Soft AntiAverage where Chase is sick and in bed but he’s hugging Anti for warmth because Anti can’t get human sicknesses and Anti’s just stuck there awkwardly like a cat being held with its arms out but not complaining
And to your left, a shade whispers, is the pride and joy of our Psychotronics division.
Chase ducks his head, and settles onto the balls of his feet. Crouch-walking is, actually, the devil's work, but it's better than being spotted by a Phantom and being fried to kingdom come-- or worse, being found by one of the Telepaths, and having his head genuinely, honest to God, exploded.
Top of the line.
Unheard of.
Never, in a human lifespan, been attempted.
Much less succeeded.
"Success," Chase mutters under his breath, and dares to pop his head up by a line of broken observation windows, "is a wild measure of whatever this is."
He's in luck: no aliens, mercenaries, or otherwise immediate threats to his continued bodily integrity.
(Bodily integrity. Henrik would get a kick outta that one.)
(Henrik is, also, why he's in this goddamn space station in the first place, helping them research some aliens that the fucking Russians, of all people, had found, so on second thought...)
You, of course, may never see inside that glass. Don't take it personally! Very few people do. The Yu brothers are... extremely selective.
He clears the line of broken glass with a crowbar before he vaults it. Security, apparently, is a joke when your entire top-of-the-line space station has been hijacked and wiped by aliens-- those damn aliens, dude!-- which means that he's a little underwhelmed by the entire space. Bright, white sterile lights, with unidentified stains on bright, white sterile floors that he's not looking too hard at. Glass cases are shattered, chairs upturned. There's a coffee mug on the table that he gives a conspicuous berth; it'd be just his luck to get murked by a Mimic when he's finally gotten into the goddamn Psychotronics labs.
At the core of Psychotronics, our goal is to push humanity to its very limit. To redefine innovation. To redefine what it means to be human.
So far, innovation looks like a whole lotta nothing. Chase snatches up a wad of inorganic material, and shoves it into his bag. He'll look and see what he can synthesize later. More importantly, he has to figure out where all the goods of this place are.
"All of this talk about redefining ourselves," he muses aloud, and circles through the lab, slowly prowling to the back. At the end of the day, he hasn't learned his lesson about the aliens having ears, and maybe he misses talking to other people a little bit, "what would I keep as my big reward? Neuromods? A fancy upgrade for a shotgun? Or another alien?"
He hopes not another alien.
Not any alien, anyways.
Chase, unfortunately, rarely gets what he asks for. See: every single event that dropped like one shitty domino after another, landing him on a doomed science project in a doomed space station.
Ssh, hang on... someone's coming.
Chase quietly, quietly, holsters his wrench. His pistol has three shots; he only really needs one for this. One for the headshot, and then he can smack the shit out of it.
I used to wish we weren't alone in the universe.
"Me and you both, buddy," Chase murmurs, and peeks around the corner. Luck is on his side, this once: it's facing away, and it's not one of them fancy Phantoms.
Child's play to fire off a headshot, and stumble the thing, before he's on it. Their aura always feels weird, like stepping into a cloud of dry ice, and the world goes a little bit strange inside of it. Like someone's overlaid 3D glasses over each other, and then turned up the contrast to maximum. It's why he doesn't pay the grin in the corner of his vision any mind; just the sensation of organic material pulping underneath his wrench. The Phantom flings him off; he ducks under its arm, and takes another swing. Stuns it. Feels the area where its ribs should be cave in. His eye throbs, just a little bit, like the little scar where the Neuromod went in is protesting; what a shame, buddy.
It's gone in minutes. A near record, compared to the near-hour that his first encounter had taken. Doesn't drop a whole lot of goodies, but he'll take what little exotic material he can scrounge up to put towards Chase Brody's Neuromod Fund, est. March of 2032.
A slow, slow round of applause sounds behind him, and Chase pivots on a heel, holstering the wrench and drawing his pistol in one smooth motion, and being greeted with something that probably was a man, once.
It looks like a man, anyways. He's not quite sure where its hands begin and the swirling miasma of... matter ends, but he's also not sure that matters-- God, Henrik would kill him-- as much as the fact that it's fixed the two brilliant specks of light that probably pass for pupils on him.
"I didn't know grunts were capable of art," it says, and tilts its head. His head? He looks enraptured, but Chase is mindful of the fact that it would be very, very easy to snap his very human bones right here. "You look lost, little rabbit."
So: about the Psychotronic's pride and joy. There are three very important things to know about the Talos I.
One: the Yu brothers, with every fiber of their being, meant to expand the bounds of the human race, up to and including sacrificing themselves for it.
Two: the Yu brothers, with every fiber of their being, believed that it was acceptable to sacrifice others with them, so long as the end goal was met.
And three: not everybody agreed with it. Least of all, the very people sacrificed.
Chase knows a thing or two about it. And he also knows a thing or two about negotiations. Negotiations, for example, for freedom, in exchange for revenge.
"Well, I was," he says. "They don't exactly give you a blueprint of the place that they leave you to die on."
A spark of interest flashes through the oily tendons that flex along his new companion's arms. Chase tries very hard not to get distracted by the literal expression of-- what did Henrik call them? Impulses? Nerve impulses?-- and tries to focus more on the fact that the hook's out.
"And you came here," his companion says, amusement warbling the edges of his syllables. He prowls closer; Chase runs some quick calculations, decides he's not good enough at math for it, and holds still, because the last thing he needs is to trigger some latent fucking predator instinct. Not latent, maybe. Very, very present. "To die quicker?"
"Well," Chase says, again, and thumbs the grip on his pistol. "You could try that. But then you'd also die a quick fucking death in the middle of nowhere, the Milky Way, because if you think that they're not preparing to blow this station-- and all of their work-- to smithereens, you're wrong."
"So you're negotiating," he muses, and halts, a bare breath away from Chase. Chase's teeth hum with the sheer energy that shivers through this thing, and he has to look up. Just a little bit. "As if you have something to give."
"A way off," Chase says. "Sure, you can try to brute-force your way off of this thing, but how much did it take out of you to get this far?"
"You assume a lot," he murmurs, and tilts his head. The hairs on the back of Chase's neck rise. "For someone who knew so little."
"And yet, at the end of the day, there's probably a reason you haven't blown your way out, to kingdom come," Chase points out. "So you're looking for something. They kept you here, like the world's shittiest Rapunzel. Two and two, mi amigo."
Chase has the distinct pleasure of watching an actual alien's eyebrows rise up the more he talks. It fades, of course, back to that smirk, that I know more than you, I have more than you, but if there's one thing that Chase knows about this station, it's that it was built by liars.
He wonders what that says about the Talos I's last creation before him.
"Fine," the Talos I's last creation says, Anti says, and leans a little bit back, out of his space. The oppressive presence of his being fades, and Chase plants his feet against the sudden shift in weight. "You want to talk, Chase? Let's talk. Quickly."
