06-29-2015, 01:03 PM
From somewhere in an adjacent room, Shang heard a low moan. More than being scary, it sounded depressing, as if someone was lying in a pool of their own blood as they made the noise. With the way he’d come now a steel wall, the sorcerer knew that the only path out would be to delve deeper into the installation. Even with that knowledge, it didn’t make him any more willing to exit the pseudo-safety of the laboratory-turned-crimescene.
Reaching down to his side, the sorcerer retrieved the handgun, checked to ensure the clip was loaded, and slid the weapon back into its holster. The less he had to rely on his actual powers, the better off he would be in the long run. As he pushed off the desk, Shang’s eyes caught something in one of the many refrigerated storage units that ran alongside the walls of the lab. Beneath the dirt, dust, and dried blood, he spotted something just barely illuminated in the dying white light of storage. The sorcerer walked over to the case and wiped away some of the grime with his sleeve to reveal a glass tube that contained a double helix of green fluid.
When more examination revealed the case was otherwise empty, Shang grabbed the handle and wrenched open the storage unit. He recognized the substance from the security feeds. It was the same stuff they’d been testing on the rabbits prior to the outbreak that ultimately consumed this facility.
“T-Virus,” Shang muttered as he reached in and removed the glass tube from the rack. While the tube had metal caps on both ends, he wasn’t trusting the glass itself to hold up to any scrutiny. Fortunately for the sorcerer, he spotted some metal containers that would slid over the large vial. With a grin, he grabbed one and slid the green virus inside. “I’m sure you’ll be of some use,” he muttered as he slid the metal capsule into his satchel.
Turning his focus back to the exit, he grabbed the pistol and walked over to the door. Although it seemed like most of the facility was running on emergency power, there was still enough juice to open the door’s pneumatic mechanism. The machinery rattled as the door slid up into the wall, revealing a corridor stained with blood and marred with claw marks and bullet holes. Shang stepped forward and poked the gun’s muzzle against the blood to verify that it was dried, and after that, he continued down the steel hallway.
The sorcerer traversed the corridor, his leather boots the only sound beside the faint hum of machinery. At the other end, he pressed another switch and stepped back as the door slid up and into the ceiling. All at once, a grotesque stench flooded through the open door. Shang, who had seen a lot in his many years, found himself gagging a little as he stumbled into what had once been some sort of a mess hall. His eyes immediately found the source of the odor--in the far corner of the room, some sort of tank had ruptured long ago. While it looked like only a type of water tank, the water had found a stack of corpses piled up in the room and turned them into a moist, fetid mass of pestilence and decay.
Shang had no problem with burning corpses… he’d smelled plenty during the Boxer Rebellion and during a stint in Germany in the 1940s, but the odor exuded by water-logged bodies was something far more unpleasant. Making sure that nothing was going to jump out at him, the sorcerer jogged across the mess hall toward the pair of double-doors on the other side. Moving shoulder-first through the exit, he made it a few more steps before he slipped in the nearly knee-deep water and fell onto his backside. In a panic, his hands went to the package in his bag, which remained undamaged.
Rising to his feet, Shang grimaced as he spotted a nearby door. He made his way through the water, which sloshed around his boots before he managed to smack open the metal door and slip into the little side-lab. It took him only a moment to see that someone was sitting in the old office chair in front of him. Although they weren’t facing him, Shang saw the back of their head peeking up over the chair.
“Hello,” the sorcerer muttered as he slid the door shut and glanced back into the hallway to make sure his sounds hadn’t attracted anything. Turning back around, he saw that the person hadn’t moved or turned to look at him. “Excuse me,” Shang added as he stepped forward. As he came in line with the person, he caught a whiff of the stench and quickly realized that he was looking at a seated corpse. Not just any dead body, but one with a knife plunged through its chest.
Leaning forward, Shang grabbed the knife by the handle and pulled it out of the decomposing flesh. The sorcerer, holding the weapon by the base of the blade, brought it up to his face and glanced at the strange runes etched into a handle that seemed to be a tusk or bone of some sort. The main image was that of a trio of circles contained within a ring filled with runic letters and an eyeball. As the sorcerer looked at the weapon, it seemed to radiate a faint heat, and the images gave off a faint red hue.
Without a second thought, Shang tucked the dagger into his belt and turned back toward the door. The little room had no other exits, which meant he’d have to continue his path into the installation if he intended to find an escape. WIth the gun in his hand, he twisted the doorknob and leaned into the door. Once back in the hall, Shang squinted and started slowly down toward the end. He made it a few feet before something nudged his ankle, causing him to wrench his foot away and aim the gun at the water. It was then that he saw the corpse slowly drifting passed him.
“At least they’re not walking,” Shang mumbled beneath his breath as he made his way down the corridor until he reached another door. Unlike the rest, this one had been ripped off its tracks after being scraped and pounded into oblivion. With the water still drowning his knee caps, Shang maneuvered around the fallen door and glanced into the new room, which was some sort of generator room. Dominated by a large piece of machinery that had long since stopped functioning, the rest of the room was a network of tubes and pipes that fed up into the ceiling and into the various vents and other slits in the walls.
Shang scowled as he waded forward, his eyes scanning for an exit from the power room. High overhead, parts of the generator were sparking, but there didn’t seem to be any danger of the machine falling down into the water.
Somewhere on the other side of the generator, Shang heard a barely functioning pneumatic door shamble up along its tracks. The sorcerer stopped dead in his tracks as he heard the sound of heavy boots smack down through water against steel. Scowling, he crept closer to the central generator and fell silent as the footsteps circled around the machine. The lights in the room left much to be desired, but it was enough for him to see as he lifted the gun and waited. The moment he saw the dull glint, he squeezed the trigger.
WIth a ping, the bullet hit a shoulder guard made of enchanted plate mail and deflected away, lodging itself into the wall after ricocheting off toward the ceiling. The armored man let out a grunt as he stumbled backwards and slumped against a wall of dead machines, his free hand reaching to ensure his pauldron hadn’t been compromised.
“Sorcerer?!” Argento declared after his eyes found Shang, who furrowed his brow at the sight of the paladin so deep in the installation.
“What… How did you get here?” Shang inquired, still holding up the gun.
“I was directed to the hospital by a young woman in military attire, and then a shabby-looking youth pointed me in the direction of the elevator. You haven’t responded to my attempts to hail you with the voice box.”
Shang glanced down at the walkie-talkie and scowled as he used his free hand to remove it from his belt. A glimpse showed that it had been turned off at some point, perhaps when he fell or during one of his earlier scuffles in the hospital. The sorcerer twisted the knob and slid it back onto his belt as he turned his attention back to the paladin. “How long have you been down here? Where’s this elevator you took?”
Argento shook his head. “It’s a few corridors back, but it’s not there any longer, my friend.”
“Vanished? Turned into a wall?”
“How did you know?” The paladin asked, his own brow creasing as he glanced around the generator room.
“This place plays tricks with the mind, Paladin,” Shang said as he tapped the gun against his own temple. “Have you run into anyone else? Alive or dead?”
The other man shook his head. “Just a lot of fallen men and the scenes of great wars fought here in the recent past. Do you know what befell this installation?”
“Some sort of virus outbreak,” Shang responded as he motioned toward a door on an elevated platform over their heads. “To put it simple… it turns people into zombies.” Without needing to convey instructions, the two men proceeded to help one another up onto the platform. Shang hoisted the heavier, armor clad man up first and was then hoisted up next to his ‘comrade.’
“That is a shame,” Argento declared as he tried the door. When it failed to open, he bashed it open with his shoulder before turning to face his companion. “There’s some foul sorcery afoot here, if you’ll pardon my use of the term.”
“No magic. It’s just science,” Shang corrected as the two made their way down another corridor. “We need to find a map of some sort… it’s the only way to find an exit from this infernal place.”
“I fear the only exit will be from this verse entirely,” Argento spoke, causing the sorcerer to stop and glance at him. “Do you not think we are here for a reason? Certainly there must be some preordained reason why the malicious forces in this town corralled us into the hospital and then down into this crypt.” The paladin placed a hand upon the other man’s shoulder. “It’s what we came here for, Shang. The path to Omni.”
The sorcerer furrowed his brow but suppressed an urge to laugh in the man’s face. Did the paladin really believe they were here for some ordained purpose? Was he truly that delusional? “Then let’s press onward, Argento.”
In silence, the two made their way into a giant, well-lit laboratory. As the door clicked shut behind them, they both found themselves staring across a sea of shattered containment cells. that lined the walls and a central aisle. At the far end, there was one undamaged cell that loomed high over both men as they approached it.
“In the name of the Sun,” Argento muttered aloud as Shang and he walked around the central aisle toward the back of the room. Within the ten foot tube stood something that could have once been a normal human being, but whatever experiments had been performed upon it had turned it into something altogether different. The sexless being bobbed around in whatever cyan fluid filled the tube. A large organ on its chest, fed by large fleshly tubes, beat slowly, resembling some sort of external heart.
Aside from handfuls of scars, boils, and various signs of surgeries performed in the past, the creature’s flesh was pallid and almost sickly. Instead of a left hand, the creature had three massive clawed digits. While its eyes were closed, its gums were missing, so it had a permanent and garrish grin upon its bald cranium.
“What is that?” Argento muttered as the pair approached the computer terminal and various machinery at the base of the containment tube. “Is it human?” He asked as he turned to the sorcerer for answers.
“I’m not sure,” Shang muttered as he joined the paladin in front of the terminal. “Some sort of living weapon, I’d wager. It seems they were researching these types of things at this facility.”
“Despicable,” the paladin spat as he looked up at the inert creature. “Is it alive?” When he received a nod in response, he scowled. “Is there any way to put it out of its misery? No one deserves such a fate as this,” he spoke as he clenched his gauntleted fist around his hammer.
Shang lifted a hand to stop the paladin from doing anything too hasty. “There might be controls that will cut off whatever life support it is receiving… let me see.” The sorcerer’s associate nodded his head and walked away to examine the rest of the room for any signs of an exit or another path to take. Now alone with the computer, Shang leaned over the terminal and started to sift through the options. His options weren’t that bountiful, as the operating system had no GUI and was little more than an advanced version of MS-DOS. Most of the information on the screen was computer jargon, but it did state the creature’s name: Tyrant-003. After trying a few generic lines, Shang scowled and leaned away from the machine, but as he did, a new command prompt flashed onto the screen.
The only way through the Darkness is to leap headfirst. Execute? Y/N?
The sorcerer took a step closer and looked up at the eight foot monster inside the tube. His eyes then fell back to the terminal. With a frown, he found the Y button and mashed it down, which prompted a few hundred lines of code to rush passed the green computer screen as a series of beeps came from the nearby machinery.
“Were you successful?” Argento declared as he jogged over and smacked a hand against Shang’s shoulder. When the water started to slowly drain from the tube, the paladin let out a gasp and turned to look at his associate, who did his best to feign horror and surprise. “What happened?”
“I-I-I thought I had found the right command,” Shang mumbled, his voice thick with fake shock as he rushed up to the machine and tried to smack a bunch of buttons. “Infernal machine must have been sabotaged or something!” He declared as he pushed away from it and turned his attention to the rapidly draining holding cell.
The paladin remained resolute despite the other man’s reaction to the situation. “Do not fear, Shang Tsung,” Argento boomed as he lifted his warhammer. “We shall slay this monster, just as we have defeated all those that preceded it. We shall show it the purifying light of the Sun!”
As the last of the fluid drained out of the tube, the pair of men stepped back as the creature’s eyes opened and its fist struck the glass, causing it to splinter outward. When a second smack failed the break the material, the creature lashed out with its claws and glass exploded outward, showering upon the two warriors below.
“Fall back!” Argento roared as Tyrant stepped out from the broken tube and dropped into a crouch in front of them, its hunched over body still towering over both of them.
Reaching down to his side, the sorcerer retrieved the handgun, checked to ensure the clip was loaded, and slid the weapon back into its holster. The less he had to rely on his actual powers, the better off he would be in the long run. As he pushed off the desk, Shang’s eyes caught something in one of the many refrigerated storage units that ran alongside the walls of the lab. Beneath the dirt, dust, and dried blood, he spotted something just barely illuminated in the dying white light of storage. The sorcerer walked over to the case and wiped away some of the grime with his sleeve to reveal a glass tube that contained a double helix of green fluid.
When more examination revealed the case was otherwise empty, Shang grabbed the handle and wrenched open the storage unit. He recognized the substance from the security feeds. It was the same stuff they’d been testing on the rabbits prior to the outbreak that ultimately consumed this facility.
“T-Virus,” Shang muttered as he reached in and removed the glass tube from the rack. While the tube had metal caps on both ends, he wasn’t trusting the glass itself to hold up to any scrutiny. Fortunately for the sorcerer, he spotted some metal containers that would slid over the large vial. With a grin, he grabbed one and slid the green virus inside. “I’m sure you’ll be of some use,” he muttered as he slid the metal capsule into his satchel.
Turning his focus back to the exit, he grabbed the pistol and walked over to the door. Although it seemed like most of the facility was running on emergency power, there was still enough juice to open the door’s pneumatic mechanism. The machinery rattled as the door slid up into the wall, revealing a corridor stained with blood and marred with claw marks and bullet holes. Shang stepped forward and poked the gun’s muzzle against the blood to verify that it was dried, and after that, he continued down the steel hallway.
The sorcerer traversed the corridor, his leather boots the only sound beside the faint hum of machinery. At the other end, he pressed another switch and stepped back as the door slid up and into the ceiling. All at once, a grotesque stench flooded through the open door. Shang, who had seen a lot in his many years, found himself gagging a little as he stumbled into what had once been some sort of a mess hall. His eyes immediately found the source of the odor--in the far corner of the room, some sort of tank had ruptured long ago. While it looked like only a type of water tank, the water had found a stack of corpses piled up in the room and turned them into a moist, fetid mass of pestilence and decay.
Shang had no problem with burning corpses… he’d smelled plenty during the Boxer Rebellion and during a stint in Germany in the 1940s, but the odor exuded by water-logged bodies was something far more unpleasant. Making sure that nothing was going to jump out at him, the sorcerer jogged across the mess hall toward the pair of double-doors on the other side. Moving shoulder-first through the exit, he made it a few more steps before he slipped in the nearly knee-deep water and fell onto his backside. In a panic, his hands went to the package in his bag, which remained undamaged.
Rising to his feet, Shang grimaced as he spotted a nearby door. He made his way through the water, which sloshed around his boots before he managed to smack open the metal door and slip into the little side-lab. It took him only a moment to see that someone was sitting in the old office chair in front of him. Although they weren’t facing him, Shang saw the back of their head peeking up over the chair.
“Hello,” the sorcerer muttered as he slid the door shut and glanced back into the hallway to make sure his sounds hadn’t attracted anything. Turning back around, he saw that the person hadn’t moved or turned to look at him. “Excuse me,” Shang added as he stepped forward. As he came in line with the person, he caught a whiff of the stench and quickly realized that he was looking at a seated corpse. Not just any dead body, but one with a knife plunged through its chest.
Leaning forward, Shang grabbed the knife by the handle and pulled it out of the decomposing flesh. The sorcerer, holding the weapon by the base of the blade, brought it up to his face and glanced at the strange runes etched into a handle that seemed to be a tusk or bone of some sort. The main image was that of a trio of circles contained within a ring filled with runic letters and an eyeball. As the sorcerer looked at the weapon, it seemed to radiate a faint heat, and the images gave off a faint red hue.
Without a second thought, Shang tucked the dagger into his belt and turned back toward the door. The little room had no other exits, which meant he’d have to continue his path into the installation if he intended to find an escape. WIth the gun in his hand, he twisted the doorknob and leaned into the door. Once back in the hall, Shang squinted and started slowly down toward the end. He made it a few feet before something nudged his ankle, causing him to wrench his foot away and aim the gun at the water. It was then that he saw the corpse slowly drifting passed him.
“At least they’re not walking,” Shang mumbled beneath his breath as he made his way down the corridor until he reached another door. Unlike the rest, this one had been ripped off its tracks after being scraped and pounded into oblivion. With the water still drowning his knee caps, Shang maneuvered around the fallen door and glanced into the new room, which was some sort of generator room. Dominated by a large piece of machinery that had long since stopped functioning, the rest of the room was a network of tubes and pipes that fed up into the ceiling and into the various vents and other slits in the walls.
Shang scowled as he waded forward, his eyes scanning for an exit from the power room. High overhead, parts of the generator were sparking, but there didn’t seem to be any danger of the machine falling down into the water.
Somewhere on the other side of the generator, Shang heard a barely functioning pneumatic door shamble up along its tracks. The sorcerer stopped dead in his tracks as he heard the sound of heavy boots smack down through water against steel. Scowling, he crept closer to the central generator and fell silent as the footsteps circled around the machine. The lights in the room left much to be desired, but it was enough for him to see as he lifted the gun and waited. The moment he saw the dull glint, he squeezed the trigger.
WIth a ping, the bullet hit a shoulder guard made of enchanted plate mail and deflected away, lodging itself into the wall after ricocheting off toward the ceiling. The armored man let out a grunt as he stumbled backwards and slumped against a wall of dead machines, his free hand reaching to ensure his pauldron hadn’t been compromised.
“Sorcerer?!” Argento declared after his eyes found Shang, who furrowed his brow at the sight of the paladin so deep in the installation.
“What… How did you get here?” Shang inquired, still holding up the gun.
“I was directed to the hospital by a young woman in military attire, and then a shabby-looking youth pointed me in the direction of the elevator. You haven’t responded to my attempts to hail you with the voice box.”
Shang glanced down at the walkie-talkie and scowled as he used his free hand to remove it from his belt. A glimpse showed that it had been turned off at some point, perhaps when he fell or during one of his earlier scuffles in the hospital. The sorcerer twisted the knob and slid it back onto his belt as he turned his attention back to the paladin. “How long have you been down here? Where’s this elevator you took?”
Argento shook his head. “It’s a few corridors back, but it’s not there any longer, my friend.”
“Vanished? Turned into a wall?”
“How did you know?” The paladin asked, his own brow creasing as he glanced around the generator room.
“This place plays tricks with the mind, Paladin,” Shang said as he tapped the gun against his own temple. “Have you run into anyone else? Alive or dead?”
The other man shook his head. “Just a lot of fallen men and the scenes of great wars fought here in the recent past. Do you know what befell this installation?”
“Some sort of virus outbreak,” Shang responded as he motioned toward a door on an elevated platform over their heads. “To put it simple… it turns people into zombies.” Without needing to convey instructions, the two men proceeded to help one another up onto the platform. Shang hoisted the heavier, armor clad man up first and was then hoisted up next to his ‘comrade.’
“That is a shame,” Argento declared as he tried the door. When it failed to open, he bashed it open with his shoulder before turning to face his companion. “There’s some foul sorcery afoot here, if you’ll pardon my use of the term.”
“No magic. It’s just science,” Shang corrected as the two made their way down another corridor. “We need to find a map of some sort… it’s the only way to find an exit from this infernal place.”
“I fear the only exit will be from this verse entirely,” Argento spoke, causing the sorcerer to stop and glance at him. “Do you not think we are here for a reason? Certainly there must be some preordained reason why the malicious forces in this town corralled us into the hospital and then down into this crypt.” The paladin placed a hand upon the other man’s shoulder. “It’s what we came here for, Shang. The path to Omni.”
The sorcerer furrowed his brow but suppressed an urge to laugh in the man’s face. Did the paladin really believe they were here for some ordained purpose? Was he truly that delusional? “Then let’s press onward, Argento.”
In silence, the two made their way into a giant, well-lit laboratory. As the door clicked shut behind them, they both found themselves staring across a sea of shattered containment cells. that lined the walls and a central aisle. At the far end, there was one undamaged cell that loomed high over both men as they approached it.
“In the name of the Sun,” Argento muttered aloud as Shang and he walked around the central aisle toward the back of the room. Within the ten foot tube stood something that could have once been a normal human being, but whatever experiments had been performed upon it had turned it into something altogether different. The sexless being bobbed around in whatever cyan fluid filled the tube. A large organ on its chest, fed by large fleshly tubes, beat slowly, resembling some sort of external heart.
Aside from handfuls of scars, boils, and various signs of surgeries performed in the past, the creature’s flesh was pallid and almost sickly. Instead of a left hand, the creature had three massive clawed digits. While its eyes were closed, its gums were missing, so it had a permanent and garrish grin upon its bald cranium.
“What is that?” Argento muttered as the pair approached the computer terminal and various machinery at the base of the containment tube. “Is it human?” He asked as he turned to the sorcerer for answers.
“I’m not sure,” Shang muttered as he joined the paladin in front of the terminal. “Some sort of living weapon, I’d wager. It seems they were researching these types of things at this facility.”
“Despicable,” the paladin spat as he looked up at the inert creature. “Is it alive?” When he received a nod in response, he scowled. “Is there any way to put it out of its misery? No one deserves such a fate as this,” he spoke as he clenched his gauntleted fist around his hammer.
Shang lifted a hand to stop the paladin from doing anything too hasty. “There might be controls that will cut off whatever life support it is receiving… let me see.” The sorcerer’s associate nodded his head and walked away to examine the rest of the room for any signs of an exit or another path to take. Now alone with the computer, Shang leaned over the terminal and started to sift through the options. His options weren’t that bountiful, as the operating system had no GUI and was little more than an advanced version of MS-DOS. Most of the information on the screen was computer jargon, but it did state the creature’s name: Tyrant-003. After trying a few generic lines, Shang scowled and leaned away from the machine, but as he did, a new command prompt flashed onto the screen.
The only way through the Darkness is to leap headfirst. Execute? Y/N?
The sorcerer took a step closer and looked up at the eight foot monster inside the tube. His eyes then fell back to the terminal. With a frown, he found the Y button and mashed it down, which prompted a few hundred lines of code to rush passed the green computer screen as a series of beeps came from the nearby machinery.
“Were you successful?” Argento declared as he jogged over and smacked a hand against Shang’s shoulder. When the water started to slowly drain from the tube, the paladin let out a gasp and turned to look at his associate, who did his best to feign horror and surprise. “What happened?”
“I-I-I thought I had found the right command,” Shang mumbled, his voice thick with fake shock as he rushed up to the machine and tried to smack a bunch of buttons. “Infernal machine must have been sabotaged or something!” He declared as he pushed away from it and turned his attention to the rapidly draining holding cell.
The paladin remained resolute despite the other man’s reaction to the situation. “Do not fear, Shang Tsung,” Argento boomed as he lifted his warhammer. “We shall slay this monster, just as we have defeated all those that preceded it. We shall show it the purifying light of the Sun!”
As the last of the fluid drained out of the tube, the pair of men stepped back as the creature’s eyes opened and its fist struck the glass, causing it to splinter outward. When a second smack failed the break the material, the creature lashed out with its claws and glass exploded outward, showering upon the two warriors below.
“Fall back!” Argento roared as Tyrant stepped out from the broken tube and dropped into a crouch in front of them, its hunched over body still towering over both of them.
![[Image: Shang.jpg]](http://www.omniverse-rpg.com/images/Shang.jpg)