[i][b]CRACK[/i][/b] To any normal human being standing in that hallway, barefooted and in a sodden evening gown, unaccountably hugging her arms for comfort, the sound through several inches of concrete and wood and steel would have been all but inaudible. But Elke was not normal. She was born and bred to be anything [i]but[/i] normal, and the small but unfamiliar explosion from behind those closed double doors had the Guardian whirled about in a split second, palm slamming into the passlock. Nothing happened. The doors remained shut. [i][b]CRACK... CRACK CRACK[/b][/i] "Moira! MOIRA! Open this door, NOW!" The Guardian slammed a fist into the wood, splintering the surface of the solid oak and slicing open her knuckles at the same time - not that she noticed in the least. Elke had never, not ever once in her life given anything like an order to her charge, but the strange sound combined with the unnatural separation from her sister-like sent a sudden, silent surge of adrenaline through her body instantly. Silence from within. Crimson drops dribbled down her ivory fingers, splattered on the marble floors in perfect little concentric circles as the Guardian waited just one moment longer before the thought clicked in her head. That same battered fist crashed into the palmreader of the passlock, shattering the clear glass as her fingers tore through the circuitry. A blinding flash, a *pop* and the smell of cooking flesh, but the Guardian tore a fistful of wiring from within, burns seared and only just starting to blister up her forearm as she reached back into the blackened hole of the pass lock. Her face impassive, Elke reached into the hole she'd made up to her shoulder now, schematics clicking through her mind's eye as her fingers found the wires she needed, yanking them from their moorings as the doors slid open. The Guardian jerked her arm free, bleeding from a dozen long scratches from the sharp edges of torn metal, blood mottling the burns to her marred fingers. Grey-blue eyes took in the whole of the laboratory in an instant. Two stainless steel topped tables, some twenty feet long and strewn with all her sister-like's small experiments, her tinkerings and hover screens, split the room. Against the far wall, were three glass lined pods, prototypes of the chronquanta vehicles she'd built herself, lovingly detailed. The glass door to one was propped open somehow, the small fusion engine within humming softly. Moira had hinted that this one was special, this little experiment of hers that she refused to share even with her sister-like, until she was finished entirely. The excitement in those sea green eyes was unsettling, startling, manic even - just as it had been when she was near to completing those first equations that showed the world the existence of the chronoquanta in that mathematical language she intuitively as the spoken word. Elke's ivory brow quirked curiously, though there was no other expression of emotion to be found on her face. She could see nothing else out of place, but for the fact Aldean alone stood against the far wall by that open door, eyes wide and arms to his sides, and Moira was nowhere to be seen. "Where is she?" Elke leapt up easily on the first table, the shortest distance between her and the well-dressed man before her a straight line. "Elke... " Aldean's dark brown eyes widened in horror as the Guardian moved inexorably toward him. "No... Stay back... " "Moira." Not a question. A statement now. The Guardian refused to allow a single thought cross her mind other than the retrieval of her charge. "Stay BACK!" Aldean's arm raised swiftly, an ugly, ungainly black object in his hand and suddenly there was a flash, and another [i][b]CRACK[/i][/b] filled the room, far louder without the inches of concrete, steel and wood between them. Elke was slammed backward as she made to leap to the second table, a fire blooming in her gut as she was hurtled into the cabinetry behind her. Eyes wide with genuine surprise, the Guardian's uninjured hand went to her abdomen where she lay sprawled on the ground, coming away crimson-covered where the bullet from the antique weapon had ripped a hole through her skin. "You don't understand, Elke! How could you!?" he screamed, he wailed, arm still outstretched though shaking with the weight of the strain and the terror. "You're as much an abomination as these machines she built! Stolen! All the mysteries of the world... All of them, to the last! And she would have ripped the last veil away, the last piece of mystery left to men - " The next two seconds of Aldean's life were anticlimatic to say the least, though they were over blessedly quick. Elke was up off her back and over the last table in little more than a blur to the man's eyes. She slapped his gun arm away as easily as she might a child's, took his head in her two bare hands and snapped his neck, twisting his shocked, horrified face to his shoulders before she let his body drop to the ground. A sudden wave of nausea such as she'd never known in her life, nearly sent Elke to her knees. In her mind, the Guardian knew she was bleeding out. Shot, burned, bleeding, only sheer will power kept her on her feet. She'd heard of these... These... Religious [i]zealots,[/i] these madmen on the outlier lands who railed against Moira's work, but this was... It was for the insane. The [i]irrational.[/i] There should have been none who might come close enough, get near her charge... [i]Moira.[/i] Elke swayed on her feet, blinking away the spots that threatened to overwhelm her vision, one hand pressed against the hole in her belly as her gaze traveled with a painstaking slowness from the body of the dead man, toward the open door - The sight splayed before her, dropped the Guardian to her knees. Moira, her Moira, her charge, her sister-like... Though she didn't know it, never heard it, the Guardian moaned softly, deep in her throat like a wounded animal as she crawled to the dead woman on the floor, her body still propping open the door to that last of her creations... And it would be, the very last. Those sea green eyes were half-lidded and empty, her mouth open slightly. She was only a shell now, an incomplete shell of the woman she'd been. Small, torn pieces of that brilliant, incomparable brain, blood and bone dangled from the hole in the back of Moira's skull, spattered along the floor, the walls, two gaping holes in her chest, turning that sapphire blue gown a mottled, brackish purple where her life's blood had seeped and stained the cloth. Elke pulled her sister-like to her arms, pressing her to her chest as if she could somehow share whatever heartbeat she had left to her with Moira, cradling that burnished bronze head of hair obscenely stained with crimson and brain. The Guardian lay her strangely hot, wet cheek against Moira's forehead. Still warm. Moira was still warm, but the Guardian knew she wouldn't be so for long, and that eerie moaning continued on and on, a strange counterpoint to the whine of the fusion engine that some part of Elke's mind told her would soon reach critical mass - but she just didn't care. Not anymore. There was nothing left in her world, in this life, that meant a single thing to her anymore. There was no purpose left to her. No reason for anything, not even her own survival, and tears she had never shed in her life - not even once - slid down her cheeks to a dead woman's face as she let the whole world slide away, heard the ominous *click* and did nothing at all but hold the empty shell of her sister-like closely. She waited with the door propped open, and the fire she knew would come when this machine shorted, and vaporized everything in this laboratory. Elke never screamed, never flinched, an eternally silent sentinel as she felt that first [i]pulse[/i] of fire wash over her, her entire being unknitting, blessed freedom at last, freedom from the unbearable agony of being without her sister-like, her purpose, her entire reason to be from beginning to end. The Guardian smiled, and then knew nothing more. [center]**********[/center] [i]Pain.[/i] Nothing but pure, pristine, unrelenting pain singing along every last nerve in her body, an exquisite symphony of agony that strangled a gurgled scream from her throat, whether she would or no. Elke blinked slowly, her eyes opening unseeing, uncomprehending, as the grey light coalesced above her head in forms... Thin shapes, dark... There was a weight on her chest - she could feel it but not understand what it might be... Sticky... Something felt sticky against her hand, thick, heavy and... And hard - and she couldn't catch her breath, only short sips of cold, strange-tasting air. And somewhere very, very close, Elke heard a song of sorts ring out from living throats, a wail, a call, utterly without words yet still eerily beautiful to her hearing, sodden and dull as it was, as if she were submerged in water.