Snippet #1597801

The fire alarms woke Nightshade with a start. He'd just sent off a ten page report to the Director and settled in for a little nap. Crying out in surprise, the half-asleep man emitted a jet of mist from his sleeves and sprayed the room around him in self defense.

"Doctor Nightshade," chimed ALEX. "There is a situation happening. The Director wants to know what went wrong with the BOOST program." The A.I. projected a holographic camera image of what appeared to be the heart of a volcano. After staring at it for a while, Nightshade figured out that it was the hallway outside the test subject's room.

"NOOOOOO!" screamed the horrified mutant, throwing his metal chair across the room as he leapt to his feet. Running as fast as his legs would carry him, Nightshade sprinted down the hallways, taking hairpin turns without caution or care, until he reached the outskirts of the flames. The fire was so hot he couldn't even approach it yet, so he shed his trenchcoat, revealing his heavily tattooed body in a wife-beater and allowed the water to soak into his skin.

"Can you hear me!" he shouted down the hallway. Fifty seconds passed without an answer, so he held his hands out and shot streams of super-cool halon gas into the fire, extinguishing it instantly. He made his way slowly to the heart of the inferno, making sure he picked up enough water to sustain himself. When he finally reached the room of the boy, the fires were mostly out, but since the entire hall was one black color, he couldn't tell if there was any remains left.

Snarling savagely to himself, Nightshade angrily stomped back to the laboratory, only to be met by his bumbling assistant. The man stammered through some kind of explanation before Nightshade simply blew chloroform into his face and knocked him out. He entered his lab and snapped his right hand, manually activating the ALEX hologram. Leveling a finger, he shouted one word, a command.

"Analyze!" The machine flickered for a second, before issuing a flat tone and blinking out. A few seconds later, it projected a list of code and formulas, scrolling as fast as Nightshade could process it. "I'll be damned if I waste more resources on this project if it is a failure. There must be something I overlooked," muttered the man pensively.