[Section 31] The Trickster, Part Two
- From: Shawna Kenton <askmesomeday@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Section 31 <section31@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2006 19:25:50 -0700 (PDT)
The Trickster, Part Two
by Raven
&
Mosaic
You knew better, and you still slipped.
I have a job to do...
There was a bitter smirk, and what a fine job you're doing. You know where to
find me.
Anita had trouble breathing, her lungs began to burn and she tried to move her
arms, but to no avail. She was suddenly splashed with cold water, sending a
violent chill through her body and Anita snapped her head up.
"How many fingers?" The man waved his fingers in front of her.
"Two."
The man to be concluded as Loki nodded and moved away from her and to Mosaic
Mosaic was still unconscious, tied like a martyr to a cross to the stone wall
that reached endlessly up to a dark, ambiguous and cavernous ceiling. Their
bonds were metallic loops that grew from the wall like fronds of a malicious
metal plant, seeming with their working parts to be controlled from elsewhere
than a simple lock or something. These things weren't going to be broken from
the prisoners' position, and that was certain.
Loki was much skinnier than what was expected, and shorter. The disguise he
wore as the drunk in the bar and the streets was extensive, adding to him
height and girth as well as a careworn face and greasy hair. Underneath the
disguise, he was very clean cut and very eccentric in appearance; his shoulders
were hunched forward and his hands worked quickly. A wicked trace of a grin was
a shadow under his pointed nose.
He did the same cold-water treatment to Mosaic, whose head snapped up with an
expression more of annoyance than of shock and anger. Some of the water had
infiltrated her lips and she spat it out hatefully at Loki, who chuckled at her
notion.
"Wakey-wakey," he said in a form of joviality that was covered in wickedness
like wax over cheese.
"Sure know how to show a girl a good time here," Anita mumbled. This was not
the time to have conflicting internal opinions being spewed out, but she
couldn't help it. Like a mind trick, Loki was suddenly in front of her, his
hand held Anita's jaw tightly and forcing her to make eye contact.
"Sarcasm doesn?t become you, Raven," Loki toyed menacingly.
"Move your hand," came the strangled reply.
Loki eased his grip a little, and then Anita spoke up, "Glad to know we're not
being uncivilized about this." She jerked her restrains, "Minus these."
"You understand the precautions just as much as I. More than with certainty I
assumed you?d do the same thing in my situation. Or is our organization
recruiting natural amateurs, hoping in vain they?ll blossom into heroes like
the original crew?" He smirked, letting Anita go and walking over to Mosaic,
"Can you see and hear me?"
Mosaic looked like the angel of death staring down someone who had been
cheating the act of God for too long. She said nothing and tried to stretch her
arms out of discomfort (to no avail) in the restraints.
"I take that as an affirmative. Now then, without further delay, I want to
know exactly what Section has been planning. You know the routine, girls: we
can do this the easy way," Loki disappeared into the darkness and reappeared
with a tray, "or the hard way. Who goes first? I?m not a fan of tired threats,
so someone speak up so we can get down to business."
Anita didn't say anything, simply looking at the various pieces of equipment
on the tray neatly space two centimeters apart. Cardassian enhancer, a Romulan
mind reader, a modified Klingon painstick... what the hell is that...? She
didn't look in his direction, or her partners, or even into the dark recesses
of the room they were in. Anita simply went blank, eyes empty, face devoid of
any real emotion.
?I don?t need either one of you alive,? Loki said, swiveling head from one to
the other. ?The jab I gave you in the tavern could have been a lethal one, and
your bodies would be cadavers in the midnight experiments of the wicked.
However, I?m not letting either of you go without spilling. So someone pick
before I have to resort to torture.? He lowered his voice and said, ?And you
know as well as I the methods in the open universe and those the Section has
come up with.?
The three, the two prisoners and the torturer, let loose a pause.
"Do her," Mosaic finally said, nodding a swimming head in Raven's direction,
keeping that awful stare locked on Loki's face. "Because if you come near me
again, I will break you from the outside in. Starting with that rodent face of
yours, then from your fingertips inward radially until I'm snapping your
sternum like a wishbone."
Loki made a tsking sound at her, "Threats don't mean anything to me. Unlike
the novice you both are, I made sure you've been secured in those restraints.
Wouldn't want to underestimate what you can do with your mechanical augments,
would we?
"But," Loki made a light sigh, "You have a point. Our other one here is more
human than machine, so breaking her would be far easier."
"Is this the part where I'm supposed to bargain and plead for my sake?" Anita
replied bitterly.
Loki came up with the modified painstick and stuck the end at Anita's ribs.
The woman jerked violently against the restraints, but she bit her lower lip
from screaming.
"And that's the normal Klingon setting," Loki said. He turned to Mosaic, "It
gets much worse. Much worse. Even in their manhood trials, the sturdiest of
Klingons would not be able to withstand the extents to which this thing can go.
No smart comments, eh?"
"I have plenty to say,? Mosaic said confidently. ?But I want to whisper it in
your ear as I'm ramming that little plaything of yours into your throat."
Loki stuck the painstick to Anita again, this time longer. The blonde jerked
violently, the chains ringing loudly as it hit the wall repeatedly. "What was
that?" Loki asked.
"Oh," Mosaic said, patronizingly. "You're confused. You're thinking I'm going
to ram the painstick into your throat via your mouth, down your esophagus. No,
no, no. I'm going to jab it into your neck right at that soft spot above the
collarbone."
"Something like this?" And Loki mimicked Mosaic's description, landing the
pain stick just above Anita's collarbone. The blonde couldn't contain the pain
any longer, letting out a scream until her lungs were out of air.
"Let's try something else. How about the Cardassian enhancer? Hard to come
by as it is only manufactured by the Obsidian Order for their own special uses."
Anita knew what the enhancer would do. Or rather, she heard stories of it.
"That," Anita cleared her throat, a painful cough that left her throat raw and
scratchy, "the best you can do? Smack me around and think that would give you
everything you want?"
Loki smiled, even chuckled as he came closer to Anita and moved her head to
the right, placing the implant at her temple, "You will wish it was a little
smack and tickle after this. Let's try setting two for you."
"There's a flaw in your character, Loki," Mosaic said, in a stronger voice
than before. She could feel her body coming back to life after his poison. "You
seem to know Sec 31 better than either of us, or so you claim, because of your
length of tenure and expertise. So you know for damn certain that I don't give
a fuck about her, yet you still torture her as if you're punishing me. In all
honesty, Loki, you should have been over here lowering my heart rate the moment
I opened my mouth."
Loki made a dry chuckle, honestly amused at Mosaic?s speech. "I?m getting to
that. Pain, real pain is expectation. To be honest with you, I lied: I think
you?ll break sooner than your companion. I just want you to know exactly what
you?re in for. You see, for all my expertise in Section and my experience
interrogating people, right at this moment none of that matters. I have
nothing to lose, and you two dying without any information extracted won't set
me back. While you're at it, you can classify this as some deranged way of
getting back at Section after my years of devotion."
He rolled his eyes at Mosaic and turned to Anita, held her face gently,
"You're in for quite an experience." The enchancer began to whine softly,
beginning with alterations to Anita's perception.
She saw a woman, bound to a chair, "Mama?" She asked softly. "What is she
doing here!?" Anita suddenly demanded out loud, looking at Loki, "She has
nothing to do with this!"
"You poor, lonely man," Mosaic taunted. "Now you're a cat swatting a wingless
fly that it thinks is just a toy. Mind tricks? Mental torture? You're wasting
your time, and mine. Do you really want to know what our mission was? Because
I'll tell you for a price."
Loki tilted his head, pushing Anita's head to the right again and re-adjusted
the setting to level five. He stepped away from her and stood a few feet from
Mosaic, "Price? You want to bargain? Well, I certainly have nothing to lose,
so by all means, let's hear what you have to say."
"'Course you worthless fuck, you have nothing I want," Anita suddenly said.
Loki made a heartier laugh and looked at Mosaic with a brighter smile, "Quite
right in a sense, but go on, I'm listening."
"I will tell you what our mission is if you get me a glass of water." Faintly
Mosaic made a coughing noise and tried to clear her throat.
Loki narrowed his eyes, "Not above of being too paranoid, but..." He
disappeared into the dark.
"And just what are you gonna do about it?" Anita asked.
"Keep your shirt on, Raven," she said. "Time is all we need." As far as she
could, she leaned her head back and tried to see beyond the darkness. From the
echoes in the room and the pattern of the air, she guessed the ceiling
stretched to a hundred feet or more. There were catwalks up there, hundreds of
them intertwining forever until they reached the top, where a banister might
keep one from falling to a remote city street.
And from that thick darkness, she heard the smallest shuffle of feet. A
signal.
"That's for me to know and you to find out," Anita replied, she turned her
head to see Loki come out from the darkness. "And if it isn't our guest of
honor," the mock enthusiasm spilling out.
"Apparently she has a lot of things to work out before I can get anything out
of her," Loki moved up, glass of water in his hand, "As you requested. But
first the information."
"At the..." was all Mosaic could get out before a paroxysm of coughing
overtook her. It hurt her chest to wheeze and spasm like that, and with each
cough was an out-of-character feminine whine. Struggling each word, she said,
"Water...one...sip..."
Loki blew a breath out and walked over, using his free hand to hold her neck
and he tipped the glass to Mosaic's lips.
Fooled, she said in her mind, and in that mind she let out a laugh of victory
as she released a tiny plastic capsule from the space where her wisdom teeth
once festered, and bit down. Even in her training for such a resort, she could
never really get over the immense pain the chemical reaction with water and the
Vaian chemical mordricyx would elicit in her mouth. But it was worth it see her
venom be sprayed back into Loki's face, and to hear his muffled screams through
his palms.
Mosaic spit a couple times to get rid of the burning in her mouth, and she
laughed menacingly at him as he writhed. "You idiot. I have a metallic throat,
and you knew that. Yet you still thought I genuinely needed some water. I wish
we had cameras here. I tricked the trickster himself!"
Loki backed into the table he set his torture tools on and knocked it on its
side, sending the instruments of pain into the obscure corners of the dark
tower.
"There's no mission, Loki," she said. "All we were sent here to do was find
you and find out how you left. The whole thing could have been settled over a
meal or in a secret office somewhere, but you brought this debacle on yourself.
And now your face is all screwed up, so every time you look into one of the
nice little mirrors we have in our hidden jail cells for dirty little secrets
like you, you'll remember the time you were bested by those you called
amateurs."
Still hanging by the chains on the wall, Mosaic let out another cackle,
tilting her head back again and letting her bray echo into the top of the
tower, through the catwalks and viscous darkness.
"It's like this you see. We play truth or dare," Anita babbled on, "Truth
you'll be dead," an almost wistful tone in her voice, "Dare that I could kill
you within a few seconds. Don't you like my game?" Anita moved her head to
the other side, "Oh no no no, my dear, don't do that, you'll ruin the effect.
Did I mention I had a mission? Oh yes, yes, it seems I have to kill someone."
Anita frowned, looking at the dark room, "But, I think I already did that."
She half attempted a shrug, "Oh well, guess we'll die here. Kinda nice, very
dark, peaceful, like so many places, all the same all the same..."
Loki, hunched and incensed, finally returned Mosaic's death-gaze like she
oh-so-wanted him to do. His skin was bright red in awful, puss-laced lines
across his now disfigured visage, and it probably stung like hell to grimace
the way he was. "You dirty rotten whore," he growled. "Now it's your turn. Now
I'll slow your heart. I'll make it stop, because I won't stop! For you I'll
keep the pain going until you die from it."
The only torture device that hadn't escaped eyesight was the enhanced
painstick, with which he now led himself to Mosaic, extending his weapon like a
fencer's sword. Still Mosaic laughed, and patronized him more: "Oh you'll stop.
You'll stop before you even start."
A single, sharp phaser blast came from above and stunned Loki's arm, and
before he knew what hit him, he was hit again, this time by two hard-leather
boots on his shoulders. Someone got the jump on him, literally. Five fingers
wrapped around a lock of his hair and lifted him so he could look at Mosaic
properly, her arms spread wide like a smiling Christ.
"Good thing about these old fashioned implants is that you can hide things in
them."
The hand holding his hair then slammed his face into the cement floor so hard
that he skipped over the thudding dull pain and went right on into
unconsciousness. Their rescuer deactivated the enhancer and began to pull Raven
off the wall.
"Don't leave Mama here, not here, she needs to be buried. So many things
left unfinished. Oh look..." A soft hiss from a hypospray and Anita went
still. The implant taken off her temple and thrown. She was set in a sitting
position against the wall while he moved to free Mosaic.
"I gotta be quick, Mose, there's a place I need to be watching."
"Didn't take you too long."
"You're welcome, Mose."
Mosaic's feet hit the ground and Lacuna handed her two old-fashioned magnums,
which went right to their holsters. She looked up at him after fastening her
weapons to her body and he looked like he was expecting something, not moving
from his current position. "Fine. Thank you. I told you it doesn't sound
natural when I say it."
Lacuna turned away from her, half-rolling his eyes. He knelt before Raven and
said, "Will you be all right?"
She was in trouble, she knew it but nodded anyway, "Get me up," Anita said
weakly and when she was on her feet, her vision spun forcing her to lean
against the wall.
The knives gleamed like twin shining stars and Anita's focus was locked upon
those knives that held as much history as Anita's life. She reached for them,
feeling the cool edge and quickly buried them in her wrist sheaths. She didn't
feel like herself, but some part of her knew she was Raven again, it was a
question of how much was left.
"Let's go," Raven said quietly, stumbling for a second before regaining her
balance and stalked out of the room.
---------------------------------
How low will we go? Check out Yahoo! Messenger?s low PC-to-Phone call rates.
Other related posts:
- » [Section 31] The Trickster, Part Two
