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The Maintenance Logs Part 3: Experiment's Distraction For repanbo By Draconicon

The robocorn stayed close to her while the lab was being rebuilt, and Tatyana had little time to herself, and even less to actually pull herself together and seal all those problems back where they were supposed to be. Behind a wall, inside a mental vault, key-coded to never be seen again: that was where they were supposed to be, but she needed to be alone to set that up in her in mind, and Ellyra never gave her the time.

As a result, she was shorter, angrier than she would have liked to be with anyone, let alone a generally nice person like the robocorn. Tatyana kept her silence most of the time to hold the worst of it back, but it was only somewhat effective when the robocorn just wouldn't stop talking.

"Well, um, I like what you did with the lab," Ellyra said. "I mean, it's definitely less cluttered, and you made it look...neater."

That was because she'd had to make do with fewer tools, particularly as the lab had been shrunk a bit to deal with the new safety concerns. Two monitors had to deal with eight different readouts, instead of having one for each, and only two generators could be fitted to the wall, now.

More than that, the other tools that she had been using had to be carried around her waist rather than pulled off of their wall holders, just to make sure that she had enough room for everything that she needed. It was far from ideal, and she wasn't keen on it, but in order to keep the experiment going, she was willing to make sacrifices.

"Um, I could clean up a bit in here. Make it nice and shiny."

"It's already as shiny as it needs to be."

"You sure? I could make it even more mad-sciency."

"I'm not -"

Tatyana hissed, clenching her fingers around the exam table again as she forced the anger down. God, the robocorn could raise her fury like few others.

"I'm not mad. Neither is the science. We are figuring you out. That's all."

"Do you want to try another experiment? I mean, we could try figuring you out for a change. You never did say -"

"I talk, I break."

Damn it. She didn't want to say it again, but there it was. She bit her lips rather than slam her fist against the table the way that she wanted to. The last thing that she needed was a broken hand at that point.

Instead, she forced several deep breaths into her lungs, her ears flattened against the top of her head. She needed to be focused. She needed to be in control, or everything that had come rushing up after her brush with the catnip was going to come back again. Everything was loose in her head, nothing tied down or restrained the way that it was supposed to be anymore.

She needed to fix that, but in order to do that, she needed time. And she wasn't going to get time without going back home, and that was something that she couldn't do without completely abandoning the project.

Just make it through. Make it through, then you can spend a year in solitude again to fix this whole mess.

When she was breathing regularly again, she turned back to the robocorn.

"Onto the table."

"...How about we do something different today, huh?"

"Ellyra. Do you want to figure yourself out, or -"

"Tatyana...I'm...I'm worried about you, okay?"

"Don't be. I am in control. I will be okay."

"But you're not. I mean, you're obviously not."

"That's because I'm here instead of at home. That's because I'm here, with people, instead of back at home where I'm in control. Where I don't have to think about all this. Now, do you want to continue or not?"

There was hysteria there, she was aware. There was something that was threatening to break through the icy bit of control that she had, threatening to thaw it out and leave her weeping again. She couldn't let that out. She couldn't let anything free. She had to keep it all in, keep it where it couldn't do anything against her.

The tigress's shoulders hunched slightly, but it was obvious that Ellyra saw it. She stepped forward, arms open -

"Stop!"

Tatyana stopped her in her tracks, holding a shock-probe up. She'd taken to carrying several in her pockets, several different ones of different strengths. This was the medium-strength one, though it would be strong enough to stop the average rampaging elephant in its tracks. She was pretty sure that would be enough for someone like Ellyra, particularly if she got the right spot with it.

"Just...stop."

"But...you need this. I can tell. You're just about to break down."

"And if you touch me, I will. I'll lose everything I have."

"But...but I can help."

"You can't fix this! Touches, hugs, all these things...it doesn't work on something like this!"

Was there any point in saying this to the robocorn? She honestly didn't know. Ellyra seemed to be off in her own little world most of the time, cheeky and kind, and she didn't seem to be touched by the same horrible things in the world that everyone else saw on a daily basis. If she was depressed, if she was ever feeling things like a normal person would, Tatyana hadn't seen it.

She shook her head, slowly lowering the shock-probe. Turning around, she leaned over the table, her claws scratching at the metal beneath her.

"Get on the table."

"...Why can't you tell me what happened? Why can't I try to help?"

"Because it's pointless. You can't change it. It already happened, and it's done. Why talk about it?"

"Because...I don't know. That's what people do. It makes them feel better. I've seen it."

"It doesn't help everyone."

Didn't help them then. All the therapy that was forced down their throats, all the little drugs, all the little probes, all the talkers...it didn't make it better then, and it wasn't going to make it better now.

All it did was make their jobs easier because it meant that they knew the weaknesses everyone was trying to hide.

Ellyra stepped closer, but thankfully didn't try and touch her. The robocorn hummed nervously behind her, and Tatyana did her best not to get annoyed.

It was barely enough.

"Will you just -"

"I'll make a deal!"

"..."

A deal? And in that frantic a voice? She slowly turned, an eyebrow raised at the robocorn. Ellyra nodded rapidly.

"A deal. I'll show you how to make a stable fusion reactor."

"I already know how to make one."

"The size of a wrist-watch, then?"

"I can do that, too."

"An atom condenser."

"...What?"

"I've got a lot of stuff in me, Tatyana. I have a lot of things that could make the world so different, so much better, but I never knew about them until you started experimenting on me. I'll share some of my stuff, some of the things you haven't seen yet..."

"...If?"

"If you talk about yourself."

"...You..."

"Think about it. Easy knowledge, right? Just have to tell me about you. You talk about science all the time. Let's just talk about you for a little bit, instead."

"You...you..." Tatyana slumped down against the table, taking one breath, two, three. This time, it didn't work.

"Get out."

"Huh?"

"Get. Out."

"B-but, Tatyana, pretty floofy -"

"GET OUT OF MY LAB!"

Sweeping her hand across the tools on the table, she pointed at the door with one desperate finger.

"Get out, right now! I don't - I can't - I just can't! GET OUT!"

The robocorn left, though she had a feeling that it was less scared and more hurt that pushed Ellyra away. She didn't care which it was, as long as she was alone.

The door shut behind the robocorn, and Tatyana pulled one of her other gadgets out. The only one she had that was more typical, the only thing that she carried that was directly capable of harm.

A laser pistol. It was old, the casing of it a simple bronze and brass, the emitter a disk that looked like it would look better on a house to receive satellite signals. She held it in her hand, shaking hard, huffing and puffing as she stared at it.

Her hand on the grip was replaced, the finger on the trigger no longer black and white, but a thick brown, with the blackened fingernail of the Boar starting to squeeze.

"AAAAAAAAAAAGH!"

She screamed at the top of her lungs, turning and lifting the weapon. She squeezed the trigger, the beam firing.

The first hallucination exploded, only to reform as the Stallion. She shot him, too, and he exploded just like the Boar.

The Donkey.

The Bear.

The Stag.

The Mare.

One after another, they came, the memories pouring through her, the old days screaming at her to be remembered. She kept shooting, and the walls kept popping and fizzling with explosions all around her as she screamed again and again and again.

Soon, she couldn't stop screaming. Screaming and pulling the trigger until the old ray gun couldn't fire anymore.

And then, she collapsed.

This time, there was no shifting from the lab to bed, and she knew that something had changed between her and Ellyra. Whether it was a good thing or not, she didn't know, but something had shifted.

The tigress looked down at her gun, first. As she had expected, the charge on it was completely depleted. Not too surprising. She never loaded it enough for there to be enough power to do more than a certain number of shots. Just enough to kill every one of them without having any left over to shoot herself.

Ever since that one time...

But she wasn't going to do that again. She couldn't control herself when she got like that, but she could control herself outside of that. She could make sure that she didn't do anything stupid when she was in control, and limit the options that she had when she was out of control.

She tossed the gun across the table, slowly pulling herself upright and leaning against the edge of it. The tigress shook her head again.

Hadn't had an episode like that...not for a long time...

Not for over a year, not since she had enforced certain rules upon herself back home. But now, out here, where there were constant little nudges and pushes that forced her to think about things that she didn't want to think about, there was no way for her to keep everything in the vault. It kept sneaking out, kept pushing itself into her head, and then she had to deal with it.

Just like everyone else did, she supposed.

Despite having just completely lost it, she felt...better. Not great, but better than she had trying to keep a vise-like grip on everything. It was like she had just spewed most of it over the floor, sicked up all the bad stuff, at least for a while.

It wasn't something that made her feel good, but it made her feel less terrible, if completely exhausted afterward.

Making a mental note of the effect, she turned her head towards the door.

It was open, and Ellyra was sitting just outside. She hadn't taken a step into the lab, but apparently, she'd been watching ever since the end of the breakdown. That's what Tatyana would have guessed, at the very least.

The tigress sighed, pulling her lab coat closed. She took a deep breath again, and felt like it was going to make her throw up, so she pushed it back out quickly.

"You want to know...what happened?" she managed to ask.

"...Yes. It must have been...horrible."

"You have no idea."

"I can imagine -"

"No, you can't. You're too...good...to imagine something like this."

"I mean...I can imagine bad things. I just...I really don't like to..."

Ellyra turned her head, and Tatyana shook hers. The fact that the robocorn was trying was probably more than she deserved after that huge fit that she'd thrown, particularly the way that she had shouted at the robocorn subject.

It wasn't the way that a scientist should behave, and not the way that someone like her, trying not to repeat the bad stuff, should behave.

"Get us tea," she muttered. "Not coffee, tea. Need something gentler."

"Tea party!"

Ellyra was going before she could correct the unicorn, not that she knew exactly how she would. The fact that the girl could still bounce back like that...

It really was something amazing.

A few minutes later, they were seated around a small table in Ellyra's quarters, the robocorn obviously bouncing on her seat and trying not to look quite so obvious about her own excitement and everything else that was rushing through her. She was trying to look sympathetic, obviously doing her best to be kind, but there was no denying the sheer excitement on her face when it came to this little chat.

"You could look at little less happy," Tatyana muttered, looking down at her teacup. "I am talking about something traumatic here."

"I know, but...but I can maybe learn to help here. I might make things better."

"Or make them worse. We both know that this can backfire."

"But everyone says that it makes it better to talk about it."

"No. It can make things better. It can also make them much, much, much worse."

As she had seen. She had seen other subjects break down, fall to pieces when they were forced to talk about everything that they had gone through, when they were forced to recount the different steps to the various procedures that they had gone through. It was a horrible moment, something that would break most people if they weren't careful.

The things that she had gone through nearly had broken here completely, and she was all too aware of the cracks out here, out where she couldn't do anything about them.

Tatyana stirred her tea, adding a few more doses of milk until it was as white as tea could be and still be tea. The tigress sipped at it, then put the cup back down.

"You want to know what happened. This goes no further than you. You do not talk about it with anyone other than the dragon. You do not mention it to others. You do not change how you treat me, except to listen to me and do what I say properly. Understand?"

"Of course. I can understand that easily."

"I mean it. No talking. No sharing. This is my past, and it stays mine."

"I know how to keep secrets. I'm not a little kid, and I'm not a blabbermouth. I just...I chatter because I get excited. It doesn't mean I share secrets."

"...No, I suppose you don't."

It was a way of holding back a bit more, trying to buy time, and Tatyana knew it. She wanted to hold it back, and this was her way of keeping it in the back of her mind.

Just do it. She won't leave you alone until she understands. She has to hear it, to know it, or she will never stop bothering you.

And maybe it would make her leave. Maybe it would make her run away when she knew what Tatyana had been through, what the tigress had done. Maybe then she could go back to being alone.

Do you want that? To be alone again?

She didn't know, but it would be back to having what she was used to. That would be something, at least.

"There was a choice made by the government back home a few decades ago. A choice to try and put themselves in a better situation against the west, to make themselves stronger and better outfitted to out-think the people in NATO, NASA, in the defense departments, everywhere." She sipped at her tea again. "They wanted to raise a whole generation, a new generation of geniuses that would lead the country into a golden age of dominance over the rest of the world.

"As you can imagine, I was...one of the children. I was one of the three hundred children that the country picked out for this experiment. That the Party picked out."

She remembered it, then. She remembered the morning that she was told by her parents that she would be sent to the Mountain. Put underground, left down there with all the others that had been pulled out of school due to her test scores labeling her as someone promising for the tests. She remembered very clearly being told that she would never see her parents again.

It was the last thing she was told that she could be sure was completely true.

Her hands tightened around the cup, squeezing it until she was sure that the china was about to crack. Ellyra started to reach out for her, but Tatyana shook her head.

"No, don't...don't touch. Not until I say. Need to...can't touch or break...can't touch or break."

The memories were coming, and they weren't stopping. The day that they had entered the Mountain, when they stepped through steel doors that were as thick as entire houses, when the doors had shut behind them and left them in darkness. When they were fitted with collars and with headbands that read their thoughts and -

Tatyana panted, forcing down another little shake with the rest of her tea.

"More."

As it was refilled, she pushed herself to keep talking. It was like her tongue was glued to the inside of her mouth, stubbornly refusing to move. She forced it, like she forced everything else since then.

"They experimented on us. Found out how to push the brain to make adrenaline, studied how to...make the perfect response to threat. How the brain got faster, smarter, sometimes. They took that and applied it.

"They put us through hell. If we weren't smart enough to figure it out, we'd die. Sometimes. Not all the time. Sometimes. Just enough to make us know they were serious, just random enough to make us push further in case this was the time that it was going to happen. Never little enough to get complacent.

"When they got it as far as it would go naturally, they started experimenting again. Changing bodies. Changing...changing minds."

She held her head, remembering that day. That had been the Mare, that day. The Mare, sitting on her chest, a little girl no more than eleven underneath a matriarch in her forties as the top of her head was cut off. Her skull cut open, her brain probed and prodded and zapped.

Tears were coming as she remembered the completely empty face of that woman. No sympathy, no interest, just blind efficiency. The same as she always had, whether she was serving food, bringing blankets, or breaking them down in the lab.

"They rewired our brains, testing every way they could think of to make us smarter. To make the thoughts, the commands of the brain go through less neurons, or more, or on a different path. Always finding the most efficient ways to make us think."

"That's...how long were you there? How long did they do this?"

"Years."

Too many years. She had been taken there at eight years old, and left there until she managed to come up with an idea to break them out. Too long. Too long.

She felt her claws sinking into the side of her head, almost like they were trying to get a grip on all the rampant thoughts running through her brain. It was making her bleed, and she didn't care.

"They cut open every child they had. Cut their heads open, changed their brains. Some lost everything. Turned into monsters. Hyper-efficient, hyper-stupid monsters. The ones that stopped thinking were handed over to the Stag."

"The Stag?"

"The one in charge of...of making super soldiers. Experimenting on the body while everyone else experimented on the brain. He'd turn them into other things. Hulks. Brutes. One got turned into a giant until her heart gave out."

"They were monsters."

"We were monsters. They were demons."

So many horrors walked the halls back then. Some of them were friends, once. Some of them had been family. But they were all twisted.

"The Boar - the one in charge of the project - ruled it all with an iron fist. If we weren't in the medical labs, suffering experiments, we were...being tested again. If we could make it through a scenario that he came up with, we had a day of puzzles, a day where we could 'relax' and just do things to keep our brains busy. If we failed...if we failed, and lived, then we were put through more experiments, more things to change our brains and bodies to make them better.

"With me...and some of the others, the ones that developed faster..."

"They...raped you?"

"They made it part of the experiment."

She dared not close her eyes, not now. Now, with them open, the memories were ghosts, ghosts that were pricking at her arms, at her legs, pulling at them and trying to hold her down so that they could do it again.

If she closed her eyes, she would be back there again. Helpless again.

Never again.

"They used...stimulation...as a way to make my brain go faster. To produce the adrenaline. They woke my brain up with anything that they could think of. Pain. Pleasure. The more I felt, the faster it worked, and the faster it worked, the smarter I got.

"It was their first real 'success.' I was...a success."

Not the first success overall, but the first one that didn't seem to have a downside. Others had gained better brains, had been modified to be better, but she had been the first one that didn't have a trade-off. She didn't get smart in one way and dumb in another. She could take what she was given and churn through it, make something better of what she was given.

The others...not so much.

"They were going to give it to others."

Ellyra was whimpering, shifting from side to side on her stool by now. The obviously concerned robocorn wanted to reach out, Tatyana knew, but she was obeying the request, holding back, keeping herself from doing something forbidden.

"That didn't happen, though. Someone stopped it. Someone saved you, right?"

"Someone did. Me."

She was shaking less, in a way. This part...this part, she had gone over a hundred times, and she had managed to absolve herself of most of the guilt. This part, she remembered well, and told herself that she had done right.

"I came up with a plan. There was no way up and out. They had too many guards to keep us in. But there were no guards going down. One day, when they were...stimulating me...I took a key from the guy walking me back. I let one of the brutes out of their cell. One...one became more, and then more, and more than that."

An army of brain-dead idiots that were made to fight. An army of monsters that the Party had intended to release on the world at the end of the war, to show that there was still life and vigor in the country. A way of spitting in the eye of the west.

"They fought their way up. I unlocked cages as we went, getting more of the ones like me out of their cells. We hacked the computers. We out-thought the soldiers. We turned the facility against them.

"And we still got hurt. All of the brutes died. Every single one, before we were even in sight of the exit. Every teenager that lost their minds, lost their body, got killed by the people that turned them into those...things.

"Then we started dying. Traps in the system, lucky shots...the fact that we didn't know how to fight...Any time that security caught one of us, they made us pay."

She rubbed her leg, remembering being caught, a broken leg being a small price to pay before she could get away. It was one of the lighter injuries that they had taken in that escape.

"But...we won."

"And you burned the place to the ground, right?"

"Wrong."

"Why not?!"

Tatyana looked up from the tea again, fixing the robocorn with a level stare.

"The lab was big enough to spread through the undergrounds of three mountains. If we wanted to destroy it, we would have needed nuclear weapons, and more than one of them. We would have had to blow it up from the inside, and the outside.

"And there was no guaranteeing that it wouldn't be rebuilt, that someone else wouldn't have come back for it."

"...That lab...that's your lab, isn't it?"

"...Yes."

"Why?"

"Someone had to protect it. Someone had to keep it from being used that way again. Ever again."

Another breath, this one shakier than the last few ones that she had taken. It took more than she wanted to admit to hold herself together as she remembered it, then. Remembered everyone else leaving it, the damaged teens and the few adults among the staff that had sided with them running off. They wanted to go somewhere, anywhere that wasn't the hell that they'd lived in for years.

And she...

She'd stayed. Fifteen years old? Sixteen? It was hard to remember, but not quite an adult yet. She had stayed, and she had done everything she could to make sure that it would never happen again.

The memories flickered through her head, plumbing the depths of the facility and digging out each hidden scientist, each little department head that they'd missed during the escape. Six of them had lived through it, making their own little kingdom under the mountain, holding onto little bits of territory and refusing to surrender themselves or the subjects that they had managed to find.

"I took it. I held it. And I'm making sure no-one can ever use it the wrong way ever again."

"You...you're brave."

"No. I'm stubborn. And that's why you can't fix this. That's why you can't make it better by touching me or snuggling me or...anything that you keep trying to do." She felt a tear sliding out of the corner of her eye. "If I can't fix myself...If I can't be smart enough to figure out how to make it better...then nothing else can fix me. I have to be better...I can't make it better, but I can be better."

"But why be better on your own?"

"...It doesn't hurt as much...it's easier..."

"But does it work?"

Tatyana didn't have an answer for that. She looked down at the table, finally pushing the cup of tea away. She didn't know how many refills she'd had over the course of the conversation, but it must have been a lot. Her stomach hurt, and not just from the stress of the topic at hand.

"...You can...touch...now."

The robocorn's hand was grabbing hers almost before she said the last word, but it was in a sufficient time that she could tolerate it. She squeezed Ellyra's hand and the robocorn squeezed back.

A few more tears tried to come free, but she managed to squish them back down, holding them inside. She had already vomited out her past for her employer to see, and now, it was time to get back to work.

She squeezed the robocorn's hand one more time.

"Now you understand. No more touching. Not without asking. No more questions all the time. Just...Just let me work and focus on the now."

"...It won't work..."

"It will work until something else does."

"But the lab..."

"I can fix it."

It's easier to fix things than to fix me.

Much as she hated to admit it, she was more broken than she thought she was. There was more damage through her mind and psyche than she had admitted when she was alone, when there was nothing to trigger it, nothing to break it down.

She couldn't put it back in the box, she supposed. Not anymore. Too much had been done to fit in the box, and someone like the robocorn could come and visit and stir it all up again. There was too much that could screw with her to rely on chance keeping the troublesome people away.

It looked like she'd have to find a way to deal with it.

I can't thank you for this, she thought, looking at the robocorn. You might be doing the right thing...and it might help me...but I can't thank you for hurting me.

"You know, I bet you can make the atom compressor even better."

"...What?" Tatyana asked, blinking.

"The atom compressor. I promised you one, remember? I bet you can make it even better than the plans for it already are."

"Uh -"

"Trust me, this is gonna be good."

The End