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", "writing": "The high mountains of Argentina form a massive, natural wall both blocking and bridging the line between Chile at various points.Many peaks are snowbound for the entirety of the year, making for an ideal, out of the way place for Robert Mammoth to hide away the most damning secrets of his legacy. \n\nThese secrets now became a matter of concern for his killer and heir to his power, Madam Director Ofelia. In the pursuit of this interest, Deikan Kalibran, known as Kali to friends and associates, found himself bundled up and standing in knee deep snow, watching a drone coast through the air as it scanned the nearby mountains for anomalous structures. It was not a matter of if Ofelia and her servants would find Mammoth’s storehouse, but when.\n\nAn 8 wheeled armored transport idled next to a cabin in a snow covered field, and in front of it stood a blue feline with black stripes. Kali was clothed in an old military surplus jacket, looking miserably out at the snow, but then curiously up at a shape in the distance. A hovering drone, scanning the nearby mountainsides for, as he eloquently put it, “Interesting stuff for us to grab then fuck off back to somewhere warm.”\n\nHe turned and looked behind him at the open side-door of the transport. Inside, a female bunny covered in pure white fur hunched over a computer, watching through the drone’s various scans as it looked around. To Kali’s annoyance, she had ditched her jacket on the floor of the vehicle and was apparently enjoying the frigid air in just an undershirt. Something beeped, and she forced the drone camera to refocus on the base of one of the mountains. “Got a structure of some kind, Sir.”\n\nKali watched the drone in the distance drop altitude quickly, to hover at about half the previous height. The bunny in the transport spoke again. “Simple corrugated awning over double doors. About big enough to drive a car through. Could be storage for the ski resort, but it’s right at the edge of their property. Not convenient.”\n\nBefore Kali could answer, the conversation was cut off by a sharp snapping sound, and he spun away from the vehicle to look at the nearby peaks, imagining they were hearing an incipient avalanche. The rabbit also glanced out of the side door. \nKali felt the explosion before he heard it as the transport’s interior filled with fire. A thin streak of molten metal shot through the center of the fireball and licked across his back, and then the blast pitched him into the snow as it scattered flaming pieces of the transport around him. One of the wheels skittered past his body, almost comically.\n\n————\n\nKali was extremely surprised to find that he awoke at all, as his final thoughts had seemingly been full of pain and hellfire. The pain shooting across his back did not bother him nearly as much as the cold press of snow against his face. He heard footsteps in the snow, and the idling of an engine, not likely friendly, and forced himself to sit motionless and listen.\n\nVoices, unintelligible over the ringing in his ears. They sounded calm. Smug, even. The ringing started to fade, and he could pick out two distinct tones, right by the wall of the cabin. The voices ceased for a moment, and Kali registered the sound of a motor, and perhaps more heavy footsteps in the snow.\n\nHe started plotting. He didn’t know if he even could move, but he needed to get to whoever was at the wall of the cabin and get whatever gun they had as quickly as possible. Then, assuming he even made it to the wall alive, he needed to kill at least three people. He would also need to hope that whatever vehicle he heard idling around the corner of the cabin wasn’t equipped with a machine gun or something.\n\nThat was a lot of conditions, but surviving the explosion in the first place seemed like a good omen. He heard footsteps, but only one set, walk along the wall, over towards the corner. Whoever was on the wall, they had split up. Either he acted now and died trying, or wrapped up bleeding to death quietly in the heavy snow.\n\nSome deep seated instinctual machine started turning in Kali’s mind and soul. He pushed himself to his feet, looked over at the wall, and launched himself as hard as he could across the space between him and the figure kneeling by it. They barely had time to look up before the blue and black blur slammed into them, grabbing their head and shoving it hard into the wooden side of the cabin. They dropped down with a groan, and Kali found his hand on the grip of a rifle. He pulled it up quickly, flipped what he hoped was the safety, and looked along the wall, spotting another figure nearby.\n\nThey were wearing combat gear, with grey fabric and blue trim, the colors of Robert Mammoth’s loyalists. They were looking curiously over, not yet registering the danger. Kali raised the rifle and pulled the trigger three times. The first shot went wide, throwing up a puff of snow, but the other two caught the trooper in the chest and neck, dropping them with a spray of blood. Kali didn’t hesitate. He rushed to the corner of the cabin and went down on his knees as he passed it, sinking almost waist deep in the snow as the figure around the corner fired over his head. He gave them no time to fix their aim, and pulled the trigger until he saw them drop.\n\nLooking away from the cabin, he spotted a treaded vehicle, painted with green and white streaks, with heavy but opened doors in the back and some kind of launcher on top. The engine revved up and the tracked APC started moving. Kali picked out the driver’s side seat through the back and fired at it, emptying the gun into it. The vehicle managed to turn halfway around before stopping, the engine sputtering out. Dropping his gun, Kali bent down by his second kill and fished theirs out of the snow, bringing it up and covering the vehicle, only to see the driver slumped over in the front seat, blood gushing from their mouth.\n\nHe heard movement behind him, and turned around to see the trooper he’d smashed against the wall struggle to their feet. They seemed to be a brown furred feline, and pretty out of shape for a soldier. Maybe some kind of specialist, and maybe a source of information. Stomping back through the snow, Kali grabbed him and shoved the gun against their ribs.\n\n“Move.” He growled. He was surprised at how messy his own voice sounded, like it was more of a struggle to get the words out.\n\nKali looked over at the smoldering wreck of his vehicle, and finally registered that the snow next to it that hadn't melted from the fire was absolutely smothered in crimson. Blood, and there was only one person it could all belong to. He felt dizzy and almost stumbled as he made his way towards the front of the cabin, before his vision seemed to sharpen again. He heard the creak of a floorboard just barely through the wall of the cabin. And gave the pudgy cat in front of him another shove, pushing them along the side of the cabin and towards the front.\n\nKali’s mind produced a clear picture of someone patiently watching the window from inside the room, ready to fire if anyone passed in front of it. He had no way of knowing anyone was even there, but was confident that if he were inside, that is exactly where he would be waiting.\n\nHe remembered the layout of the cabin quite clearly from inspecting it earlier. A central hallway leading to a kitchen area with a bedroom on each side. If this theoretical enemy inside was smart, they’d have picked a window, settled down a few steps back from it, and were now waiting for him to do something stupid.\n\nAfter guiding his captive around the corner. He gave them a sharp shove, sending them past the front window. Gunfire erupted from within the room, shattering the glass and following the fat cat’s fall. A round passed cleanly through their tail, severing it halfway down and making them shriek. The black and blue and bloody cat leaned in, raised the muzzle of his own rifle through the broken glass, and swept fire across the interior of the room.\n\nHe fired until the rifle was empty. There was no return fire, and Kali pressed his head against the side of the cabin next to the window. He could hear sickening, wet, labored breathing. Someone hit in the lung. They didn’t have long. He grabbed his sobbing captive, dragging them past the threshold of the front door, and then tossing them to the floor of the hallway.\n\nLooking the terrified man over, Kali saw that they had magazines for the rifle in pouches on their chest, he knelt down and grabbed one right out of it, taking grim satisfaction in the terrified look they were giving him as he reloaded. The door to the assailant’s room was shut, but with a sharp kick, it snapped inwards and Kali swept the room with the gun.\n\nThe final trooper was sitting back against the bed, staring off into the distance with a well-weathered looking pistol in their hand. They had been prepared for Kali to try and enter the room, but never had a chance to stop him before the struggle to breathe and the bloodloss had overcome them. Kali set his rifle down and took the pistol from the dead trooper, figuring it’d be easier to deal with his final problem, grabbing and then threatening or moving his new captive as needed, if he had a hand free.\n\nHe stepped out into the hallway, and indeed, it was easier to grab the final trooper (Their nametag read “Earl”), and drag them into the open door of the opposing bedroom, shoving them into the corner next to the dresser. He realized they had something in their hand and began to raise the pistol, before realizing it was the end of their tail. He snorted, then set the pistol on top of the dresser while rummaging through it. \n\nSoon, he had Earl tied down with a combination of belts and makeshift bindings made from clothes in the dresser. He sat on the edge of the bed across the room, and stared at his captive, before taking a short look around. Bloody handprints and smears covered everything he had touched, and Earl. Especially Earl. Finally afforded the opportunity to do so, Kali started to worry about himself.\n\nHe started to slump over, feeling oppressively tired, and impossibly cold. Then, with a sharp inhale, he snapped upright again, still freezing cold, but alert, vibrant even. He caught himself hyperventilating and forced himself to calm his breathing, counting deliberately in his head between breaths.\n\nEarl spoke up, his voice trembling, devoid of confidence, and somehow paranormally frustrating to listen to. “Hey can… can you leave the room if you’re gonna die?”\n\nKali’s yellow eyes narrowed at the tied-down Earl. “How about this. You don’t say a goddamned word, and I won’t shoot you in the gut and throw you back outside?”\n\nThere was no reply, much to Kali’s satisfaction. He pulled off the tattered remains of his jacket and looked down at himself. His fur was absolutely soaked through with blood, the normal blue with black stripes more of a muddy purple in some places. He looked at a particularly nasty gash on his left side, and felt a knot form in his stomach. He could see the edge of his ribs, white bone covered in blood. \n\nOut of morbid curiosity, he reached out and touched it. To his surprise, it didn’t hurt, but he could feel a cold pressure radiating outward from it. It occured to him that if his entire back was like this, he should have bled out. He slid his finger across the bone and brought it up to his face… The blood was diluted with some clear substance that it couldn’t seem to mix with or even turn red. He stared at it curiously, not sure what to make of it. Then he let his hand flop back into his lap, staring over at Earl in the corner.\n\n“You hit us with a missile, right? What was in it? Some kind of chemical weapon?”\n\nThere was silence, and Kali let out a long, put-upon sigh. “Oh for fucks… you can speak. Answer me, what did you do? Why am I so cold? Why didn’t it kill me right away?”\n\nThe whimpering fat cat in the corner stared back at him. “It was supposed to kill that bitch you’re following. My own design! I wanted to call it the Hellfire missile but some jerkoff beat me to that.” They said, suddenly forgetting the severed piece of tail in their hand and jumping on the opportunity to brag.\n\n“What did it do to me?”\n\nEarl looked sideways at him. “It blew you the fuck up, you moron. You know why you feel so cold? It’s because you left most of the blood that’s supposed to be inside of you out in the snow. You’re the weird one here, not me.”\n\nThey sat in silence for a few more minutes. Kali touched his side again and stood up, determined not to keel over and die on the bed. The blood-soaked cat went to the door and looked across the hall at the dead trooper. Their clothing seemed custom made, but the rifle was a normal Belgian pattern. Robert Mammoth’s loyalists must have still had an in with one or more european governments. Leads to pursue later. \n\nHe turned around, shot a nasty gaze at Earl, and examined the Trooper’s pistol. An extremely weathered looking Browning Hi-Power with Argentinian markings. Maybe a personal weapon. Maybe even a family heirloom. He almost felt bad for them for losing it in such a way, but it was his now. His ears twitched as he picked up the sound of another motor in the distance. He snatched the pistol and leveled it at Earl’s face. They flinched and looked away.\n\n“If it’s your friends, I’m blowing you away. If it’s *my* friends, I highly suggest you don’t call Madam Director “that bitch” to her face, unless you’d enjoy being vivisected.”\n\nThe sound moved right to the front of the house and a metal door was thrown open with a screech of metal on metal. Kali kept the gun shoved right up in Earl’s face as footsteps approached, though he kept his eye on the doorway. They stopped right before passing in front.\n\n“Kali?” It was a woman’s voice, full of both concern and command. He lowered the pistol from Earl’s face.\n\n“In here, Madam Director. I’m… I think I’m hurt bad.”\n\nThe whole tone of the room changed as Madam Director Ofelia Broussard stepped inside of it. A grey tigress with red hair tucked under a thick hooded jacket. She was the smallest person in the room, and yet seemed to fill it. Earl flinched and scooted back against the wall as his eyes met hers for a brief moment. This was likely because her irises burned red like a setting sun over a killing field.\n\nThose irises turned to Kali. She did not gasp, or cringe, or even raise her voice. She poked her head calmly out in the hall and said to the armored guard “You need to fetch the medic right now.”\n\nKali turned around and leaned against the dresser, suddenly faint again. He heard someone push their way past the guards in the hallway. A heavy bag was tossed onto the floor next to Ofi and a lightly armored monkey wearing a facemask walked in and stopped. Kali looked over his shoulder at her. “How bad is it?”\n\nShe took another nervous step towards him. She tried to reply and it just came out as “eeeeeee-eeeeek….”\n\nShe looked between Kali and her bag, then composed herself and knelt in front of it, unzipping it and loudly rummaging through it. She came up with a tablet computer. “Alright. Alright… Mister Kalibran. I can see your spine, and your ribs. You need to lie face down on the bed, and don’t move. We’re going to take some scans and figure out… just… let’s take some scans.”\n\nTrying to ignore what he’d just learned, he went over to the bed and tried to make himself comfortable. He noted a big bloody patch along the edge where he’d been sitting. Ofi followed him over and knelt down, taking his hand. The monkey stepped up and leaned over him. “Madam Director, these aren’t ideal conditions, or even vaguely sterile….” She looked around at the room, Kali’s blood all over it “But we’ll want to figure out what we’re dealing with, and do what we can here before we move him.”\n\nBefore Ofi could answer, Earl piped up, finding some courage. “He’s a fucking freak, that’s what’s wrong with him.” \n\nOfi didn’t even turn around and look at him. “Paul, can you come in here and throw this idiot to the floor? Roughly, please.” \n\nPaul, the massive polar bear out in the hall, came stomping in around the medical bag, grabbed Earl, and lifted him up. Then, with a loud thud and an exclamation from the pudgy cat, Earl was thrown to the floor. The guard even added a sharp kick to Earl’s ribs, making them splutter.\n\n“Anything else you wanna add there, buddy?” The tigress asked, in an almost singsong voice. There was no reply.\n\nWhile this happened, Rin had the tablet set down on Kali’s back, and it was humming loudly. It was also getting quite warm, cutting into the freezing cold that the blood-soaked cat felt. “You’re not going to believe this. I am looking at it and I don’t believe it. Scanner says I can make you stable. It also recognizes you, Sir. Not by your usual name though.”\n\n“I spent most of my childhood floating in an MTC glass tube having murder techniques and an education cooked into my brain.” Kali replied. “It wasn’t as bad as that sounds. I don’t remember much of the actual horrible-science-experiment part.”\n\n“Well, you’re preloaded into my scanner, and it’s lighting up a bunch of things around your spine, in your ribcage… Something about deployed implants. Does that sound familiar?” Asked Rin.\n\n“Nope! So… Uh… What do we need to do.” Kali asked, suddenly aware that the tablet warming up his back was also starting to make him feel the wounds much, much more clearly.\n\n“This is uncharted territory. Most people would die immediately in your condition. There is an implant in your spine near your heart that is apparently pumping an unknown compound into your bloodstream. I believe this is keeping you alive. So I’m gonna see if I can stop the major sources of bleeding, then we’re gonna get a lot of water into you. I don’t know if a transfusion is safe with this other compound in the mix.”\n\nThe monkey medic stepped away and rummaged through her bag for some surgical tools. She looked over at Earl, cowering in the corner away from the armored guard. “And then, once that’s done, I’m obligated to help you.”\nEarl wisely didn’t reply, but gave a little nod.\n\nShe came back, and Kali heard the hum of some tool being powered on, then a few moments later, Rin leaned against him and he felt a piercing, searing pain against the edge of his back. He gritted his teeth and didn’t move.\n\n“Sorry, but without my help, I think you’ll still die, Sir. So we need to get moving.” Rin said. “We’re gonna cauterize what we can, sew up whatever the cautery won’t work on, and then…” She paused, and there was another moment of piercing heat. “We’ll get you in the APC with something to drink.”\n\nKali started to answer, but immediately gritted his teeth again as he felt the cautery’s white-hot tip slide through the flesh right next to the exposed ribs in his side, then again up near his right shoulder. The pain was indescribable, but he forced himself to focus on it, to control his body’s response to it. \n\n“Aaaaaand, Done! Now we can sew up the rest. That’ll suck waaay less.” Rin seemed to have completely rebounded, becoming positively chipper as she made progress.\n\n“Hey, someone should be having fun with this, right?” Ofi asked, getting an amused snort out of the bloody cat on the bed.\n\nRin was right, the stitching was considerably less painful, though he could still feel the needle picking through his flesh every time. “I have a feeling that a tradeoff of whatever’s keeping you alive is painkillers wouldn’t do much. That and you have about enough blood to keep a goldfish alive left to circulate it.” Rin said.\n\n“And done. I can’t close the wound fully, but it looks like I’ve cut down on the bleeding considerably. Madam Director, can you help him out to the APC and get some water in him?”\n\n“Of course.” Said Ofi, helping Kali to his feet. He looked around weakly, finding that just getting up had made him incredibly dizzy. \n“Miss Rin, tend to the idiot, then take Paul and Yan and see if you can load him up in the other vehicle outside. Oh, and if he gives you trouble, Paul’s allowed to punch him until he’s quiet and cooperative. Or if you get bored. Or just because.” She added.\n\n“Hey… why aren’t I burned?” Kali asked, seemingly out of the blue. The question had been sitting in the back of his mind since he’d looked over himself, but held back by the thick cloud of blood loss and concussion induced fog until now. “Our new best friend here said they designed a weapon they think can hurt Madam Director. Something that can apparently torch an armored vehicle but not the guy standing next to it. Make sure you recover any additional explosives from their APC.”\n\nWith that, he was led outside into the blood-caked snow, finally noticing what a thick trail of the stuff he’d left behind in the white powder. Anywhere he’d touched, there was more than just an indent, there was a bloody footstep, a bloody handprint, more than a few smears on the outer wall of the cabin. He peered behind him at the hallway, and it was just the same. Confident they were out of earshot, he looked at the grey tigress holding him up. “We can’t leave yet. Sarah thought she found the storehouse. The drone should be hovering right over it. We can’t come back, they’ll know we were here.”\n\nHe gestured at the snow, and looked down at his side, ribs still very much exposed. “Fuck, it’s freezing out here.” \n\nThe tigress helped him into the door, then climbed into the driver seat of the large wheeled vehicle. She fired the engine back up and turned on the heater, before stepping back out and joining the blood-soaked cat in the back, shutting the door behind her. \n\nKali spoke up again “Also, they knew we were here. Educated guess, or maybe those implants include a tracker or some kind. Could’ve driven right up and slaughtered us if I hadn’t just gotten lucky. What a mess. And Sarah… Well, I guess she didn’t suffer, at least.” He leaned back against the seat hard enough to bump his head into the metal of the APC, and didn’t even flinch.\n\nOfi sat across from him, pulling off her jacket and tossing it into an empty seat. Her flame red eyes looked him up and down. “You worry too much, Kali. You…. You were magnificent. You *are* magnificent. They could have sent an army and you would still be sitting there.” \n\nShe didn’t speak with the usual tone of a fun loving young woman. There was something ancient and all knowing, something dangerous, adding an edge to her tone. Kali felt it in his bones, exposed and otherwise, that she was speaking the truth, but he still questioned it. “What… makes you say that?”\n\n“Call it a hunch!” She snapped back, the cheery young girl returned to her voice. “I’m sorry about Miss Sarah. Let’s make it count and go figure out what we’ve found… and then we’ll go to the beach or something. Somewhere that doesn’t make you miserable.”\n\nShe rummaged around underneath the seat for a few moments, and despite the bleeding seemingly stopped, Kali nearly passed out again as he watched her. She sat back up and shoved something at him. “Drink.” She ordered.\n\nIt was a mundane water bottle, but at this moment, it was one of the greatest things he’d ever seen in his life. He grabbed it out of her hands (on the second try), practically ripped off the cap, and downed the entire thing in one go. By the time he was finished, she’d come up with another.\n\n“Kali, this is your body’s way of telling you to keep your blood mostly on the inside, okay?” She said, as he downed the second one just as fast. \n\nThe water was freezing cold from sitting in a poorly heated troop transport all day, but somehow it cut into the numb chill he felt all over. He held up his hand and flexed it, making a fist and then opening it again. It was excruciating to focus on moving. Before he could reply, he heard Earl curse, followed by the heavy thud of Paul punching him for talking. Ofi snickered to herself and pushed the door back open.\n“Good work, Paul,” She said. “We need to drive a bit. Can you get the idiot back into his carrier and follow us in it? We have juuuuust one more thing to check.”\n\nPaul and Yan both took the treaded vehicle and followed along behind the wheeled one. \n\nRin sat in back, observing Kali and making him eat something.\n\nOfelia, who shared a soul with the Devil, who was the feared and respected usurper of the Mammoth Tech dynasty, drove and giggled like a schoolgirl as the APC plowed through snowbanks.\n\n———\n\nAs Kali said, the drone was hovering right over an unassuming metal awning embedded in the base of a nearby mountain, serving as a break against the snow. It stood out a bit as the two APC’s approached it, but looked enough like some sort of boring utilitarian storage that none but the criminally curious would think to investigate further.\n\nThe outer door was easily lifted up and off its hinges with the combined effort of Paul and Yan. Yan was a falcon, notably smaller than Paul, looking almost comical as a choice for lifting anything next to Paul. However, he was wearing the latest in experimental MTC wing ballistic protection, which included a partial exoskeletal frame they found was actually powerful enough to let him press his back up against the door and help shove it off of the old, heavy hinges with Paul’s help.\n\nAs the doors slammed to the snowy ground with a muted clank, a cavernous garage lined with chain-link motorized doors, most of them protecting completely empty storage blocks. Except for one. Within were a series of crates, painted black and emblazoned with the Mammoth Tech logo.\n\nYan stepped in first, shining around a flashlight while flexing his wings, seemingly a little surprised at the fact he hadn’t just crushed them. “No apparent tripwires or sensors or anything. I guess they really did plan on hiding this in plain sight. I guess it’s too far out of the way to try stealing scrap or tools, and not guarded enough to be obviously valuable.” He suggested. Paul stomped towards the only occupied storage space, and found that the ancient motor holding the gate shut was not at all able to keep him from shoving it open with a slight mechanical sound of protest.\n\nThe pair approached one of the crates, and Paul unlatched and pushed the closest one open. Inside were a series of heavy duty laptops on one side, some shrink-wrapped books featuring esoteric diagrams on the other, and a spherical shape sitting in the middle. It was about the size of a beach ball, with an iris-like aperature in the middle, staring up at the cieling. Ofi climbed out of the driver seat of the wheeled APC and walked in, standing between Paul and Yan and looking down at it. “Can you feel that?” She asked.\n\nYan rummaged in one of his cargo pockets and brought out a small box. Turning it on, it gave a few cursory beeps as he squinted at it. “It’s radioactive, Madam Director, if that’s what you mean.” He saw Paul looking over at him. “Nah… I mean, if we keep the lid off and spend the night in here, that’d be bad, but we’ll be fine.”\n\n“No, Yan… it feels *important*. It feels *powerful*. Like we’re about to pull Excaliber from the stone and become king.” Ofelia said. She pulled out the shrink wrapped papers and cut them open with a claw, then with the help of Paul’s flashlight, gave a quick read of some of the contents. \n\n“What if I told you boys that by this time next year, we could use this to make nuclear war impossible without my explicit permission?”\n\nThe two stayed silent. “Right? Awe inspiring!” Madam Director finished for them. “Get this boxed back up and load everything in my vehicle. Let’s go to the beach.”\n\n———\n\nThere were no further encounters with Mammoth’s loyalists as the gang packed up and moved to the warmer northeastern part of the country. Somehow or another, Ofelia had secured several miles of beachfront property all to the group, with several cabins and a cove ringed with rock formations hosting all manner of exciting ocean life. Not a soul would bother them as they laid low with their ill gotten gains. It was about the .\n\nEarl’s mood seemed to improve in the warmer conditions, as he was allowed to enjoy the beach so long as he was within sight of Paul, who frequently reminded the pudgy cat that their head was perfectly sized for crushing in his bear hands. He was being a model prisoner. Also, Rin had spent an evening doing a very, very invasive surgery in the back of one of the APCs and his tail seemed to be making a decent recovery.\n\nKali was recovering much more slowly. According to Rin’s assessment, he seemed to be recovering from the shrapnel wounds impossibly fast, and was “fully functional” within just a few days. The line across his back from the missile’s shaped charge, magically enhanced, seemed to be lingering, occasionally reopening and making swimming in the cove an unpleasant experience. Rin insisted, however, that his recovery was a “miracle of medical technology, and far beyond what we knew MTC was capable of.”\n\nOne evening, under the harsh light of the APCs, they dragged out one of the missiles used against them in the mountains and disassembled it. Earl, apparently far more concerned with showing off than maintaining the Loyalist’s secrets, couldn’t wait to show off the technology inside. He claimed to have managed to fit much fancier guidance and stabilization instruments into the body of the missile at about half the cost of the original, as well as sensors enhanced with machine learning models. When they got to the warhead, he excitedly held up the concave alloy plate, explaining it was designed to go through a meter of rolled steel while still being stamped with a blessed writ of banishment powerful enough to stop even the mightiest demon in its tracks, and likely kill them outright with a followup shot.\n\nMadam Director had snatched it from him and held it in front of the light. Then, staring right at Earl, she pressed it to her forehead. Her red eyes widened, and began glowing brighter than the headlights of the nearby vehicles. Her mouth opened in shock, and a spire of smoke rose from it. Then she snapped it shut and dropped the symbol-stamped plate with a clatter. She laughed sharply in Earl’s face.\n“I’m just playing. It doesn’t work. You should see your stupid face. You went from hopeful to scared so fast, Mister Earl.” No one had asked the pudgy cat his last name, and no one was going to. Ofelia walked off into the night laughing “Wish I’d had someone record that!”\n\nAs they had the whole stretch of beach and the cove to themselves, the majority of the group had taken to wearing little to no clothes at all, following Madam Director’s example, as she enjoyed wandering around in the nude much of the time, and not a single person on earth had the strength to keep her from doing so. \nKali and Fuji, the blue furred fox royal advisor, could often be spotted laying (cuddling, really) naked on a towel by the edge of the water. Rin took to climbing the palm trees to retrieve coconuts, flashing the two of them and clearly trying to flirt and show off. It was working.\n\nRin had climbed back down and was using the coconuts to mix up cocktails when she stopped and looked up the beach. Kali heard an unfamiliar gait stepping through the sand. Stumbling, slow steps that struggled to carry themselves, followed by the sharp sound of a cane driving into the sand to help support them. He turned and looked over his shoulder, then rolled around completely and sat up. \n\nWalking (poorly) down the beach and across the stones of the cove was an extremely sickly looking feline. Their fur was brown, with a pattern of black stripes exactly identical to Kali’s. They didn’t merely resemble one another, Kali was like a healthy, blue furred, identical younger brother to the man. And when he spoke, it was with the exact same voice. \n\n“Don’t mind if I don’t strip like the rest of you. I’ve been dying since you were born, and my body’s a little… corpse-y. Speaking of,” He gestured towards Kali, who was too surprised to see this man to have a retort “You seem to have gotten torn up.”\n\nKali looked around “Uh… can we get a moment? It’s fine, guys. This is… this is Merick.” He said to Rin and Fuji, who looked concerned, but also didn’t question it, wandering up the beach towards the back porch of Ofelia’s cabin. Ofi was standing out back, basking in the sun and idly watching as Kali met the closest thing he had to a father for the first time in decades.\n\n“So…” Merick began, teetering a bit against his cane. “You’ve been busy. And ironically, you’ve been busy working for MTC. Gotta say though, I much prefer the new ownership. Broussard told me the Devil is in that girl, and yet she is worlds beyond a better person than Robert Mammoth ever was.”\n\n“She means a lot to me.” Deikan replied. “If it makes you happy, you should know that Mammoth died afraid.”\n\n“Not a lot of company I’d say this out loud to, but that does make me feel better. He was the worst. Not to mention the things he wanted the four of us to make you into. You know he never spoke to us directly? Even when we were in the same room he’d relay them through an assistant, like he’d get dirty if he interacted with us. He was like that with everyone but his board. Barely even spoke to his son.”\n\nKali was about to comment on that, then immediately latched on to something else Merick had said. “His… wait, “four of us”. I only remember you. Who else uh… worked on me? What did they do?”\n\n“Your name, Deikan. You put it together out of a code representing four people. Delta-Three One- Kilo- Four November. That’s all it meant. I’m Kilo. The one who worked on your implants was Four November. She came with me actually, but she’s very, very shy. Then Delta and Three One was all the army stuff and murder methods that are cooked into your brain. It went deeper than just making a smart servant once they knew my technology worked.”\n\n“And where are the other two?”\n\nMerick sat down at the water's edge. Kali noted the sickly cat was dressed quite plainly. A sharp contrast to the man with an MTC science team uniform he hazily remembered. Kali could practically feel a sense of exhaustion coming from the man poking at the calm water of the cove with his cane.\n\n“Well, they drove out to the desert after I dropped you off with Broussard, and did a murder-suicide. Yeah… I know you probably don’t want to hear that, but I haven’t got a ton of time left, and I’m not going to spend it lying to you. So, you know, get them questions out while you can. You’ve got forever, I have… weeks, maybe.”\n\n“These implants are going to keep me alive forever?”\n\n“If you avoid dying violently, they just might. They speed up your body’s healing process to a rate everyone who didn’t work on you would consider impossible. They leech various compounds directly into your muscles, joints, and connective tissue to make you literally as strong as your body can possibly be.”\n\n“There’s more. A lot more. You’re more than just a person, you’re a glowing achievement of scientific advancement. And with me gone soon, you’ll be completely unique.” Merick watched as a small, reddish brown crab rose from the sand of the lagoon and poked curiously at his walking stick before skittering away.\n\n“Can I be tracked with these implants? Is that how they ambushed us this time?” Kali asked.\n\n“Nope. They’ll interact with an MTC medical scanner. Actually, your biometrics are in a lot of MTC systems, they were so ready for you to be a slave. Now it just means they can’t easily lock their doors on you.” Merick sounded pretty pleased about that.\n“If you were trying to hide in a crowd, they could pick you out by checking individuals. But I don’t think that’s going to be a problem for you.” \n\nThe black and brown cat watched as the crab scuttled back through the shallow pool and took another look at his walking stick. “They can’t track you with them. If they could, Mammoth would have tried to kidnap you from Broussard. Not that I would have let him. I confess I may have shown up to check on you from time to time without you knowing. I’m proud of my work. And I’m proud of you.”\n\nThis man was not Kali’s father. The concept of a parent simply didn’t apply to him. And yet, hearing those words filled him with an odd sense of warmth and satisfaction. Kali sat down next to him by the pool and put his hand on Merick’s shoulder. They felt so very frail just to the touch, but also seemed to draw an odd comfort from the contact. “Could Mammoth’s Loyalists recreate this technology? Even without your notes?”\n\nMerick shook his head. “They have the technology. They had the specs on the equipment we used to create your body, and some of the memory-writing technology. They could clone you, maybe, but there are hundreds of other steps between that point and you, Deikan Kalibran. They have glass, but no know-how to get to a telescope, if that makes sense. It will be centuries before anyone can replicate our work. Maybe never.”\n\nHe stood, almost losing his balance as he rose, prompting Kali to grab him and help him up. Merick took Kali’s hand and met his gaze “You are my gift to the world. You were born to be a slave, tailor built to be a weapon, like one of those drones circling a village dumping missiles into children. But now? You’re going to be a God, beholden to someone only if you choose to be.” \n\nThe two of them looked up towards the patio at Ofelia. The naked grey tigress looked back and gave a playful wave. “You know,” Kali said “We could help you. MTC’s assets are mostly under our control. We could give you back your tools. And Ofi could help you with magic. You have options.”\n\n“What, and give myself a chance to fuck up a legacy as magnificent as all this?” He gestured at Kali.\n\n“No… I’m ready to check out. They can’t use me to get at you if I’m gone, they’ll never find Four November, and I wanna make some room for you crazy kids. Now help me up the beach so I can ride off into the sunset.”\n\nKali took Merick’s hand, the two of them looking more like relatives than ever as he guided the withered cat back up the beach. He tried to mask the flurry of emotions boiling up inside of him. Happiness at the odd sense of closure of actually getting to talk to Merick was clashing with a desperate sense of loss, as this was the only time he’d ever truly meet the man. \n\n“Your face is my earliest memory.” Kali began, trying to put some words to his feelings. He owed this man that, if nothing else. “I remember the looks you used to give me when no one else was in the room. Even with all the knowledge and memories burned into my brain, I really didn’t know what you were like. I dunno why that’s important to me, but it is. So I’m glad I got to see you again.”\n\nThey stopped at the top of the beach, and Kali let go of Merick’s hand, pulling the sickly doctor into a hug. Merick mostly stood there awkwardly, looking surprised and more than a little overwhelmed. When Kali let him go, though, he was smiling. \n\nA very, very won out looking truck sat by the side of the road. Unknown to most present, it had started life as a display model with all the accessories. It had then been used by its owner to drive up and down two continents in service to MTC’s research team, and then as a refuge from MTCs retrieval teams. It had carried scientific equipment, food rations, high explosives, illegal firearms, stolen computers, and on one occasion, the life-support pod that Kali had been born in.\n\nLeaning against the hood was an astoundingly tall reptilian woman. At least, Kali assumed she was female, based on Merick’s use of “her” earlier. She lacked any of the gendered features that were typical of mammalian species. His guess, based on her facial structure, was that her species was loosely related to an Anolie, but her size had him doubting himself.\n\nStanding up straight, her shoulders lined up with the top of the truck’s cab, and cut a formidable figure compared to the two cats. Her attempt to dress similarly simple and drab like Merick seemed almost comical, as her stature meant she could hardly keep a low profile. And yet, she had evaded the most powerful corporation and paramilitary organization on earth since the day she left it.\n\n“Merick, you would have been pretty cute if you hadn’t chosen fatherhood over health.” She said. Even her voice was androgynous. She held out her hand, and Kali took it. Merick laughed.\n\n“I’m T- I mean, I’m Four November… Uhm…” There was a brief pause, then she let go of Kali’s hand. “Taivas. My real name is Taivas. Sorry, I don’t meet people very often. I don’t like to…” She said, rubbing the back of her neck nervously. \n\nKali looked up at her. “I don’t know how much you helped Merick to get me out from under Robert Mammoth, but thank you. I hope it’s not a problem that I’ve somehow ended up back in his organization. Probably not what you were imagining for me when you escaped.”\n\nThere was another awkward pause. Taivas was looking over him back towards the cabins. Kali followed her gaze to see everyone else, even Earl, gathered around the window watching the three of them. Then she looked back at him. “Sorry! They’re probably just curious, right? This is the longest conversation I’ve had with someone other than Merick in a long time, and everyone always watches me because I’m kind of big, and I don’t like crowds…” She seemed to be getting more anxious.\n\n“They’re alright, Taivas.” Merick said. “But we should be going. If Broussard or Robert Junior figure out we came by, it’s trouble for everyone. Kali…” He pivoted on his cane a bit to look at the black and blue cat. “Be well, and try not to get any more scars. Taivas, remember to give him the thing.” He finished, before meandering over to the truck and getting in with surprising grace for a man whose body was failing.\n\nTaivas fished around in her pockets, then handed Kali a flash drive. “I kept some notes. Some. On the implants we… you have. That’s the only copy in the world. Uhm… I hope you find it useful. Or destroy it. I destroyed all the rest.” She glanced back towards the truck. “Everyone’s calling you Kali, right? Kali, you’re more than the sum of your parts. Merick said that’s what he wanted. For you to be more. So… uhm… be more.” And with that, she also turned and wandered back towards the truck, clearly completely done with social activities.\n\nSomehow, she managed to fit into the driver side of the truck, get it started, then drive off into the distance, leaving Kali standing alone for a few moments, naked, awkward, lost in thought. He looked over his shoulder again at his friends (and also Earl), the unlikely crew that was edging ever closer to having the power to completely upheave the entire world order. Then he looked down at the flash drive in his hand. It might be able to answer a whole slew of questions from the last decade of his life, and yet, he found that he struggled to care at the moment, so he wandered inside to see if Rin was still mixing drinks.\n", "writing_bbcode_parsed": "The high mountains of Argentina form a massive, natural wall both blocking and bridging the line between Chile at various points.Many peaks are snowbound for the entirety of the year, making for an ideal, out of the way place for Robert Mammoth to hide away the most damning secrets of his legacy.

These secrets now became a matter of concern for his killer and heir to his power, Madam Director Ofelia. In the pursuit of this interest, Deikan Kalibran, known as Kali to friends and associates, found himself bundled up and standing in knee deep snow, watching a drone coast through the air as it scanned the nearby mountains for anomalous structures. It was not a matter of if Ofelia and her servants would find Mammoth’s storehouse, but when.

An 8 wheeled armored transport idled next to a cabin in a snow covered field, and in front of it stood a blue feline with black stripes. Kali was clothed in an old military surplus jacket, looking miserably out at the snow, but then curiously up at a shape in the distance. A hovering drone, scanning the nearby mountainsides for, as he eloquently put it, “Interesting stuff for us to grab then fuck off back to somewhere warm.”

He turned and looked behind him at the open side-door of the transport. Inside, a female bunny covered in pure white fur hunched over a computer, watching through the drone’s various scans as it looked around. To Kali’s annoyance, she had ditched her jacket on the floor of the vehicle and was apparently enjoying the frigid air in just an undershirt. Something beeped, and she forced the drone camera to refocus on the base of one of the mountains. “Got a structure of some kind, Sir.”

Kali watched the drone in the distance drop altitude quickly, to hover at about half the previous height. The bunny in the transport spoke again. “Simple corrugated awning over double doors. About big enough to drive a car through. Could be storage for the ski resort, but it’s right at the edge of their property. Not convenient.”

Before Kali could answer, the conversation was cut off by a sharp snapping sound, and he spun away from the vehicle to look at the nearby peaks, imagining they were hearing an incipient avalanche. The rabbit also glanced out of the side door.
Kali felt the explosion before he heard it as the transport’s interior filled with fire. A thin streak of molten metal shot through the center of the fireball and licked across his back, and then the blast pitched him into the snow as it scattered flaming pieces of the transport around him. One of the wheels skittered past his body, almost comically.

————

Kali was extremely surprised to find that he awoke at all, as his final thoughts had seemingly been full of pain and hellfire. The pain shooting across his back did not bother him nearly as much as the cold press of snow against his face. He heard footsteps in the snow, and the idling of an engine, not likely friendly, and forced himself to sit motionless and listen.

Voices, unintelligible over the ringing in his ears. They sounded calm. Smug, even. The ringing started to fade, and he could pick out two distinct tones, right by the wall of the cabin. The voices ceased for a moment, and Kali registered the sound of a motor, and perhaps more heavy footsteps in the snow.

He started plotting. He didn’t know if he even could move, but he needed to get to whoever was at the wall of the cabin and get whatever gun they had as quickly as possible. Then, assuming he even made it to the wall alive, he needed to kill at least three people. He would also need to hope that whatever vehicle he heard idling around the corner of the cabin wasn’t equipped with a machine gun or something.

That was a lot of conditions, but surviving the explosion in the first place seemed like a good omen. He heard footsteps, but only one set, walk along the wall, over towards the corner. Whoever was on the wall, they had split up. Either he acted now and died trying, or wrapped up bleeding to death quietly in the heavy snow.

Some deep seated instinctual machine started turning in Kali’s mind and soul. He pushed himself to his feet, looked over at the wall, and launched himself as hard as he could across the space between him and the figure kneeling by it. They barely had time to look up before the blue and black blur slammed into them, grabbing their head and shoving it hard into the wooden side of the cabin. They dropped down with a groan, and Kali found his hand on the grip of a rifle. He pulled it up quickly, flipped what he hoped was the safety, and looked along the wall, spotting another figure nearby.

They were wearing combat gear, with grey fabric and blue trim, the colors of Robert Mammoth’s loyalists. They were looking curiously over, not yet registering the danger. Kali raised the rifle and pulled the trigger three times. The first shot went wide, throwing up a puff of snow, but the other two caught the trooper in the chest and neck, dropping them with a spray of blood. Kali didn’t hesitate. He rushed to the corner of the cabin and went down on his knees as he passed it, sinking almost waist deep in the snow as the figure around the corner fired over his head. He gave them no time to fix their aim, and pulled the trigger until he saw them drop.

Looking away from the cabin, he spotted a treaded vehicle, painted with green and white streaks, with heavy but opened doors in the back and some kind of launcher on top. The engine revved up and the tracked APC started moving. Kali picked out the driver’s side seat through the back and fired at it, emptying the gun into it. The vehicle managed to turn halfway around before stopping, the engine sputtering out. Dropping his gun, Kali bent down by his second kill and fished theirs out of the snow, bringing it up and covering the vehicle, only to see the driver slumped over in the front seat, blood gushing from their mouth.

He heard movement behind him, and turned around to see the trooper he’d smashed against the wall struggle to their feet. They seemed to be a brown furred feline, and pretty out of shape for a soldier. Maybe some kind of specialist, and maybe a source of information.  Stomping back through the snow, Kali grabbed him and shoved the gun against their ribs.

“Move.” He growled. He was surprised at how messy his own voice sounded, like it was more of a struggle to get the words out.

Kali looked over at the smoldering wreck of his vehicle, and finally registered that the snow next to it that hadn't melted from the fire was absolutely smothered in crimson. Blood, and there was only one person it could all belong to. He felt dizzy and almost stumbled as he made his way towards the front of the cabin, before his vision seemed to sharpen again. He heard the creak of a floorboard just barely through the wall of the cabin. And gave the pudgy cat in front of him another shove, pushing them along the side of the cabin and towards the front.

Kali’s mind produced a clear picture of someone patiently watching the window from inside the room, ready to fire if anyone passed in front of it. He had no way of knowing anyone was even there, but was confident that if he were inside, that is exactly where he would be waiting.

He remembered the layout of the cabin quite clearly from inspecting it earlier. A central hallway leading to a kitchen area with a bedroom on each side. If this theoretical enemy inside was smart, they’d have picked a window, settled down a few steps back from it, and were now waiting for him to do something stupid.

After guiding his captive around the corner. He gave them a sharp shove, sending them past the front window. Gunfire erupted from within the room, shattering the glass and following the fat cat’s fall. A round passed cleanly through their tail, severing it halfway down and making them shriek. The black and blue and bloody cat leaned in, raised the muzzle of his own rifle through the broken glass, and swept fire across the interior of the room.

He fired until the rifle was empty. There was no return fire, and Kali pressed his head against the side of the cabin next to the window. He could hear sickening, wet, labored breathing. Someone hit in the lung. They didn’t have long. He grabbed his sobbing captive, dragging them past the threshold of the front door, and then tossing them to the floor of the hallway.

Looking the terrified man over, Kali saw that they had magazines for the rifle in pouches on their chest, he knelt down and grabbed one right out of it, taking grim satisfaction in the terrified look they were giving him as he reloaded. The door to the assailant’s room was shut, but with a sharp kick, it snapped inwards and Kali swept the room with the gun.

The final trooper was sitting back against the bed, staring off into the distance with a well-weathered looking pistol in their hand. They had been prepared for Kali to try and enter the room, but never had a chance to stop him before the struggle to breathe and the bloodloss had overcome them. Kali set his rifle down and took the pistol from the dead trooper, figuring it’d be easier to deal with his final problem, grabbing and then threatening or moving his new captive as needed, if he had a hand free.

He stepped out into the hallway, and indeed, it was easier to grab the final trooper (Their nametag read “Earl”), and drag them into the open door of the opposing bedroom, shoving them into the corner next to the dresser. He realized they had something in their hand and began to raise the pistol, before realizing it was the end of their tail. He snorted, then set the pistol on top of the dresser while rummaging through it.

Soon, he had Earl tied down with a combination of belts and makeshift bindings made from clothes in the dresser. He sat on the edge of the bed across the room, and stared at his captive, before taking a short look around. Bloody handprints and smears covered everything he had touched, and Earl. Especially Earl. Finally afforded the opportunity to do so, Kali started to worry about himself.

He started to slump over, feeling oppressively tired, and impossibly cold. Then, with a sharp inhale, he snapped upright again, still freezing cold, but alert, vibrant even. He caught himself hyperventilating and forced himself to calm his breathing, counting deliberately in his head between breaths.

Earl spoke up, his voice trembling, devoid of confidence, and somehow paranormally frustrating to listen to. “Hey can… can you leave the room if you’re gonna die?”

Kali’s yellow eyes narrowed at the tied-down Earl. “How about this. You don’t say a goddamned word, and I won’t shoot you in the gut and throw you back outside?”

There was no reply, much to Kali’s satisfaction. He pulled off the tattered remains of his jacket and looked down at himself. His fur was absolutely soaked through with blood, the normal blue with black stripes more of a muddy purple in some places. He looked at a particularly nasty gash on his left side, and felt a knot form in his stomach. He could see the edge of his ribs, white bone covered in blood.

Out of morbid curiosity, he reached out and touched it. To his surprise, it didn’t hurt, but he could feel a cold pressure radiating outward from it. It occured to him that if his entire back was like this, he should have bled out. He slid his finger across the bone and brought it up to his face… The blood was diluted with some clear substance that it couldn’t seem to mix with or even turn red. He stared at it curiously, not sure what to make of it. Then he let his hand flop back into his lap, staring over at Earl in the corner.

“You hit us with a missile, right? What was in it? Some kind of chemical weapon?”

There was silence, and Kali let out a long, put-upon sigh. “Oh for fucks… you can speak. Answer me, what did you do? Why am I so cold? Why didn’t it kill me right away?”

The whimpering fat cat in the corner stared back at him. “It was supposed to kill that bitch you’re following. My own design! I wanted to call it the Hellfire missile but some jerkoff beat me to that.” They said, suddenly forgetting the severed piece of tail in their hand and jumping on the opportunity to brag.

“What did it do to me?”

Earl looked sideways at him. “It blew you the fuck up, you moron. You know why you feel so cold? It’s because you left most of the blood that’s supposed to be inside of you out in the snow. You’re the weird one here, not me.”

They sat in silence for a few more minutes. Kali touched his side again and stood up, determined not to keel over and die on the bed. The blood-soaked cat went to the door and looked across the hall at the dead trooper. Their clothing seemed custom made, but the rifle was a normal Belgian pattern. Robert Mammoth’s loyalists must have still had an in with one or more european governments. Leads to pursue later.

He turned around, shot a nasty gaze at Earl, and examined the Trooper’s pistol. An extremely weathered looking Browning Hi-Power with Argentinian markings. Maybe a personal weapon. Maybe even a family heirloom. He almost felt bad for them for losing it in such a way, but it was his now. His ears twitched as he picked up the sound of another motor in the distance. He snatched the pistol and leveled it at Earl’s face. They flinched and looked away.

“If it’s your friends, I’m blowing you away. If it’s *my* friends, I highly suggest you don’t call Madam Director “that bitch” to her face, unless you’d enjoy being vivisected.”

The sound moved right to the front of the house and a metal door was thrown open with a screech of metal on metal. Kali kept the gun shoved right up in Earl’s face as footsteps approached, though he kept his eye on the doorway. They stopped right before passing in front.

“Kali?” It was a woman’s voice, full of both concern and command. He lowered the pistol from Earl’s face.

“In here, Madam Director. I’m… I think I’m hurt bad.”

The whole tone of the room changed as Madam Director Ofelia Broussard stepped inside of it. A grey tigress with red hair tucked under a thick hooded jacket. She was the smallest person in the room, and yet seemed to fill it.  Earl flinched and scooted back against the wall as his eyes met hers for a brief moment. This was likely because her irises burned red like a setting sun over a killing field.

Those irises turned to Kali. She did not gasp, or cringe, or even raise her voice. She poked her head calmly out in the hall and said to the armored guard “You need to fetch the medic right now.”

Kali turned around and leaned against the dresser, suddenly faint again. He heard someone push their way past the guards in the hallway. A heavy bag was tossed onto the floor next to Ofi and a lightly armored monkey wearing a facemask walked in and stopped. Kali looked over his shoulder at her. “How bad is it?”

She took another nervous step towards him. She tried to reply and it just came out as “eeeeeee-eeeeek….”

She looked between Kali and her bag, then composed herself and knelt in front of it, unzipping it and loudly rummaging through it. She came up with a tablet computer. “Alright. Alright… Mister Kalibran. I can see your spine, and your ribs. You need to lie face down on the bed, and don’t move. We’re going to take some scans and figure out… just… let’s take some scans.”

Trying to ignore what he’d just learned, he went over to the bed and tried to make himself comfortable. He noted a big bloody patch along the edge where he’d been sitting. Ofi followed him over and knelt down, taking his hand. The monkey stepped up and leaned over him. “Madam Director, these aren’t ideal conditions, or even vaguely sterile….” She looked around at the room, Kali’s blood all over it “But we’ll want to figure out what we’re dealing with, and do what we can here before we move him.”

Before Ofi could answer, Earl piped up, finding some courage. “He’s a fucking freak, that’s what’s wrong with him.”

Ofi didn’t even turn around and look at him. “Paul, can you come in here and throw this idiot to the floor? Roughly, please.”

Paul, the massive polar bear out in the hall, came stomping in around the medical bag, grabbed Earl, and lifted him up. Then, with a loud thud and an exclamation from the pudgy cat, Earl was thrown to the floor. The guard even added a sharp kick to Earl’s ribs, making them splutter.

“Anything else you wanna add there, buddy?” The tigress asked, in an almost singsong voice. There was no reply.

While this happened, Rin had the tablet set down on Kali’s back, and it was humming loudly. It was also getting quite warm, cutting into the freezing cold that the blood-soaked cat felt. “You’re not going to believe this. I am looking at it and I don’t believe it. Scanner says I can make you stable. It also recognizes you, Sir. Not by your usual name though.”

“I spent most of my childhood floating in an MTC glass tube having murder techniques and an education cooked into my brain.” Kali replied. “It wasn’t as bad as that sounds. I don’t remember much of the actual horrible-science-experiment part.”

“Well, you’re preloaded into my scanner, and it’s lighting up a bunch of things around your spine, in your ribcage… Something about deployed implants. Does that sound familiar?” Asked Rin.

“Nope! So… Uh… What do we need to do.” Kali asked, suddenly aware that the tablet warming up his back was also starting to make him feel the wounds much, much more clearly.

“This is uncharted territory. Most people would die immediately in your condition. There is an implant in your spine near your heart that is apparently pumping an unknown compound into your bloodstream. I believe this is keeping you alive. So I’m gonna see if I can stop the major sources of bleeding, then we’re gonna get a lot of water into you. I don’t know if a transfusion is safe with this other compound in the mix.”

The monkey medic stepped away and rummaged through her bag for some surgical tools. She looked over at Earl, cowering in the corner away from the armored guard. “And then, once that’s done, I’m obligated to help you.”
Earl wisely didn’t reply, but gave a little nod.

She came back, and Kali heard the hum of some tool being powered on, then a few moments later, Rin leaned against him and he felt a piercing, searing pain against the edge of his back. He gritted his teeth and didn’t move.

“Sorry, but without my help, I think you’ll still die, Sir. So we need to get moving.” Rin said. “We’re gonna cauterize what we can, sew up whatever the cautery won’t work on, and then…” She paused, and there was another moment of piercing heat. “We’ll get you in the APC with something to drink.”

Kali started to answer, but immediately gritted his teeth again as he felt the cautery’s white-hot tip slide through the flesh right next to the exposed ribs in his side, then again up near his right shoulder. The pain was indescribable, but he forced himself to focus on it, to control his body’s response to it.

“Aaaaaand, Done! Now we can sew up the rest. That’ll suck waaay less.” Rin seemed to have completely rebounded, becoming positively chipper as she made progress.

“Hey, someone should be having fun with this, right?” Ofi asked, getting an amused snort out of the bloody cat on the bed.

Rin was right, the stitching was considerably less painful, though he could still feel the needle picking through his flesh every time. “I have a feeling that a tradeoff of whatever’s keeping you alive is painkillers wouldn’t do much. That and you have about enough blood to keep a goldfish alive left to circulate it.” Rin said.

“And done. I can’t close the wound fully, but it looks like I’ve cut down on the bleeding considerably. Madam Director, can you help him out to the APC and get some water in him?”

“Of course.” Said Ofi, helping Kali to his feet. He looked around weakly, finding that just getting up had made him incredibly dizzy.
“Miss Rin, tend to the idiot, then take Paul and Yan and see if you can load him up in the other vehicle outside. Oh, and if he gives you trouble, Paul’s allowed to punch him until he’s quiet and cooperative. Or if you get bored. Or just because.” She added.

“Hey… why aren’t I burned?” Kali asked, seemingly out of the blue. The question had been sitting in the back of his mind since he’d looked over himself, but held back by the thick cloud of blood loss and concussion induced fog until now. “Our new best friend here said they designed a weapon they think can hurt Madam Director. Something that can apparently torch an armored vehicle but not the guy standing next to it. Make sure you recover any additional explosives from their APC.”

With that, he was led outside into the blood-caked snow, finally noticing what a thick trail of the stuff he’d left behind in the white powder. Anywhere he’d touched, there was more than just an indent, there was a bloody footstep, a bloody handprint, more than a few smears on the outer wall of the cabin. He peered behind him at the hallway, and it was just the same. Confident they were out of earshot, he looked at the grey tigress holding him up. “We can’t leave yet. Sarah thought she found the storehouse. The drone should be hovering right over it. We can’t come back, they’ll know we were here.”

He gestured at the snow, and looked down at his side, ribs still very much exposed. “Fuck, it’s freezing out here.”

The tigress helped him into the door, then climbed into the driver seat of the large wheeled vehicle. She fired the engine back up and turned on the heater, before stepping back out and joining the blood-soaked cat in the back, shutting the door behind her.

Kali spoke up again “Also, they knew we were here. Educated guess, or maybe those implants include a tracker or some kind. Could’ve driven right up and slaughtered us if I hadn’t just gotten lucky. What a mess. And Sarah… Well, I guess she didn’t suffer, at least.” He leaned back against the seat hard enough to bump his head into the metal of the APC, and didn’t even flinch.

Ofi sat across from him, pulling off her jacket and tossing it into an empty seat. Her flame red eyes looked him up and down. “You worry too much, Kali. You…. You were magnificent. You *are* magnificent. They could have sent an army and you would still be sitting there.”

She didn’t speak with the usual tone of a fun loving young woman. There was something ancient and all knowing, something dangerous, adding an edge to her tone. Kali felt it in his bones, exposed and otherwise, that she was speaking the truth, but he still questioned it. “What… makes you say that?”

“Call it a hunch!” She snapped back, the cheery young girl returned to her voice. “I’m sorry about Miss Sarah. Let’s make it count and go figure out what we’ve found… and then we’ll go to the beach or something. Somewhere that doesn’t make you miserable.”

She rummaged around underneath the seat for a few moments, and despite the bleeding seemingly stopped, Kali nearly passed out again as he watched her. She sat back up and shoved something at him. “Drink.” She ordered.

It was a mundane water bottle, but at this moment, it was one of the greatest things he’d ever seen in his life. He grabbed it out of her hands (on the second try), practically ripped off the cap, and downed the entire thing in one go. By the time he was finished, she’d come up with another.

“Kali, this is your body’s way of telling you to keep your blood mostly on the inside, okay?” She said, as he downed the second one just as fast.

The water was freezing cold from sitting in a poorly heated troop transport all day, but somehow it cut into the numb chill he felt all over. He held up his hand and flexed it, making a fist and then opening it again. It was excruciating to focus on moving. Before he could reply, he heard Earl curse, followed by the heavy thud of Paul punching him for talking. Ofi snickered to herself and pushed the door back open.
“Good work, Paul,” She said. “We need to drive a bit. Can you get the idiot back into his carrier and follow us in it? We have juuuuust one more thing to check.”

Paul and Yan both took the treaded vehicle and followed along behind the wheeled one.

Rin sat in back, observing Kali and making him eat something.

Ofelia, who shared a soul with the Devil, who was the feared and respected usurper of the Mammoth Tech dynasty, drove and giggled like a schoolgirl as the APC plowed through snowbanks.

———

As Kali said, the drone was hovering right over an unassuming metal awning embedded in the base of a nearby mountain, serving as a break against the snow. It stood out a bit as the two APC’s approached it, but looked enough like some sort of boring utilitarian storage that none but the criminally curious would think to investigate further.

The outer door was easily lifted up and off its hinges with the combined effort of Paul and Yan. Yan was a falcon, notably smaller than Paul, looking almost comical as a choice for lifting anything next to Paul. However, he was wearing the latest in experimental MTC wing ballistic protection, which included a partial exoskeletal frame they found was actually powerful enough to let him press his back up against the door and help shove it off of the old, heavy hinges with Paul’s help.

As the doors slammed to the snowy ground with a muted clank, a cavernous garage lined with chain-link motorized doors, most of them protecting completely empty storage blocks. Except for one. Within were a series of crates, painted black and emblazoned with the Mammoth Tech logo.

Yan stepped in first, shining around a flashlight while flexing his wings, seemingly a little surprised at the fact he hadn’t just crushed them. “No apparent tripwires or sensors or anything. I guess they really did plan on hiding this in plain sight. I guess it’s too far out of the way to try stealing scrap or tools, and not guarded enough to be obviously valuable.” He suggested. Paul stomped towards the only occupied storage space, and found that the ancient motor holding the gate shut was not at all able to keep him from shoving it open with a slight mechanical sound of protest.

The pair approached one of the crates, and Paul unlatched and pushed the closest one open. Inside were a series of heavy duty laptops on one side, some shrink-wrapped books featuring esoteric diagrams on the other, and a spherical shape sitting in the middle. It was about the size of a beach ball, with an iris-like aperature in the middle, staring up at the cieling. Ofi climbed out of the driver seat of the wheeled APC and walked in, standing between Paul and Yan and looking down at it. “Can you feel that?” She asked.

Yan rummaged in one of his cargo pockets and brought out a small box. Turning it on, it gave a few cursory beeps as he squinted at it. “It’s radioactive, Madam Director, if that’s what you mean.” He saw Paul looking over at him. “Nah… I mean, if we keep the lid off and spend the night in here, that’d be bad, but we’ll be fine.”

“No, Yan… it feels *important*. It feels *powerful*. Like we’re about to pull Excaliber from the stone and become king.” Ofelia said. She pulled out the shrink wrapped papers and cut them open with a claw, then with the help of Paul’s flashlight, gave a quick read of some of the contents.

“What if I told you boys that by this time next year, we could use this to make nuclear war impossible without my explicit permission?”

The two stayed silent. “Right? Awe inspiring!” Madam Director finished for them. “Get this boxed back up and load everything in my vehicle. Let’s go to the beach.”

———

There were no further encounters with Mammoth’s loyalists as the gang packed up and moved to the warmer northeastern part of the country. Somehow or another, Ofelia had secured several miles of beachfront property all to the group, with several cabins and a cove ringed with rock formations hosting all manner of exciting ocean life. Not a soul would bother them as they laid low with their ill gotten gains. It was about the .

Earl’s mood seemed to improve in the warmer conditions, as he was allowed to enjoy the beach so long as he was within sight of Paul, who frequently reminded the pudgy cat that their head was perfectly sized for crushing in his bear hands. He was being a model prisoner. Also, Rin had spent an evening doing a very, very invasive surgery in the back of one of the APCs and his tail seemed to be making a decent recovery.

Kali was recovering much more slowly. According to Rin’s assessment, he seemed to be recovering from the shrapnel wounds impossibly fast, and was “fully functional” within just a few days. The line across his back from the missile’s shaped charge, magically enhanced, seemed to be lingering, occasionally reopening and making swimming in the cove an unpleasant experience. Rin insisted, however, that his recovery was a “miracle of medical technology, and far beyond what we knew MTC was capable of.”

One evening, under the harsh light of the APCs, they dragged out one of the missiles used against them in the mountains and disassembled it. Earl, apparently far more concerned with showing off than maintaining the Loyalist’s secrets, couldn’t wait to show off the technology inside. He claimed to have managed to fit much fancier guidance and stabilization instruments into the body of the missile at about half the cost of the original, as well as sensors enhanced with machine learning models. When they got to the warhead, he excitedly held up the concave alloy plate, explaining it was designed to go through a meter of rolled steel while still being stamped with a blessed writ of banishment powerful enough to stop even the mightiest demon in its tracks, and likely kill them outright with a followup shot.

Madam Director had snatched it from him and held it in front of the light. Then, staring right at Earl, she pressed it to her forehead. Her red eyes widened, and began glowing brighter than the headlights of the nearby vehicles. Her mouth opened in shock, and a spire of smoke rose from it. Then she snapped it shut and dropped the symbol-stamped plate with a clatter. She laughed sharply in Earl’s face.
“I’m just playing. It doesn’t work. You should see your stupid face. You went from hopeful to scared so fast, Mister Earl.” No one had asked the pudgy cat his last name, and no one was going to. Ofelia walked off into the night laughing “Wish I’d had someone record that!”

As they had the whole stretch of beach and the cove to themselves, the majority of the group had taken to wearing little to no clothes at all, following Madam Director’s example, as she enjoyed wandering around in the nude much of the time, and not a single person on earth had the strength to keep her from doing so.
Kali and Fuji, the blue furred fox royal advisor, could often be spotted laying (cuddling, really) naked on a towel by the edge of the water. Rin took to climbing the palm trees to retrieve coconuts, flashing the two of them and clearly trying to flirt and show off. It was working.

Rin had climbed back down and was using the coconuts to mix up cocktails when she stopped and looked up the beach. Kali heard an unfamiliar gait stepping through the sand. Stumbling, slow steps that struggled to carry themselves, followed by the sharp sound of a cane driving into the sand to help support them. He turned and looked over his shoulder, then rolled around completely and sat up.

Walking (poorly) down the beach and across the stones of the cove was an extremely sickly looking feline. Their fur was brown, with a pattern of black stripes exactly identical to Kali’s. They didn’t merely resemble one another, Kali was like a healthy, blue furred, identical younger brother to the man. And when he spoke, it was with the exact same voice.

“Don’t mind if I don’t strip like the rest of you. I’ve been dying since you were born, and my body’s a little… corpse-y. Speaking of,” He gestured towards Kali, who was too surprised to see this man to have a retort “You seem to have gotten torn up.”

Kali looked around “Uh… can we get a moment? It’s fine, guys. This is… this is Merick.” He said to Rin and Fuji, who looked concerned, but also didn’t question it, wandering up the beach towards the back porch of Ofelia’s cabin. Ofi was standing out back, basking in the sun and idly watching as Kali met the closest thing he had to a father for the first time in decades.

“So…” Merick began, teetering a bit against his cane. “You’ve been busy. And ironically, you’ve been busy working for MTC. Gotta say though, I much prefer the new ownership. Broussard told me the Devil is in that girl, and yet she is worlds beyond a better person than Robert Mammoth ever was.”

“She means a lot to me.” Deikan replied. “If it makes you happy, you should know that Mammoth died afraid.”

“Not a lot of company I’d say this out loud to, but that does make me feel better. He was the worst. Not to mention the things he wanted the four of us to make you into. You know he never spoke to us directly? Even when we were in the same room he’d relay them through an assistant, like he’d get dirty if he interacted with us. He was like that with everyone but his board. Barely even spoke to his son.”

Kali was about to comment on that, then immediately latched on to something else Merick had said. “His… wait, “four of us”. I only remember you. Who else uh… worked on me? What did they do?”

“Your name, Deikan. You put it together out of a code representing four people. Delta-Three One- Kilo- Four November. That’s all it meant. I’m Kilo. The one who worked on your implants was Four November. She came with me actually, but she’s very, very shy. Then Delta and Three One was all the army stuff and murder methods that are cooked into your brain. It went deeper than just making a smart servant once they knew my technology worked.”

“And where are the other two?”

Merick sat down at the water's edge. Kali noted the sickly cat was dressed quite plainly. A sharp contrast to the man with an MTC science team uniform he hazily remembered. Kali could practically feel a sense of exhaustion coming from the man poking at the calm water of the cove with his cane.

“Well, they drove out to the desert after I dropped you off with Broussard, and did a murder-suicide. Yeah… I know you probably don’t want to hear that, but I haven’t got a ton of time left, and I’m not going to spend it lying to you. So, you know, get them questions out while you can. You’ve got forever, I have… weeks, maybe.”

“These implants are going to keep me alive forever?”

“If you avoid dying violently, they just might. They speed up your body’s healing process to a rate everyone who didn’t work on you would consider impossible. They leech various compounds directly into your muscles, joints, and connective tissue to make you literally as strong as your body can possibly be.”

“There’s more. A lot more. You’re more than just a person, you’re a glowing achievement  of scientific advancement. And with me gone soon, you’ll be completely unique.” Merick watched as a small, reddish brown crab rose from the sand of the lagoon and poked curiously at his walking stick before skittering away.

“Can I be tracked with these implants? Is that how they ambushed us this time?” Kali asked.

“Nope. They’ll interact with an MTC medical scanner. Actually, your biometrics are in a lot of MTC systems, they were so ready for you to be a slave. Now it just means they can’t easily lock their doors on you.” Merick sounded pretty pleased about that.
“If you were trying to hide in a crowd, they could pick you out by checking individuals. But I don’t think that’s going to be a problem for you.”

The black and brown cat watched as the crab scuttled back through the shallow pool and took another look at his walking stick. “They can’t track you with them. If they could, Mammoth would have tried to kidnap you from Broussard. Not that I would have let him. I confess I may have shown up to check on you from time to time without you knowing. I’m proud of my work. And I’m proud of you.”

This man was not Kali’s father. The concept of a parent simply didn’t apply to him. And yet, hearing those words filled him with an odd sense of warmth and satisfaction. Kali sat down next to him by the pool and put his hand on Merick’s shoulder. They felt so very frail just to the touch, but also seemed to draw an odd comfort from the contact. “Could Mammoth’s Loyalists recreate this technology? Even without your notes?”

Merick shook his head. “They have the technology. They had the specs on the equipment we used to create your body, and some of the memory-writing technology. They could clone you, maybe, but there are hundreds of other steps between that point and you, Deikan Kalibran. They have glass, but no know-how to get to a telescope, if that makes sense. It will be centuries before anyone can replicate our work. Maybe never.”

He stood, almost losing his balance as he rose, prompting Kali to grab him and help him up. Merick took Kali’s hand and met his gaze “You are my gift to the world. You were born to be a slave, tailor built to be a weapon, like one of those drones circling a village dumping missiles into children. But now? You’re going to be a God, beholden to someone only if you choose to be.”

The two of them looked up towards the patio at Ofelia. The naked grey tigress looked back and gave a playful wave. “You know,” Kali said “We could help you. MTC’s assets are mostly under our control. We could give you back your tools. And Ofi could help you with magic. You have options.”

“What, and give myself a chance to fuck up a legacy as magnificent as all this?” He gestured at Kali.

“No… I’m ready to check out. They can’t use me to get at you if I’m gone, they’ll never find Four November, and I wanna make some room for you crazy kids. Now help me up the beach so I can ride off into the sunset.”

Kali took Merick’s hand, the two of them looking more like relatives than ever as he guided the withered cat back up the beach. He tried to mask the flurry of emotions boiling up inside of him. Happiness at the odd sense of closure of actually getting to talk to Merick was clashing with a desperate sense of loss, as this was the only time he’d ever truly meet the man.

“Your face is my earliest memory.” Kali began, trying to put some words to his feelings. He owed this man that, if nothing else. “I remember the looks you used to give me when no one else was in the room. Even with all the knowledge and memories burned into my brain, I really didn’t know what you were like. I dunno why that’s important to me, but it is. So I’m glad I got to see you again.”

They stopped at the top of the beach, and Kali let go of Merick’s hand, pulling the sickly doctor into a hug. Merick mostly stood there awkwardly, looking surprised and more than a little overwhelmed. When Kali let him go, though, he was smiling.

A very, very won out looking truck sat by the side of the road. Unknown to most present, it had started life as a display model with all the accessories. It had then been used by its owner to drive up and down two continents in service to MTC’s research team, and then as a refuge from MTCs retrieval teams. It had carried scientific equipment, food rations, high explosives, illegal firearms, stolen computers, and on one occasion, the life-support pod that Kali had been born in.

Leaning against the hood was an astoundingly tall reptilian woman. At least, Kali assumed she was female, based on Merick’s use of “her” earlier. She lacked any of the gendered features that were typical of mammalian species. His guess, based on her facial structure, was that her species was loosely related to an Anolie, but her size had him doubting himself.

Standing up straight, her shoulders lined up with the top of the truck’s cab, and cut a formidable figure compared to the two cats. Her attempt to dress similarly simple and drab like Merick seemed almost comical, as her stature meant she could hardly keep a low profile. And yet, she had evaded the most powerful corporation and paramilitary organization on earth since the day she left it.

“Merick, you would have been pretty cute if you hadn’t chosen fatherhood over health.” She said. Even her voice was androgynous. She held out her hand, and Kali took it. Merick laughed.

“I’m T- I mean, I’m Four November… Uhm…” There was a brief pause, then she let go of Kali’s hand. “Taivas. My real name is Taivas. Sorry, I don’t meet people very often. I don’t like to…” She said, rubbing the back of her neck nervously.

Kali looked up at her. “I don’t know how much you helped Merick to get me out from under Robert Mammoth, but thank you. I hope it’s not a problem that I’ve somehow ended up back in his organization. Probably not what you were imagining for me when you escaped.”

There was another awkward pause. Taivas was looking over him back towards the cabins. Kali followed her gaze to see everyone else, even Earl, gathered around the window watching the three of them. Then she looked back at him. “Sorry! They’re probably just curious, right? This is the longest conversation I’ve had with someone other than Merick in a long time, and everyone always watches me because I’m kind of big, and I don’t like crowds…” She seemed to be getting more anxious.

“They’re alright, Taivas.” Merick said. “But we should be going. If Broussard or Robert Junior figure out we came by, it’s trouble for everyone. Kali…” He pivoted on his cane a bit to look at the black and blue cat. “Be well, and try not to get any more scars. Taivas, remember to give him the thing.” He finished, before meandering over to the truck and getting in with surprising grace for a man whose body was failing.

Taivas fished around in her pockets, then handed Kali a flash drive. “I kept some notes. Some. On the implants we… you have. That’s the only copy in the world. Uhm… I hope you find it useful. Or destroy it. I destroyed all the rest.” She glanced back towards the truck. “Everyone’s calling you Kali, right? Kali, you’re more than the sum of your parts. Merick said that’s what he wanted. For you to be more. So… uhm… be more.” And with that, she also turned and wandered back towards the truck, clearly completely done with social activities.

Somehow, she managed to fit into the driver side of the truck, get it started, then drive off into the distance, leaving Kali standing alone for a few moments, naked, awkward, lost in thought. He looked over his shoulder again at his friends (and also Earl), the unlikely crew that was edging ever closer to having the power to completely upheave the entire world order. Then he looked down at the flash drive in his hand. It might be able to answer a whole slew of questions from the last decade of his life, and yet, he found that he struggled to care at the moment, so he wandered inside to see if Rin was still mixing drinks.
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