Mutant 74

| Earth |

There stood a girl.

She was freed of her icy tomb, but its memory still clung to her tinted skin in the form of shards and frost. Her purple lips trembled as her teeth chattered, dark hair matted against her neck and shoulders. Free, but still frozen. Still dreadfully cold.

She stood in a puddle at the edge of the dark platform. She stood like this for hours. Were anyone around to see her, they could mistake her for a statue. Staring ahead, she waited for something there to answer her unspoken questions. Sometimes her lips parted, as if to ask them, but she never spoke. Her cries of pain were long gone. It wasn't possible for her to call out even if she'd wanted to... she was certain she'd lost her voice.

She couldn't figure out where she was. She didn't really know who she was. This made the girl scared. Her left arm was stretched out in front of her as if she was reaching for something. Something.

There was nothing there, just the air that hung heavy with a gray smog. She breathed in, expecting the scent of something putrid, but received little to go off of. She was numb in so many senses, but she could see. And so, she saw.

She looked at her left forearm, trying to decipher what was scrawled against her skin in black ink. The longer she stared, the more the strange lines began to make sense.

MUTANT 74

What's that supposed to mean? The word nor the number meant anything to her. For her, it was just letters imprinted on her wrist. For her, they could be seen as nothing more than a form of... well, nothing.

She turned her head. With that small movement the sound of crackling ice filled the small, dark room. There were four walls, a platform in the very back of the room that was still covered in ice. The black floor held a sheen from the pools of water that gathered. It was torturous to stand within them, but she didn't have the will to move... yet. The fight to escape the ice had taken too much of her.

The only visible form of exit or entrance was a lone window that sat straight across from the platform on the opposite end of the room. The girl was facing that window, but watching her forearm. Something about the branding was so peculiar that she couldn't look away, not yet. She had to know. She had to have some sort of explanation for what the thing meant. She looked over it again and again; nothing changed.

MUTANT 74

She came to a silent conclusion. This is me, she thought. I am Seventy-Four. Whoever or whatever put me here knew I would forget. That, however, was just her reasoning, something to make her feel less paranoid. Still, it didn't do a very good job at that, but there were other matters to resolve.

She had to figure out why a room with no doors was where she woke. More importantly, why she woke surrounded in ice.

When her gaze finally moved on to the window, it narrowed as she determined her next move. She was going to leave. This room was not seen as a place that would protect her. She loathed it, all because of the ice she had been frozen in.

Seventy-Four walked forward. Her legs were stiff, but they functioned with only a slight delay. As she neared the window she drew her right hand back and thrust it forward into the hazy glass.

Cr—Cr—Crack!

The shattering glass reminded her of the ice breaking. Freeing. A smile came to her lips. She didn't even notice the small shards stuck her hand, the slivers of scarlet leaking down her wrist. Those small slits of pain were inconsequential next to what she had already endured.

She looked out the window, sticking her head all the way over the sill only to immediately pull back, catching her shocked breaths. There was a drop that went down, down, down into a nebulous fog. The air was cold, but warmer than the ice. She stared at the world ahead, not below.