Chapter Text
Sirin clutches the bloody bandages around her arm as she sulks in the miserable cell that she has become familiar with for a few years.
At least, she thinks it’s been that long, Sirin doesn’t care enough to count, and her sense of time has all but fallen apart.
She grimaces as she tightens the wrappings around her wounded arm. The scientists hadn’t bothered to properly tend to her injuries after one of their personnel lost their sanity and slashed her with inhuman claws.
Not that they ever cared about her well-being, to them, she’s just material for testing on. No amount of tears would change that.
…
Ignoring the whimpering from the cells across from her and occasional hopeless cry for help, it’s unusually quiet. Over the past few days, Sirin noticed that fewer and fewer people were coming back here, not just orphaned girls like herself, but the lab personnel too.
She hasn’t seen Bella either… though, the two of them don’t share a cell, so there’s no way for Sirin to know if she disappeared as well.
The purple-haired girl pulls her arms around herself. If something happened to her, Sirin doesn’t know what she’d do. She might finally lose her mind as she rots in this horrible place.
Maybe she’s already lost it, her ears are ringing and she’s starting to hear faint voices whispering in her ears. Something flutters in the corner of her vision distractingly. The ringing starts to escalate to the point that it becomes too much to bear.
Sirin slaps her hands around the vicinity of the sound and the ringing stops, as does the whispering. Feeling a strange texture between her palms, Sirin opens her hands, only to panic, desperately wiping the gross remnants off her hands.
What kind of insect is that? It’s white and pink, it faintly glows in the dark and crumples apart like ceramic. It doesn’t even have any legs—
Her train of thought is interrupted by the sound of footsteps outside her cell.
“—what the hell have they been doing here?” A girl exclaims, cutting through the silence. Sirin carefully leans against the cold bars of her cell door. Whoever she is, she certainly isn’t one of the prisoners.
Judging by the frequency of the footsteps, and another voice she can’t quite make out, there’s at least one other person accompanying the stranger.
Sirin listens carefully, trying to discern their intentions. Following along the conversation until a grating sound hurts her ears. Surprised yelps, followed by hushed murmuring presumably other cells, and that same metallic sound.
Sirin tries to make out what’s going on, but the view from her cell is limited.
The sound gets nearer and nearer until something knocks against the door of her cell, causing Sirin to flinch.
“You might want to stand back!” A voice calls out from behind the door.
“Huh? Wait what are you going to do—” Sirin’s stammers, falling onto her back as the door in front of her is torn off its hinges. With a loud clang, the slab of metal falls to the ground.
Sirin’s half-frightened eyes meet the cyan-blue eyes of a white-haired girl in front of her.
The girl wears a black dress, and a ponytail hangs loosely over her left shoulder. She couldn’t possibly be much younger than herself. The same girl that just ripped off a door roughly three times her own weight.
Beside her is a woman with tan skin and light gray hair, a serious expression covering her face.
Sirin hesitates, cautiously eyeing the familiar symbol on the girl’s dress before noticing the crowd of fellow test subjects behind her. Only then does Sirin relax, her doubts subside, quickly replaced by confusion.
Why?
The white-haired girl reaches out her hand, smiling warmly. “It’s okay, you can come out now!”
“Theresa,” the taller woman puts her hand on the white-haired girl’s shoulder, “HQ isn’t going to be happy if they find out that you’ve let these test subjects go.”
“What they don’t know won’t hurt them. Besides, if they try anything, it would be unfortunate if their records were suddenly made public.” Theresa replies in earnest. “We’ve still got the missing staff to look for, surely they won’t mind a few questions. Right, Pat?”
Patricia blinks, taken aback by her statement. She relents, sighing defeatedly. “If this comes out of my paycheck, you owe me a beer.”
Sirin follows the other test subjects, carefully filing away the details of her supposed rescuers’ conversation. Right now, her only concern is looking for Bella, though so far, she hasn’t been able to spot the brunette’s signature ‘airplane tufts’ among the crowd of girls. Doesn’t help that they’re all wearing the same plain white dress.
Sirin hears a strange wispy noise behind her. Turning around, she catches a glimpse of something slipping into a vent in the wall. Feeling uneasy, she glances around, but no one else seems to have noticed.
After a few moments of searching, Sirin notices a familiar brown-haired girl in the crowd, and the uneasy feeling hanging over her is washed away by a sense of relief. A curved lock of hair waving in the air as she hurries over towards Bella, mumbling apologies as she squeezes past some of the girls in her way.
She lunges forward, happily throwing her arms around her friend. The brunette stares back at Sirin in surprise.
…
Did Bella always have a tail?
Eventually the group reaches the large elevator platform at the base of the level. Theresa presses the button, and the platform starts to ascend, then suddenly stops. The lights flicker and for a painfully long minute, the chamber cast into complete darkness. The power returns shortly after.
The elevator continues its ascent, though the lights continue to flicker at random intervals.
“That’s strange…” Theresa says aloud, “it wasn’t like this when we used the elevator earlier.”
As if on cue, the platform stops early on an unregistered level in between levels 12 and 14. This would make it level 13, but strangely enough it has been omitted from the elevator console.
The bulkhead doors open, and in front of her is a cross-section display of a snake-like Honkai beast, its body parts cut up and encased in a row of thick, glass-like material. Theresa eyes the sign on the wall with mounting dread. The words spelling out ‘Biological Research' in bold letters.
She has a bad feeling about this.