BABBLE

Oh he isn't just doing what I think he's doing, is he?

Oh yes he was. The joker actually had the gall to think he could use sound against him. The arrogance of man has been something that has always led to his constant state of suffering and just when he was almost ready to think they'd of wizened up they go and try to pull this trick... Again.

As the volume grew his mind was cast back to the event which led to the loss of his hands.

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Flash-back to the incident at the previous facility...

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The doctor laid dead at his feet. Blood covered the index and middle fingers of his right hand. Dr. Ritter's left eye had been torn apart along with the contents of his skull, all mixed up inside. It had all been so fast, this culmination of events he had set into place. So long he had been vulnerable, listening to the agonizing noises. Up until then he had been subjected to nearly every sound known to man, his reactions recorded for scientific purposes.

He learned to laugh, and his laughter had spread. Just a few days before this gruesome scuffle he had practiced in his box of torture. The radio never ceased to pain him, it was only natural that the only logical consequences he had to look forward to were death unless he learned to cope with the noise of static it produced. While he never solved that particular weakness of his he did learn another trick: The spooky noise.

His doctor had spoke of another experiment, something of a prelude to another sound he'd be subjected to. On 31 May 2003, a group of UK researchers had held a mass experiment where they exposed some 700 people to music laced with soft 17 Hz sine waves played at a level described as "near the edge of hearing", produced by an extra-long-stroke sub-woofer mounted two-thirds of the way from the end of a seven-meter-long plastic sewer pipe. The experimental concert entitled Infrasonic took place over the course of two performances, each consisting of four musical pieces. Two of the pieces in each concert had 17 Hz tones played underneath. In the second concert, the pieces that were to carry a 17 Hz undertone were swapped so that test results would not focus on any specific musical piece. The participants were not told which pieces included the low-level 17 Hz near-infrasonic tone. The presence of the tone resulted in a significant number of participants reporting anxiety, uneasiness, extreme sorrow, nervous feelings of revulsion or fear, chills down the spine, and feelings of pressure on the chest.

Whilst the sound that was blasted from nearby speakers tormented his mind, yielding interesting data no doubt, it had also taught him a valuable lesson. Over the course of several days he honed a sonic emissions until he pinned down the perfect infrasound and then proceeded to extend that sound throughout the entire facility. Within the week the guard who had been a source of much abuse to all of the subjects in his block resigned. His work environment had become unlivable and the man was thoroughly convinced that the block was haunted.


This news was so hilarious to Babble that he began to laugh for the first time in years. His laughter spread throughout the entire facility, hundreds of phantasmal voices all laughing. To the people who worked there, the subjects and even the visitors it sounded as though the very walls were laughing at them. Terrifying as it was everyone began to flee. Subjects shivered in fear within their cells while the employees abandoned their posts and fled. There was only one man that didn't flee, the man who laid dead before him now.

The doctor's will had come unwound but rather than surrender to his patient which he worked so hard to crack he cracked first under the sound of laughter and dragged poor Babble from his cell into the operating room. Ritter strapped him onto a large metal table and plugged in an electric saw. He was going to figure out what made him tick once and for all, regardless of whether or not he would survive the operation. Lee continued to laugh. "This is the end for you, you babbling idiot! I will find out what's wrong with you if it's the last thing I do!"

The laughing stopped. "But doctor, the answer is simple."

"What!?"

"I am sound, doctor. I know who I am now. I am sound's avatar, it's will made flesh. I am here to do what must be done. I am... I am..."

He gazed directly into the doctor's cold stare.

"I am Babble."

At that instant the whole table shook violently. He transmitted his sound waves through the table, causing every component of the table to vibrate wildly. The screws holding the straps to the table came loose, allowing Babble to spring free. The doctor couldn't believe what he was seeing, the power he was witnessing. Before the doctor could react Babble lunged for the doctor, knocking him down onto the ground and on the ground he held him. The doctor swung at Babble's head with the live saw, buzzing with a dangerous vibe, but he caught the doctor's arm before he could hit him. Babble touched the side of the saws motor and transmitted his destructive sound through the machine. The whole thing shook wildly before the plug fell from the socket. The vicious whirring of the blade came to a dead silence. Dr. Ritter could only watch in dread as Babble looked deep into his eyes as though he was staring into his very mind and watching his fears play out before him. "Doctor, you should be proud. Your reputation remains unmarred. After all, you have solved..." Babble no longer moved his lips to speak as he spoke in the doctors own voice, albeit with a mocking tone. He held out his right index finger and middle finger. They began to vibrate until they were just a blur.

"... The unsolvable case."

The doctor's screamed loud and clear but there was nobody left in the building to save him. No one came to help him when Babble inserted his fingers through his left eye and whisked his brain like a chef whisks an egg. Babble had just learned the art of singing to his limbs and decided to honor his fine doctor's achievement by letting him be the first to fall to it's melody. After that liberating resolution he went and hit the panic release button. With a buzz all the doors unlocked, the prisoners of the facility were set free. To ensure all the patients made their ways out instead of lingering and causing trouble he sang the song of despair to encourage them in their exodus. All the subjects of Hope Town's Genetic Modification Center were unleashed upon the neighboring towns, for better or for worse.


But of course what little victory he could claim was short lived. As he dwelled within the lightless halls of the now inactive facility he acted as a ghost, scaring those who would try to take this new home from him with his spooky noises and phantasmal songs. It worked for a couple weeks but eventually someone had done something dastardly. They hacked into the sound system and turned the facility's speakers against him. Blasphemy! Babble's thoughts cried out in outrage as the very facility which was his new true home turned on him. The government men were using the speakers to push Babble into a corner using the pain as a subtle incentive. He did try to destroy the speakers to no avail as the speakers weathered his onslaught and responded in kind with harsh noises. After much running Babble did eventually find himself trapped in a room in one of the upper floors. The hallway outside the door had a speaker on each corner blasting away and the only other exit was a window. He heard the footsteps of the intruders coming. After the sonic assault they laid on him Babble only assumed the worst. He had to escape.

There was only one way out. He had this idea in his head that he'd cut open the glass like in those cartoons where a guy would use glass cutting tools or something similar to slice a circular hole through a glass window. As he sang to his hands and brought them to the window the instant his hand made contact with the pane of glass it shattered. People do not often grasp just how sharp glass can be.

Before the sensation could even reach his brain his hands were gone. His hands had been vibrating like crazy, passing through the same space hundreds of thousands of times a second. When glass occupied the same space his hands were passing through that meant his hands were hitting the glass hundreds of thousands of times a second. The time it took for the hands to come off could only really be calculated with a negative exponent.

As he looked down he could see the bloody stumps that once sported hands with five nimble fingers. The pain was relatively low as the cut removed most of the nerves and the adrenaline dulled the rest. It was more the out of body feeling that washed over him as though he had just fallen apart, which was true in a limited sense. Of course, reality came knocking as the door opened behind him in his state of confusion. He turned the face the men who were pursuing him, backing away as the figures almost came into view. Such a meeting was interrupted as in his absentmindedness he had backed into the window and in blind misfortune happened to fall backwards out the window's frame.

The fall seemed to take forever. He opened his mouth to scream but no sound came out. All he could hear is the howl of the wind rushing up past him as he descended.

Crunch.

...

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Back to present

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Spoiler Alert: He survived.

But injuries can leave scars and he was rife with those, both physically and mentally. Old wounds still ached from the memories, experiences still fresh in his mind that bring forth nothing but the hurt he felt when he remembers what transpired then.

He had been relatively happy up until now. He had dark, he had quiet, he had peace. This place was still noisier than anywhere he'd like to be but it was several grades above what he was used to. Even this little game was nothing compared to what he's been through despite Sam's best efforts. Turning the speakers on him was the last straw for him. This wasn't a game he was going to play anymore. The only man who ever came close to understanding just what he was capable of was dead, these clowns didn't know just what was going to hit them.


Not using his powers? Like hell if he was going to follow that rule any longer. Immediately over the speakers Sam's voice crackled to life, only it wasn't really his voice. Yo dawg, Drop the bass! The voice of Sam spoke in a comical 'gangsta' accent. Well, how was Babble going to turn down such a polite offer?

His rather unsightly feet planted on the ground he started off with something he'd been thinking of trying for a good long while. The air crackled to life and a very fine ringing sound rang out through each and every hall of the facility, reaching to every closet and room. Nowhere was safe from this sonic wave he released. Once every room was ringing with this very sharp bell sound he triggered a sharp jump and that's when it all broke. Every light bulb, Every computer screen, every window, every single glass object possessed the same shatter point and his sound jumped to the amperage where not even the thickest glass object would remain intact. The ringing mingled with the sudden universal crack of every glass object inside the building shattering into millions of pieces. All the lights went out. There was only darkness.


Without sight the only other medium people could navigate by was by smell or by sound. Sound. You know who is sound? He is sound. They were all blind without him.

But he wasn't done, oh not at all.

Now that chaos was sewn the next step was to spring from this little death trap dungeon. He started projecting what sounded like a deep powerful bass sound into the floor causing it to start shaking. It started off light but within moments the vibrations reached an earth quake level of shaking. You see, his hypothesis was that while the doors were super reinforced to keep anyone from busting free the walls around them were loaded with delicate equipment with numerous parts to rattle loose since this maze was designed with so many traps with numerous parts. Very few people are so thorough as to reinforce every single wall inside a building as that would essentially transform it from a normal place into a literal bunker. While certain parts of this building were designed to keep monstrously strong mutants from busting through there were definite weak points all throughout this building and even this maze had plenty of spots more poorly assembled than others.

Such was the case for the very floor they were standing on. As it turned out the floor beneath them was supported by a few beams out from several motors. This part of the hall was a death trap designed with two walls to close them all in while the roof and the ceiling closed together, flattening them all. There was a complex puzzle hidden in a panel in the wall next to them that they'd have to solve before they'd get crushed if they were to survive. Well, it looked like that puzzle would continue to go on unsolved another day as instead of playing along Babble was planning on going straight through the floor.


Now the entire floor had advanced to the point where it was shaking so badly that it was impossible to even stand on. Babble was only still on because he was moving with the beat, his body vibrating along with the ground as he pumped up the volume through the floor. The mechanism which held the floor up started to fly apart, bolts and screws coming undone and flying about within the rapidly disintegrating machine. The very metal of the floor itself started to warp from the sound, bending below them as the song went on.

Loud horrid cracks rang up through the floor as his song started to break apart the layer of concrete that separated the two floors. As the very beams which held the floor together started to bend and separate the concrete fell apart and everything that rested upon it came tumbling after. Machines, plates of metal, rock and of course all the subjects which used to be standing on top of all these things all fell in a rain of debris all concealed in the pitch blackness that surrounded everyone within this forsaken facility.


And so he fell. He could tell what was going on better but he was in no more control over his descent than the rest of them were. It lasted only a few seconds but it seemed to go on for an eternity. Falling... Falling...

Crunch.

...