The V.I.C.I. Diaries: Valley of the Damned (Part 3)

[DukeNukem 2417]

A quiet humming noise filled the room as Vicki lifted the “hood” of the ALPA's SAN-check scanner up and away from her face. The experience had been...interesting, to use a word that wouldn't provoke screaming fits or the desire to jump into a canal at the next available opportunity; her entire existence, starting with the Big Upgrade and ending with her emotional collapse in the hallway a few minutes earlier, had been replayed within the span of twenty-one minutes---a sensory overload the likes of which Hollywood couldn't (and hopefully wouldn't) hope to match in decades.

Of course, there was also the small matter of one of the “aftereffects” Oberon had mentioned...

...specifically, the sight of an all-too familiar black-clad, white-masked figure standing in the far corner of the room.

“Oberon,” the brunette gynoid called out, “the SAN-checker is done---you can let me out now.”

Silence.

Vicki frowned; either something else came up, she mused, or this is a test of some kind... “Oberon---”

“He can't here you.....but I can.”

Faceless' voice nearly drew a scream from Vicki, until she remembered Oberon's mention of “lingering after-images and auditory stimulii”. “I'll admit that I'm seeing stuff that's not here,” she called out, “but just give me a few minutes and---”

“Who says I'm not really here...Vicki?” The last word came as a hiss, right into her ear.

Despite the fact that an apparent apparition of her most hated enemy was standing near her, Vicki managed a smirk. “You're a memory,” she replied quietly. “A fragment of ocular and auditory data manifesting as a projection in my sensors, that only I can see or here. Nothing more---”

“Projections,” the not-there Faceless hissed, “can be as real as anything....” He chuckled quietly. “Those blades I used, back in July...you haven't forgotten their...somewhat unique attributes?” The apparition stepped back, circling the gynoid. “You did get one fact right, earlier---I'm not here, in a physical sense. You saw to that yourself, in July....stabbed me with my own two wristblades...” Another quiet chuckle permeated the air. “I have to commend you for that...on second thought, actually---no I don't.”

“So you left a little something in my memory when you stabbed me,” Vicki drawled. “That doesn't---”

“Explain how it's in your new processors?” Faceless finished. “I could tell you...but I won't.”

Vicki shook her head and turned for the door. “I don't have to put up with this---”

“Oh, but you do,” Faceless insisted, reappearing in front of her. “You're not leaving---”

“Who's going to stop me–-” Vicki took a step forward, only to find that she was standing on the far end of the room, closer to the SAN-check machine than she'd been a second ago. “You're...screwing with my perception of the room around me,” she muttered. “One last little trick from beyond the---”

“Grave?” Faceless finished. “You haven't killed me yet, Vicki...you only wounded me, back in July...”

“So it's your last trick from beyond the emergency room, then,” Vicki hissed. “A virus of some kind–-”

“Not...officially. It's more like...a nightmare. Except you don't have to be asleep.”

The statement brought another smirk to the gynoid's face. “So this is just a nightmare, right?”

“One that you won't wake up from,” Faceless intoned. “In a few minutes, you're going to----” A shudder ran through his body, followed soon after by a subtle fade. “What...NO---I'm...not DONE WITH YOU...”

Vicki blinked, and found herself as close to the door as she'd bene a second ago. “Looks like your trick is falling apart on you,” she began with a grin. “I'll just---”

Her ocular sensors were overcome with a sudden, impossibly bright light.

“The...scanner...verwrote parts---code,” the ersatz Faceless growled, his voice turning staticky with each fade-out. “You...aven't wo....is time, Vi....you've onl----layed the ine----WILL be back, in the flesh, to fini----hat I star---” The figure of Faceless gripped his arm, as if he could force it to stay solid. “I will---troy you, Vi---nn-Smith Lawson, if it's---NO! YOU CAN'T---”

Another flash---this one a bit slower, possibly even calming---filled Vicki's field of view; within seconds, she was being helped to her feet. “The scanner sent off an alarm as soon as you lifted the hood,” Ashley Tobias Wakeman explained. “I'd have been here sooner, but the elevator was full, and I almost dropped my keycard at the stairs---”

“I get it,” Vicki laughed, dusting herself off as she glanced around the room. “Ah, what exactly happened to me after I finished the scan?”

Ash glanced back at the SAN-checker. “From what I could see, you were hallucinating that Faceless was---”

“Wait, what do you mean 'what you could see'?!”

“I got here right before you fell over---and I would've been in here a second sooner if I hadn't tried to use my keycard for the stairwells to open the door. As for how I knew you thought you were seeing Faceless...” He held up a USB thumb drive. “The SAN-checker sent the alert to my laptop, and I saved it to this before I came up here,” he explained. “The blades Faceless stabbed you with must've left a passive program in your system that didn't trigger after your upgrade.”

“Figured that. So...any chance it's out of my system?”

“I could run a check,” Ash began, “and---” His words were cut off by a black-gloved hand clamping over his mouth, and an all-too familiar blade shooting forth from his chest, right where his heart would be. Vicki nearly fell over as she backpedaled to get away from the horrifying sight---

---except for some reason, Ash was still talking to her. “Whatever you're seeing now, it isn't real!” he assured her. “Vicki, you have to trust me---I'm okay. I'm still here, I'm not dying or on fire or anything...just tell me what you see right now.”

“I...I see Faceless,” the brunette gynoid stammered, “and he's...he's stabbing you through the heart!”

“Okay, I want you to trust me on this: reach out and grab my arm.”

“But....I---”

“Vicki, just trust me, okay? Take a step forward if you need to, and grab my arm.”

Hesitantly, Vicki approached the apparently-dying figure of Ash, reached out to grab his arm---and felt her hand close on empty air. “I...I can't grab it,” she gasped. “There's...nothing there...” She grabbed again, feeling nothing. “There's nothing there!” she echoed, fighting the urge to laugh. “You're not being stabbed, Faceless isn't here---”

A hand on her shoulder spun her around, putting her face to face with the Butcher of Lake Gilmour.

“Vicki,” Faceless intoned (in Ash's voice), “tell me what you see right now.”

“I....I see....Faceless...standing right in front of me, with his hand on my shoulder....”

“As weird as this may sound, that's a sign that you're almost done with this. Now, what I'm about to ask you to do may be a bit...weird....but you have to trust me, okay?” He paused; “You do trust me, right?” he asked.

“I....I trust you.”

“Good. Now, then....reach up, and try to grab Faceless' mask.”

Slowly, as if she were in a dream, Vicki reached up towards the bone-white mask that hid Faceless' scarred visage---and felt it.. At least, she felt the edge of the thing.

“Can you feel the mask in your hand?” Faceless/Ash inquired.

“I....I can.”

“That's a very good sign, actually. What I want you to do now is to pull the mask off–-”

From behind Vicki, the Ash with a knife through his heart yelled something. “I...I don't---”

The hands on her shoulders tightened their grip. “Trust me, Vicki....pull the mask off.”

Even though she hated the thought of possibly staring at the disfigured face of her hated foe, Vicki gingerly pulled the mask away, her eyes squeezed shut all the while. “Is it off?”

“It's off---and you can open your eyes now, Vicki.”

Here goes nothing.....

Vicki opened her eyes...and stared at the smiling face of Ash Wakefield. “Well, you're officially cured of that stupid program Faceless left in you,” he beamed. “Isn't that right, Tell?”

Over her shoulder, Vicki heard the voice of her preferred Field Mechanic: “Damn straight, Ash. The last bits of it got washed out by the code purge I just ran---oh, and you might want to close your back panel, V. Had to access your hard drives and stuff...I didn't do anything too major, just ran the ALPA version of ComboFix to clear out the code crud left over by old Psycho McCrazyMask.”

“So....Faceless was never really here?”

“Not physically,” Ash replied, as Vicki's back panel whirred shut. “To paraphrase a movie I watched way too many times when it first came out, your mind made him real....and I'd like my glasses back now.” He motioned for Vicki to hand over the “mask” she'd pulled off of him---which, as it turned out, was a pair of glasses. “Oh, right...sorry about that. So...how did he---I mean, the program---know that the real Faceless was---”

“The surgeons at the medical facility where Faceless is being kept had to perform an operation last night to remove something from the base of his spine,” Tell cut in. “They found some weird little gew-gaw hooked up right underneath the vertebrae; as far as they can tell, it was meant to let him control some kind of computer program by sheer power of thought---with a bit of help from the WiFi modem they dug out from his shoulder blades. Seems the Maestro tried to kit him out to be a human super-router of some kind...and yes, he is, in fact, still alive, though he'll be spending a lot of time sleeping in the forseeable future. Seriously, trying to hook WiFi routers up to his brain....and I thought he was just a garden-variety psycho!”

“As much as I'd like to hear the details,” Vicki admitted, “I need to tend to some other stuff first....”
------------------------------
For some reason, the fact that Oberon was in a meditative position while being suspended from a pair of pull-up rings linked to chains on a series of pulleys connected to the ceiling didn't strike Vicki as all that odd.

Seeing him suspended upside-down in said meditative position, though....

“Ah, sir? I just wanted to...um, talk about....the whole Hannsen thing.....” She couldn't bring herself to finish the sentence; there was just something phenomenally wrong with the sight of the ALPA Chairman hanging upside-down by his ankles from a pair of rings. “Oberon? Are you....can you hear me?” She stepped into the room, noticing (for the first time) what appeared to be a white bar of some kind beneath the shirtless figure of the Chairman---

---and in that instant, she nearly turned on her heel and fled.

Vicki had heard the phrase “poetry in motion” thrown around a lot in reference to sports, performing arts and other such things, but she always viewed it as a cliché that served to hide commentators' ineptitude to actually describe what was going on. Here, however...the only term she could think of was that exact phrase---because Oberon's dismount of the rings was exactly that. It took him less than five seconds to pull himself up, grasp the chains, slide his feet out of the rings and execute a front flip to the floor---landing on his feet, no less---before the brunette gynoid realized that the white bar was actually the scabbard of a sword---a sword that, in less time than she had to blink, was aimed directly at her face.

Even more awe-inspiring (and terrifying) was the fact that Oberon had been blindfolded.

“It's me, sir,” she managed, “Agent Lawson---Vicki Lawson. Victoria Ann-Smith...” She paused, trying to fully wrap her mind around what was going on. “Just move the sword away from my face, please!”

Exactly fourteen seconds after Vicki's plea, Obeorn lowered the blade. “I need to put a sign on the door when I come here for my meditation,” he chuckled, removing the blindfold with his free hand. “You should try it some time....it clears the mind, focuses the senses. Speaking of mind-clearing, I understand Faceless left a bit of a nasty present from July 9.”

How the HELL does he---oh, screw it. “He did, sir....Tell and Ash helped me get over it.”

“Good. Wouldn't want your perception of the world around you to be muddled by a psychopath...but that's not why you're here, is it?”

“No, sir, it's not....and why aren't you wearing any of your chest armor? Or a shirt, for that matter?”

Oberon chuckled again. “Excess weight isn't exactly something you want on you when hanging upside-down from a pair of rings, Vicki---that, and I didn't need the armor at the moment. If anyone came in here to 'try something', the sword would've been the only defense I needed.”

“Right....anyway, I just wanted to ask about...well, a few things, really...”

“Ask away, then,” Oberon replied, grabbing his shirt off a nearby rack. “We've still got about 45 minutes until the representatives from the Stepford base arrive, so unless you want to know my take on the meaning of life, we have plenty of time to talk.”

“Cool. So....I was wondering---first of all, what got you started in the ALPA?”

As soon as the question left her lips, Vicki wainted to kick herself in the head. That's NOT what I wanted to ask, why the HELL was I even thinking it?! “I...sir, I didn't...forget I asked the question,” she stammered, trying to recover some semblance of dignity. “What I really wanted to ask was---”

She stopped, noticing that Oberon was staring at the floor in complete silence.

“Ah, sir.....you don't have to asnswer the question if you don't want to, or anything....I---”

A sound, best described as a cough mixed in with what could either be a barely-contained giggle or a half-smothered cry, came from somewhere in the ALPA Chairman's throat.

Oh, scrap.... “Sir, I was just trying to think of what I really wanted to ask you,” the brunette gynoid explained, “and---”

“It's funny,” Oberon cut in, his voice sounding oddly toneless. “You asked me earlier if I still loved Celeste when she was trying to kill me...I said I didn't remember.” He shook his head, still staring at the floor; “I lied,” he continued. “I remember it all too well, Vicki....I did love Celeste back then. Loved her more than I loved life itself, almost, with a reverence second only to my faith, and a bond that I felt would last the two of us for the rest of our lives. Well, it turned out, she loved me as well.....loved me too much, to be honest. So much, in fact, that she never wanted me to leave her side...”

He turned to glance at Vicki over his shoulder---and the gynoid was shocked to see the sclera of both his eyes had turned blood red. “...and when I did leave,” he murmured, “she made damn sure I paid for it.”

Before Vicki could say anything, the Chairman collapsed to a kneel, heavy breaths wracking his body.

“Sir......are you---”

“I'd told her,” Oberon gasped, as if Vicki hadn't spoken. “I told her I wouldn't be able to be there for her like she wanted me to....told her a thousand times, if not more....I had to leave, to help an old friend deal with a problem...and then her daughter.....”

Vicki moved to help Oberon to his feet, but a hand on her shoulder stopped her. “Let him,” Clive DuBraul whispered. “He needs to vent in times like this...best to just leave him to it.” Without another word, he guided the brunette gynoid out of the room, closing the door behind them---just in time to drown out an anguished scream...which still sent chills down Vicki's titanium spine, even with the door muffling it. A thousand apologies and variations on “I didn't know” swam through her thoughts, each more pathetic than the last---

“It wasn't your fault. Any time he meditates, he ends up going back to that particular moment.”

DuBraul's sigh cut off any statement or inquiry Vicki could've made. “Considering what we're facing here,” he went on, “it's not surprising he's falling back on the meditation...we're facing a threat that could go red-ring any minute, and even if we do manage to get out of this with nothing more than a few scraped knuckles...”

“What happened between Oberon and Celeste?” Vicki interjected. “Why is he still---”

“He told you already, didn't he?” DuBraul replied. “He loved her---really, truly loved her---and she loved him as much as he loved her. Except her love became all-consuming...she couldn't be without him, ever. That's always been one of Celeste's many character faults---any time she falls in love, it becomes an obsession, a quest to always have that one kindred spirit by her side at all times. She's always felt a need to be saved, to be honest...and with Oberon being almost the perfect knight in shining armor...”

Something about that last sentence prompted a raised eyebrow from Vicki. “Almost perfect?”

“As he told you,” DuBraul continued, “he had to help an old friend. There was...a conflict of some kind, and he made it sound like it could be the end of the world; weirdly enough, he was only gone two or three days, at the very least....but when he came back....”

“When I came back,” Oberon finished, “I looked as if I'd been through hell.”

The suddenness of his appearance nearly prompted a scream from Vicki. “I'm fine, by the way,” he added, giving her a reassuring smile---indeed, the sclera of his eyes no longer looked blood-red. “But as Clive was just about to tell you, I looked as if I'd been through Hell...needed a bit of a lie-down afterwards, of course---”

“I get it,” Vicki muttered. “I'm just...why didn't you give me a straight answer when I asked earlier?”

“You'd just gone through an emotional outburst of your own,” Oberon reminded her. “Granted, I wasn't exactly in the most stable mental condition I've been in for a good long while...anyways, it wasn't exactly a question I'd expected to hear at the moment. Hell, I'm still coming to grips with some of the things that happened between Celeste and I...starting with all the chaos after I took her daughter from her.”

And now we've reached that part of the conversation... “So, feel like giving a bit more backstory for that?”

Oberon chuckled mirthlessly. “No need to worry if I've forgotten any of it...I have it memorized by now.” His smile faded as he continued; “Vengeance,” he stated, “is like an open wound---doubly so if you've broken up with someone, tried to get back together and then taken something or someone they care about from them, no matter how noble your intentions. Believe me, I had the noblest of intentions when I had the ALPA move in and take Celeste's daughter into custody---but she didn't see it that way. Celeste, I mean....Celeste didn't see it---I might as well admit that her daughter did, indeed, agree with my viewpoint, and was perfectly fine with it all---”

“I get it.”

“Good. Just making sure....oh, sod it. The fact of the matter is, Celeste was going through a paranoid spell of some sort, and she thought I was trying to turn her daughter against her. I can't even remember the specifics; it was such a stupid little pique between ex-lovers---not even that, it was a one-sided feud that I was only aware of when Celeste....well...” He turned away.

“She wanted to have him killed,” DuBraul finished. “Even hired a few poisoners whose speciality was dripping half of the poison into the victims' eyes while they slept...then administering the second up-close the next day.”

Before Vicki could express her shock, Oberon cut in again. “That's not even the worst of it---the bastard with the second half of the chemical---the one meant to start the reaction meant to kill me---was posing as a birthday clown in a park. Waited until I meandered over to the outermost edges of some birthday get-together, lost in thought---and then the idiot sprayed me in the face with a seltzer bottle. Sprayed at least twelve other people, too....all of them ended up in hospital. As for me....” He nodded to DuBraul. “They called in Clive after someone noticed I'd been gone longer than the two hours I said I'd be out, and he found me face-down on the floor in my flat, crying blood into the carpet....”

For a minute or so, nobody spoke.

“As it turned out,” Oberon finally said (a bit too loudly for Vicki's liking), “Celeste didn't even give the order to have me poisoned---one of her underlings took it upon themselves to call the poisoner, and paid extra for their finest emotionally-triggered reactant poison. Of course, when she heard the news, Celeste didn't shed any tears...though the plonk who gave the order got a not-quite golden parachute the following day.”

DuBraul nodded gravely. “The effects still crop up, sometimes,” he added. “The red eyes, mostly.”

“Figured that,” Vicki murmured. “So....you're okay now? It's not in your blood, or anything---”

“I take blood tests daily to check for any lingering traces,” Oberon replied, “and last time I checked, there was still .014% of the stuff left in me. A lot better than last month.....035%.” He sighed. “I just hope Jake doesn't end up like I nearly did...and by that, I don't mean 'dead'---I mean I hope he doesn't end up trapped by Celeste, or turned into her new white knight by choice....or by force.”

A trilling sound from DuBraul ended the conversation. “That'll be Cedric,” he mused. “I need to take this...”

Oberon nodded. “It'll probably be the Stepford reps...” He turned his attention back to Vicki as Clive retrieved his phone. “So,” he beamed, “you mentioned that you had another question you wanted to ask me, back in the meditation room....you wouldn't happen to still remember what it was, would you?”
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[DollSpace]

I enjoy the psychological aspect of this installment, especially. From someone that's been in a situation close to where Vicki is now (and some would say I still am), I can really relate. Please post again soon!

[Uhoh]

Awesome! Great to read more back story, awaiting the next installment

[Brytestar]

This was the part I was waiting for. The story behind Oberon and Celeste and the poisoning. Hopefully Jake doesn't get wiped out. Almost all the chips are falling into place. This might make me start writing again. Keep up the good work Duke!