Member
Master EffeX
Half Pint
Lemons
Sep
Eviledd1984
AlteredTundra
Master Bruce
Izurich
Simple Unicycle
Damycles
N O M A D
Steve took a reluctant step toward the floating liquid silver. It didn't look like something he should touch, let alone walk into. First time didn't kill him, though, so why should the second? His stomach churned, and he was back at Camp Lehigh, stepping off a C-47. Man was not meant to fly. Inhale, exhale. Don't hold your breath or you'll lose it. Striding forward, he shut his eyes, and let the silver whisk him away across time and space. Just like the red fella said: Once more unto the breach.
Then his boot hit concrete. An alarm droned overhead with eerie familiarity. Fast as he could blink the shield slipped from across his back and the pistol leapt from its holster on his hip. After so many years, checking their surroundings for danger was less of a deliberate choice and more of a natural function of his body. There was an eerie familiarity to their surroundings: hard angles, reinforced concrete and not a window in sight. It was a bunker on the Atlantic Wall blown up by a hundred factors. It was a HYDRA research facility built into the Swiss Alps. Places like this were designed for bloodshed rather than human habitation. The architecture itself was wrong. Hostile.
"I'm assuming by predator you don't just mean a lion or, I don't know, a big crocodile."
The kid wanted to lead the way. Rogers felt something seize in his chest. It was pretty obvious he wasn't your average ankle-biter, what with the flying and supernatural senses, but it wasn't a logic thing. It was a visceral, gut reaction to seeing a child thrust in this position. Rogers took in a gulp, like physically swallowing would somehow help him cope with the cognitive dissonance of it all. This wasn't home. Things were different here, and he'd have to accept that.
Continuing on in formation they arrived at a heavily reinforced door blocking their way to 'SECURITY.' That was promising. He was readying himself to try to pry it open when the Martian stepped forward and kept stepping even as she hit solid steel. It was hard to contain his surprise. There was no containing his jump when the whole damned door came tearing outta its frame like it was made of notebook paper. "Would it kill you for a warning next time?"
Going through that door was like stepping onto the set of a Twilight Zone episode, or a panel in a Flash Gordon comic strip. There was a massive bank of two dozen screens stretching from wall to wall along one side. They were far more advanced than anything he'd encountered back on earth, even the bleeding edge tech of 1960. He gave a whistle of astonishment. Fascinating as this all was, a question itched at the back of his mind: if this really is a lockdown then why is the security station unmanned? Maybe they knew Rogers and his people were coming this way and made a quick escape, but that felt a weak explanation. This would be a hardpoint in the facility's defenses with few exceptions. And there was the matter of the monitoring feeds in front of him as well: as far as they showed this entire place was devoid of anything or anyone, save for the five of them. Something else was going on.
He leaned his shield against the lone console and holstered his pistol.
'Why's future tech gotta have no buttons,' he wondered to himself, staring like a slack-jawed moron at the buttonless slab in front of him. Anyone from a timeline closer to this one was busying themselves with other work: namely, Flash and Martian were off scouring the rest of the facility, leaving the cowboy, the weird boy and him alone to sleuth. Detective novels were never his thing. He'd always been more of a superheroes and Sci-Fi guy. This was way outside his comfort zone.
But if Flash Gordon taught him anything...
Steve Rogers cleared his throat, "Computer," he began in a commanding voice, "Access camera feeds."
Nothing happened. Did it require a specific input before coming on? That was a common enough trope. "Uh, this is...Jim Harper, computer."
Still nothing. A rush of embarrassment hit him, as he hadn't the foggiest idea what in the hell he was doing. Moving on quick as he could, he examined the podium more closely. It turned out to be some kind of...keyless keyboard, with the shapes of buttons drawn on the surface- another piece that looked like a movie prop. May as well give it a go, though.
He placed a finger against the surface and lo and behold it actually worked. One of the monitors switched its feeds! Excited by the discovery, he began pressing the other buttons in consecutive order, soon discovering that the grid on the keyless keyboard matched the grid of screens, and each screen could be rotated through a set number of camera feeds. An ingenious piece of technology, really- and the security cameras in this timeline looked better than a feature film in his.
There were more empty hallways, the interiors of offices nobody had bothered to clean up after a shift, a break room with an untouched pot of coffee on the counter. Then another shifted, and Rogers saw an exterior camera for the first time. The background was dominated by a mountain and what looked like desert or arid grassland, and there was a tunnel dug into the side- the entrance to this very facility, he guessed. And there were people around. Dozens of emergency and military vehicles surrounding barricades erected around the tunnel entrance, soldiers set up in defensive positions, and all sorts of scientists and business-types milling around.
"I feel like I've seen this place before." He wondered aloud, digging through decades of memories. A photograph he'd pulled out of a file cabinet. He'd broken into an Air Force colonel's office to gather intel for the resistance. It was a joint project with HYDRA to build complexes in the heart of mountains across the States to protect from nuclear attack- the Nazis were paranoid the Japanese would nuke them all to hell and take the whole world with them. Was this...Bare Mountain? No, that was New England. This was the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado! Construction wasn't even underway back on his world, but they'd picked the spot, and he'd seen nearly that exact patch of land in a photograph from...God, how long had it been? Time on that prison planet was hard to track.
Still mulling over that revelation he kept moving through the different camera feeds, worried more and more by what he was seeing. There was a meeting room with all the chairs and the table stacked against a heavily reinforced door that looked like it'd been bent near to the point of snapping from its hinges. Many of the feeds were cut off, like the cameras they were coming from were just gone. And there were finally signs of violence. Small, dark stains from what could only be blood on a carpet. A human hand print pressed against a wall, staining it crimson.
Then there was the cafeteria.
"Good God..."
The cafeteria was drowned in a sea of red. It was smeared across tables, on the counters, the floor and the walls, like somebody had taken hundreds of cans of paint and dumped them from the ceiling. Trails of the stuff led off in every direction: maybe they were from bodies being dragged or the wounded trying to flee, it was impossible to tell. Sickening as the scene was, there was also a profound strangeness to it. Where were all the bodies? This much blood would've came from...God, he couldn't possibly tell how many people. But there wasn't a single corpse left behind. No viscera, either. It was literally just a sea of blood.
"Hey! You need to see this." He barked back over his shoulder at Hex and Six. "There's something out there and its killed everybody in here, we got to- Lord, and those two went out on their own! Damn it all." His chest felt like it was being pulled apart at the seams. Have to breathe, recenter. His people needed him. Some truly wicked thing had descended upon this place and they'd come stumbling right into the center of it. "We need to find some way to warn 'em what's coming their way before its too late."
