Name: Lucius Bask Sex: Male Age: 44 Hair: Black Eyes: Brown. Height: 6'1 Weight: 171 lbs. Occupational status: Active (w/ Honorary Doctorate in Neurology & Masters in Psychology) Employer: H.A.A (The Harlem Asylum Association) Jo, crumpling the piece of paper with the data that Amy had dragged up from her network—a painstaking two more days of waiting—wished that with this information, there had been a picture to go along. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- She resisted against the guards holding her, just enough so it would look normal, like Sei had told her to and for all her troubles she got a tighter squeeze on the arm and a forceful shove. "Get in there. Dammit, she's just a kid and she's already this nuts." "How's Isaac doing?" "His left arms completely dislocated. "Fuckin' kid." "You tellin' me. Lock her ass up and throw away the key." "Shouldn't we let Juvee handle her?" "Naw, they'll send her right back to us. The only thing we can do is wait for Dr. Bask. I ain't goin' in there with no psycho." The two burly guards walked down the echoing hallways, leaving her to stew on the cell bunker and wait for the appropriate time to click on the communication earpiece. "Amy, you read me?" "Loud and clear, Cerise." Jo gave a long-suffering sigh. "Why are you calling me that?" "Because we need code names and I thought it suited you." "How many times did you read that report?" "About ten times. I had to be thorough." "Well whatever." "You can call me Carnation. It's light pink." Jo looked at her earpiece and didn't say much after that as the girl blabbed blueprints and security systems in her ear. Jo switched off the communicator and waited for the doctor to come to her. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "Hey Doc, this ones a whack-job, so be careful around her." "I will." Voices floated from down the hollow corridors, the click of slick and black oxfords echoing of the walls and Jo sat up straight on the moth-eaten bunk mattress she had been lying on. A man with a white doctor's coat peered into the cell, his face obscured by the flickering light bulb, but his eyes, sharp, coal eyes cut straight through the darkness and Jo immediately recognized the stare. It was Mavors! "Hello in there. Why the long face?" He called out and she couldn't understand how this could have happened or why he had a name badge that read "Dr. Lucius Bask." The guard spoke then, moving to open the cell door with his jingly keys, "You'd swear she'd seen a ghost or something." "Silly girl." The doctor said, moving towards her now that bars didn't separate them. "Do you have a death wish?" It was the first thing to come out of her mouth and it was the last thing the guard heard when he walked out of the cell and cracked a smile and told the good doctor that he would be two doors down and packing enough tranquilizers to bring down an elephant if need be. The doctor, ignoring the guard, smiled at her like she'd told him a joke with a bad punch line, "Not particularly. No." He assured her and then he was walking closer. "Where's Meg?" "You're like a broken record." "Where's Meg?" The doctor sighed and moved to the other side of the cell where the sink was located. He washed his hands and dried them off with the edge of his coat. "I'll tell you, but you must promise to be good." "So where's Meg?" "Oh good grief." He laughed a little and Jo could suddenly see the lines around his mouth. In this place, with its gray concrete walls and its bare bulb light, his face looked older, used up, like time had taken him for a dance and then dumped him on some random doorstep. "Young love, is it? I haven't felt that in quite a long time." Why was he suddenly talking to her like this? It was so different from that first time, when he had mocked her and been cruel, withholding information from her that she had desperately needed. What had changed between them? "I see you're not even questioning your good luck with all the open paths before you. To busy following the breadcrumbs." She narrowed her eyes at him in incomprehension. "The Professor knows that you're digging around. He knows someone's been sneaking into his business. I suggest you tell your little hacker friend to quit while she's ahead, or the little dear might find herself in more trouble than she bargained for." He brushed some lint of his black, uniform pants absently like his words were of no consequence despite the warning underneath it. "You really do have a one-track mind, eh? That's the problem with the Angel Prototypes. They stick to one thing and only one thing, while they don't focus on any of the repercussions or the effects their decisions can make. It's almost ironic, they're strong as tens of men, but they have the mental capacity of children. They're too sheltered to understand what actually goes on." What was he talking about? "C'mon, I don't have much time." He opened the cell with a spare key and walked out, she followed behind at a safe distance and when they passed the guard, the man made a squawk of protest. "She'll be good. I'm just going to take her to Juvee now. It's cruel to lock up a youngster in a place like this." ---------------------------------------------------------------------- It had been a two-hour drive and he had talked every minute, of every second of that two-hour span. Jo thought her head was going to explode. "You're the strong and silent type, hmm? I bet girls fall in love with that left and right." He said teasingly and Jo wanted to punch him through the car window. "Ah, why don't you humor this old man, we can't all be heartbreakers, now can we?" This conversation was getting stupider and stupider as time progressed and Jo wasn't sure if she should smash his head against the steering wheel, or her own. "She's very pretty." He said out of the blue and Jo had actually gotten a tick in her eye. "You go for the big-chested ones, don't you?" The tick was steadily turning into a murderous glare. "Oh don't look at me like that. I'm just joshing with you. You really don't have a sense of humor, do you?" Well if he counted her wanting to throw him out of the car and into any nearby pothole then no, she supposed she didn't have a sense of humor. "I pride myself on these father, son moments." Huh? She turned her head in his direction and she noticed he had this small, knowing smile on his face as he abruptly stopped in front of an abandoned hospital. Jo's attention cut back to her surroundings and she immediately got the feeling that this would be the usual landscape for most of the places she would come to visit in NYC. That thought didn't sit too well with her. They'd walked up about three flights of stairs before the doctor opened a door and walked in. There were dusty papers littered all over the floor and more cobwebs than she could poke a stick at. She hoped distractedly that they hadn't kept Meg in a place with cobwebs. Meg hated spiders. A sudden, sharp pang shot through her chest and it was like she was choking on the air in her lungs. "Meg?" She said, turning to Mavors so he could understand that she didn't want to wait. He smiled at her and then pressed a button on the wall. There was an elevator and she could hear it creak as it came up from the pits of wherever it had been submerged. "It's quite new. Don't worry about that noise. It just keeps people from being too nosy." It dinged open and he stepped in easily, Jo following anxiously behind. After a five-minute ride, they'd been let out into a dark room that smelled like unfermented alcohol and wet mold. There was something underlying the other smells, something pungent and Jo could taste it bitterly in the air when she swiped her tongue over her chapped bottom lip. "Oh that's just the type of formaldehyde we use. Strong stuff." He walked briskly to another room, a larger room. It was practically a replica of the room that she'd been trapped in on first meeting Mavors, even down to the beeping noises that came from the large computers caging in the room and making it more compact and blocky, and the sounds of drips from a saline machine. She looked around, her eyes scouring the darkness for a lock of red hair, but there wasn't a trace of it. She felt a sinking feeling in her heart...but she really had no one to blame. The doctor had never told her that Meg would be here...She had just hoped... An ominous-looking glass cylinder tank with black bands on both the top and the bottom stood in the middle of the room. It had immediately caught her attention because it was the only thing that was different from the other room. She moved towards it and the doctor stopped her with a shake of the head. He suddenly switched on the lights and Jo could hear something powering up, like a juiced battery pack. She moved quickly towards the tank, unhearing of the doctor's gestures for her to wait there and stopped to peer through the glass and cloudy liquid that separated her from the contents of the tank. Mavors came to stand next to her and said unexpectedly, "Jo meet Miss Ave Maria, Genocide Angel Prototype number 011." He said this without even blinking his eyes as he continued to look straight ahead at the tank. Jo's felt a sharp twinge in her chest, like someone was pinching the muscle between fingernails. She recognized this face... Even if that face didn't have a body attached to it anymore, wires dangling out of the meeting place of a neck, so many wires that the throat was practically invisible and the sides of the tank were meshed in it like seed weed. "You remember meeting her a short while ago, don't you? This was...that girl. The one who had followed her into that other dimension and had attacked her with a Cybot. The one who had talked to her, threatened her, urged her and... It was all such a blur... "Maria had escaped to come after you. She wasn't supposed to seek you out yet and apparently that was the sealing nail in her coffin. This is what happens when the people in charge can't control a suject anymore. They string you up like a Christmas tree and study you until they can't preserve anymore." Jo placed her hands on the glass, peered deeper into the murky water that was now the resting place for this person who had confused and angered her those months ago. "I don't think you should stand so close." Mavors warned and she had looked away for a brief second before turning back and feeling like her heart had caved into her chest. The head had its eyes opened now, fusia pink eyes that didn't blink and looked like they were very close to becoming detached from the retinas. A voice hit her in the back of the head, like a block of ice. A familiar draining voice that she had recognized as the one from a few weeks ago when her terror had started. "How's it been Jo?" "You!" Mavors moved in to intercept her when she'd pointed her heavy guns at the tank. "Calm down. She's not really the one to blame for this, so put that damn thing away." Mavors told her and for some reason, she didn't know why, but she had actually listened. There was something about his voice and his expression that was familiar and it quieted her. She turned her naked and raw gaze on him, "Then who is to blame?" "Me and about two dozen other scientists who've been working steadily on this project for the last ten years." "Explain." She curtly said and the irritation in her voice had come back. He nodded once, went over to a desk and opened the top drawer with a key from his pocket. He tossed a manila folder at her. "Open that up." And she did. She was suddenly staring into a face she had never seen before, but immediately recognized by the striking similarity to her own. It was a picture of her from when she was younger. "What is this?" She looked at him beseechingly because her past was always an unknown to her and for it to be so suddenly thrust into her face like this was unsettling. "You've always felt different, haven't you?" He asked, like she had given him some hint to this feeling. She said nothing, but it was painfully obvious it was true. "There's a reason for that." He said almost noncommittally. "There's a reason for all of this. You've read about it in my journal, all the reports. What do you think all those things mean. You were apart of that project..." "Hehehehe." Jo, despite the doctor's words pulled her gaze away from him and turned towards the tank. "Isn't is lovely? You're one of us. A failed experiment, or soon to be. They've found you, they've been asking a lot of questions about you and I had to give them the answers, I had to tell them where you lived, what you were thinking, what you were dreaming about..." "Shut up." It wasn't yelled but given under her breath, a plea. She turned to the doctor. "Is that true?" He looked at her strangely and then told her, "I can't hear the conversations that go on between you and Maria without the machines behind me turned on." Jo looked at him, and then realized he was telling the truth. He explained, "When we were going through the basics of the project, it was decided on that the Angels would be given the ability to keep in contact with each other via a mental link. However all the experiments for such a telepathic link failed. Only three out of the many girls could utilize such a link." He pointed at her, he pointed at the tank containing the remains of Maria, and he pointed at the folder in Jo's hands, the one with the countless bios and statistic charts on each girl that was born into the project. "You remember Larva, don't you Jo? She had a weaker mental link up with you, but she was still able to track you down." Jo looked on in horror as this man recounted in detail things that even she did not understand about her life, but were now starting to make sense to her as he continued. "They've been using this link between you and Maria to track you down. They've been tracking since Maria came into contact with you months ago." "Why?" And her voice had come out sounding sad and defeated. For what purposes would someone go through all this trouble to track her, to take away the thing that mattered most to her, to make her so utterly miserable that she contemplated taking a gun to her head and blasting a hole through it. "They want a new martyr." He said cryptically and then he was writing down something hurriedly on a piece of paper. "Here." He thrust it at her forcefully and said, "Take it. It's what you've been searching for all this time." She didn't understand why this man would help her like this. She didn't understand what was going on and suddenly the electrical crack of her eyepiece was buzzing and she picked it up and answered, "Cerise here." Amy was telling her to come back, because there was a major signal disturbance and they wouldn't be able to hold communication for long if that happened. "On my way." She said and she was tucking the earpiece back into her shirt and looking at the doctor. He had a surprised look on his face and she tried to not be affected by it. "Cerise." He said and she couldn't tell if it was a question or just the simple pronunciation of the code name. "Your...code name?" He asked strangely and she nodded her head. She answered "yeah" and she didn't know why she was answering his question, or even continuing, "It was in the file I stole at Collis Quirinalis Laboratory." "Of course." He said and his eyes were glazed over. "Yeah." She said again because this was getting kind of awkward and she usually never felt this way. "Do you like it?" And Jo hadn't been expecting a question like that to come out of nowhere and hit her on the side of the head. "I don't hate it." She answered truthfully. He smiled then, something dried up and small, but concrete and he waved her off. "Alright then." ---------------------------------------------------------------------- A/n: Jo doesn't know that she's 013 so therefore she's not going to know that her father is actually Mavors/Lucius Bask. I wished they'd showed us who Jo's biological parents were in the anime because she had to come from somewhere, even though they were born in test tubes. There had to be the donors. Also, I made up the whole 013 and 011 numbers for the project, because I liked these better and I thought 013 would symbolize how unlucky Jo was. I had fun with the dialogue btw. Mavors and Jo and I hope nobody gets offended by the father, son comment. (All in fun) The character of Mavors just likes to be vague and off-balancing and sarcastic. Anyway, I'm still continuing with this story, despite confused readers (Sorry) and it won't be long now, until it's all over. I hope you can put up with me until the end.
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