Months, days, hours, minutes; Alex had lost too much time, unaware of its passage while being kept under lock & key, captured by Gentek. Picked apart by Gentek. Like what happened to Manhattan hadn't been enough for them. Astounding really, how they never seemed to learn. Too focused, too greedy. Guess that made its choices akin to natural selection, since there was a subtle justice to being killed by the weapon you helped create.
Of course, now there was this entire mess to fix, with pieces of itself transported to other facilities, some it'd recovered, some yet to be found - and Dana, loveable, clever Dana Mercer. Though still comatose & unaware of her own capture, Alex had been enraged to find it'd failed her twice. Maybe she'd been taken in order to trap it again, maybe they'd hoped to get some fragment of the Redlight virus. Didn't matter. In its hands it all went the same way.
The anonymous contact that helped it along was what rattled Alex, gave it a shock of deja vu. Helpful or not, that didn't detract from the clear threat. The instances were infrequent, but sooner or later everything went to shit. Better to snub the problem.
So immediately after securing safety for Dana, it turned its attention to this problem. Took longer to track them down than Alex liked. They were better hidden, more careful & wiser than it'd expected. That'll learn it, right? Gave it some sense of humility. And, in the end it did feel begrudging respect. Whatever that was worth when it planned on killing them.
Alex tracks them back to Manhattan, to the outer edges, practically in another burrow. The building was half destroyed like all the ones in this area. This implied good survival skills - and everything else suggested military, with connections. Probably ex-Blackwatch, since not many were aware of its existence. That raised a lot of other questions, but it'd have them answered soon enough.
It circles around to give a once-over of the perimeter, complete with infected & infrared vision. There were odd blips of infected material, so small as to be overlooked, and one person. With an exhale, Alex shifts and promptly dissolves. It reshapes into four separate masses: A dog, two rats and a raccoon. Direct, consistent cognitive function of all itself was difficult; disorienting at best, impossible at worst. Until it had more practice, it stuck to simple directives when pulling off something like this.
The rat forms scurry in easily through one of the many small holes in the foundations. The raccoon climbs & tries a window, and with its reduced dog mass, Alex takes the direct route through the building until its met with a barricaded door. Its considers the door for a moment, ears pricked up for any sounds, then promptly paws at it and whines.
