Chapter Eight: Creation

Reaching their group office, Silas and Ronin found Eve asleep at her desk, surrounded with dozens of datapads all linked to small flashlight sized tubes filled with some kind of liquid. The lab space they'd been allotted was connected to the office space via a door in the corner of the room, and inside of it, there was a large machine that had clearly been constructed overnight somehow.

Ronin tapped Eve and said, "You weren't kidding, you really had an idea for what to do, didn't you?"

Smiling sleepily, she slowly woke up and hugged herself as she said, "I'm the best."

Falling back to sleep, she jolted awake and looked at Ronin and said, "YOU SAW NOTHING."

Silas raised an eyebrow and said, "Yeah...you were just sleeping…"

Ronin nodded and Eve let out a sigh of relief and asked, "What time is it?"

Silas checked her V.U.I. and said, "It's almost two p.m., did you sleep here?" Eve nodded and said, "I was able to get everything we needed, somehow, so I figured I'd just build the damn thing so we could start whenever you were ready."

Ronin started to introduce Silas when Eve said, "Marcus is in the lab, he told me about...her...already. He said she'd be observing. Sounds like she gets a free credit in her project folder."

Ronin said, "There is merit to an observation team, plus she's data and information, she's basically custom made for observation."

Silas laughed and punched him in the shoulder and Eve rolled her eyes as she stood up and stretched her arms out.

Touching the seat of the machine Eve had built, seemingly from scratch, Daniel asked, "So how exactly does this work?"

Eve yawned and said, "Basically the machine is just a massive injection device. I took all of your algorithms and data and programmed them into a LOT of liquid Aether. What this SHOULD do is inject the liquid Aether with the programming into you long enough to alter your DNA and make your body match one of someone with the level of experience you specified in your data. Once that's finished, the machine will withdraw the Aether from your system and hypothetically you'll be good to go."

"Will the injection process be dangerous?" Marcus asked from a corner of the room.

Eve nodded and said, "Obviously, this kind of thing has NEVER been done before, so there's no point of reference to draw from, but Aether is a highly transformable substance. There's no way we can guarantee his safety, but my guess is Ronin knew that when he suggested the project."

Nodding, he motioned to the machine and said, "When my other experiments kept failing, I figured I'd need to take some drastic measures to make the idea work.. This actually seems pretty tame compared to what I was considering."

Marcus shrugged and said, "As long as you know the risks involved."

Ronin gave a thumbs up and said, "Death, Failure and probably a terrible hangover the next day."

Chuckling, Marcus motioned to the machine and said, "Go ahead and climb in."

Climbing into the machine, Ronin started strapping himself in when Silas said, "Sit back and relax lover boy. Gotta earn my keep somehow."

With that, she began tying ties and locking locks to keep him in place so the injections all went exactly where they were supposed to.

Eve sat at a computer terminal near the rear of the machine and began rapidly typing in instructions and calculations while Ronin kept his breathing level.

Suddenly the machine sprung to life, almost faster than Silas could react and get away.

There was no warning when the injections began, not that anything could prepare him for what came next.

The pain was beyond comprehension.

It felt as though he were being turned inside out, his skin melting, his bones all breaking, reforming and breaking again while his muscles spasmed and tore and reconstructed. Even through all this, just when he felt it couldn't possibly get any worse, the pain doubled, he tried to scream, but a wave of pain forced him to bite down and he almost bit through his tongue. Compared to the pain he was feeling at that exact moment, he barely felt it as his whole body was being rewritten and reshaped on a level he couldn't have begun to calculate. As sudden as the pain had started, it stopped and he was wrapped in total darkness.

He looked around and found that he was free of the machine's torturous injections. Wandering around in the dark surrounding him, he started to think that he was blind, some miscalculation on his part, until he noticed that he could see his body, and it was exuding some kind of silver light for some reason.

Focusing on the silver light, he found that with enough effort he could make it glow brighter, though the action tired him considerably. Looking around more, he realized he wasn't in the lab at all.

He was floating in what seemed to be a massive black cavern, one he could see more and more of as his eyes adjusted and his light increased. Focusing hard, he was able to float downward and he found that the bottom of the cave was entirely comprised of dark water with MASSIVE purple and black crystals jutting out of it.

Getting closer to the water, he noticed a pair of glowing silver eyes staring at him from within the depths. Trying to get as close as possible without touching the water, he reached the surface and a hand of what seemed to be total silver grabbed him and pulled him into the water and he lept backwards off his bed into a wall.

Shaking his head and grabbing his body in a panic, he realized he was in one of the school's many Medical Bays.

Looking around, he saw that Silas, Eve and Marcus were all watching him quietly, though Silas seemed to have a look of relief on her face.

He struggled to talk, and almost couldn't, but managed to squeeze out, "What….what happened to me?"

Marcus sighed, the tension finally leaving his face, and said, "There is literally no way to know exactly what happened to you, or what Eve did to you."

"What...what Eve did to me?"

Looking in a mirror nearby, he saw that he looked exactly the same as before, but he felt a hundred times better, maybe even more. Like he could do anything, and he realized that he knew exactly HOW to do anything, knowledge of years and years and years of combat experience and martial arts crammed successfully into his very DNA.

"The test went exactly as planned and described, until the time came to remove the Aether from your body," Silas said quietly.

Marcus rubbed the bridge of his nose and said, "When she 'tried', the machine mysteriously stopped working. Powered down, and refused to be turned back on. Silas took it on herself to change that. She jacked into the machine with her datapad and FORCED it awake somehow. The machine, however did not proceed to the supposed next step of the procedure. It began the procedure AGAIN. The Aether in the system luckily was spent from the initial process, so the machine shut itself off again.

Shaking his head a bit, Ronin asked, "What...what does that mean?"

Silas touched Ronin's shoulder and said, "Eve never programmed the machine to remove the Aether from your body. We reviewed the security cameras from the night she built and programmed the machine and prior to doing so, she apparently 'tested' a small sample of Aether on one of the janitors who'd come by to clean the office. He's dead, his body exploded and turned into mist, and apparently this isn't the first case of Eve killing someone for seemingly no purpose."

Marcus grabbed Eve's wrists and lifted them above her head, showing Ronin that she was handcuffed and immobilized as he asked, "Do you know the reason you're in these cuffs, Eve?"

Glaring at him, she said, sarcastically, "Because I tried to kill the golden boy."

Ronin looked at her coldly and said, "No."

Marcus chuckled and continued, "You're in these cuffs because you're a mad dog, not a scientist or a researcher. You've been killing people just to see if you could do it. That breaks the first rule, no pointless loss of life. Every person in existence is a valuable resource, either to the creators or AS a creator. You've been using lives like a toy, and that's unacceptable. We've overlooked your gross disrespect for that rule however, because it seemed to sate you and you had massive potential, or so we thought. Do you know the reason the Bureau has banned alchemic research, as it's called nowadays?"

Eve glared at him and said, "Because your government masters told you it's for big bad wolves?"

Marcus stood silent for a moment and moved, but before he could do anything, Silas slapped her across the face.

Silas held her by the throat and said, "Alchemy is banned because there is no progress involved. The Bureau couldn't give less of a damn about what the government 'thinks', if you can call the moral hypocrisy of a hundred thousand slobbering animals 'thinking'. Alchemy involves using Aether in a way that gives immediate results with no way to understand what caused them, and thus, no growth or advancements."

Marcus put his hand on Silas's shoulder and said, "However, your experiment was a success, despite your active sabotaging of it. I'm not sure why Ronin lived and the janitor died horribly, but he does live and his body is indeed different, which reminds me."

Turning to Ronin, he began, "Ronin. The Aether Eve implanted in you is still there. Your body may look the same, but as I'm sure you can feel, it is much, much, MUCH stronger than it used to be . My guess is something in your calculations forced your body react differently than our unfortunate friend, though I've read through them a dozen times, and I can't see anything that would cause that. I'm guessing that if you tried hard enough, you could access the Aether in your body, but I don't want you trying that until you've fully recovered and we can get a lab to test in safely."

Nodding, Ronin said, "Understood."

Silas turned to him and said, "Marcus and I have discussed it at length, but in accordance to Bureau policy, it's up to group members and the afflicted to decide the consequences in a situation like this. We've both decided that you should be the one to choose her fate."

Ronin instantly knew the only acceptable punishment for her.

"Does your datapad have the ability to access the school mainframe?" he asked Silas.

She nodded and handed it to him.

He walked over to Eve and sat beside her so she could watch him work.

Rapidly cutting through security measures like they didn't exist, he reached her records and profile.

One by one, while she watched in horror, he removed rewards, accolades, everything and anything that made her, Evelyn Dwyer, seem successful. Then he moved to her profile and pulled up her school status.

He whispered in her ear, "You've changed my life forever, so I think I'll do the same for you, you know, one scientist to the other."

Silently, he changed her status from "Active" to "Expelled" and set the reason for Suspicion of Treason - Threat Level Black, Kill on Sight.

"You know Evelyn, there is one benefit to the school being so deep in bed with the Government. I can do anything I want to you from anywhere on campus. You're not worth killing with my own hands, Evelyn. It'd be a waste of energy."

As soon as he closed the profile and records, every change he'd made went live and the cameras in the room caught her face. Immediately the alarms began ringing and he broke the chains holding her wrists and ankles together with his bare hands.

She looked at him with hate and he said, "Ohh...scary eyes from someone who poses no threat. Run, Alchemist. Pray we don't ever meet again."

Evelyn stood, her eyes still on Ronin and said, "I may have helped create your claws...but you've always been a monster Ronin, and you'll always be one."

She turned and ran, jumping out a window, even though the school floated over a mile and half in the air above the tallest buildings in the area.