Chapter 119: Chapter 115

Piper steeled herself as she stepped out of the teleport room and into the heavily guarded halls of Blacksite Tleilax with the other girls. Between the three of them, only Curie often ventured here with any frequency, and even then not into the more…disturbing areas, especially after gaining her synth body.

 

There was a heavy chemical stink in the air, and Curie paused as she sniffed it out. “Hm. They must have tested the security protocols recently…”

 

“Correct,” Eva answered from the walls around them. “Several super mutant subjects were designated as extraneous and were used to simulate a breakout.”

 

Piper looked at the neat rows of turrets and white laser emitters embedded in the walls and ceilings as they walked through the halls, and ignored Cait’s smirk. No way was she going to bet on a forgone conclusion.

 

“Unfortunately, security measures were found to be incomprehensive.” Oh? “Of the twenty-one subjects armed and released at various points of this site, two managed to survive beyond the projected twelve point seven seconds, and set a new record of fourteen point two seconds.”

 

Piper didn’t exactly know if the AI was humblebragging or not.

 

The main hall eventually branched into three routes, each unmarked and almost identical in their ubiquitous security and lack of decor. Piper knew the middle one led to the sprawling holding complexes, but had no idea which of the other two paths brought them to the medical complex where Sev was waiting for them. Curie led the way down the rightmost route, which meant that the leftmost route was for military testing.

 

“So, Niche Room’s down this way too, right?” Cait asked, earning an uneasy nod from Curie. “You think we’re gonna go in there today?”

 

“I hope not,” the former robot sighed out. There was speculation that Sev had tested some rituals on some of the stumps there, though the three girls didn’t bother using their clearance to find out. They valued good sleep and unmarred mental states too much.

 

The hallway eventually ended with a heavy blast door, the first quarantine door of this particular section of the blacksite. It snapped open with surprising speed for something that likely weighed several tons. Piper gulped softly as she stepped into the medical complex and dismissed the very faint screams in the background, which was broken up with the occasional soft and wet machine whirrings. Cait looked just as excited, and only Curie kept up a nonchalant expression.

 

Sometimes a door would open and unmute the screams for a brief moment. Other times, the noise that escaped was a wet gurgle or the clicks and hisses of unseen contraptions. Sentinels and Mr Brainy robots flitted through the hallways with a cold silence, effortlessly weaving around the girls as they moved from one room to another. Some human and synth researchers populated the complex as well, pausing to give the three of Sev’s girls a respectful nod.

 

Piper avoided looking into the glass walls and windows. As much as she was glad to know the monsters of the wasteland being punished and put to use at the same time, she didn’t want to know the full details. Seeing Cait give in to her curiosity and glance into a room, and then blanch and snap her head away, proved her decision to be wise indeed. Curie had briefed them all that time ago on some of the procedures conducted here, and Piper felt that the gore and violence of combat were far tamer than the pragmatic cruelty inflicted here. 

 

She pretended not to notice how a naked man’s body seemed to be dangling far too loosely and in weird angles as he was carried away by a Sentinel. Her eyes met Cait’s as they averted their gaze from a researcher running past and carrying what her eyes initially thought was a head with a blood-stained spine.

 

No, the spine was definitely not wriggling, nor was the head screaming.

 

They eventually turned into a room where Sev awaited them. It was a large, rather empty lab, save for the large operating slab with an unconscious super mutant strapped onto it and a clear blast shield. Piper noted the unknown runes daubed with blood onto and around the table.

 

As he walked over to hug and kiss them, Piper couldn’t hold back her annoyance. “Couldn’t you do the demonstration somewhere else?”

 

“Sorry, but it’s one of those things you need to see from start to finish.” He gestured to the super mutant and cackled softly. “The wonders of the fusion between science and magic. Get behind the shield, please.” Sev then walked up to the operating table and chanted something, causing the runes to glow and the air in the room to drop to a deathly chill.

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The girls watched as the super mutant trembled violently, and with a deafening crack, the giant exploded in an omni-directional geyser of blood and gore. When the drizzle of shredded flesh and organs stopped, the girls got from the smeared shield and walked over to a gore-drenched Sev who was cackling away like a kid watching his first fireworks.

 

“Never gets old…”

 

Curie’s disapproval was far more controlled than the unamused looks Cait and Piper shared. “And what was the purpose of this, Sev?”

 

With no surprise at all they watched the gore suddenly slide off their man, leaving him clean. Sev then summoned a Sentinel over before reaching into the blasted pile of flesh on the operating table to fish out the super mutant’s massive heart. “Purification ritual. It’s not perfected yet, hence the lethality, but it accomplishes the main objective.”

 

A Sentinel swam into the room, lugging a large antique weighing scale and a small pouch. A purity scale set, a recent development from the metaphysical department to determine how ‘good’ or ‘evil’ a person or body part was. After the scale was set down, Sev took the pouch from the robot and fished out two feathers, one white and the other black.

 

Piper was there when this new device was displayed, and remembered how annoying it was to create, particularly the feathers. It didn’t matter which birds they came from, so long as the white feather was a high degree of pristine whiteness, and the black feather was as close to jet black as possible. 

 

Sev placed the black feather on the plate of one end of the scale, and then put the heart on the other end. To the girls’ surprise, the scale was tipped slightly to the black feather’s end. 

 

Piper blinked in amazement as Sev gave a toothy grin. “Like I said, purification ritual.” He then replaced the black feather with the white, and they watched as the scale tip a little towards the heart’s end. “Expels out the metaphysical weight of evil from the heart - violently, leaving at worst a neutrally weighted heart, or at best, a ‘good’ heart that could be used for the usual rituals. Already used a few to check, and it looks like our forest reserves are going to be greener than ever.”

 

There was a pause as the girls digested the information. “Raiders and ghouls…?” Cait wondered, to which Sev shook his head. “Explodes them, but raiders still are weighted towards evil, while ghoul hearts are blown apart with the rest of their body.”

 

There was a sharp ‘tsk’ from Curie as the scientist in her got annoyed at the puzzling behavior. Still, getting pure hearts out of super mutants wasn’t too bad. There were still plenty of them in Tleilax’s cells. After giving Curie a placating look, Sev beamed another smile. “Now our occultists are working on focusing the ritual to work on other body parts, or at better yet, purifying the whole body.”

 

Piper looked at the heart in Sev’s hand, then back to him as she realized something. “So, I’m guessing we’ll be pushing towards the super mutant buildup soon?” The eyebots had noted and monitored the movement of a large conglomeration of super mutants, larger than they’ve ever faced before.

 

“Of course.”

 

Sev did his about-to-leave-but-stop-and-remember-something turn, and grinned at them. “Oh yeah, you girls wanna see a bunch of raiders turned into women with just some dried uteri and testes?”

 

The silence was heavy and highly judgemental as the girls leveled their glares at him.

 

“Incidentally, we also found out the ritual to allow for cross-species in-”

 

“Shut up Sev!” the three of them cut him off in unison.

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