Way Back Home

by Eldorado

Chapter 4

Dr. Anderson cautiously advanced into the middle of Queen Chrysalis’s cell, pushing a squeaky-wheeled food cart with the same mismatched jumble of choices they’d offered yesterday. The creature before him may as well have been a lifeless statue, the way she sat so impossibly still and only occasionally turned her head to track whatever her visitors were doing. Even seated, her eyes were level with Anderson’s, and they stared unblinking into his, somehow managing to be simultaneously curious and apathetic as he announced his purpose.

“We’ve got, uh… got some food for you,” he struggled to say. He paused, hoping for a reply but knowing full well he’d get none. The eerie green eyes shifted downward a few degrees, noting the various food items being offered but making no further movements. Still she remained rooted in place, a static object that bore no similarities to the ruthless and savvy shapeshifter that’d flawlessly impersonated him and nearly escaped the base within hours of being hauled in.

“You know, this would be a lot easier if you told us what things on the cart you liked and didn’t like.” He picked up a withered bit of pre-war snack food that may have once resembled cake. “For instance, I’ve never been much of a chocolate guy. If it was me in the cell, I’d be asking for a bit less Fancy Lads and a bit more potato chips. So far it seems like you’re alright with everything, but… you know. Any little information we can get to know you better, we’d love to have.” He tried to twist his lips into a friendly smile, but the whole exchange seemed silly even to him.

Chrysalis looked down at what had been offered to her—some fruit common to most Equestrian climates, a kind of soup she’d never seen outside the Gryphon Kingdom, barely-edible miniature cakes and other junk food that looked to have been sitting around for ages—and wondered how Raven Rock’s food stores could be so high in variety yet low in quality. Still, she said nothing, and merely shifted her eyes back up to meet his.

Anderson smiled genuinely, shaking his head. He was actually starting to wonder if her “natural” form was even capable of speech at all, or if she could only communicate verbally in the voices of other people.

“Sure, go ahead,” he answered her unspoken request to begin, pushing the cart further ahead until it was right in front of her. “I’ll be back for it in an hour.” He turned to leave, but her horn spontaneously erupted in a flash of green light, startling him. He took a big step back, and the guard at the door scrambled to get his rifle trained on her head.

“Hey!” the guard shouted. “Whatever you’re doing… knock it off!”

Chrysalis raised a mocking eyebrow as an apple, surrounded in a glowing green aura, levitated off the table and towards her face. She bit noisily into it, closing her eyes as if savoring the taste, and then the apple levitated away as she chewed. The soldier’s finger stayed tensed on the trigger, until she reopened her eyes to shoot an inquisitive “what?” look in his direction. After all, she didn’t exactly have hands, so how else was she expected to manipulate the contents of the tray?

“Alright… carry on…” he took his finger off the trigger and slightly lowered the rifle. “Just, no sudden moves like that, okay?”

She quickly lifted a hoof, and the rifle shot reflexively back to attention. Its overly-nervous owner was about to shout more, but all she was doing was wiping the juice from her chin. Again, the rifle lowered, and she continued her meal without ever flinching even once.

“Ugh…” Forrester sighed, turning away from the camera feed to absently rub his temples. “This is hard to watch.”

“Agreed,” said Colonel Autumn. “That’s all she ever does, no matter what we do to her.”

“She’s playing with them. She’s in control of that cell, and she knows it. You’re never going to be able to get her to talk with normal methods, whether it’s Anderson giving out milk and cookies or Fairlight punching her in the gut. She’s smart, she knows she’s important to us, she’s tough, and she’s patient. This isn’t going to be easy.”

Autumn watched as the power-armored, plasma-rifle-toting soldier posted at the door all but cowered in fear of the prisoner he was supposed to be guarding. She spent so much time sitting perfectly still that every movement seemed like she was readying an attack, or trying to escape the base again. She’d made such a spectacle of it the first time that, even in failure, she still had everyone spooked. Their own clumsy handling of the situation, confusedly alternating between violence and threats and kindness, hadn’t helped things along, but they were used to dealing with idiot raiders who would sell each other down the river for a can of beans.

“Suggestions?”

Forrester thought for a moment, watching Anderson finally turn to leave the cell empty-handed as always. “She’s outsmarting us, biding her time and gathering all sorts of information on how to exploit us while divulging none of her own secrets. She’s probably been planning another escape attempt since the instant her first one failed. Whatever kind of treatment we throw at her is meaningless, because she thinks she’s too good for us to truly outsmart her in the end. I’d call it arrogance, but she seems capable enough to back it up. We wouldn’t be so interested in studying her otherwise.

“I think the only way you’re going to get her to talk is if you break her spirit, and that’s not going to happen unless she’s beaten at her own game. She obviously has a great deal of physical ability, and yet she didn’t simply start blasting her way out of the base when she decided she’d been here long enough. She prides herself on trickery and deceit—which makes sense, given her shapeshifting ability, and the fact that aliens have always acted in shadow despite possessing far superior firepower—and until we prove our superiority there, I don’t think she’ll be talking much.”

On the monitor, the fuzzy image of their captive sat casually in the corner of the cell, muzzle buried in a box of over-sweetened prewar breakfast cereal.

“I imagine this business of offering her good food is only making it worse.”

Forrester clicked his tongue. “Well, technically, it could work, if she was actually speaking to us. I think Anderson wants to use her favorite foods as an incentive to cooperate, and what she hates as negative reinforcement, which… isn’t an inherently terrible idea, I suppose. But with the way she’s been acting so far, I bet you could serve her a plate of raw mole rat and she’d down it without complaint to avoid giving us any ounce of leverage over her.”

Autumn watched her pause for a moment before levitating the glass of water to her lips to take a drink. “I tire of this. I’m going to shut this whole… whatever this is down, before it wastes any more time and resources. We need her to crack so we can figure out what makes her tick, and then have Anderson’s people get to work on reverse-engineering her, or something.”

“Colonel, if you want to use her as a weapon, you don’t necessarily need to make her agree to it,” Forrester objected. Autumn shot him a look. “Err… not in the sense you mean, anyway. You need her cooperation, but that can be got without her ever uttering a syllable. Mankind didn’t harness the atom by locking it in a cell and interrogating it, and even if it somehow spoke it’d be poor science to take it at its word without confirming the results in a controlled environment.”

Autumn frowned. “So you’re suggesting I have Anderson go ahead with the autopsy?”

“No, no, no,” Forrester rejected, waving his hands, “what is it with you two about autopsies? No, I mean setting her into a situation we control, and observing how she responds. Goading her into action to test her capabilities and limits. I can take care of the whole thing, and it won’t interfere with any of the other projects my department is working on, I assure you. If it goes nowhere, we can always come back to… this.”

Autumn looked back at the monitor. The current plan, if it could even be called such, was going nowhere in a hurry, and Forrester was probably the most qualified of any of the Enclave’s officers when it came to such matters – though he was the Enclave’s chief weapons and technology engineer at the moment, he’d started out studying interrogation back west, and gradually transitioned from there to designing torture devices and techniques before the Oil Rig was destroyed. His move to mechanical and weapons engineering was a matter of practicality, as he just happened to be a competent scientist who survived the rig’s destruction and had engineering experience. All this time, he’d been sitting on years of impassioned study into the science of making other living things spill their secrets to the world.

Autumn shrugged. It couldn’t make things any worse.

“Alright.”

---

A few days passed, though it could have just as easily been a few weeks and Queen Chrysalis would have hardly known the difference. At regular intervals, which she assumed to be around lunchtime of every day, the one she’d impersonated would bring her food on a cart, and try to strike up a conversation. She always ignored him, as she did with the omnipresent armed guard at the door. She marked the passing of morning and night with the times a new guard entered to relieve the old, and silently stood her ground the rest of the time.

Her thoughts were often with Canterlot, reliving the whole experience from the capture of Princess Cadance to the final defeat of the hive. Nowhere in there did it make any sense how she and the whole changeling horde had wound up in that steel-walled dungeon. Not the current one, but the other one, with the sterile walls not covered in grime and the little green men she couldn't understand and the ventilation system that didn't constantly sound like it was about to sputter and die. She also couldn’t work out who her current captors truly were, or what they were hoping to accomplish. If they were looking for a ransom, then they already knew who she was and had no cause to interrogate her further. If they were hoping to turn her, to make her a weapon against Celestia, then they need only ask – she’d play along, use their resources to free the changelings and take Canterlot, then backstab them and take Equestria for her own. The only satisfactory explanation was that they didn’t know who or what they were dealing with, and were trying to find a potential use for her. With that being the case, then they were on equal footing, and that was unacceptable.

A part of her was worried, concerned that the pitiful attempts at interrogation would drag on forever, but these people were clearly not used to dealing with a prisoner such as her. Initially, they’d wavered back and forth between Anderson’s calm and friendly talking approach and Fairlight’s punching and kicking, a textbook good cop/bad cop act played completely unironically and without any apparent sense of self-awareness. Pathetic. Now, they were rolling with this food cart charity, attempting to buy her cooperation with almost-spoiled food, or something equally nonsensical.

But sooner or later, they’d give her an opening. They’d slip up, leave themselves exposed somehow, and that was when she’d strike.

---

The next day, Anderson’s standard food cart greeting was replaced by a quartet of soldiers with their handheld spellcasters and bulky metal armor. Chrysalis straightened her back, holding her ground, waiting for one of the men to reveal himself as Fairlight and start punching her in the ribs again. She almost smiled at the impatience.

Instead, two of the soldiers immediately shouldered weapons and took aim at her head, while the other two set aside their weapons and took out bundles of rope. The door guard joined the covering pair, and Chrysalis decided against making the move she'd been planning. She’d tested several soldiers for their reaction times with out-of-nowhere levitation spells, and they always had their rifles up and ready to go in tiny fractions of a second. The regular day-guard, who she liked to toy with during meals, was especially excitable, but all the guards she’d seen had been far too jumpy to make it worth the risk. If they saw her horn start glowing now, she was as good as dead.

The rope went around her forelegs, and then she was forcibly pushed over onto her side. With no way to break the fall, her head smacked painfully against the hard floor. The spellcasters got poked into her face, and the door guard even warned her not to move. Her hind legs were bound just like the others, and then her captors tied a final strip of rope around all four hooves to completely immobilize her. The other two soldiers then lowered their weapons so the four of them could carry her.

The room rotated further as she was turned onto her back, and four pairs of armored gloves each grabbed a corner of her torso and heaved. She went up, the door guard’s weapon still trained on her face, and the whole group moved swiftly out into the corridor. She expected them to go right, around the corner to their bio lab, maybe hook her up to some kind of a machine to run direct tests. Oh, how exciting it would be to break out of there, leaving loads of expensive damage in her wake. But instead, they went left, shifting her up to their shoulders so they could walk closer together in the tight space. She looked around, scanning her surroundings for any sign of their destination, but the map she'd seen had only showed more holding cells forming a giant ring. The one ahead on the right was open, and another soldier stood guard at the door.

They squeezed through the door and went in, and suddenly all the support under her vanished. She fell, flailing her limbs only to have them restrained by the rope. Her vision flashed white with pain as her whole weight cracked hard into the unforgiving steel floor. She cursed silently to herself—that had very nearly been a dislocated shoulder, or worse.

The metallic sound of a knife being unsheathed registered somewhere in her mind, and then the ropes were being slashed away the next second. Disoriented, she tried to turn her head in the direction of her captors, but they’d already cut her loose and were heading out of the cell. The door closed loudly, leaving her alone. She twisted herself to stand upright, and the cell was instantly cut almost in half by a shimmering blue aura.

She jumped to her hooves and ran up to it, but pressing a hoof into its surface revealed it as solid. She sat, ears folding back. Perhaps as much as ten feet into the cell, leaving just enough room for their own people to enter and observe or speak with her, her captors had erected a magical forcefield similar in appearance and function to the one deployed over Canterlot. It simply couldn’t be a coincidence.

Someone had tipped Celestia off to the changeling threat; she’d initially planned to use the Princess Cadance cover to assassinate Celestia, and Luna if it was possible, and then call for an invasion once the nation’s most powerful defender was out of the picture. That had all gone south almost immediately, however, when the mostly-ceremonial Royal Guard was fully mobilized overnight, and its captain was suddenly and mysteriously able to project a city-encompassing forcefield spell. Compared to the wanton cavalcade of failure that followed, it was a minor hiccup that she’d expertly adapted to on the fly. But it still left the question—where had that spell come from?

The door to her cell opened before she could come up with an answer. A new face, tall and narrow like the body it belonged to, greeted her with a cold stare. His hair was greying in places, and the way he sort of squinted from behind his horn-rimmed glasses made him very nearly intimidating. Colonel Autumn appeared behind him, but the newcomer drew all of Chrysalis’s attention. She studied him cautiously as he and Autumn entered the cell, walking right up to the forcefield.

Anderson always had a somewhat cagey look at first, as if unnerved by the idea of standing so close to her. She always sat with her back perfectly straight, ensuring her eye level was at least an inch or so above his despite her seated posture. These creatures were taller than ponies, but her natural form still held enough of a size advantage that she could look down upon them and intimidate their weaker-willed members. It usually worked, too; Anderson was essentially spineless, Autumn and Fairlight betrayed their fears by taking security so seriously, and even the soldiers themselves tended to be a bit jumpy in her presence.

But this new one was different. He didn’t flinch, didn’t tense up as he approached, didn’t reveal his feelings at all. He stood up to her, stared her straight in the eye, and frowned a bit as if to say he was not impressed with her. Maybe it was false confidence, since the forcefield was between them, but they had to know she was capable of breaking down such barriers when she set her mind to it. Otherwise, this was going to be an easier escape than she thought.

“She’s all yours, Forrester,” said Autumn. “I’ll stay with Fairlight’s team in the hall until you’re done here.”

If anything, Forrester frowned a little more. “Thank you, Colonel,” he said, still keeping his eyes locked on her. “I’ll get to it, then.”

Autumn nodded and turned to leave, but stopped himself right away. “Oh, I nearly forgot. She seems to be more cooperative lately, and the barrier seems to be working fine, but just in case…” He reached under his coat and drew his pistol, flipping it so the back end faced Forrester. “Remember, she’s expendable, and you're not.”

Forrester took the pistol, almost reluctantly. “Thank you, Colonel. Although it shouldn’t come to that.”

Autumn shrugged. “I hope not, but the option exists.” Without waiting for Forrester to say anything further, Autumn made for the exit at a brisk, purposed stride. The door’s obnoxious center wheel slid down behind him, locking the sides of the door in place.

“My name is Clayton Forrester,” he introduced, “and unlike dear Dr. Anderson, I am not incompetent.” He paused for a second, as if waiting for a reply. He got none within the first few seconds, and continued on. “I understand why Colonel saw fit to hand you over to him, considering his department is biology, but I think he underestimated just how bad Anderson is at dealing with living things.”

Again he paused, this time taking a step closer to the wall so he could lean against it comfortably. He set down Autumn’s pistol on top of a control panel of some sort jutting out the wall—given that this cell had a forcefield and a control panel and her old one had neither, Chrysalis had to assume the two were connected.

Forrester continued, “I’ll be honest with you, I’ve got a lot to do today and so I’d prefer to keep this brief. I don’t care if you talk to me, or explain yourself, or whatever. I don’t want to have to check on you every day, and sit through the same stupid staring contest that Anderson did, waiting for you to say something. I’ve got a saucer full of alien hardware that needs reverse-engineering, Grant's new armor project out of Adams AFB that I need to supervise, whatever the hell Whitley is doing to our eyebots out there, and half a dozen other projects that are way more important than standing here getting looked at for twenty minutes a day.

“If Anderson kept you, then he’d just keep wasting food on you for another few weeks, hoping you’d talk but getting nowhere in a hurry. Then Autumn would lose his patience and order Anderson to kill you and perform an autopsy, or Fairlight would lose his patience and beat you to death with your own spine for all the stuff you’ve done, or maybe they’d both lose patience at the same time and Autumn would order Fairlight to beat you to death while he watched. Either way, you’d end up dead and we’d have nothing to show for it that we couldn’t have gained by simply snapping your neck on day one and being done with it.

“So… now that you’re my project, I’m going to make a few changes to the way things are run.” He stood up straight and took a step away from the wall, leaving the pistol behind. Chrysalis readied herself to grab it. “The guard from your old cell? He was one of Anderson’s security detail, a rotating shift he had moved from the Bio Lab. But I don't hate my security people enough to make them babysit you, so we’ll just rely on the forcefield. You can’t get through it, can you?”

She blinked, not sure what he was trying to accomplish. Of course her magic was powerful enough to pass through a simple barrier spell. Maybe advanced spells would be disrupted by it, and combat magic would have to forcibly break through the barrier in order to hit things on the other side, but all she needed here was a levitation spell to shut down the barrier from the console in her cell. Her captors were idiots if they didn’t realize this.

Still, Forrester was half-smiling at her, giving her a few more seconds to answer him. If they truly didn’t realize how easily she could escape, she wasn’t going to be the one to tell them. She focused on a pen in Forrester’s breast pocket—messing with the controls or the pistol atop them might make them change their approach—and slowly cast the weakest levitation spell she could muster. A few sparks whirled around the pen, and Forrester looked down at it curiously. Then the barrier began to shimmer, and she felt a hint of resistance disrupting the spell. Rather than push, channeling more energy into the spell to overpower the barrier, she held it, squinted her eyes and gritted her teeth with feigned exertion, then released the spell. The barrier returned to normal, the sparks dissipated, and Forrester’s pen settled back into his pocket, having barely been made to twitch.

“Excellent. I’ll send someone through with a food cart a couple of times a week or so, whenever one of us feels like it. That’ll be your chance to communicate, as well—if you cooperate with us, I can and will reward you for it. It’s a similar deal to what Anderson was trying to offer you, I admit, although I differ from him in that I believe a prisoner who’s given nothing should get nothing in return.”

He was about to leave, and Chrysalis decided that now was her best chance. In his overconfidence, he’d left the pistol Autumn gave him on the opposite side of the room, too far to do anything about it in the short time it’d take her to fire a stronger levitation spell through the barrier and grab it. The men outside would hear the shot and come running, of course, but that was fine by her. It stood to reason that the barrier would block or at least substantially weaken their spellcaster fire, so they couldn’t do anything to her until it was down. One shot from the pistol would take out Autumn, whose big overcoat didn’t seem to be armored, and she’d still have two or three seconds, minimum, before one of the soldiers got to the controls. Plenty of time to disarm them with another set of levitation spells, at which point she could turn their weapons on them or merely destroy them and deal with the soldiers in close quarters once the barrier went down.

The whole thing would be over in perhaps as much as ten seconds, and her captors would have lost their Colonel, Major, some number of lower-ranked soldiers, and an important member of their science team all at the same time. Once she was out in the hallway, she’d be home free; they wouldn’t have prepared another “just in case” squad, and she already knew how to escape and could do so before anyone on the base realized the extent of what was happening. A chorus of frantic running footsteps would play her off, the sound of dozens of soldiers and medical personnel rushing to the cell block to check on the wounded. Anderson may have been incompetent, but it would be Forrester who took the blame—posthumously, of course—for allowing their prized captive to escape.

Chrysalis focused on the pistol and reached out for it, pushing up against the weak resistance offered by the barrier and—

It didn’t give. A swirling blue distortion appeared between caster and target, but the barrier had halted her efforts to reach through. Two feeble green sparks danced in circles around the pistol, and the handgrip trembled a little, but that was all. Chrysalis pushed harder, channeling more energy into the spell, but she couldn’t beat it. The barrier warped and distorted, its tortured bluish shimmer pulsating erratically, but it held.

Chrysalis's strength was draining fast—Anderson’s generous food offerings had kept her physical strength up, but it’d been so long since she’d last fed on emotions that she didn’t have the energy to sustain the spell for long. She pushed one last time, as if she was levitating an entire house off its foundation, but her horn gave out and she collapsed to her knees. Forrester chuckled a bit as he picked up the pistol.

“Well, that’s a relief. For a minute there, I thought you were just pulling my leg with that pen gag.” Chrysalis looked up at him, seeing an intact and seamless barrier spell between them, as if nothing had happened at all. “It’s good to know we really can trust these things to contain you.”

The door opened, and Colonel Autumn entered the cell pushing one of Anderson’s food carts. This one only had a single bowl of something on it, not the wide variety of options that Anderson always prepared. He set it against the wall, then accepted his pistol back from Forrester.

“Works perfectly, Colonel,” Forrester said. An odd thing to say about a pistol that hadn't been fired, Chrysalis thought, until Autumn reached into his overcoat and pulled out a metal stick of some kind. He stuck it into the handgrip of the pistol, then yanked back the top part until it clicked. Then he put the pistol away, and congratulated Dr. Forrester. Chrysalis’s heart sank with the realization.

He was in on it. He’d disabled the pistol and left it as bait. They didn’t know if the barrier was going to work, and they were testing it. They’d anticipated a fake-out, and they'd played her.

“So, what’s the next step?” Autumn inquired.

“Well, I suppose we’ve learned all we can, for the time being.” Forrester shrugged. “No sense wasting a perfectly good forcefield, though, so we might as well follow through what I said about starving her alone in the dark until she cooperates. If it’s all right with you, sir.” The glance he sent in her direction as he finished his sentence confirmed her suspicions that they’d already decided this hours or perhaps days earlier, and were deliberately having the conversation again where she could hear it.

“Very well. Just make sure the kitchen staff knows to stop preparing food for her every day, and get one of your own people to do this from now on. I don’t plan on coming down here more than is absolutely necessary.”

“Neither do I, Colonel, believe me.”

Autumn gestured to the forcefield control, signaling Forrester to get ready to power it down. He put both hands back on the cart he’d brought, and looked Chrysalis straight in the eye.

“I don’t suppose we’ve convinced you to cooperate with us now, have we?” Autumn asked, his drawling voice actually showing signs of short-tempered frustration. “Otherwise, this’ll be your last meal for a while.” She said nothing. “Well alright then.”

Forrester pressed a control on the wall, and the shimmering barrier spell vanished before her eyes. Immediately, Chrysalis fired up her horn again, visualizing the pistol inside Autumn’s coat and wrapping a levitation spell around its handgrip. Immediately, Autumn saw the glow of her horn and felt the tugging inside his coat, and grabbed the pistol with both hands. Chrysalis fired a second spell at the controls, locking them so Forrester couldn’t activate the field and disrupt her magic.

The gun went off. The crack of its report stung her ears, and a hole exploded out the side of Autumn’s overcoat. Little bits of the fabric and smoke from the blast floated in the air for a second, before she wrenched the pistol hard to the side to dislodge it from its holster. Thinking quickly, she fired a third spell at the door, sealing it shut before the kill-squad could storm through in response to the shot. She was weakening, though, desperately low on magical energy after such magical exertion and starvation. Three simultaneous spells were too much to sustain, and her horn failed her. The power of her spells faded, and Autumn regained control of the weapon. He drew it from his coat, turned it on her, and fired.

Chrysalis fell. He’d shot her in the leg, the round going right through her chitin armor as if it wasn’t even there. Footsteps and the whine of servomotors followed Fairlight’s team through the door, and Chrysalis soon had half a dozen weapons pointed at her head. Autumn waved an arm to make them stop, before anyone could open fire, and the cell became almost quiet. A faint, pained whimper escaped Chrysalis’s lips.

Colonel Autumn put his boot against the cart and shoved it into the cell directly at her. She couldn’t dodge in time, and the heavy metal cart clocked her right across the side of her face. Something hot splashed against her neck, and she heard the bowl it had been served in shatter on contact with the ground just before the barrier spell was recast. Six pairs of footsteps filed out of the cell, fading into the silence beneath the barrier’s hum after the door rolled shut behind them. Then the lights went out completely, and Chrysalis was left alone with nothing but the eerie blue glow of the barrier to help her see.

Tears were already accumulating, but she forced herself not to cry. She twisted her foreleg to look at the wound in the dim glow of the barrier, and winced at the sight of it. The chitin around the wounds on both sides was cracked and caved in, and the muscle had obviously been torn up a fair bit. She was bleeding pretty badly, but it wasn’t life-threatening. She forced a smile as she reminded herself that she’d been through much worse before.

Chrysalis sniffed the air, catching the scent of whatever had splashed onto her neck. She poked at it with her good foreleg, then tasted the wetness on her hoof. Her captors had served her chicken soup, another meat-based dish inconsistent with her rapidly-deteriorating theories about Princess Celestia organizing the whole thing. She shuffled painfully over to where the bowl—and most of the soup—had hit the floor, and stooped low beside it. As she licked the soup from the floor, she couldn’t help but smile. Even in defeat and humiliation, she’d gone down swinging, and nearly turned the tables even after playing right into their hands. Maybe she hadn’t killed everyone and escaped the base, but she’d put a hole in Autumn’s coat that hadn’t been there an hour ago, and that was cause for some celebration in itself. She only wished she’d been able to get through the barrier, and that she’d had the presence of mind to ignore the disabled trap pistol and opt for directly snapping Forrester’s neck, instead. It would have been worth it just to see the look on his face.

Chrysalis finished the majority of the soup that she could reach, which probably amounted to a few spoonfuls at best, and leaned back against the wall of the cell. They’d be back for her, at some point. They had more plans, and she was to be involved. They’d try and force her cooperation, somehow, and considering how pitifully she’d taken the bait this time, she couldn’t rule out the possibility that they’d best her again. Forrester was right when he said he wasn’t like Anderson—he was the first person on the base she genuinely had to be wary of.

Unless she found a way to escape beforehand, of course. Perhaps there was some way of casting a different type of spell through the barrier, or getting around it in some fashion. She had just enough energy for one good transformation, maybe two, and she could muster up some other spells if she really needed to. If what Forrester said was true, and they’d be waiting days or perhaps a week before returning to check on her, she definitely needed to act sooner rather than later. That long of a time and she’d be too weak, physically and magically, to stand a chance at escape.

No, it had to be soon, preferably the same day, while the memory of nearly being shot point blank in the chest with his own gun was still fresh in Autumn’s mind. Chrysalis decided that she’d sleep on it a bit, wait for the bleeding to stop while she came up with a plan, and make a go of it in a few hours once most of the base’s staff were asleep. It was as good a plan as any, and so Chrysalis curled up in the corner as best she could, and closed her eyes.

Comments

[Perteks]

Yay, now write next chapter little faster :P

[HMage]

Fantastic! Don't stop!

[zsewqthewolf]

Later so going to find out she no longer on her home world.

Man i just love this fic, how you play her just in the way.

As the old saying gose they get what's coming to them and she going to get it

[Peaceful Treasure]

I'm happy to see the dark change of events; I loved how she thought of "every" possible solution but still got outsmarted by them. Maybe next time dearest Chrysalis will succeed, and, for myself, I'll be waiting for the next chapter to bring good or bad news regarding her!