unity. [ii]

[-unity-] Give her this much: Danicka doesn't give up.

There are three men on the roof, combat-trained, better shots than she is, better fighters than she'll ever be. There are three men on the roof and they managed to put her werewolf of a boyfriend down like a mad dog. There are only three because two others are dead, and they're dead partly because Danicka was shooting them with the 9mm handgun she didn't even want a matter of months ago.

And now they're coming for her.

And she fights. She fights them every step of the way, kneeing groins, dodging grabs. She goes for a gun laid out on the ground, the handle slick with blood. One dives for her and misses. She scrambles out of their way. She has the gun now; it stains her palm slick and red; and another man has her by the ankles, and this time try as she might she's not getting away, and he hauls her in like a fish and it's the man that's bruised and wheezing from almost falling to his death and he flips her on her back and she's seen enough movies to expect something terrible now, buttons popping off her blouse or hands on her body or --

but no. He straddles her and holds her down and the 'reasonable' fellow is coming along now. He has a hard face, grim and angry, the dusky skin and caucasid features and lean cheeks of an algerian or a berber. He has something in his hand, a capsule that he shoves between her teeth while the other holds her down. His hands grab her by the jaw and the top of the head and force her to bite down, rupturing the capsule.

A cool trickle in her mouth -- a burning, itching numbness like the one spreading from her arm -- but much faster, much faster, sinking across the mucus membranes of her gut and into her blood.

"Night-night, missy."

Blackness.

--

A black-grey haze that she drifts in and out of. She's moving. She's moving and she's jostling around and she can't feel her limbs... she can't feel anything at all and...

blackness.

--

She's still moving. It's brighter now, but not enough to see by. Is she alone? Where is she? Jostling, the steady rumbling of an engine. She can't feel her hands. She's terribly thirsty. Blood rushes toward her head suddenly -- acceleration or deceleration? She hears brakes. Deceleration. A stop. Moments pass. Then acceleration, and the blood rushes the other way now, draining from her brain, and...

blackness.

--

Grey light, like daybreak. There's something in front of her. She can feel him breathing. He has blue eyes that are familiar somehow, but they're halfclosed, they don't glint and spark with ferocity and intelligence. They're glazed and dazed and he looks at her, too weak to speak, and...

blackness.

--

When she wakes again it's brilliant. White light. She can't see because it's too bright, and then she can't see because her eyes are blurry and there are no features, no contrast in this place. Nothing but white.

Her hands are still numb. She realizes they're bound together behind her back, not with rope but with something that feels like rubber, like a tourniquet. She's lying on her side, face pressed to the ground, and the ground is white and the walls are white and now her eyes are clearing up and the ceiling is one huge pane of frosted glass or plastic, aglow with light. Nothing else in here. Just a cube of white, perhaps eight by eight feet, with a single door set in a single wall. No handle on the inside.

And Lukas. He's here too. He's nearly on his face, unmoving.

Neither of them are wearing their street clothes anymore. They're dressed in identical cottons, white, shortsleeved, barefoot. Beside that, neither of them appear mistreated in any way. Neither of them appear treated either. Whatever injuries she has are still there.

It's very quiet in here. She can hear the huff of the ventilation, but that's quiet enough that she can also hear herself breathing. She can hear Lukas breathing -- the slow, even timbre of deep sleep or unconsciousness.

[Danicka Musil] Six months ago, she would've given up. She wouldn't have had the gun, and she would have run, leaving the Ahroun to fend for himself, leaving anyone at all behind. Back in New York, she would've handed over whatever they wanted, and she would've gone quietly, and she would've behaved herself rather than encourage the fighters with guns to use greater force against her. She would not have fired a gun. She would not have scrambled for another. She would not have kicked and tried to bite and struggled as she's grabbed, dragged, flipped over.

But tonight Danicka didn't run. And she fought, and fired, and struggled, and when the man Lukas threw off the roof drags her towards him she screams. It isn't a terrified sound, though she is scared for her life, for the core of her self that has not yet been violated, for her mate, for her soul. When he flips her over she struggles against him, and she chokes on a sob, but that scream was one of rage. Frustration.

Her eyes are vicious green, poison green, ichor green, when her jaw is wrenched open. She shakes her head and smacks it against the roof but it's ultimately no good; she is staring with loathing up until the moment when her eyes roll back and her eyelids fall.

--

But for some reason, when the light is gray and she can sense him breathing, Danicka feels happy. She would smile, but

it's so dark.

--

She is not smiling when she wakes up again. She's tired when she wakes up again, keeping her eyes mostly closed against the stinging light, groggy as she lies there. She's not in jeans anymore. Her bag is nowhere, and she thinks about the bloody bandages and the nightshade and the pill case inside it that also contains a couple of clay beads that Lukas said would protect her like the rest. Danicka closes her eyes for a moment, exhales a sigh, opens them again.

Danicka wiggles her fingers, and wiggles her toes. She is as unhurt as she ever was. She is tired, but not as much as she was before. If anything, she's feeling better. Lukas is alive, and she's alive, and that's something.

"Lukášek," she says, in a loud, clear voice. She doesn't fight the bindings on her wrists. She doesn't even try. If once doesn't wake him up, she raises her voice, makes it firm despite the rasp from disuse: "LUKÁŠ."

[-unity-] The first time, it's like trying to scar the ocean with a stone. His name disappears into his unconsciousness without a trace. Lukas doesn't even stir.

The second time, much louder. His name rings off the walls flatly, can't quite echo in these confines. It makes him stir, makes him curl on himself like a teenager too lazy for school, makes him

snap his eyes open, suddenly, and jolt upright in a burst of violence that

dies almost instantaneous. Weak still, he falls back, face-up now. One more thing that wasn't there before: he's wearing a goddamn collar. It's silver, seamless, as though it had been forged onto his body. He hasn't noticed it yet. His eyes search the ceiling for a moment, then turn to her. She can see his chest fall suddenly with a rush of an exhale that might've been relief, or even joy.

"Danička," he says, groggy, scratchy. His eyes hold her for another moment. There's still a glaze to them; he's not all there yet. It takes him another moment before he blinks once and frowns.

"Kde to jsme?"

More dawning now. He struggles, raises himself awkwardly on his elbows, looks around.

"We need to get out of here."

[Danicka Musil] She doesn't move. Danicka doesn't fight to sit up, or struggle awkwardly with bindings she has no chance of getting out of. She lies where she is and breathes in sharply when Lukas comes to, as though bracing herself in case he explodes, frenzies, hurts her, does something

he can't control.

But he doesn't. And she doesn't quite relax but she breathes out, slow, slow, a long stream of air from her lips. She shaking. She barely even notices, but she's trembling nonstop, her body doing what she won't let her mind do and simply quivering itself apart.

She doesn't blink. "Já nevím," she says, and a moment later: "Vím."

Her eyes go to the collar, go back to his face. "That's like the one they put on that boy," she says, almost nonsensically, taking a breath. "He was in the back of the truck I crashed into. When Lee was with me. And the redhead brought me back." Her words are disjointed, but she's trying. She closes her eyes, opens them, takes a deep breath and tries to stop shaking.

[-unity-] Lukas's head turns. He looks at Danicka. He looks at her for a long time, and then he turns, clumsily, the way dolphins or seals turn on land. He comes down on his right shoulder, the right side of his chest and his body, and scoots toward her in fits and starts.

They're some two or three feet apart. He inches over little by little, until he's right beside her. Right against her. And because his hands are bound as well, because he can't put his arms around her, he simply leans into her, nuzzles his head against hers, his jaw against her temple.

She can feel him breathing, quicker than necessary. He's thinking.

"We never did figure out what they wanted." By we he means not him and her but the larger we -- the Sept, the Garou. "I'm going to turn around. Look at my wrists. Tell me what's on them. Okay?"

All around them: silence still, other than the hum of ventilation. No footsteps. No voices. They may as well be a thousand feet underground. They may as well be in outer space. There's no way to tell.

The lights don't even buzz.

[Danicka Musil] And she nuzzles him back. Not haphazardly, not hesitantly. Lukas comes closer and she stretches out her neck, heedless of the fact that she's rather sure Big Brother is watching. She rubs her face against his, kisses his cheek, tastes the staleness of her own mouth and doesn't care. For a moment there's almost passion to her, somewhere in between fear and anger, somewhere in between the trembling of one and the shaking of the other, she is overcome again by gladness that he was not killed while she was unconscious, that her last sight of him is not him falling, that his last vision of her is not someone straddling her and forcing a capsule into her mouth while she screams.

"Okay," she says, unnecessarily, as he rolls around, turns, and she twists to see what's on his hands.

She makes a noise. It's strangled. Frustrated. "Zkurvysyne," she snaps, breathing out harshly. "Stříbra."

This time Danicka decides to sit up. She rolls, twists to her side, and fights until she's upright. She's breathing faster, looking around the room, looking back at him. She doesn't tell him the shit she saw done to her mother with silver, the memorable nights when she would come home bloody, the stain on the hardwood floor covered by a rug that never moves now. She does not tell him that it's why she's shaking. She takes a deep breath. "Okay," she says. And again: "Okay."

"They didn't kill you. They didn't do anything to us. They locked up the other one instead of killing him. Myslím, že to je o experimentování."

[-unity-] As though inspired by her, or perhaps spurred by silver on his neck and silver on his wrists, Lukas twists and struggles until he's upright, too. He's not sitting. He's on one knee, his hands clenching and unclenching behind his back. Not because he's angry, though he is. He's working to get circulation back in his hands.

They have their first good look at the room. It's 8x8. It's white. The door is hardly more than a cutout in the wall, the corners rounded, the edges flush. The corners of the room are rounded, too. The floor and the walls all join seamlessly. There's a tiny edging around the ceiling for the light, but even that's minimized. Everything is smooth, featureless, pristine.

No new furniture has materialized. They're stll the only things in here. And he looks at her as she thinks through it, comes to a logical conclusion. A faint, humorless laugh escapes him.

"Skvělý." He sounds wry, but not bitter. His eyes are brilliantly blue in here, and then they turn away again as he cranes his neck this way and that, looking around.

And then:

"Turn around. Let me see." When she does, he looks. "It's not silver. It looks like rubber, or maybe some sort of ... spandex or something." A pause. "Come here. Back to back. I'll see if I can tear it."

[Danicka Musil] If she can sit up, he can sit up. If she can start thinking, he sure as hell better be. But Danicka was only shot once, wasn't even hurt, didn't lose complete control over her body until they pinned her down and shoved something down her throat. She, miraculously, was never in as bad of shape as Lukas was tonight. Last night. She doesn't even know when.

Danicka keeps examining their space. And when she's gone over it once, she goes over it again. And a third time. She learns it by repetition, knowing that something is wrong in her mind because she can't stop trembling and she can't think beyond the most immediate, present moment without starting to panic. She knows she'll miss something, something vital, if she only looks once.

She turns obediently, and scoots back towards him just as obediently, clenching her jaw. "Myslíte si, že jsou nás sleduje?"

[-unity-] (rip!)
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 2, 3, 5, 9 (Success x 1 at target 8)

[-unity-] "Asi ano."

A pause. Back to back like this, she can feel the strain in his arms, his upper back, as he gets a firm grip on her bindings and pulls. The rubber stretches tight; cuts into her wrists; refuses to give. He works his hands along the material without letting go, gets a better grip, digs his nails in, pulls until his deltoids are beginning to quiver, and --

suddenly the rubber lets go. It snaps off her wrists, the pieces recoiling and flying apart, debris on this otherwise featureless room. They're white, too.

"And probably with translators."

He gets to his feet, raising his head, looking up at the light that glows down on his face. It bathes him with an utterly uniform light.

"Maybe they're watching to see what we do. How we react. What we do under stress--"

Suddenly, without warning, there's a spinechilling scream. Howl. It comes from somewhere outside this room. It's rage and fury and fear ... but it's mostly pain. Lukas shuts up, tilting his head sharply to listen, the strap of muscle in his cheek standing out as he clenches his teeth.

Interminable seconds later, it dies off.

"Or maybe it's something worse," he finishes, quietly.

[Danicka Musil] It hurts, getting that rubber or spandex or whatever it is tugged and pulled til it rips. Danicka winces, though this doesn't hurt any more than anything else that's been done to her. The bloody bandage from earlier is still in effect, the extra resilience like a buffer to her flesh and bones, keeping her not from feeling but from dropping. She rotates her wrists almost gracefully, draws her arms around her, sighs at the ache in her shoulders, and turns to see him as he rises.

And then the scream.

The hairs on Danicka's arms and the back of her neck stand on end. She breathes in sharply, curls in a bit self-protectively, and looks at the blankness of the door. She gives a shudder, stands up slowly, and heads towards the door. Because you never know until you try. But she doesn't say anything. She is trying not to shiver.

[-unity-] They're both standing now, the only living, dynamic presences in this otherwise sterile, pristine little cell. Danicka goes to the door, and for his part, Lukas kneels again, straining until he can loop his shackles under his feet. Now his hands, albeit bound, are in front of him. His balance is better. His ability to move, too.

The door, meanwhile, turns out to be utterly unresponsive. Cut into the solid wall itself, it may as well be a laser-etched outline, completely flush with the walls. They have nothing to insert into the cracks to determine if they can slip something through, or find a lock, or anything of the sort.

"Anything?" Lukas comes up beside her, putting his palms on the door. He strains against it, bracing his feet, leaning his shoulder into it until the veins in the side of his neck stand out. It doesn't give. His breathing is a harsher overtone to the hum of the ventilation.

[Danicka Musil] She pushes. And she pulls. She pries. She digs her manicured fingernails in where she can. She tries to slide it to the side, the other side, up. Down. Danicka exerts various forms and directions of force on the door, and when it all comes to nothing, she smacks it hard with the palm of her hand and snarls something in Russian. It doesn't sound very nice. Lukas comes up behind her to do the same, adding his strength to what paltry power she has, and Danicka shakes her head.

"Nothing," she says, and steps away, glances up at the light and winces at its brightness. Her brow is furrowed, her wrists sore. She goes to look more at the tourniquet that had been around her wrists, wondering what it actually was. As she crouches to pick it up, she adds: "I'm hungry," in a soft mutter to herself, sounding more resigned than anything else.

[-unity-] The tourniquet appears to be some form of rubber. It's very smooth, very uniform, powderless. Nothing flakes or chips off when her hands move over it, and when she applies force, it stretches evenly across its length. Where it snapped, the two ends, even, are smooth. There are no visible deformations.

"Let's see what's behind the lights," Lukas says suddenly. Reaching up, outstretching his arms, the ceiling is still just out of his reach. He drops to one knee instead, holding out his hands as a stirrup. "Stand on my shoulders. Be careful."

[Danicka Musil] "No, you stand on mine," she counters, quips, jokes when there's nothing funny about it, when it wouldn't really be that funny even if they weren't stuck in Room 101 wearing scrubs and with him bound in silver.

"Don't drop me," she murmurs, walking over to him and putting her hands on his shoulders, putting her bare foot on his silver-bound hands. Danicka climbs rather deftly, in the end, onto his shoulders, sitting on them. She feels the silver around his neck briefly and coldly touch her inner thigh.

She feels a flush of anger, and breathes out. She doesn't need to stand when his natural height puts her right at the ceiling. She actually has to curl a bit, twisting her head around and pushing at the edges of the light.

[-unity-] A faint laugh when she quips, but Lukas just looks at her when she tells him not to drop her. He doesn't have to say it:

Never.

She climbs onto his shoulders. His hands have a few inches of leeway; it makes it difficult for him to hold her steady at the knees and the thighs, so he grasps her ankles instead. When he stands, it's slow and careful.

He walks her around the edge of the room. She pushes on the light's covering, which is also flush with the walls, integrating almost seamlessly with the smooth, cornerless confines of their cell. Unlike the door, however, there's a definite give. It feels like plastic, deformable, and when she pushes hard enough, there's a small pop! as a corner of the sheet comes up.

Assuming she keeps it up, the entire cover snaps off. It's only a little more effort after that to twist it out of its seating. It's large enough that they have to struggle to get it down on the floor underneath them, the edges of the hard plastic threatening to cut at their exposed skin.

When it's down, they can see that the light comes from six circular discs, spaced and tuned to provide an utterly uniform blanket of light. In the center of the six, there's an air vent covered by a very fine grille, perhaps three feet by three feet. They can't see past the grille.

[Danicka Musil] What he knows about her, and has known for a very long time now, is that Danicka has no lack of persistence, no lack of drive. Her temper may flare and then sputter out, but when she wants something, she keeps at it, relentless, stopping only when there is but one final shred of her dignity left. She told him, one way or another, then over and over as soon as the words were out of her mouth, that she wanted him. She kept coming back, over and over, even when he tried to make himself as unappealing as possible, as unavailable, as... cold. As cruel.

She most certainly keeps at the light. She wants out. She wants the silver off of his neck and hands with a fervency she can't even put into words, couldn't do more than scream over if she tried. She pries and pushes and slides and all but squeals when it actually pops the first time, then just breathes a bit heavier as she keeps working at it.

Danicka winces as the plastic tries to cut her, doesn't make a sound. She squints against the light that is now less diffuse, reaching down and scritching Lukas's scalp idly. "They are either not watching," she says, "or this is all rather futile."

[-unity-] He breathes out another laugh. "I don't give a fuck. Can you get that grate open?"

(str check. if she's actually balling up her fists and hammering on it, you can roll attack.)

[Danicka Musil] [Strength: ENH!]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 5 (Failure at target 6)

[Danicka Musil] [Dex + Brawl: I SAID ENH.]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 4, 8, 8 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Danicka Musil] [Damage: That's what I thought.]
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 1, 7 (Failure at target 6)

[Danicka Musil] Oh, she tries. First she pushes at it, grabs at it. And it doesn't budge. Danicka scowls, balls up her fists, and hammers at it furiously, forcing Lukas to compensate for her movement up on his shoulders. And it does no good. It just hurts her hands a little.

"Goddammit," she snaps, and stews, thinking. She takes a breath. "If we get that rubber thing maybe you can help me pull it down."

[-unity-] "Stop," Lukas breaks in as Danicka starts hammering at the grate, "stop, baby. Stop."

She would've stopped anyway. He's planted his feet farther apart to counterbalance. She things of the tourniquet, or the bindings, or whatever the hell it was. He turns, looks at it.

"I'm going to let you down," he says. And then he goes down on his knee, carefully. She gets the strap. He lets her climb back onto his shoulders, stands again.

"Pull it down here," he says, after she gets the strap through. "Give both ends to me. Just put your hands on the grate so it doesn't hit us in the face."

[Danicka Musil] They are getting quite the workout for two people who are hungry, whose sleep was chemically induced and not natural, who are or were bound up and changed out of their clothes. Danicka climbs up, climbs back down, climbs up again as soon as the rubber is in her hand. She glances at the door as she's getting back onto Lukas's shoulders, taking her time because they seem to have plenty of it and because she does not want to fall.

Not that he would let her. If he could. She always remembers that, though: if he could. He can't always protect her. And she has never expected him to. Or wanted that.

Danicka can knit. And she can use a sewing machine. Danicka can cook, and bake, and put a child to sleep, and fire a gun, and drive a car. She can do a lot of things, but this is new. She was never captured before, or kidnapped, and yet she seems ridiculously calm in the face of imprisonment. Her head is cool. She's tired, and she's drained, but she isn't panicking.

A lot of people like her would be panicking. But this does not frighten her, being stuck in a room she can't get out of and can't keep anyone else from entering. And it has nothing to do with Lukas's presence.

Danicka obeys, and tugs on the rubber until Lukas can reach up and grasp it. As soon as she's sure the stretching material is firmly in his hands, she takes her hands off of it and presses her palms on the grate. She doesn't push. She waits. "I got it."

[-unity-] Lukas does not, yet, know the truth of her house, that locked doors were forbidden, that Danicka never really had ...anything, really, that was purely and wholly her own until Chicago. He does not know why she's not panicking.

He appreciates it, anyway.

"Okay," he says, when she says she has it. He wraps the cords around his hands once each, firmly, and then he begins to pull. Hard. She can feel his shoulders straining under her thighs, the short, deliberate, labored puffs of breath. All of a sudden the grate comes loose, and for an instant Lukas's strength and the stretch of the tourniquet is pitted against Danicka's comparative feebleness.

The Ahroun lets go almost immediately. Danicka drops the grate, or tosses it aside, and they're both looking up now.

It's very dark in the air shaft. Darker still by comparison to the blazing lights in the ceiling. Lukas stands 6'4"; Danicka is another 5'6" on top of that. Sitting on his shoulders, she can reach up into the vent and feel around. Standing, most of her body would be in it.

(roll percep! diff 6 if she's sitting, diff 4 if she stands)

[Danicka Musil] Locked doors were never forbidden. No one ever told her not to lock her door. She was really only punished once for doing it, and that was beside the point. An addition. The insult to injury, as it were. Lukas does not know why Danicka's calm, doesn't know all the ins and outs of why Katherine's invasion to her apartment had Danicka sobbing under her bed to hide and that Katherine coming into that apartment is why Danicka is already looking for a different place, which is something else he doesn't know, which is something she's not sure she'll tell him because he might argue, and

it's all beside the point. She's taking a deep breath, and wincing as he pulls, as she tightens her legs slightly because she's afraid she'll fall as his shoulders and arms shift to pull on the grate. She yelps as it comes free, his solid signal that it's done, he can relent, and she all but throws it aside to the ground.

She holds onto his head for a moment, takes a breath, looks down. "I'm going to stand up, okay?" And waits for acknowledgement of this before she does, very gingerly crawling to her feet and standing up, using the grate itself for balance.

[Danicka Musil] [Perception + Alertness]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10 (Success x 5 at target 4) Re-rolls: 1

[-unity-] "Yeah." He reaches up awkwardly, his shoulders tightening beneath her bare feet. The confines of the shackles make it necessary for him to grasp her not at the ankles but higher up, close to the knees. She grabs the grate for balance and carefully extends to her full height --

-- or as close as she can get, because about five feet into the ventilation terminal, her head taps the top of the cross-shaft.

The air is cool in here. It doesn't smell or taste like anything; nothing but filtered, conditioned air. As her eyes adjust to the darkness, she can see that the cross-shaft is larger than the terminal, about five feet across and two and a half high. It extends in both directions; to the left, there's a dead end maybe a hundred feet away. To the right, it goes on for several hundred, and then curves away to the left. What light there is to see by comes up from below, presumably through other grates.

There are no handholds in the walls whatsoever. But standing on Lukas's shoulders, she can easily pull herself up into the cross-shaft.

[Danicka Musil] "Ow!" she yelps, but it isn't wholehearted. Her head bops against the shaft, and she ducks down a bit on instinct, holding to the vent so she doesn't jostle Lukas overmuch. A moment later she rises again, and looks one way and the other, and exhales. She looks down, hoping her voice carries out of the shaft clearly enough. She describes, quickly, what she just saw, then adds:

"...will you be okay if I leave you?"

There is no measurement of the trepidation in that question.

[-unity-] "Ano," immediately. And then -- "Wait. Hold on a minute. Go up first -- " and he boosts her if she needs it, holds on until she draws her feet up herself.

From above, foreshortened, Lukas is all thick black hair and broad shoulders. The cottons they've been dressed in look out of place on him, too docile, too uniform. He cups his palm over the outside of his arm and -- like a magician performing a trick -- pulls a small leather bag out of literally thin air.

He tosses the bag up at her, underhanded. "You know how to use them all?" he asks. She'll find talens inside, all of them familiar to her.

[Danicka Musil] It isn't that easy. He tells her to wait, hold on, go up first, and she says -- shakily, "Ne. Let me down. Please."

[-unity-] "Co?" -- but he does, carefully, his hands moving up her legs as she lowers herself. Lukas bends back to one knee, letting Danicka off his shoulders before looking up at her. "What's the matter?"

[Danicka Musil] There's a grace in the way she comes down to him, sliding around his body and down, that comes solely from trust. She is not trying to hold up her own weight when she swings her leg off of one shoulder and moves around to his front, wrapping her arms around his neck and burying her face against his throat. Breathes against him. Gives a shudder.

She doesn't answer. She just holds onto him for a moment, then breathes in, sighs out raggedly: "Já bych si tvůj maličkým." Danicka presses a kiss to his cheek. "Nechci tě ztratit. Já nejsem připraven. Ale kdyby oni přišel, byl bych hrdý na to mít jim."

She pulls back, and if he lets her go, she climbs back up onto him to get into the cross-shaft.

[-unity-] Ironic, that Lukas is in the classic pose of a suitor proposing marriage. He never went down on one knee to ask her to be his mate. He never even asked, that he can remember. She didn't either. They simply were; finalized it when the solstice came; verbalized it months later; sealed it, months after that.

She says what she says and Lukas looks at her. He's stunned, she can see it in his eyes. She starts to pull back. He holds her where she is, pulls her back against him suddenly, roughly, clasping her against his chest.

And breathes.

"Miluji tě." That's all he says in the end, kissing her neck once, fiercely. Then he lets her go. She climbs onto him. He stands. She pulls herself into the cross-shaft, and he tosses his talens up to her.

[Danicka Musil] And that was all. No other secrets whispered before dying, when even if he's fine if she leaves him she's less than certain she'll be okay, herself. Danicka curls around him when he holds her, rests her head on his shoulder as he's kissing her neck in the wake of a confession to something he likely wouldn't expect to hear from a woman who miscarried once and...

...god only knows what happened the other time, the second time that he's heard of but knows nothing about. He can guess the end result easily enough, but the end result is never a complete story.

She clambers into the cross-shaft and takes the talens, saying: "It's really not fair that I lose my purse and you can do that," as though she didn't say what she just said, didn't insist on holding him and telling him something that may very well haunt him if it's the last thing he ever hears her say in his native language,

which it isn't, because as she looks down at him she also says, lower now:

"Miluji tě."

And goes to the right.

[-unity-] Lukas did not, though part of him wanted to, tell Danicka not to talk like that. Not to talk as though she wanted to tell him something in case she never saw him again. Lukas did not, though part of him very badly wanted to, tell her not to leave him. To stay with him. To face whatever it is they might face together, not because he was afraid to be left behind but because he didn't want to be separated from her.

His mate.

Who told him something so searing that all he could do was stare; whom he held to his chest while the rest of it broke over him, the ache, the poignancy, the gladness, the pain.

Who tells him something in English that makes him smile, fleetingly, and something in Czech that makes him look at her so intently and intensely that if it's the last time she sees him, it'll be fitting for her to remember him like that. Focused. Fierce. Eyes like ice and lightning.

--

She goes to the right. She can probably walk bent double at the waist, but it'll be awkward, and besides, she'll put all her weight in her feet. Safer, easier to crawl on all fours. After a dozen steps or so she passes another terminal shaft. The grate down there likely won't hold her weight if she stood on it, but if she leans down head-first, she can see -- blurrily, through the translucent light cover -- a cell just like the one she so recently vacated. This one's empty.

There's another one, a dozen paces down from there. And another. And another. They're all empty.

As she nears the bend in the air shaft, another shriek resounds through the ventilation system. It's louder now, and much nearer.

[Danicka Musil] There are Kinfolk in town, and Garou, and mortals, who cannot help but check out things like this. It's dangerous, it's stupid, but they have to know. They're curious as kittens, and as unlikely to be able to handle themselves. Danicka breathes quietly, crawls slowly, and her muscles are aching after awhile. She hears the scream, and her breathing hitches in her throat. She looks down each shaft into empty cells.

And goes towards the scream. But not because she can't help it. Because she might learn something useful. Because she might be able to figure out what the hell they're here for.

[Danicka Musil]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 4, 5, 6, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 6 at target 6) Re-rolls: 1

[Danicka Musil]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 2, 2, 6, 6, 7, 8 (Success x 3 at target 6)

[-unity-] Around the bend, the layout is different. There are only three terminal shafts, each larger than the ones behind her. None of them are shielded behind plastic light-covers.

The first room is dark, and about twice the size of the cell she's crawled out of. But Danicka has been moving through darkness for a long time, and the acuity of her senses sometimes verges on superhuman. She can make out panels of blinking lights, stacks of machinery, humming black boxes -- with her affinity towards computers, the first thing she might think is server room. Then, communications center. Power and utilities room. Something like that. There's a door, nothing like the seamless portal of her cell. An actual door, with a handle, to some outer hall.

The second room is small, about the size of her cell. It's well-lit. The walls are lined with lockers on one side, sinks on the other. There's a door into the room, and another door, a glass porthole mounted at about eye-level to the adjoining room.

The third room, which is the room that the portholed door connects to, is by far the largest. It is awash in brilliant light, so much of it that Danicka might fear her peering face will be seen through the grate.

There are three vats along the far wall, steel-capped and steel-based, the walls made of curving glass. Two are empty. The one in the corner contains a female, apparently human. Her eyes are closed. She wears a mask sealed over her nose and mouth, the tube running upward into the ceiling of the vat. She floats motionless in the solution, which is faintly blue, like chlorinated water. She is naked, and totally hairless. It's hard to determine her age. It could be anything from 25 to 45.

Her arms do not end in hands, but in complex, gleaming, lethal machinery.

There are also two stainless-steel tables in the room -- exam tables, surgical tables, something of the sort. They are almost directly beneath Danicka. One is empty. On the other is what appears, at first glance, to be a man. Brown fur flickers up and down his arms, though, and he's secured to the table by silver manacles and silver collar. His right hand is replaced by a construct similar to what the woman in the tank bears. His left arm is a mangled, shredded mess of bone and tendon and nerve and muscle: a work in progress.

At the head of the tables looms a large machine, whirring, humming, buzzing. A long, multi-stage proboscis extends from it, moving delicately, meditatively over the Garou. When it touches down on the raw meat of his arm, a thin strand of smoke curls up. The Garou makes an inhuman noise.

The last occupant of the room barely seems to belong in such a sterile, advanced environment. He -- it? -- wears a long black robe, shapeless, that obscures his entire body. The hood is drawn up. He stands with his hands tucked into his sleeves, one into the other, his head slightly bowed. He appears to be merely observing.

If Danicka proceeds past this vent, the vent shaft takes another left. This stretch is very similar to the first: a series for five or six terminal shafts leading down, presumably, to cells.

[Danicka Musil] What she sees horrifies her. Danicka pulls back almost instantly from the brightly lit room after she sees the man in black, swallowing her breath, praying to a goddess that feels light years away for safety and strength. It is rare that she prays like that: words in her head, imploring for something that may not be granted. Danicka prays with the kneading of dough and making love to her mate and noticing the wind on her face. She asks for nothing, expects nothing. She begs now, briefly, and then stops herself, silencing her thoughts.

She looks again. And watches for perhaps five seconds, maybe less, before going back to the shaft over what she's calling the server room in her head. It's dark, and she guesses no one is in there. It's quiet, and she guesses she'll be alone if she can get into it. It's where the computers are, and if these people are attaching cybernetics to Garou, she's willing to wager that it's far more important than what looks like a locker room.

Danicka clutches the bag Lukas gave her and takes a breath. Eight feet high, plus maybe four or five feet of shaft. If she hits the grate and sends it crashing to the ground --

-- well. She reaches into the bag and finds a slim vial of black fluid. If someone comes running, they won't find her. She prepares to drop.

[-unity-] (grate, resisting Danicka's weight: must get 2 succ or more to hold)
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 2, 5, 10, 10 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Danicka Musil] [Stamina + Athletics]
Dice Rolled:[ 3 d10 ] 5, 9, 10 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Danicka Musil] [Dex + Ath!]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 5, 6, 9 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[-unity-] Danicka jumps down. Her weight and gravity conspire to pop the grate from its clips. It clatters down -- high-density polymer, not steel, doesn't clang -- and she lands atop it a second later. Keeps her footing, though barely.

Her knees and hips complain with the impact. Nothing broken, though.

Now she's down in the darkened machine room. Walls of lights blink and glow at her. There's a low, constant humming in this room, the noise of countless pieces of machinery all operating at once.

And as far as she can tell, no footsteps come running to see what the fuck the noise was.

[Danicka Musil] She waits, at first, after dropping into a crouch and slowly rising, her joints asking her what the fuck she thinks she's doing. She waits for ten seconds, then makes herself count to thirty, then thirty again. Danicka doesn't even move until she's certain, barely even breathes.

It's hard to see in the dark, but at least there's enough light to give her eyes something to adjust to. She scans this room like she scanned the cell: three times.

[Danicka Musil] [Perception (Apprehensive) + Computer // -2 Diff (Computer Aptitude)]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 3, 4, 4, 4, 6, 9, 9 (Success x 6 at target 4)

[-unity-] Once, Danicka told Lukas that she doesn't know much about computers. She likes them. She took her old Vaio and set it up in the Brotherhood, and when it caught a virus from someone's uncareful surfing, she cleaned it right up in a matter of hours, even managing to salvage most the data. She has two or three PCs of her own, at least one over which she became noticeably tense when Lukas moved it uncarefully. She's a PvP beast on world of warcraft. She could, with a little training, probably code faster than most people can think.

But she told Lukas she doesn't know much about computers.

And now, she stands in this dark, humming room full of machinery, all of it foreign, all of it unknown, all of it laid before her with no prior exposure, no familiarization, and all Danicka has to do is look at it.

It opens to her like a book. She reads it as easily as she ever read the Shadow Lord that became her mate; she reads it more easily, in fact, than most times she's read him.

There are three major banks of machinery. Enormous numbers of cables and wires run into the back of each, neatly partitioned and bundled off. The two smaller banks appear to be purely storage: racks and racks of humming drives, air-cooled, each identical to its neighbor. The central, larger bank is more complex than that. There's only a single display, an LCD or something like it, darkened. There's only a single input, which appears to be a pane of touch-sensitive fiberglass, faintly laser-etched. There are no labels in any language. The only markings are symbols, simple and stylized. All the same Danicka can intuit, can simply guess through long practice and sheer wits, most its functions.

There's the ventilation control, a sliding scale from off to high. There are the lights in the south wing, the north wing, and the central wing: rooms A B and C. Here are the door locks. Here's the uplink to the storage banks. There's the outlink, which will likely allow her to exert some control over the machinery in the other room. And there, solitary, sectioned off from the rest, are the main power controls: south wing, north wing, central wing rooms A B and C.

There's only one isolated panel that she cannot make sense of. Not because she's not clever enough, and not because it hasn't clicked in her mind, but simply because it's completely alien to her. There are only three symbols in that panel:

A cone, point-down.
A circle perfectly and vertically bisected.
And a point.

[Danicka Musil] To be fair, she told the Kinfolk at the meeting once upon a time that she knew 'a little'. And she told Lukas 'not much'. Both times, she was telling the truth. She can fix a Mac better than a 'Genius'. She can dismantle and reassemble her new Vaio faster than she could her old one. She built her first computer when she lived in New Orleans, and gave it to Helena. She now makes biweekly trips to the Brotherhood to check on the computer there and make sure it's in good working order. She doesn't think she really knows what she's doing. Or didn't.

Now that she's in classes she's realizing she's quite a bit brighter than she thought she was. She knew she was smart, knew she was clever and creative, but she had no idea how she ranked, how she compared, how above average she was. She still doesn't know what she can do with computers. She is still as unaware of her particular talent with them as some women are unaware of their beauty. But she's thinking... well. She's thinking that maybe next term she'll take a programming class. She'll see if she can make it. It seems like something esoteric and difficult, the way others talk about it.

It seems so simple, when she picks up a book on Perl in a bookstore and flicks through it. So fucking simple. How come only the scrawny wizards in glasses seem allowed to practice it, as once upon a time only priests could read scripture? Danicka has no idea yet.

She knows more than the vast majority of people in this city, and she knows it by instinct and intuition and inclination. But: she doesn't know 'much'.

So every single thing she learns is checked two, three times. She looks, and it tells her things. She knows, and she checks again. She is certain, and looks a third time anyway. There are no vagaries of experience or mood here to alter what she can tell. There is no body language to change from one moment to the next. There's no rage, no sense of will, no emotion. It isn't exactly static, but it's not primal. It is not familiar or comforting or anything of the sort: it's just that it's so goddamned simple by comparison, so much fucking easier...

She stares, and she absorbs, and then she comes to the three symbols on the isolated panel. The first thing that comes to mind is three, two, one. The second thing is Flatland. The third thing is: A, B...not C. The fourth thing is ...I'm going to leave you alone for a moment.

Danicka glances at the door, then goes to the central bank and its single, darkenened display. Her hand wrapped around a vial of nightshade, she starts to explore, looking first into the storage banks. Because you never try to control what you do not understand.

[-unity-] When Danicka investigated the room, the storage racks told her little in and of themselves, the same way a computer tower will tell her little of what data is stored inside it. She had no absolute confirmation that what she was looking at really were storage drives, but by their number and arrangement and outward appearance, it's almost impossible that they're anything but. By surface inspection, she could see that they appear to be solid-state drives, or something like it. When she touched their surfaces she couldn't feel hard disk platters spinning.

There's no readout on either of the storage banks; not so much as an LCD temperature monitor. Some of the wires and cables running out of the banks go into and through the wall. Some of them run toward the central bank, where she stands now, nightshade talen in hand.

At her first touch, the etched-fiberglass keyboard comes alive. The symbols glow like runes. The monitor blazes to life, displaying an unbelievably sharp, vivid image. Everything within the computer appears to be coded in the same symbolic pseudolanguage as the keyboard. By trial and error, she begins to sift through the stored data on the hard drives. It's hard to translate the symbol-code into exact dates and times, but it soon becomes apparent that she's looking at a sequence of experiments running back months, perhaps years.

Attempting to actually access experimental records runs into encryption.

(if she wants to hack into it, it's wits+computer, resisted by comput0r itself. aptitude applies.)

[Danicka Musil] [Aw HELL to the Yes]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 2, 6, 7, 10, 10 (Success x 3 at target 4)

[-unity-] (RESISTANCE IS NOT FUTILE!)
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 1, 4, 8, 10 (Failure at target 6)

[Danicka Musil]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 4, 4, 5, 7 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[-unity-] ...encryption which, as it turns out, poses almost no trouble for Danicka.

She's not trained. She's going off sheer wits and intuition. She breaks the code; she cracks the lock; she gets through the encryption and all of a sudden, the monitor isn't merely displaying, it's projecting.

Vivid as life, a three-dimensional image traces itself out of thin air. Numbers crawl over the right side of the projection, ghostly blue. On camera, as it were, the black-robed figure presides over the surgical tables, the left one of which is in use this time. The camera swings up. It was hard to tell from above, and it's hard to tell now in the change view, but the man(?) in black appears taller than humans should rightfully be. Then he's out of the field of view, which swings over the table.

It's the woman on the table this time. Her hair used to be a rich auburn-brown. Her face is contorted, almost unrecognizable. She's screaming as the machine welds, weaves, warps flesh to titanium and polymer and carbon-fiber. There's no audio, but the hairs on the back of Danicka's neck rise of their own accord anyhow.

Click. Back. Another file: the same, but a different Garou. Younger, a boy, in his late teens.

And another: a man, late 20s.
And another: a woman, early 40s.

And so on, and so forth; literally dozens of subjects, victims, all the way back to the first, a young man that weeps openly, strains and struggles and sobs, as the robed figure and the machine goes to work. It's a record of atrocity.

As for the numbers scrolling up the right side of the field of view: the details are lost to Danicka, but it becomes apparent that they're a measure of various factors, all of which sum to a single number, a success quotient that rises steadily through the experiments.

The next-to-latest, the female now in the hibernation vat, also bears the highest quotient thus far.

--

The screaming has stopped. Danicka realizes this only in retrospect, when the silence is broken again. There's a disturbance outside the machine room. Footsteps, at least two sets, walking steady as a metronome. Louder, nearer, closer ... and then farther again. Moving down the hall, away.

The video playback ended, the display is two-dimensional again, glowing silently at her.

[Danicka Musil] Of course at first her reaction is horror. Disgust. She sees things she does not want to see and has never seen before. She flinches away, can't look, several times. She has no idea that for most people this information would be unattainable, not to mention impossible to interpret. The fact that there are two tables and only one subject at a time bothers her intrinsically, but she doesn't dwell on it.

Over time she recognizes the numbers, and realizes that the male being worked on right this moment isn't finished yet, won't be measured yet. She thinks about the blonde-haired young man who was wearing silver the first and only time she saw him. He got out.

And she thinks about Lukas in a cell wearing collar and manacles and anger snaps through her so hard it feels like fear, nearly makes her crack the nightshade in her hand. Danicka takes a deep breath --

-- and notices that things have gotten quiet. She freezes as the footsteps go by, horrified, breathing only when the footsteps go away again. Two sets. Who the fu --

She doesn't care. She goes looking for building schematics. Fire escape routes. Maps. Ventilation shafts that will hopefully hint at where doors are, where they are in relation to the world, whether they're underground -- which she suspects -- or not. Her first priority is getting out. Strangely, the second thing on her list is personnel files.

[Danicka Musil]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 3, 5, 5, 6, 8 (Success x 3 at target 4)

[-unity-] It takes her a handful of precious seconds to find what she's looking for. When the building schematic is projected into the air before her, she can see that the entirety of it seems to be the two wings of cells attached to a central wing -- this room, the locker room, and the surgical suite. There appears to be some form of elevator shaft outside, in the hall. There's no indication where they are, exactly, nor how far underground, but it is certain that they're underground.

When she begins to look for personnel files ... there simply is none to be found. At all. She's almost certain she's searched everywhere there is to look. There are simply no records on file of personnel in this facility. For that matter, there are very few records on file, period.

Another oddity: the building schematics also show a staircase leading down. There's no indication of where it leads, or where it ends.

There's a commotion down the hall, more easily heard through the ventilation system than the walls. A door has opened. Then there's snarling and growling, and the distant hiss and whirr of machinery.

[Danicka Musil] She nearly breaks something when she hears the growling.

Moje.

Danicka looks a second time, memorizes where the elevator is in relation to the room she's in now, and then closes out that particular projection. She memorizes the location of the stairwell. And then she shuts down power to the surgical suite.

[-unity-] (encrypted! resisted roll, same as below!)

[Danicka Musil]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 3, 6, 9, 10, 10, 10 (Success x 5 at target 6)

[Danicka Musil] [Forgot to change diff! Doesn't matter!]

[-unity-] (slightly stronger encryption!)
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 2, 7, 8, 8, 9 (Success x 3 at target 6)

[-unity-] It takes Danicka a matter of seconds to shut off the power. She touches the symbol for power, surgical suite. Diagrams and symbols appear in thin air. She circumvents the protections and encryptions with a stunning ease. If she knew who -- what she was up against, she would be amazed at herself. As is, all she knows is:

she just crushed the security on this machine.

Two doors down, machines suddenly go dead. Lights black out. Everything goes quiet.

And instantly, a presence intrudes in her mind. It's alien. It's macabre. The brush of it against her psyche is at once revolting and chilling, like eels brushing against her skin in the dark. It shrieks at her, not in words but in pure thought:

Who dares?!