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Best of Intentions: My Way (ch. 12)
🕑 Added 2024-09-30 15:01:28 +0000 UTC“It's like these people have never even heard of safety measures. How exactly do you have an outbreak in the facility that's specifically dedicated to developing antivirals and countermeasures to the crap the other Hive is cooking up? I swear, I feel like I'm losing my mind here.” I groused under my breath, thoroughly unimpressed with the state of the other Hive. “The bar is so low it's in hell, and these people are still managing to trip over it.”
Hive II had fallen. I'm not exactly sure what happened there -- it wasn't covered in the game, as far as I was aware or, if it was, then I missed it. The end result was that when we made our way up into the Hive from the emergency elevator, we were greeted by what was rapidly becoming a familiar sight. Dark halls, gore, and undead.
But, thankfully, there were no massive monsters hunting us down so, in that regard, things were looking up.
“Odds are it got overrun because this is the place that has the answer to the virus. Umbrella employees probably rushed here when they got infected, hoping for a cure. Instead, they got trapped down here and turned,” Jill replied, taking point and checking corners as we explored Hive 2. So far, it was going pretty smoothly.
The layout was pretty different from the other Hive. This Hive seemed to be more inline with the movie, which was a little weird considering the ringed base had been under that mansion outside the city. But, I was just going to chalk that up to creative licensing from the director. And given that the movie showed the apocalypse happening when they opened the Hive inside city limits, I'm pretty sure they connected somewhere.
In Hive 1, space had been far more strict. The labs were smaller and more numerous. In Hive 2, the rooms were more open -- testing areas, labs, shooting ranges, and storage. I didn't get to see that much of the Hive during the game, so we were making our way through unfamiliar territory.
“Hm. Maybe. But, given that they turned…” I trailed off, and Jill understood what I was hinting at.
“Either they ran out of the vaccine, they couldn't produce it fast enough… or it was deliberately withheld,” Jill agreed. The latter sounded about right for Umbrella. They were absolutely one of those comically evil companies that killed their own employees for the sake of convenience. Honestly, I hoped the people running the company were genuine sociopaths because if they weren't, then they were just… that dumb. Though, maybe not paying out severance cheques was the reason they had such ludicrous amounts of money?
“Suppose we'll find out soon enough,” I reasoned with a small sigh. There was a knot of tension between my shoulder blades -- this should be where Alice was. With my bag of tricks empty, having a full blown psionic on our side sounded absolutely lovely. I could get my hands on the rail gun designs too, which would majorly up my firepower. Not to mention, this could be where we start pumping out industrial quantities of the vaccine.
This Hive was exactly where we needed to be. Honestly, we should have come here first. Before the outbreak even, seeing as these people had been dead for days by the time of our arrival. The good news was that since we came from the bottom up, we didn't have to go far to reach the server room.
Opening the door with an access token that we picked up along the way, I saw that the layout was generally the same as the last server room, minus the guy that committed suicide. Which, as morbid as it seemed, was a bit of an issue because it meant we didn't have easy admin access to the servers. Hardly the end of the world as the access token gave us, well, access to the information on them, but there wouldn't be any compiling of that information.
“First things first -- a map of the Hive,” I said, pulling it up and as soon as it appeared on the terminal, my eyes narrowed. There was no connection to the mansion. My lips pursed, mulling over that discrepancy for a moment before giving a small mental shrug. That didn't really mean anything. The mansion was its own secret facility, so it was probably a case of compartmentalization.
What I did see was the area that Jill had visited in the game. If I had a tail, it'd be wagging when I saw the room for the railgun.
“They were working on a lot down here,” Jill observed over my shoulder. Reaching over, she tapped one of the laboratories. “That's where we'll find the vaccine.” It was almost dead center in the Hive and from the info on the screen, that's where they created countermeasures to all of their bio weapons.
“Hopefully,” I agreed, my gaze bouncing around for what would fit the bill for Alice. She woke up in an observation room, hooked up to some monitoring equipment. There were a lot of little spaces that could fit, so I was drawing up a short list.
Jill noticed that I was distracted, “Looking for something in particular?” She asked, cocking an eyebrow and I fought off a frown.
“Honestly, I'm looking for a silver bullet that'll just kill the whole company,” I admitted. Wasn't like I could specify I was looking for Alice, and she was exactly that. I'd probably have to talk her into killing a couple dozen people with her mind, but even if I didn't, without Alice Umbrella's whole superhuman plot fizzled out.
“We aren't that lucky,” Jill said, placing a hand on my shoulder. I kinda hated that she was right about that. “We should split up -- we need to gain access to the security systems so we can start mobilizing what's in this place. That lift is going to be important,” she added, pointing to the lift that connected to the hospital.
“Split up? You've seriously never seen a single episode of Scooby Doo, have you? That's a terrible idea,” I said, glancing up at Jill with an expression of pity. I could only imagine how dreadful her childhood must have been. I learned a lot from Scooby Doo and the greatest lesson it had to impart was ‘Don't split up when there are monsters running around in an unknown, possibly haunted, location.’ It wasn't a lesson that I ever thought I'd actually put into practice, but I also never thought I'd get isekai’d either.
“We don't have time to waste, Rude,” Jill frowned, her lips thinning. “Things are still going to hell in the city, and the longer we wait here, the bigger the chance that those things back in the other Hive escape. Maybe they'll kill one another, but, like I said -- we aren't that lucky.” That was… an argument I was having difficulty refuting. It must have shown on my face too, because Jill tapped me on the shoulder with a fist.
“Fine. You're right. It'd help if we could find the IT guy -- alive and well would be nice, but getting everything on the servers will be a lot easier with admin access.” I sighed, looking at the map with resignation. I really didn't like it, but Jill was right. Time was of the essence and we really didn't have any to waste. “I'll hit the security office first.”
I should be able to check the security feeds there, and that would help me find Alice.
“Radio is on. If you find yourself in over your head, then give me a shout. You better not die just because I took my eyes off of you,” Jill said as we both approached the door.
“Right back at you,” I shot back, giving her a small nod. She returned it before turning down the opposite hall that I would be walking. I watched her go for a moment, feeling uneasy but I couldn't tell if I was worried for her or for myself. At the end of the day, Jill was a trained specialist super cop.
I was literally some guy that got superpowers handed to him just in time to be tossed in the deep end.
“Least I still have you, buddy,” I told Dakka, patting her chassis before walking down the dark halls. It was a little shameful to admit, but I felt safer with others around. People who I knew would survive the apocalypse. Not so much because I felt like they had some kind of plot armor but more because they were highly trained badasses that knew what they were doing, instead of faking it until they made it like me.
All the same, things were pretty different from what they were. Before, the thought of being in dark halls filled with undead scared me enough that I put it off until the very last second. Now I stalked through the halls, killing undead like it was nothing. The fear was still there. It just wasn't enough to stop me anymore.
Which is why I found my way to the security office without much issue. I already had the map memorized just by seeing it once, with the only issue being I had to find the corpse of a security guard to snag their access token. Inside of the office was a pretty sweet set up -- one wall was covered in various monitors that swapped every few seconds. There was a locker room and weapons locker, but all the contents were currently missing.
None of that really mattered at the moment. “Alice… now, where are you?” I muttered, looking at the screens. There were a lot of troubling things to see -- hallways filled with undead, labs that had been purged… and Jill, who was making her way towards the lab. Everything at her destination seemed to be stable.
Even if the test tubes filled with genetic monstrosities were a little alarming, they seemed to be in suspended animation.
I had eyes on pretty much everything within the Hive. As well as the entrances or exits.
Which is why I was starting to sweat a little as I rapidly scrolled through the camera feeds. “Alice. Where are you?” I repeated myself, a growing sense of urgency in my voice. Camera feeds flickered by, showing testing labs and whatever, just not the one that I wanted to see. “You should be here. I literally have no fucking clue where else you could be if you aren't here…”
There was a knot of tension forming between my shoulder blades, coming with that dawning sense of horror that something really bad just happened, was going to happen, or was currently happening.
I went through the security feeds once. Twice. Then a third time just to be sure, but the results didn't change.
Alice was nowhere to be found.
“Okay… did… hold up,” I muttered to myself, pinching my chin as I forced myself to think. I had already thrown canon off course -- Jill had found me instead of getting jumped by Nemesis. Jill then called Chris to bring him over. That was something I could track through cause and effect.
Alice not being here just straight up didn't make sense. My knee-jerk reaction was to say it was because of me -- I had gone around screaming about the T-Virus until I was blue in the face. So, maybe they moved her because of that for some reason. But… that didn't make sense. Why move Alice when you could just send a black ops team to black bag me in the middle of the night? Not only was it smarter -- and I would never be caught accusing Umbrella of doing the smart thing -- but it was easier.
“Did the movie get creative there too?” I muttered, the tension growing worse as another possibility started to whisper in the back of my mind. A possibility that I never seriously considered but one I couldn't so easily dismiss. It was entirely possible that Umbrella was keeping Alice somewhere else in Raccoon City, but that felt like a long shot considering that they already had two massive underground bases for the sole purpose of experimentation. They might have had a third, but… I doubted it. The last possibility was…
“But that's crazy,” I blurted to myself, finding that I was pacing the length of the room. “There's no way. The entire franchise was about Alice. She was the main character.” The Resident Evil movies followed Alice and her journey. First in the mansion. Then in Racoon City. Then in the rest of the post-apocalyptic hellhole of a world. I… how would…
Slowly, my hand went down to my waist to pull up the radio. Looking at the screen, I found Jill making her way through a hallway. Swallowing a lump in my throat, I pressed the button. “Jill. Does the name Alice Abernathy mean anything to you?”
I watched as Jill glanced down at her radio, frowning for a moment, before answering. “No. Why?”
It felt like the rug had just been pulled out from underneath me while I got sucker punched. The breath that I had been holding was forced from my lungs as every thought came to a screeching halt.
Those fuckers. How the fuck are you going to put an OC at the helm of an already established franchise? Was this the reason why the Resident Evil movies weren't considered to be part of the ‘not bad’ video game adaptations? Holy shit. Holy fucking shit.
“Rude?” Jill prompted and I realized I had been stun locked from the revelation.
“It's not important,” I replied, my tone stiff. I didn't even know what to say. This was insane. I felt like I was going crazy or something.
I always thought it was a little weird that Alice never came up in the third game, but the game felt like it was Jill's story, so it didn't feel that weird. And the movies… I knew Leon Kennedy was a major character in the franchise, but he never showed up in the movies. Some part of me wanted to cling to the idea that Alice was real and I was getting something twisted or was missing context but…
I just couldn't buy that, because Jill didn't know Alice. Jill, who was at the mansion where all of this mess kicked off. And given that I could confirm that Jill was real, her credibility was infinitely higher than Alice’s. Which made me swallow down a very bitter truth.
I couldn't trust my metaknowledge at all. If the movies straight up made up their own main character, then I couldn't trust anything that came from the movies. Full stop. The only thing I could trust, so far, was my knowledge of the third game and the wiki crawls I did when something confused me. And even that was a hard maybe because I had already missed that there were two fuck off massive secret bases in this city.
Which left me with… what, exactly?
I crouched down, feeling sick to my stomach. “Is the world actually even going to end?” I muttered, taking off my glasses so I could drag a hand down my face. I didn't know. I figured the movies would at least loosely follow the plot of the games, but if they were homebrewing their own cast… shit. It wouldn't be the first time they took the name of a series to act as window dressing to tap into a fan base. Hollywood did the same thing with World War Z. “Hollywood, do you really have to suck this much?”
If I had known, then… I would have done so many things differently…
“Rude? What's going on?” Jill questioned and I stole a glance at the video screen to find her standing on a hallway, her expression concerned.
I closed my eyes for a second, taking a breath, and finding my center. Now wasn't the time to break down. Even if I was wrong about everything, it didn't change anything. I always had to assume the worst case scenario. So, I forced myself to calm down and stand up, “I'm at the security office,” I said, throwing away any plan that had involved Alice. “I'm printing out an access token now. Couldn't find an IT guy, though.”
Jill glanced up at a security camera, and I saw the concern linger for a moment before she wiped it away. “I haven't found one either,” she replied, speaking into the radio.
As I spoke, I went about creating the access token. I was sidestepping the process a bit, but with the token, anyone could operate the lift. It also meant that we needed to secure the hospital to fully make use of it, but that was doable. We had the forces for it back at our main base. The entire thing was quick to print off, and with my already existing access token, I approved the process.
“I'm heading down to you,” I told Jill, my gaze flickering to the feed of the room that she was heading to. A lot of my plans had involved Alice. More than I cared for, in hindsight. I should have been better prepared for her not being here, even if I hadn't known she was basically just an… OC of some Hollywood jackass. So I was left scrambling, but if I could do anything it was think on my feet. And there was still an opportunity here. “Just don't touch anything if you get there before me. That lab is going to have countermeasures out the wazoo.”
Jill pointedly rolled her eyes at the camera before saying, “Understood. I'll resist the temptation.”
That got a weak chuckle out of me before I snagged the freshly printed off token. With my head back in the game, I left the security office and headed down to the lab. My mind mulling over the new circumstances every step of the way. With Alice being a non factor, other characters became uncertain.
The most important of them all being Albert Wesker. I would need to confirm his existence too since his whole deal was pretty heavily tied up with Alice. I made a note to do exactly that when I returned to the server room.
Thanks to the cameras, I knew exactly which hallways to travel down -- the ones that were filled with the undead. My shotgun bucked against my shoulder as I made my way down, putting the shambling corpses down as I went. The more work I did now, the less I would have to do later.
“The plan just changed a bit, is all,” I told myself, making another shot and reducing a corpse's head to bone shards and red mist. I had hoped that I could just point Alice in the direction of the bad guys so she could do her thing. But since she wasn't real -- and goddamn if I wasn't stuck on that -- then someone else had to fill that same role. I wanted it to be Chris on account of the boulder punching, but realistically, there was only one person who had the same qualifications as Alice.
Me.
The last of the undead was finally cleared out and I stepped over their corpses before the sliding doors parted for me, allowing me inside the lab. It was bigger than it seemed on camera. A sterile room with the walls lined with test tubes -- six on each side with each tube being around ten feet tall. The bluish fluid inside was opaque, but not enough to obscure what was inside of them.
On the right were some familiar faces. Mr. X. They were lacking the iconic trench coat and fedora, but there was no mistaking what they were. Massive, built like a brick wall, but currently asleep in goop.
On the left were things that I recognized but hadn't seen in person yet. They were shaped like bipedal lizards -- six feet tall or so, covered in scales with almost chitinous armored plates that covered their vitals. Their hands were massive claws and their feet had talon-like hooks. I really didn't fancy a tangle with either monster and I was rather glad to see that they were dead asleep.
Looking up, I saw Jill, “Heard you coming. Any luck with IT?”
“Nope,” I answered with a sigh, walking forward across the lab to the elevator that would take me above the base lab. “My bet is he called out sick or something.”
“Where does that leave us?” Jill questioned as I headed up, watching me carefully. I was trying to act normally, but she must have sensed something was off. I was really hoping that blind trust stopped her from asking any questions because I wasn't sure if I had any answers.
I just couldn't get over it. The star of Resident Evil, something like ten movies over the course of twenty years, was an OC. That was wild. What had the director been thinking? From what I've seen of Jill so far, it was like he made an OC of Jill that he gave her best moments to, then included Jill herself to make her look bad. It stood out to me before, but more so now, but the director did some full on character assassination for what seemed to be no reason. The second movie was particularly bad when it came to shining a spotlight on-
… wait.
Weren't the director and the actress for Alice married?
Did that asshole mislead me, inadvertently making me risk the goddamn planet, just because he wanted to show off his hot wife!?
“You okay? You seemed pissed about something,” Jill observed as I approached the terminal that monitored the test tubes. Sliding the access token across the reader, I was greeted with an interface.
“If I killed someone, would you arrest me?” I asked her, still silently fuming as I navigated the screens.
“When you say it like that, it sounds like premeditated murder,” Jill noted. “Do they have it coming?”
“Oh, absolutely,” I muttered darkly under my breath as I pulled up the screen that I wanted to see. A little window box that had two choices.
[Emergency Experiment Termination]
[Confirm] [Cancel]
Before Jill could answer, I pressed confirm. Instantly, the lab became filled with a humming sound, the purge initiated as-
[You have leveled up!]
[You have leveled up!]
[You have leveled up!]
From level 6 level 9 and a half. I had those Mr. X copies to thank for that. If I wasn't still pissed, I’d be smiling right now because any DM would be crying tears of blood at this little bit of metagaming. XP based leveling had its weaknesses -- such as a major boss not giving enough XP to level up so you have to kill like three goblins on the way out of whatever cave or dungeon to actually hit level whatever. But it also had its strengths, such as killing incapacitated enemies delivering the same amount of XP as if I had actually fought them.
Level 7 was interesting. Flash of Genius enabled me to aid my allies -- whenever they were in a pinch, I could come up with a plan. Gameplay wise, it was me adding my intelligence modifier to their roll. Not sure how that would work in practice, but it was nice to have.
Level 8 was more important as it allowed me to take my second feat. Originally, the plan had been Metamagic. Taking Twinned and Subtle Spell would be massively useful, even if they were essentially one use per day. Whenever I needed to cast stealthily or hit two targets at once? Even if it was only once, it would be useful.
But, the plan had changed. I couldn’t just throw Alice at Umbrella and let her kill it like she did in the movies. I had taken some steps to help her out, but in the end, I would have to fill her shoes instead.
So, what I chose was Prodigy. It granted me expertise in one of the skills I was proficient in, a new language, and proficiency in a tool. The skill I took expertise in was Arcane, further granting me mastery over magic, which would then help me create magic items. Since I already had Spanish and French as known languages, I settled on German as the next language to learn. As for the tool I gained proficiency with, that went to Jewelry Tools as it was going to come in handy in the future.
Level 9 upped my damage for Dakka, granting me another 1d8 to the damage to her cannon, bringing it up to 3d8. And the option to blow her up if the situation ever arose, but I don’t think I would have it in me to do that. Especially not after implementing the upgrades I was planning for her.
Lastly, I gained a single new spell slot. A little disappointing there but it was an important spell slot -- my first level 3 spell slot, and I picked Revivify. Which allowed me to revive someone who had died within a minute of their deaths.
My selection made, time resumed once more and I felt… Stronger. I didn’t notice it overly much level to level, but getting three at the same time made it very apparent. Turning around, I saw Jill giving me a dull look, her lips thinning before relaxing ever so slightly when I offered a more confident grin.
“Can’t say I won’t arrest you, but I probably won’t testify against you in court,” Jill replied with a small shake of her head. “Do I even want to know what this Alice woman did?”
“No. No, you really don’t,” I said before walking by her, thumping her on the shoulder as she passed. “Now, let’s go build a railgun so we can kill those things in the other Hive.” Might even be enough to push me up to level 10 between the two of them.
Jill simply chuckled as she followed me, “Sounds like a plan to me.”
