Chapter 10: The Serum

Alexis discovers a deeper, darker layer to the Facility.

“Alexis Pecora?” 

Alexis rose from his cot where he skimmed over the contents of his “welcome” package. The young lab assistant stood in his door, holding a clipboard and looking more than a little nervous.

“Come with me,” he said, his eyes focused on the papers in his hand instead of the nonhumans in the room.

A few hours had passed since Alexis and Jasper had left the courtyard and settled back in their room. Outside, they’d figured it had warmed up, and the winged nonhuman had no desire to test his limits in the higher heat. It had only just been bearable when he’d been outside earlier. When the assistant tapped on the door, Jasper shared a concerned look with Alexis. 

“Where’re you taking him?” Jasper said, rising halfway from his cot.

“Stay seated, please,” said the assistant as one of the guards from earlier loomed behind him, glaring at the siren. “We will bring you back at a later time.”

Jasper frowned and looked away. Alexis, knowing compliance would serve him better than resistance, set the papers down and left his seat. He followed the assistant down the hallway, flanked by the guard. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Jasper leaning out of the doorway and watching, expression worried, as they turned a corner. 

They proceeded to an elevator, which took them a couple floors down�"underground. When they exited the elevator, Alexis looked around him. The walls, a dark gray and made of granite, lit up with lights at floor-level. The smell and temperature reminded him of a cave or a poorly-maintained basement. The few lights above them flickered, and as they walked down the hallway, they passed doorways every hundred feet or so. At the end of the hall, they took a right, and the assistant stopped at a heavy-looking door down a shorter corridor.

“In here,” the assistant said after he slid a card from his pocket into a pad by the door.

Alexis followed, his heart pounding in his chest as they entered a small room full of medical supplies, vials, and an ominous chair in the middle. It had more, brighter lights than the hallways, and two doors�"one to the front and one to the side�"led elsewhere in the complex. Off to the side of the room, the doctor from earlier entered from the door and joined them in the room. She turned around once to look at a mirror which had to be more than an ordinary mirror, but then she focused on the three.

“Hello, again, Alexis. As you should remember, you’re going to take some tests here. I hope you rested up,” she said and took a clipboard from a table by the vials. She glanced over the papers on it and handed it to the assistant a moment later. “We’re going to remove your wing bondings after we are done here. If you keep your appendages to yourself, we should have no need to bind them again.

“Take a seat,” she said, not looking at Alexis as she turned around to pull open a drawer and take out a translucent box. 

Muscles tense, Alexis unwillingly and uncomfortably sat on the off-white medical chair, trying to adjust his wings so he didn’t sit on his feathers too much. The guard stood by the door, glaring at him and looking ready to force him to do something if he did not comply. Alexis could only imagine who else waited behind the other doors, so even though he wanted to get out and not do as commanded, he felt the alternative to obeying would be worse than his current situation.

The doctor opened the rounded box on a smaller table in front of the chair the nonhuman sat on. The box contained an assortment of needles, each labeled for different purposes, and a handful of bottles, also labeled. None of the labels made any sense to Alexis, even though he could read them plainly with his hawk-like vision. The assistant turned to him and asked Alexis to turn his head, pointing to the left. After he did so, the assistant wrote down something�"presumedly having to do with the code on the nonhuman’s neck. The assistant then put down the clipboard and pulled gloves from a box over his hands. He then removed some supplies from a small container and set them on the table beside Alexis.

“Okay, hold your arm out, please,” he said, holding his newly-gloved hands to Alexis.

Brows furrowing and lips pursing, Alexis hesitated before he slowly offered his arm. The assistant pulled out an armrest from the side of the seat and rested the hybrid’s slightly feathered and scaled, left arm on it. Tying a tourniquet around his upper arm, the assistant asked Alexis to make a fist. He then examined the crook of Alexis’s arm and felt along the veins, which sent an uncomfortable tingle down the nonhuman’s spine. 

After applying an alcohol wipe to the bend in the arm, the assistant assembled the needle and blood collection tube carefully, all while the doctor set up her own set of needles behind him. Alexis watched the needles, his heart in the pit of his stomach as the assistant inserted the first of many to come into his skin. The nonhuman winced and looked away from the blood leaving his body, and after the assistant finished and cleaned the wound, the blood-filled tubes went into a small, fridge-like container. What they planned on doing with that blood, Alexis felt he did not want to know.

The assistant stepped away, and the doctor gave a meaningful look to the guard, who proceeded to bolt the door. Though slightly light-headed from the blood loss, Alexis’s heart raced as the doctor and assistant had him strip and enter a small shower�"hidden by a curtain�"in the corner. With his wings still bound, the arrangement made for an uncomfortable one, but once he’d been cleaned�"rather abrasively�"the assistant dried him off and led him�"with only his pants on�"back to his seat. Once there, they attached adhesive pads to his torso which had wires attached to a monitor system. 

“Keep still while we do this.” The doctor proceeded to inject one of the solutions in a vile into Alexis’s opposite arm, after the assistant prepared it for her.

The assistant took notes of readings on the monitor as their unwilling patient’s heart raced and face contorted up uncomfortably. Alexis felt the solution running through his veins, and as it went, his skin felt prickly and whole body shivered. He looked down to his arms when he felt something running down them, and as he did so, his eyes widened as a familiar cold enveloped his body. At this reaction, the assistant and doctor murmured to each other, and the woman grabbed another needle and vial while the assistant filled his own vial with the semi-frozen liquid. With his heart still racing, Alexis felt that only parts of his abilities had returned, as the transformation had not yet come on, despite his distress. 

“Can you… solidify that?” requested the doctor, clearly intrigued by the phenomenon. 

Alexis’s brows furrowed as he realized that he had little control over the perspiration which he usually would only use for self-defense or self-healing. Whatever chemical concoction they had given him had activated parts of his biology without his knowledge or will. Despite that, he did try, if not because they requested it, then because he wanted to test if he had a weapon against them. He breathed deeply to focus his mind and slow his heart rate, despite the itchiness he felt in his veins. As he did so, the liquid which dripped down his arms slowly froze and hardened. Normally, that would occur in less time, but he attributed the resistance to the air being warmer than he’d like and the odd solution in his veins.

“Amazing,” remarked the assistant as he picked up the clipboard and jotted something down.  “The elemental adjustment capsule seems to have worked perfectly, even on a hybrid.”

“Yes, but the reversal serum didn’t return the ability to full potential. I wonder if that has to do with the transformation biology still being suppressed. Hmm…” The doctor put a finger to her chin and turned away from the others. She then entered the door where she’d come in from.

Taking in what the doctor had said, Alexis weighed his options in his head. He could either try to escape with what small portion he had regained of his abilities, or he could stay and see what else they planned on doing to him. When he glanced over to the guard at the door, he frowned, noticing the intense stare of the human on him. The guard certainly knew to keep an eye on him, and with whatever threats the other rooms held looming over him as well, Alexis felt he had only one option. He would have to see how far these people wanted to go with him, and maybe that would help him figure out how to get the hell out of there.