A Second Chance

Chapter 1 - Lost and Found

AUTHOR'S NOTES: Full lines of dialogue written in cursive indicate that the character is speaking in Spanish. Think of the cursive as subtitles.

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August 24th, 2003

Alarms blared at an Oscorp laboratory facility in New York City. A severe-looking woman in a suit marched through its sterile hallways towards the security room while armed guards rushed towards the source of the commotion.

"What happened?" she demanded, her heavy Hispanic accent accentuating the fearsome sharpness of her voice.

"It's Arachne, Madame Franco. She's escaped from her container," one of the personnel replied. Madam Franco's eyes widened as she stormed out of the room.

The hallways echoed with the sound of Madame Franco's heels clacking against the tile as she stomped towards the laboratories, passing downed soldiers as she neared her destination. She stopped at one of the corridors and saw an empty, bullet-ridden hallway on her right and a swinging door on her left. Madame Franco turned left and flung the door open even wider as she burst into the room.

Inside she found overturned tables, broken lab equipment, and white-coated scientists in varying degrees of injury and confusion. At the center of all the chaos stood a shattered cylindrical, glass container surrounded by shards of broken glass.

She marched over to one of the scientists and demanded in Spanish, "Hermano! What happened here?"

"Arachne woke up and broke out of the container," the scientist, her brother, replied as he pulled himself up from the floor.

"How?"

Dr. Franco limped over to a computer and began typing as his eyes skimmed through the information on the screen.

"$#!+!" he cursed.

"What?" Madame Franco replied.

"There was a glitch in the splicing process, and her metabolism was altered. The sedative we gave her should have kept her asleep for hours, but her metabolism broke it down within minutes," Dr. Franco explained.

"She was an incredibly expensive investment, Guillermo. High command will be disappointed to find out that we lost her because of a glitch."

"We'll worry about high command and recovering Arachne later. Right now, we need to focus on covering our tracks before Oscorp gets suspicious."

With that, Dr. Franco leaned close to his sister and whispered, "Hail HYDRA."

"Hail HYDRA," Madame Franco responded, also whispering.

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Meanwhile, in an alley roughly two blocks from the facility, a thin, pale 13-year-old girl shivered as huddled behind a dumpster. Her green eyes darted all over her surroundings for any sign of the armed men who had been chasing her. Her hands and the soles of her feet were bloodied and bruised from all the glass that she had just punched through and accidentally stepped on, having gone unnoticed thanks to the rush of adrenaline that urged her to escape as fast as she could. She didn't know how long she had been sitting there, just panting and praying that those people didn't find her, but after a while, she finally calmed down enough to remember what had happened before she woke up in that strange place trapped behind glass.