[SFW VERSION]
🌹 There's something wonderful in those who stare death in the face. Even in a world wracked by relentless calamity, flowers blossom between a sea of corpses, the shapeless crimson rivers marched over by mechanical instruments of mass...
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. . .
The comms have died. The blinking lights at the head of the device fade into an absence that echoes both obscurity and the silence that followed every gunshot we heard before the communications ceased to exist.
I have no thoughts. No good thoughts. I want to believe this is all a prank, a big joke someone's playing on us, on the Ark, but deep down I know it's real. I feel it's something straight out of a horror film, from the way Shifty's voice quivered and trembled, an unbridled fear clutching to her last words, and the voice that followed her premature death. It sounded familiar to me. A feminine, recycled voice only the mass-produced Nikkes can call their own.
"We have to hurry, Commander." Rapi's sudden alertness breaks me out of my train of thought. I look up from the blank comms device and find her eyes boring through mine, a desperation in them that may as well match mine.
"Yeah," I stutter. "Right."
"Should I accompany you, then?" Rapi and I turn to Snow White who is actively fishing through her pockets for the Rapture chunks she recently gathered up. Although she seems quite aloof and unbothered by the situation at hand, I know it's only because that's who she is. Her attitude will change up the moment any stroke of danger physically shows itself to us.
"No, it might be dangerous," I tell her without considering my words. I'm just too shook to form plausible thoughts.
Rapi squeezes my sleeve. "Commander, that's the very reason we should consider sticking together. If there does happen to be some kind of terrorist attack taking place in the Ark, we may need immediate assistance."
"I'll come with either way," Snow says, walking forward into the elevator.
I decide against arguing. Besides, the coherent side of me, which is struggling to stay intact, knows well the dangers we might face. Before Shifty was attacked, she mentioned something about guns and Nikkes. My only guess is that it really is a terrorist attack, and that the very first targets were made to be any mainline operations within the Ark. Communications, government officials, any functional base of operations, perhaps even the manufacturers sitting at the top. Suddenly I'm stuck wondering who all has just fallen victim to this attack. If we're going to be too late to stop it.
I follow Snow and Rapi into the elevator and it begins to descend into what I can only assume to be impending doom.
* * *
The two Nikkes are lounging in the Commander's Room. One sips at a can of soda, half empty. The other twirls a single golden bullet between her pinched fingers.
"You think Master and Rapi are gonna be okay?" Neon asks. She kicks her feet up on the couch, staring over at Anis who seems to be absorbed into the television rather than her questions.
"Eh," Anis mumbles. "Yeah, I guess. They only went on an itty-bitty retrieval job. They'll be back in no time." Anis doesn't look Neon's way. For once in her life, she's invested in televised news. She can't remember the last time she actually watched the news for longer than a minute. She wants to use the excuse of being dispatched for those redundant tasks down at the Outpost or for missions up on the Surface. In reality she's just not the news type. Today is the first day she has little to nothing to do, so she spends it actually paying attention to the latest news.
