morning. Especially if I’m being sent to more urban environments next month and someone else will be taking my position. You know how the boss feels about your complaints.” Mick chided, but not in a confrontational way. More of a friend trying to convince another not to take yet another shot at the bar.

With these words said, they started to climb the stairs, the echoes of their voices carrying up the flights. Frieda took a moment, but then replied. “I know. And I’m really not happy you actually accepted that position.”

The man scoffed and seemed to glower at that. “As if I had a choice.” he mumbled under his own breath.

Frieda furrowed her brow and continued. “Just because you survived the infection, and just because it was brought on by a Scourge outbreak… that shouldn’t mean you have to be brought to Bogushevsk. I get that there’s some value in that now, but you’re next to guaranteed to run into one of the town’s Guards. Then boom, there goes my effort of healing you and a life is lost. Again.” Her hands came up in a gesture as if to throw an invisible table. A gesture of disgust.

Mick sighed behind her and nodded his head. “I plan on laying as low as I can and hoping to be assigned to one of the bruisers that Petrov loves using. Being cleared of the Scourge makes me valuable when working with contaminated areas, after all.”

The two of them fell silent with that hope as they came to the top of the stairs. For some reason, this place separated levels 1-3 and 3-5 with their main research room’s hall. She had a feeling that the areas below were supposed to be guarded by someone and roped off, but with Mick here his job was to just guard the only room on this level and not the way down or up. She rounded the corner and pushed open the door to the research dome.

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Inside were a couple of scientists already up on their platforms, looking over notes or studying the readings coming back. In the center of the room was a Vulture; a Voidling that had reached the second stage of its evolution cycle. It was contained by a gate that it was under, but not by pressure or force. There was plenty of space for it to move and leave the object, but it seemed to be rooted there by some unknown force. A good thing too, as it had in times prior swung at researchers that got too close. One had even lost their life to it, only to be snatched up and eaten in such a quick motion that nearly no reaction was garnered from Mick. Though a pistol wouldn’t do much to a Voidling like this, his presence was more so for more human-like problems that arose. To assure that something like that wouldn’t happen again, they had attached chains to the beast. Though, after reviewing logs on it, Frieda was convinced that those chains were more decorations than bindings.

Frieda parted with Mick, leaving him at the door and his usual spot. She mounted the stairs to one of the platforms and came up to the display on it. Another woman was there, Dr. Angla. A doctor like her, but being more specialized in engineering than Frieda’s field of zoology. They traded nods, and Frieda approached the display. “So what’s new on the docket?”

The woman just gestured with a look of disgust to the picture Frieda had been looking at but an hour ago. “A lot of nothing.” The woman’s thick Russian accent was hard to hear through, but Frieda managed. With the standardization of languages back before The Fall, it was a god-send for people like Frieda who barely spoke a lick of anything other than Standard. Which Standard itself was a bastardized version of English that came from it vampiring every other language it encountered. That did not, however, exclude people from using languages other than it. This was proven as Dr. Angla proceeded to fill the air with vitriol in a language Frieda was happy she didn’t speak.

Clearing her throat, Frieda tried wrestling her coworker’s terrible mood from her. “Even if it’s nothing, a whole lot of nothing is still a lot of something. Do you happen to have a report?”

The woman nodded her head to the display across from her at an open report document. Frieda slid over to it and started reading. Angla had been busy, that was for certain. She had torn apart a diagram of the suit as well and had been looking through the inner workings of it. It was definitely an Outlander’s equipment. The latticework on the suit was closer to Kevlar, but was so thin that it seemed unusable. And yet simulated tests showed that it could stop small arms fire from even point-blank distances. It even boasted some form of shock absorption at a lower level that would eat the force of the shot up to a certain point. If they could replicate this design, they wouldn’t need to barter with the factions behind The Wall. They could manufacture these things themselves, if they had the materials!

Frieda looked up to ask a question when she felt something. No, the entire room felt something. The room shook and caused dust to flake off from the ceiling and rain down on them. Something just caused the entire complex to shake.

A chill ran down her spine as Mick opened the door to look out into the T-junction hallway. He yelled something and ran out moments later. Frieda felt fear lock up her mind and joints as she watched him go, a second rumble running through the building. It took Angla slapping her to bring her back to reality. She was now in front of Frieda, yelling something at her. When had she gotten in front of Frieda?

“Wake up, Frieda. Mick needs your call.” She yelled at her before pushing her down the platform.

Mick needed her call? What did that even mean? Confusion and fear clouded her mind as the realization of why she was so terrified finally came to her. She had heard a sound on that first rumble that she had been dreading since day one of being in here.

Frieda ran into the hall to find Mick at the entrance to the T-junction. Well, what was a T-junction before. Now it was rubble that blocked the hallway leading further down. He knelt next to the rubble, his hands on a man who had his torso trapped under the collapsed hallway. He was screaming for help, but Mick’s tugging only seemed to make the man scream more. Mick looked over to the approaching Frieda and a look of panic showed on the man’s face. “I need to know if I can cut him out. You study people and animals, right? You should know!”

Her mind raced as she knelt next to the man. She knew this man, but his name wasn’t surfacing in her mind. She pushed that thought down as she looked him over. Mick could technically use his combat knife and cut the man’s legs at the hip, but every single artery that was in his legs would kill him quickly. But what choice did they have? She pointed to the man’s legs. “Wedge your knife against the rocks and start cutting. Work as close to the base of the pelvis as you can get. We don’t want to rip out anything from the body when pulling him out.”

Mick nodded and grabbed his knife. He reached over and stabbed into the man’s legs, causing him to howl again before passing out from the pain. Mick cut one of the legs over and over, blood flowing freely from the open wound. It took nearly a minute before the one leg was cut before he started on the second one. However, Frieda could see the writing on the wall. This man was gone, no matter what they tried to do. Her eyes went down the hallway as the sound of something cracking filled the air. She looked up in time to see some more debris starting to come loose from the ceiling. A quick grab to Mick’s uniform and she hauled with all her might to drag him back. The knife forgotten in the flesh, both of them fell back as more rubble filled the hallway. The man buried underneath it.

Mick heaved shaky breaths as he helped them stand up. It almost looked like it wasn’t even a T-junction anymore. The rubble completely obscured the entrance to the other hallway, and now the body of the man. They stood there for a moment, just staring, before they both turned and headed back to the research dome silently.

They came in to the researchers cowering on their platforms behind the monitors. As if that would provide some protection to someone entering in. Mick rested next to the door and placed a hand on his chest. It was obvious the man had nearly had a heart attack from the shock of all of that. Frieda placed a hand on his shoulder and spoke. “I’m going to use the terminal on the main platform to call for help. Petrov needs to know something’s happening.” Her calmness frightened her. She didn’t feel like she was calm, she felt like she was in an absolute panic that threatened to overwhelm her very existence. This was even furthered by the concerned and shocked look in Mick’s eyes before he nodded.

She approached the terminal near the front of the chamber, the one she had climbed before, and mounted the stairs to it. She had just reached the terminal on the platform and started looking for the app to let her send a distress signal when the door burst open.

A man entered, covered in blood around his chest, face, and arms, and seemed to look around the room. Mick was still winded from the ordeal and wasn’t prepared to actually defend the room like he needed to. He scrambled for his rifle and tried to lift it, only to be stopped by the man. It was like he effortlessly held the gun in place and stopped it from rising. The strain on Mick’s face was plain as he tried to raise the gun to meet the man’s body and effectively neutralize him. It was plain to everyone that it was a losing battle, and Mick seemed to realize this too as he went for his pistol instead and let the man have the rifle.

The movement was swift, but not faster than they could follow. The man jabbed out and rammed his thumbs into Mick’s eyes, causing Mick to stumble and cover his face in a panic. That was all the man needed for an opening to grab Mick’s pistol, which he then used to lay shots into Mick and put him to the ground.

Frieda recognized the man the moment the shots went off, terror donning her face like a mask for a drama. That was the man who’s gun they were studying, the one who was imprisoned above. He had come for his items, probably, and she doubted he really needed her and her colleagues to get them back.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the man saying, in a very nonchalant voice “Alright everyone, what the actual fuck is gong on here? Explain it quickly… and please don’t talk to me in nerd-talk. Simple and straight-forward explanation of the Voidling, the room, and why I shouldn’t just shoot you all.”

She shared a look with Angla that showed she was terrified as well. Whatever was going to happen with this man, neither of them thought they’d be getting out of this alive. Frieda’s hand slowly started to move towards the ‘Send’ on his panic message.