{Experiment F.O.X.} {Continued...}

The others shake their head, and then quickly they hurry off to begin starting the fires in the other rooms of the facility. He turns his attention to the girl on the operating table and starts walking over toward her. Her body is almost convulsing, she back arches up from the table, throwing her head back against it, and her fingers twitch uncontrollably. Her legs struggle beneath the leather restraints, as do her hands, and the silver waves in her hair move with her head; causing them to look similar to the waves rushing up onto the shore from the ocean as the tide comes in. The man stares at her blowing a smoke ring above her head, and he withdraws a long machete-like knife and cuts the leather restraints from her wrists and ankles. Then, the air swooshes and the man disappears out of the room, leaving the girl to awaken all alone in a building set ablaze.

The girl's eyes open, her iridescent purple eyes are adjusting to the gray smog of the room. Her mind is jumbled with fragments of information she can't seem to comprehend properly. She breathes in the gray smog, and then she goes into a coughing fit, her lungs stinging with every breath she inhales. Her eyes begin to water as she rises up from the operating table; her naked body is quickly covered by the massive length of her silver hair. She puts her bare feet on the floor and her feet are touch something wet and sticky beneath her. She struggles to see, as she lifts one of her feet up close to her to see, and the bottom of it is covered with something red. It looks as if someone had been crushing red grapes in this room.

She lowers her feet back down to the floor and pushes herself off of the operating table, her feet plunge into small red puddles as she steps quickly across the room. Her breaths escape her mouth in coughs, and her eyes struggle to see, now watering from the effect of the gray smog in the room. She presses her hand near the doors and pushes through them. The double doors swing quickly shut behind her, and she stares out into large flames stretching on the sides of the hallway up to the ceiling. Burning debris fall from the ceiling and her only instinct is to run. So she does, she runs quickly the stickiness on the bottom of her feet, causes her to slip multiple times. Each fall causes bruises to form on her pale white skin.

Finally, after running for what felt like hours, she comes to a door that is undamaged by the flames. She pushes it open, as the flaming debris falls behind her blocking her path from exiting through the same door she came through. Her headache is agonizing, she can feel the pulsating pain rushing through it; she reaches up and touches her forehead lightly with her fingertips. The air in the room is cleaner, and she can breathe without bursting into a coughing fit. She lowers her hand back down by her side and looks around the room cautiously.

There are pods of glass filled with liquid with charts above them and little windows to look through to see whatever is inside these pods. She shivers wondering what kind of madhouse she is in, as she stumbles over to one of the pods. The pod reads: "Experiment S: Severed Shadow" and she peers into the little window. A girl with short black hair is in the pod, her eyes are closed but she looks to be about the same age as the girl looking in.

At first, the girl gasps and looks away from the window quickly. Then something in her instincts makes her look again into the window, and she smiles at the girl inside. But the sleeping girl doesn't smile back, she floats there in a green liquid completely naked, and oxygen mask strapped around her nose and mouth. Her dark hair perfectly straight and short floats in small bits away from her face. The girl can smell the gray smog entering slowly into the room by the ventilation ducts, and quickly she begins to look around for some way to open the pod of the dark haired girl. She doesn't know how to feel, but her instinctive need for companionship tell her she doesn't want this other girl to die, that she would do anything to try to save her. The girl runs over to a dresser with many drawers, and she pulls each one open frantically searching for something she can bust the glass with and finds two items within the dresser drawer:

A black fur jacket in the last drawer and a small rock shaped object that seems too heavy to lift. But the girl lifts it, and then tosses it at the glass pod. Upon impact from the rock shaped object, the glass pod begins to crack. A green liquid spills out of the cracks and onto the floor, making the floor dangerously slick. Then, all at once the glass shatters. Pieces of the glass fall to the outside of the pod, some pieces slip through the vents around the pod, while other pieces cling to the black creases in between the white tiles on the floor. The naked dark haired girl falls forward, and the silver-haired girl catches her. On the dark haired girl's wrist is a bracelet similar to a hospital I.D bracelet that has the word, "Shadow" engraved into it. The silver haired girl suddenly notices the exact type of bracelet on her left wrist, it reads the words, "Fully Operating Xperiment," and then two smaller words are written beneath it, "Alice Fox." Assuming these are their names, Alice the silver haired girl looks down at the dark haired girl she will now call "Shadow" according to the name on the bracelet. Carefully Alice lifts Shadow out of the way of the glass and lays her down in the center of the white tile.

Suddenly realizing both she and Shadow are naked, Alice frantically looks through the drawers again for some type of clothing. This time, more clothes seem to have appeared in the dresser. She stares at the sets of clothing, wondering how they got there when there hadn't been anything in the dresser beside the round rock shaped item and the fur jacket moments before. Her head begins to pulsate with pain, a screeching sound starts to ring in her ears, and she covers them with her hands and falls to the floor. The noise gets louder, and she can feel tears swelling in her eyes.

"Stop it," Alice says softly at first, her eyes now leaking tears down her cheeks.

"STOP IT!!" She screams, almost as if the noise heeds her request, it slowly subsides and softens until finally it is gone. Alice begins to rock back and forth; her mind is still jumbled as bits and pieces of images flash into her mind. A doctor, Strange hooded figures, Purple and green fluids mixing. Then an eerie darkness swallows her up.

"Stop it. Stop it. Stop it." Alice mumbles to herself as she rocks back and forth. She quickly reaches into the drawer grabs both sets of clothes and the black fur jacket. She slips on undergarments first, all the same, eerie color black like the darkness that swallowed her up inside her head. Then she slips on a black sweater type dress that has fur around the neck, the cuffs of the sleeves, at the bottom of the skirt of the dress, and then she slips on a pair of black stockings underneath her dress. Then quickly she slips the black fur jacket which is obviously three sizes bigger than her onto her shoulders.

There is something about the jacket that makes her feel comfortable, it moves swiftly as she carries the other set of clothes toward Shadow who is still lying naked on the cold tile. Not moving. Alice leans in close to Shadows face and she sees that Shadow is breathing her chest is swelling with air and her small nostrils exhaling it back out into the room around them. Alice quickly begins to dress Shadow, first she puts on her dark purple set of undergarments. Then she lifts Shadow's limbs like she is a doll, and slips a deep dark purple-black overlay lace dress onto her body. She zips the back of the dress on Shadow's small delicate back, once she gets the rest of Shadow's stiff doll-like body into it. Alice begins to panic as the gray smog fills the room through the vents at a more rapid pace. She slips the stockings onto Shadow's small legs, and she begins to shake her shoulders.

"Wake up!" Alice cries out to her, as she turns to look over her shoulder at the gray smog heading straight toward them. Then an image flashes into her head, of two different color blood mixing into a puddle on the floor.

Alice quickly lifts a shard of the glass and slices the palm of her hand then she does the same with Shadow's palm. Both of their blood is different colors, Shadow's is a crimson red, but Alice's is a deeper shade of red almost black. She presses her bloody palm against Shadow's, and unnatural light appears between the cupped spaces between the palms of their hands. Then Alice feels a warming soothing sensation in between their palms and pulls her hand away. She watches as the slit on her hand heals abnormally fast, and her eyes widen in shock. She glances to Shadow's palm and her slit has healed too.

What am I? Alice wonders silently to herself, then she see's Shadow open her eyes. Her eyes are dark and they match her hair. Streaks of unnatural bright green surround Shadow's pupil. She rises up and looks at Alice with fear in her eyes. Shadow quickly scoots away from Alice and covers her face with her hands, and begins to shiver. Alice smiles at her and reaches out her hand toward Shadow slowly.

"I do not mean you any harm at all, but we have to hurry and get away from her. Come with me." Alice says softly to her, the blackness within her mind being replaced by fragments of sentence's she had heard someone speak to her in her comatose state on that operating table. She doesn't know what the words mean only that she says things on impulse. Words escape her mouth as her mind shuffles through the fragments of information in her brain. Placing each piece with the piece they connect too, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle falling into place.

Shadow looks wearily up at the girl but takes her hand, and Alice helps her up to her feet as she stands up. Alice holds her hand and leads her down the hallway as they both start to run the black smog fills the room, and seems to follow the two down the hallway. Alice and Shadow reach the end of the hallway, only to find a dead end. The smog surrounds them, and both of them go into coughing fits and their eyes begin to water.

"Help!" Shadow whispers out into the smog, between coughs. Her fingers feeling along the wall for anything that might be an exit, her strength begins to leave her and she collapses on the floor as Alice takes over tracing the walls with her fingertips. She shifts her eyes down to look at Shadow lying next to her, and they instantly become moist with tears.

This is it. This is what it's like to die. Alice's thoughts scream inside her head as she finds it harder to breathe, but with last bit of strength, she begins beating her fist against the wall in front of them. After hitting the wall repeatedly she discovers, it isn't really a wall at all but a glass door made to look identical to the walls around them. Alice wills all her strength into her fists as she beats against the glass harder, but with each hit the wall still remains intact and unaffected by the blows of her fists. Alice glances down at Shadow who lies lifeless on the floor next to her, and a burst of adrenaline shoots through her veins. She looks to Shadow and then pushes herself off the floor where she had been sitting next to Shadow when she collapsed.

"We aren't going to die today. Not here in this awful place." Alice states to Shadow, as she backs away from the wall. Then once she gets enough distance between her and the glass wall she sprints toward it with all of her might, pushing her shoulder forward the glass shatters when her weight and the force she used with her shoulder impacts it. The smog escapes through the shattered wall and seems to be blown away. Alice lies on the ground, the impact she had hit the wall with had caused her to fall forward as it shattered. Alice raises her head up and jagged shards of glass stick to the fur of her coat, as she looks back to where Shadow is lying still inside the hallway, she can feel the blood trickling down the right side of her face as she slowly stands up. Her silver hair is glistening in the sunlight, but she doesn't notice it until she steps back inside the hallway. She carefully lifts Shadow's body in her arms and checks the side of her neck to see if she has a pulse. Alice smiles as she feels a pulse drumming from the place on Shadow's neck where she has her fingers pressed too. Suddenly Shadow's opens her eyes and looks at Alice who immediately steps out of the hallway and lets her down in the grass outside of the hallway, away from the shattered pieces of glass.

Alice and Shadow both gasp, as they stare at the life blooming around them. Their eyes watch as the leaves dance in the wind that is blowing past them, the trees rustle with small creatures running from branch to branch and the golden sun in the sky casts light down on the scene around them and ahead of them illuminating a beautiful horizon full of trees, mountains, and rivers. From where they are sitting they both feel as if they can see the whole world.