From: li@Data-IO.COM (Phyllis Rostykus)
Subject: Danger Room:  Li's First Run (part 1 of 2)
Keywords: Danger Room
Organization: Data I/O Corporation
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 18:07:42 GMT


Liralen slips through the bar, headed for the Danger Room with Argent by
her side.  Before they go in, they speak to the panel at the side of the
door for a while.  Liralen goes in first.  Argent adds a couple more
commands to the sequence they've given the Room; and then he joins her...

If you don't want violence, please hit your space bar... the Danger Room is
quite solid.

-------------------

	The door to the Danger Room closes behind them.  

	For a moment Liralen looks around her, the grid of the walls, the
smooth steel of the floor.  She sighs.  The door is closed.  The adrenalin
rises and she can feel her pulse starting to race as her mouth dries.

	No one can come in who does not *want* this.

	No one can see her who is afraid of a very real part of her...

	Her eyes close and then open, pure chrome.  Pupilless, they are
merely smooth mirrors of the world.  Argent clasps Li's hand, just for a
moment, and then trots off into a room suddenly filled with shadows,
ghosts, and images.

	Night.  

	Utter darkness, with only the stars to see.  Then pavement, wet,
cracked, a deeper grey than the walls of the city that rise over her.
Glass and steel monoliths, over white-grey of sidewalks, black grey of
pavement, and coming down is the mist of the ever-eternal rain in the
Seattle Sprawl.  Li goes down on one knee, touching the roughness of the
rain slicked road.  A car hisses by on a street a few blocks back.

	The street is not even close to perfect.  It is cracked, potholed,
the sidewalks are blasted, cracked, and pieces are missing out of them.
The buildings at the ground level are missing all their glass, and empty
holes wink and mottle the once smooth surfaces of what are now abandoned
giants.

	Li stands, in her blue leather jacket, hands in fingerless black
leather gloves, a black t-shirt tucks into indigo blue jeans, black tabi
to light canvas shoes with rubber soles.  The jacket has large lapels, and
the front of the jacket only closes to her breast bone.  She checks the
two pistols slung crosswise under her jacket, four ammo cartridges,
six grenades on her belt, twin knives in their sheaths against her
forearms, and the glint of silver under laquered too-long nails.

	A wink of movement and she is behind a car.  The pavement sizzles
softly after her abrupt departure.  Not her speed, but the hiss of a
paintball spreading itself in garish neon across the dark pavement.  Li
laughs softly. 

	A *boom* of sound and then a gout of light.  A siren goes off.
The goal.  There is screaming in the distance.

	She pokes her head out from behind the car, sees, again, the
movement as she ducks back and hears the splat, hiss of the paint.  Li
pulls out a pistol, ducks out on the *same* side as before, and pumps off
three shots in the direction of earlier movement.  Someone falls from the
window she targetted and the sniper's body then melts away.

	Another careful look around, and she starts running for the fire,
under the shadows at the feet of the giants.

	At an intersection, a person comes around a corner just as she
reaches it.  Li notes the tap of heels and leaves the guns in their
holsters.  The woman in a cream coat looks at Li with startled eyes and a
small cry, Li just keeps running.  As she passes the pedestrian, the woman
melts away.

	Before the next intersection, she can hear them, five heavy
treads.  It's been too damned long, she hesitates, trying to decide, wait
and ambush or charge 'em?  She nerves herself for the charge, and at the
last instant, realizes that she has grenades.  Li laughs.  The heavy steps
hesitate at the laugh.  She waits until she sees the ugly snout of a M64
and lobs the grenade even as she dives for the ground with a pistol in
both hands.

	She dives for the opposite side, across their line of sight.  A
flat dive ending in a tucked one shoulder roll that lands her facing them, on
the opposite side of their anticipation from her laugh.  Li moves fast,
fast, faster than is normally humanly possible.  Here, though, she has
never been quite human.  The grenade goes off.  For her, there is no
flash, simply a blink of darkness, and then the image of men falling, the
one left with a hand over his eyes.  The other hand holds a subnosed Uzi.
She fires once, slightly surprised at the recoil.  He falls.

	They begin to melt even as she turns away.

	The fire is huge.  Licking at the sky behind the pure black of a
low warehouse between her and the apartment building.  Between here and
there is an empty field, an unfinished construction site, pockmarked with
broken chunks of concrete, rusted out hulks of cars and abandoned
appliances.  There are holes, laced with barbed wire, chain link, and the
very go-gangers that probably started the fire.

	A glimpse at the wide-open area.  She quickly moves behind a car.
No need to stay out in the open.  A splat! hits the far side of the wrecked
Ford Narcissus sprawled by the side of the street.  Li pokes her head up,
so that she can see the field through the windows of the car.  The window
she looks through is suddenly covered with neon green, rendering it
opaque, but she got a hint for the direction of the motion that did the
firing.

	She sighs, softly.  Then rolls to the left of the car in a tumble
of low line motion, suddenly pausing to squeeze off a single shot, then
tumbling again in a diagonal to what she did before.  The *splat* of a
paint ball too close to comfort to her telling her she missed.  She thumps
up against a three-foot tall lump of concrete, her shoulder against the
hard stone.  Would they be stalking her as well as her stalking them?
Perhaps.  Li bares her teeth in a smile with anticipation.

	The sound of running feet move towards her...

	Fast, light, quick.

	Who?  She waits, pistol poised to cover whenever whoever comes by
her.  A youngling rushes by, too-long legs, too-long arms for the
slenderness of the ungainly body.  The kid turns down the street she came
on, and she never even sees the kid's face.

	Two sets of feet, again quick, but broken with stops.  Interlaced
stops.  First one, then the other, then the first again.  She can almost
see them, covering each other as they move.  A burst of a third set of
footfalls and the whine of pellets through the darkness.  Pellets?  Or
bullets?  The third set of running steps comes towards her as the first
two stop completely.  A startled cry and the thump-slide of a body hitting
the ground and she sees the whites of the staring eyes of a dead man as he
slid by her, with his back and heart wide open to the night sky.

	She pops up and at every movement loses off a shot.  The darkness
is like daylight with her eyes and the light from the fire.  Even with that
advantage, she misses the first two shots.  They are, however, close enough
to make the gangers duck.  In the midst of her frustration, she remembers
Argent's training and on her out-breath squeezes off a shot that takes one
of the gangers in the forehead.  She finds herself a little surprised at
how *good* it feels to see the ganger's moment of surprised death.  At the
shot, the other disappears back into the maze of rubble.  Li sighs and at
seeing nothing else, kneels next to the man the two had flushed and closes
his eyes.

	Test.  Step.  Test.  Step.  The walk across the field is stomach
wringly slow as the fire paints the sky in the colors of destruction.  

	Li tastes the acid in her throat.  

	Frustration, fear, anticipation, all beat at the back door of her
mind.  Ambush fights were never really her kind of thing.  Hand-to-hand
and the satisfaction of muscle and speed and skill are her loves; this
killing from a distance brings the fear to her throat.  She stops, thinking
that she doesn't have to do this.  This is only a game.  Nothing is riding
on this.

	The wail of the burning building's alarm is like that of a
small child.  A single scream, high and pure, sounds in counterpoint.
Li's eyes narrow and she moves on.

	She picks her way over the rubble, testing each step before she
takes it, testing each opening by showing herself for a brief second before
stepping back to see what the consequences are.  Li tires of it, the
additional precaution taking her too damned long to get to the fire.  She
steps and backs and steps and backs up.  Two forward, one back.  Two
forward, one back.  

	She ducks back again, bored by it, but not quite ready to give it
up.  A rock spangs as a paint ball annihilates itself on it.  The paint
whizzs by her and leaves tiny splatters of neon along her side and thigh,
momentos of what splinters of the rock might have done if they were real.

	Li realizes that she is holding herself still, breathing deep,
expecting the pain, but there is none.  

	She looks up and to either side.  The rubble pile is taller than
she is, loose stuff.  The pile stretches as far as she can see, at varying
heights in both directions.  Another ball comes through the door, hissing
as it annihilates itself behind her and to her left.  So she trots,
softfooted to her right, looking for a shorter spot in the mound of rubble.
Li nerves herself for a moment, and then vaults the wall.

	The world slows to molassass.  Two faces turn towards her.  One is
slow and is above a rifle cradled in two arms.  The other is quick, with
eyes of molten gold, over a single blade as blue as ice that sings a soft
song.  Li forgets about the hunk of metal in her hand, dropping it as she
springs forward.

	The rifle splinters satisfyingly under a kick leveraged against the
slow ones chest.  The shock wand's hum changes as Argent swings it at Li.
Absently, part of her thinks, how beautiful, even as she steps back from
his extension, noting the distance he has with the thing.  It's a vertical
swing, without the momentum displacement a side-to-side swing might have.
He is as fast as she is.  The next step has her on the loose footing at the
bottom of the rubble pile, and a solid feel for the distance he's using
with the wand.  Down it comes, she steps to her left as he begins the
swing.  She dodges the wand and moves straight into his arm.  She connects
with a gut punch and gets the satisfaction of a grunt.  He doesn't halt.
The hissing hum warns her just enough to block with an elbow.

	A jolt that flings her against the rubble.  Gravel grinds against
two knees and one palm.  The other arm hangs limp.  It throws her balance
off, and she has to use her left hand to hold the right wrist close, as she
rolls away from the wall.  Awkward, strange, to have something that was
once part of her nothing more than dead meat.  Without being able to
control that counter balance, getting up is harder than she wants to think
of.  The hum comes at her again.  She sees the glow of it coming from her
left, at the last instant, she jumps back, then dives forwards.  Argent's
swing was from left to right; and as he was right handed, the overswing
closed the line.

	Li hit him with everything she has, forgetting the microblades
under her nails until he smiles at her and the blood splashes against her
legs and floods from his mouth.  Silver swirls with the inigo blue, and he
falls. 

	She stares at him lying there.

	Argent doesn't disappear. 

	She kneels and touches him gently.  He doesn't move.  She pushes at
him and the body lolls onto its back. 

	A gold eye winks at her and the blue blood beads and runs back
towards its source.

	She starts laughing as Argent gets up.  He bows lightly and walks
through a wall bristling with rebar.  Li blinks after him.  She tucks her
now useless right arm into her coat, over the waistband.  It feels like a
raw band of pins and needles.  It is also frighteningly uncontrollable, so
she doesn't even try.  She casts about the area, looking for the pistol
she dropped, only to find it gone.  Probably along with the man who had
been carrying the rifle.

	She pulls out the second pistol and cradels it in her left fist.  

	This time she doesn't mind the slow, cautious going.  

-- 
Phyllis Rostykus     | "... and how you feel can make it real 
aka Liralen Li       |      Real as anything you've seen... "
li@inigo.Data-IO.com |	                         Peter Gabriel _US_ 
Newsgroups: alt.callahans