Kiss me Deadly

[Tasha Walker]

Month 6, Week 3, Day 3

---

Tasha sits down on the settee in the lounge and props her elbow on the window ledge. There are bars on the double-pained windows, and mesh between the panes. She can't see anything through the glass that she's now gazing into. Still, some sunlight, real sunlight, filters through. She thinks she remembers what sunlight actually feels like. She thinks she should miss it, and maybe she does, somewhere in her head. There is so much medication in her system that her head might as well be empty, as little thoughts as there are in it.

She shifts in the seat, the movement sending pain through her left leg. Lifting the hem of her skirt, she peers down at the fresh stitches. Her expression grows fearful as she carefully touches the wound. What happened this time? What did she do? They never tell her.

Her eyes stray again toward the exit door and the nurse manning the lock gate as they have so much more often of late. The little voice in her head has been whispering again. She can't talk if Tasha takes her medicines, but that doesn't mean she isn't there. Today she tricked Tasha into only taking two thirds of her allotted pills, and hiding the rest.

The spider is waiting, hungry, and Tasha is scared of her. So very scared.

[Sable Conolly]

Sable has been taking some time considering her options with radio towers. Surely somewhere, there is a cell phone relaying station that hooks into satellites that has actual operators she can take hostage and force to send a message for her. She has notes on likely targets piled on the passenger seat, and there are empty cans of Full Throttle rolling around the floor.

While she's been thinking about all that, Sable has been doing something that doesn't take much thinking at all: driving a truck from point A to point B. She can pretty much do it by instinct, leaving her mind free to wander and to seethe and to hate. Shockwave.

Sable parks the truck and climbs out. It's a long drop, and she is not a tall woman, but she makes the jump without fear. Now, to find someone to sign for this shipment of highly volatile experimental medicine.

[Tasha Walker]

Sable will find herself directed to the nurses station set off the lounge, just on the other side of the half wall. Apparently, the medication is for the hands of a specific doctor. Sable will have to wait for the nurse to call him down in order to get the proper signatures before she can unload, and of course there is the one sample that has to be hand delivered. The nurse tells her that it will be a bit, and if Sable would like to sit, the nurse will buzz her into the lounge.

This lounge is where visitors are brought, on the rare occasions when a family member deigns to remember their crazy relation still lives. Tasha never gets any visitors, but since she seldom causes trouble, she is allowed to sit and people watch. Sable had Tasha's attention from the moment the trucker stopped at the station. Regardless of whether or not Sable actually came into sit, she now has a fretful redhead staring at her. Tasha whimpers and twists her hair about her fingers.

She is stirring.

[Sable Conolly]

No, Sable would not like to sit down. She stands, feet apart, and watches all the exits, holding the package and her clipboard tightly.

She watches the occupants of the room, too, looking at each one in turn. Sable pauses on the redhead and gives her a bored expression that seems to ask, Is there a problem here?

Because if there is, the redhead can go hang. Sable doesn't care.

[Tasha Walker]

Tasha gets up and walks toward the trucker. The nurse gives her a warning look, which prompts Tasha to stop several feet away. Her hands twist and worry at her shirttail as she stares at the teal-haired woman. Tasha's eyes close for a moment, and when they open again, there is something... slightly different.

"I had a boyfriend once," she says softly, "His mother had teal hair, and his father a mask of iron."

[Sable Conolly]

Sable's face twists in displeasure, and she asks, flippantly and a little bitterly, "Mmph. Was he tall, dark, and handsome?"

Crazy woman.

But wouldn't Sable be a crazy woman, too, if she said what was in her soul? Sigma, if someone but looked at the notes on her passenger seat, she'd be a terrorist at the very least.

[Tasha Walker]

Tasha winces at the laughter, but she answers the question as if an answer were actually expected.

"Tall and dark and handsome and cruel. A black knight with eyes of red and sword to match, who was smart enough not to love me."

Her expression changes a bit more, becomes less timid, more direct. Then she smiles, smugly, seductively, as if she has forgotten she is dressed in hospital rags.

"I had two boyfriends once, neither so good as the one, for they were weak enough to love me and so I stole their sparkling hearts, and devoured and twisted all their good."

An orderly has come up behind Tasha, summoned by the nurse. He touches her arm, startling her back to herself. She doesn't protest as she's urged out of the common area, though she does keep turning to look back at Sable.

[Sable Conolly]

Sable taps the pen against the clipboard, and she looks thoughtful.

Blackarachnia never was that stable to begin with, and after the transfer to Elita-1's body failed...

Hmm, maybe she's still coherent enough to cobble together a long range radio if Sable raids a Radio Shack. Sable hopes so, anyway.

Perhaps there is something more, but if there is, it doesn't matter. She watches as the orderly takes the redhead away and mentally tries to map a layout for the complex. That doctor ought to be here to sign for the shipment any time now.

---

Later That Night...
Mordred prowls the asylum, avoiding its security systems and the night guards as best she can. Her armour is silent, well-oiled, with no clinks and clanks to betray her, and she steps lightly.

Finding the redhead again takes some doing, but Mordred manages it. The door's lock surrenders to her rake, and she steps inside the room, closing the door behind her. She tries to clamp a gloved hand over the redhead's mouth and holds up a finger to the mask of her helmet, warning the redhead to be silent.

[Tasha Walker]

Tasha is not sleeping when the black knight comes for her. She was curled under her blankets facing the wall, wishing the memories stop coming, wishing she would be quiet.

She struggles instinctively in Sable's hands, but when Tasha sees who holds her, the struggles cease. The woman's basic physical characteristics don't change, but still she is obviously Someone Else.

Nightshade smiles seductively and tries to twine herself about Mordred.

[Sable Conolly]

Mordred allows the twining rather impassively. Inside her helmet, one eyebrow raises at the shift. Her voice muffled and muted by the helmet to something androgynous, Mordred asks, "Know where they keep the patient records?"

Mordred would like to know just what she's retrieving here. Then there is one other matter that will need attention.

[Tasha Walker]

"If you just want the Good Girl's records, down Foxworth Hall, third office on the left. "If you want it all," the woman purrs, "Level Five. But that's guarded by more like us."

By "us" Nightshade means meta-humans, not humanized transformers. Tasha/Nightshade still doesn't acknowledge that she's an alien robot trapped in a spider body trapped in a human body. Every time her mind gets close to that realization, she has another break, falls a little more into madness.

[Sable Conolly]

"Everything dies just the same way," Mordred says evenly. "Now come with me. Any idea what these guards are like?"

She starts to head off for Level Five, confident and self-assured.

[Tasha Walker]

Nightshade does follow along, but because she wants to, not because she was ordered. As she walks the differences between herself and her Tasha component become even more apparent. Was she always wearing fishnets under that skirt? And where did the white face makeup come from?

"Should be Johnne tonight. He electrifies things."

[Sable Conolly]

"Electricity? Scrap. That does make wearing metal a bit problematic," Mordred muses, thought she is not dissuaded from her goal.

Tasha or Nightshade or whoever she is - Mordred hasn't actually picked up her name yet - changing her looks a bit does not bother Mordred much. Mordred summons her armour in a henshin transformation, after all. Clothing coming out of nowhere is a reasonable thing for her.

She just draws her red blade, which flames and flickers in the dark. "I'll make it quick, before he has a chance."

Now she turns corners carefully, ready to do just as she said.

[Tasha Walker]

The appearance of the red blade in the Black Knight's hand tugs even more at the tangle which is Nightshade's mind. There's a thread that, if followed, will undo the knot. The problem is that undoing the knot might well destroy her.

She stumbles on her stiletto heels, and puts a hand against the wall to steady herself. Nightshade stares at Mordred's back, one barely-audible word slipping past her lips.

"Scourge?"

Johnne is on duty just as predicted, and luckily so. He's the most careless of all the metahuman watchdogs, likely because he has one of the more deadly powers. He's arrogant enough to think no one can touch him.

His right shoulder is propped against the wall next to the archives's door, and he seems rather engrossed in the reruns of House that he's watching on his tablet instead of the security details he should be watching. His back will be to Mordred when the knight rounds that last corner.