"Aww, bummer. Maybe another day," Emma smiled. "Cause that sounds super delicious. Maybe we should just get Mediterranean, I know this city's full of those."
She checked her watch. "We've still got time before the massage. It's always nice not having to rush while eating. I wonder if Flora and Yurei are eating right now."
--------------------------------------
Flora was marched roughly down the hallway, the guards not even giving her time to make eye contact with anyone walking by.
"Flora?" asked Nash, a human test subject heading for the Circulatory lab. "What's going on?"
"I'm not sure, I--" she started, but the guard elbowed her roughly in the side. "No talking, no slowing down," he informed bruskly.
Finally they herded her into the brig and threw her into the first available cell. Flora took several seconds to catch her breath, and only once they'd assumed guard positions outside the brig entrance did she timidly stagger to her feet. Shivering in the drafty cellblock air, Flora debated the merits of once again asking for something of an explanation, before a fiery-haired raccoon scientist named Cherlins suddenly marched into the brig. "You've got a lot of explaining to do!" he snapped, rattling her cage bars and sending her leaping backwards in alarm.
"I will! I'll tell you whatever, I promise!" Flora stammered. “Just tell me what about!”
“You thought you’d deleted the security footage,” he leered. “And nobody would discover that
you were the one who freed Experiment L1F3.” He smiled grimly when realization played across her face. “But one of the new test subjects can restore damaged film, and now we’ve got it on video.”
Oh crap… Flora gulped. “I, um…” She took a deep breath. “Okay, yeah, I may have done that…” Her eyes widened and she raised her hands quickly when he drew a silver-barreled taser. “Whoa don’t shoot! I’m sorry!”
“Not yet you’re not!” Cherlins snarled. “Why? Why did you jailbreak the most dangerous experiment Sartonic has ever held? Do you have any idea how valuable she was?”
“Yes, yes, I know…” Flora couldn’t keep her heartrate in check. “I broke all the rules, I don’t really have any excuses. I just thought the way we were treating her was inhumane.”
"We're not paying you to think..." Cherlins growled. “Tell me
everything from the moment the two of you left Sartonic, or you die right here, right now.”
“We escaped over the west courtyard wall,” Flora confessed, eyes still locked onto the taser barrel. “We were gonna head deeper into the desert, she promised to take me with her. We headed directly away from the city, hiked for a day. You should be able to follow our path, she kept growing flowers and stuff everywhere she stepped. That night, we slept on some sand dunes, and when I woke up in the morning she was gone.” Flora felt her face redden remembering how L1F3 had abandoned her. “So...I just came back. Pretended I’d spent all that time in my room.”
Cherlins had grown beet red himself. “You are so goddamn stupid!” he screamed in frustration. “We could have furthered humanity and gotten rich at the same time. She could have given us the cure for aging!”
“She wasn’t going to give you anything!” Flora snapped back. “We both know that. You were just going to end up killing her.”
“I guess we’ll never know…” Cherlins shot her in the crotch. Flora’s eyes widened and she screamed as she collapsed to the floor, losing control of all her muscles. “Unfortunately Van Der Merwe says we can’t kill you yet, so we’re just going to leave you here for now.” He didn’t bother to hide the threat in his tone as he deactivated the taser and left her crying and spasming erratically in the fetal position. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”
Gnashing his teeth furiously, he stomped out of the brig.