A Bio-Weapon’s Rhapsody

As it turns out, they didn't wake up. Neither big sister or Golem… Or what was left of Golem anyway.

Big Sister was floating inside one of the capsules similar to the ones Ale had used before, apparently Ale was also about to be loaded into one capsule, they were only waiting to ensure that there was nothing wrong with her body when Alexanders called in to check.

If not for what, Ale would have ended up being loaded into a capsule and being sent back to Aquila like that.

"When are we departing?" Ale asked as she placed a hand atop the capsule of Big Sister, the older girl was sleeping so peacefully, as Alexanders had claimed, she could not see any evidence of the wounds that she had suffered in the attack.

"We have already left, it has been around an hour since we left the American continent, we are currently cruising above the Atlantic ocean. Thing is… Are you planning to wake Miss Bella? If so I can wait to give the full explanation when she is awake." The man who was called a Taxi driver asked, "This information will be important, should Lady Bella be awake, I can start the wake up protocol, we still have around two to three hours of time."

Three hours? It has been an hour since we left the American continental mass, so around an hour of cruising speed above the Atlantic ocean… What was supposed to happen two to three hours of cruising speed? If Ale's calculations were accurate, they would need between eight to ten hours to get to their destination, three to five hours of travel at cruising speed wasn't enough.

Not unless they planned to climb higher? But she didn't think this plane was built up for that kind of travel.

Main Core, do you know anything about it? Is there anything marked on the flight plan? Or on the database of the plane? Ale decided to ask Main Core, if something was afoot, they probably could pluck the data out from the database.

Nothing on the flight plan or any mention about a change of plans. Main Core answered within the second, There are some warnings and the plane has some subroutines to activate around the time you specified, mostly are self defense protocol and the activation of weaponry on the plane to fight any invasion.

…Huh?

Now that Main Core was mentioning that, Ale was accompanied by fighter jets as bodyguards when coming back from Aquila hadn't she?

"Is it about a possible fight?" Ale decided to ask the taxi driv… Ale decided to ask the pilot.

"That is correct, while this plane was charted under the name of a student transportation plane, it still took off without waiting for confirmation from the control tower, and it is under the umbrella of the Saintsworths family. With a Saintsworths Clansmen as pilot…" The pilot said scratching the back of his head, "Albeit a low grade one, but that still makes it easy to guess the type of people that are on the plane. Even like that I am one of the taxi drivers to Alexanders."

…One of the drivers… One of… meaning there was more than one poor soul whose fate was to drive around Alexanders… Ale couldn't help but sigh.

"Wake up Big Sister." Ale said placing a hand on the capsule, "Main Core, ensure everything goes all right."

Of course, Ale was not speaking to the pilot, instead she had given the order to Main Core. And sure enough, a pulse of Mana was emitted from her hand into the machine. The full schematic of the device flashing on her mind's eye. Ale had never seen one of these things before.

Well, that could come in handy at a later date. Ale would ignore it for now though, instead she focused on reading all the information that Main Core was transmitting her way, there were some interesting data that had been collected out of Big Sister. And not all was needed for the device to work, worryingly enough, some of that data seemed to be more… sensitive than it had any right to be.

The device had basically mapped out Big Sister's body and stored the readings out, it was ready to send a short burst data packet with all the data, Ale was quite concerned about it, more so since the target of said information was not a a Saintsworths address as far as she could guess. For now, Ale decided to block the data transmission and erased all the data, just in case she stored a copy on her own personal memory banks for later use, in case that was indeed something they would need.

She did, however, send an inquiry to the Saintsworths server asking what kind of data these things took and what they did with it. Ale was not expecting them to answer seriously, but just in case she edited the header of her inquiry and made sure it went straight to the top. To the purple woman.

Wonder how that one would answer to this, she did not want to think the worst of the Saintsworths, or well, not of Alexanders, since the man seemed genuinely worried about her, which was… weird. More so after their first interactions, the man had been more… normal, for the sake of finding a way to describe how he had acted. Which was funny on its own, since no one would describe Alexanders Saintsworths as a normal person. Not with the amount of shenanigans the man had going on the internet, be it by gossip websites or video recordings.

Starting wake up protocol, please clear the area.

The message from Main Core pulled Ale out of her reverie so she removed her hand and weirdly enough, felt the connection to the device still going strong.

"Huh?" Meanwhile the pilot at her side was panicking as he messed around with his own terminal, probably wondering why the device was not answering to his queries, if Ale was to guess.

Not that Ale would worry about that, she made sure that particular terminal would need to go through her first if it wanted to do anything on the plane. At least for now anyway.

"Wakey wakey~" Ale said with a smile on her face as the capsule's door started to open and the device slowly moved upwards, letting Big Sister rest almost as if she had been standing up all this time.

The device didn't fully let go of Big Sister though, she was still being held down by some straps that took hold of her and didn't fully let go, but her hands were free, so she could very easily release herself, Ale didn't move forward and instead waited for her to fully come into her own. She wasn't sure how she would react, her last memory should be of her being thrown against the floor after all. That surely couldn't be a happy memory, and the last thing that Ale wanted was for her to lash out with her Core and end up teleporting god knows where.

To her surprise, the first thing that Big Sister did was neither lash out or ask where she was, instead the first signs of her awareness returning was the fact that a mana pulse came out of her body, it was the same as always. A pulse of Space aspected Mana that probed her surroundings, after that single pulse of mana, Big sister opened her eyes and groaned.

Even t hough she already knew what the situation was and where they stood, she still seemed half relieved and half annoyed.

"Great… A Medi-pod… Just perfect, what I needed…" Big Sister continued complained as she started to unstrap herself from the thing, all with measured movements as if she already knew what she needed to do and in which order she needed to use the buttons on the inside of the pod to fully release herself. "Please tell me we at least managed to get a good one on them?"

Big Sister wasn't that bad, she even went as far as to look around and frown when she saw the pilot and Ale, but seemed to be looking for something else.

"Where is Golem?" Big Sister said confused, "Last I saw was a pile of rubble falling as the wall came crashing on us… Actually what was what?"

"That…" Ale sighed as she herself went through her own memories, which came in the way as a projection within her mind's eye thanks to Main Core, the image of the barrage of bolter rounds destroying the wall and golem coming to the forefront of her memories, that was not something she wanted to see again, ever. "Take us to see him."

Ale instead turned to the pilot, trying to keep her expression as neutral as possible, even though Main Core had already given her a visual feed of the room where Golem was currently set up.

"As you wish Lady Ale." The pilot answered and turned to the door, "I will give you a few minutes with Mister Eduardo, but then I do need your input."

With that said, they moved out of the room and walked a few seconds to the back of the plane, it looked more like a cargo loading area than a room set up for a wounded person, soon enough the answer as to why it was like that was put in front of them.

In the center of the room was a single capsule with a brown sphere floating, it was… closer to a sphere made out of dirt and some minerals growing on it than anything else Ale could think, it did not look like what she remembered when they had first proved Golem's Core. That time it looked more like a purple sphere surrounded by the metaphysical representation of Golem's Body.

This time? That was closer to a dirt ball than anything. And worse of all, Ale could see it, her sensors made sure she was aware of it, that sphere of dirt was alive, to her sensors it radiated Mana as it took it in, and ever so slowly, it was building itself. It slowly took something out of the liquid it was suspended in and grew from it.

"Main Core… How is he?" Ale said as she raised her hand and touched the pod, the design of this one was similar to the capsule that Big Sister had been in, but there was some weird aspects of it.

Evidence is inconclusive. Main Core answered, this time it seemed… annoyed, I think they are alive, if you can call it like that Mistress. The Core seems responsive, but we can't interface, I found out what is it that they are taking from the substance though. They are taking in the microfragments of dirt and minerals in the solution and using those to build itself up. At the speed they are moving they should have their full body in another 200 years.

"Oh goddess…" Big Sister gasped from behind, "… What did they do… Is… is he okay?"

"Alexanders said that they could provide a body for him when we landed." Ale said sighing, "From what I could gather, it is a coin flip to see if the body would fit, or if they would even get to keep their powers. I was hoping that we could communicate with Golem and see… But I can't connect to him… Shocker… I don't know why…"

Why had Ale thought they would be able to talk to him?

Something had changed, on a more basic level, and that something was what made her think this would work, she had forgotten, it hadn't been an issue yet after all, but these means of achieving things were more of a thing that Alexa did naturally, and since her connection to Alexa had changed, this too, was something that had changed.

Ale should have known, it was part of the reason why she had wanted to test this after all, when she was more intrinsically close to Alexa, nothing ever failed, all always one way or another made sense, it all ended up working up as normal.

"What do we do?" Big Sister said turning to Ale, she too seemed quite impacted by the scene.

"I can think of a few things to work around," Ale said removing her hand from the pod, "Alexanders made it sound like he could get him into a new body, that is one. I told him that we would think about it, and if needed we would work ourselves into getting what was needed, he didn't say anything. So it should be something we can achieve…"

And third… Ale could just check on with Alexa, if this was as how she guessed, then their power was more complex than she had ever given it any credit, from the start Ale had always thought that their power was based on the Nanites, the ability to re structure the base materials and create/modify things as they went.

But that didn't explain a few of the things that they had done, and Elder seemed to think so to. The more Ale separated herself from that, the more obvious it became.

"Lady Ale? Miss Bella?" The Pilot knocked on the door as he walked in, "May I have a minute?"

"What?" Big Sister said with a frown, "My name is not Bella but Skye. Skye Venti."

Ale had not even processed that they were calling her that, more things she did not have time to worry and deal with.

"We are about to enter the dangerous part of the travel, as I told Lady Ale briefly before." The Pilot said pulling out a tablet and showing a map with some red areas highlighted, "As thus I would like to know what do you want to do, or how do you wish to proceed."

The tablet also had some of the options that the pilot could give them. "Glide part of the way and only turn on the engine to keep altitude and in case of detection… Fly higher… fly lower… go in gun blazing… Do nothing… really?" Big Sister said aloud as she read the options.

Ale was also not happy with the options, none were… quite what she wanted, and while in most situations she wouldn't mind what they ended up doing ,right now was not one of those times.

"What will happen to Golem if we crash?" Ale asked pointing at the pod, "How long can he survive outside that?"

"He should be able to keep cohesion for sometime outside the pod." The Pilot answered, "But I am not a scientist or a specialist in the topic, when we picked you up according to your instructions, the Core was moving itself towards some of the debris around, we picked those up and will deliver them for study in Aquila. But if we crashed the plan into the ocean… there is no telling if he will keep cohesion under the ocean."

He was moving towards debris?

Ale scanned the area around with her sensors and didn't found anything that was particularly special according to the readings she was getting. But what was he moving towards?

"What do you think Ale?" Big Sister said turning to her, "I could teleport us back to Ohio… See if Billy can do something about Ed… Or worst case scenario we deal with whatever comes our way. Between the two of us we should be able to keep the plane safe…"

Both options were tempting, but Ale was thinking about a third option, something she hadn't thought she would need to use, but something that was an option nonetheless.

"I can't believe this is my only option…" Ale sighed as she closed her eyes and thought about what she was about to do, "But this is stupid enough that it just may work…"

Ale would pick up another phrase out of Alexa's dictionary and she couldn't help but smile as she made sure to check her reserves would hold for this. It was, as they say… Time to boogey.