Dressel's Open Terrain

The former Shard pushed his vertigo to the side through sheer force of Whill (teehee) and stood. It took a little doing, but he was able to wrap his one good arm around the Major, despite the sharp jabs of pain cause by her holster digging into his damaged ribs.

"Sounds like a plan to me," he said gently. "Let's save that shit for the bastards that'll come knocking on our door, eh?"

Dresden chuckled.

"You could be an old crone of
800 years and I'd still be a cradle robber. I got into a fistfight with
Revan at a bar once."

It was up to the Major to figure out if he was joking on that point. The former Shard suspected it might have been true, but his memories of that century were a little hazy.

"If you want to get technical, this body is only about 25 years old. Legally, that puts us somewhere around the same age."

Dresden say down on the bed, dizzy for reasons that had nothing to do with the blows to the head. Reproductive...don't ask a question you don't want an answer to.

"The body isn't a clone. About twenty some odd years ago, we picked up a geneticist, brilliant woman, but utterly mad. You'd have gotten along well with her. Anyway, she was determined to create the 'perfect human.' Used a retrovirus to rewrite the genetic code of her own eggs as a teenager. She actually had a child the natural way about the same time this body was created as a control, to see which was superior. Her husband kidnapped the other kid and ran off once he found out what she had in mind. She went looking for the boy and he gunned her down. Can't say I blame him. This was supposed to be a test purely of the physical; she chemically wiped the mind of anything resembling a personality. The boy was rescued in time, but this body wasn't. No mind to speak of. When she died, we found the body in the lab, completely vegetative. The brain could have worked, but with the OS wiped clean, there was no way to really to give the body a chance at a life, so it was brought in and cared for as a backup in case my body was destroyed. If I had known, I probably wouldn't have signed off on the project, but no one asked me. Flash forward to a few months back, and I wake up with my soul in a fully functioning, genetically augmented body. The whole thing operates at something like thirty percent above baseline in terms of musculature and neural efficiency, and according to the gene spooks, the changes will breed true. They were about beside themselves when I refused to let them take a sample of the, um, reproductive fluids."

"Your guess is as good as mine on that," he said thoughtfully. "They tried to explain it, something about metaspiritual transference or some such crap, but I had just gotten back to the world."

Dresden left out the bit where a loss of control on his part wrecked the lab and destroyed the equipment and personnel in charge of the transfer.

"Still, we've known it was possible to transfer one's soul to a new body for centuries. Sith were apparently quite good at it."

If the line of questioning offended Dresden, he didn't let it show.

"Less a matter of suppression than retention. Brain had to learn to store memories from scratch, took a little getting used to. As far as the location of the lab, it used to be on Dressel. As I understand it, the equipment was destroyed and the lab was filled with ferrocrete."

Technically true, though the former Shard had his doubts about whether or not the equipment was truly destroyed. But that was a line if questioning he didn't want to pursue, because there were things on that inventory sheet that he never wanted anyone to get their hands on.

"Out of curiosity, I don't suppose you've got one of your magic bullets on hand, do you? Might go a long way towards evening the odds."

"That doesn't seem right," Dresden said, his brow furrowed in thought. "Koko is up to something, but whatever else might be going on, she didn't leave us here to die. There's got to be one somewhere, and knowing Koko, it's hidden someplace she'd find funny."

"Suit yourself. I've never fought with a magic bullet on my side before, I reckon it's not gonna kill me to go without today."

Dresden wasn't lucky enough to have holsters on hand for his weapons. Fortunately, his belt had a built in slot for a holster that almost, but not quite, held the .500 comfortably. The grip jabbed uncomfortably into his side, but it was a damned sight more comfortable that lugging the heavy revolver around all day. He wasn't anywhere near stupid enough try try to tuck the LeMat into his waistband; it was left lying on the bed for the moment as the former Shard walked over to the box of rations and started rummaging around.

"Between you and me, if it's not in your pockets, she's either got it tucked into that hair of yours or somewhere a bit more intimate. I wouldn't mind helping out with the search in the slightest, but that's on you."

At random, he pulled a case off the stack and brought it over to the bed. There were 18 meals inside, each a self contained little slice of nutritional hell. The meals were designed to provide enough calories to keep a person alive in survival situations, and while they excelled in that, it was highly recommended that they not be consumed for more than a few weeks at a time. Most of the shelters like this had their own stash of other goods to be used in conjunction with the emergency rations as a result. But, Dresden figured, if this wasn't an emergency, he didn't know what was, and pulled a meal out of the care. Chicken pesto pasta.

"I doubt she hid it anywhere requiring a cavity search to get to, but pretty much anything else is fair game. Care for a meal?"

Dresden shrugged with his good shoulder. Expecting her to pick up on the hint was wishful thinking in the extreme. Despite their tendency to chide each other over their lack of romantic experience, neither of them had any room to talk. They could handle themselves alright given time to think and an idea of what was coming, but try to catch them by surprise and cue the gong show.

The former Shard started his search at the source, gently massaging her scalp while he was at it. He was able to enlist the help of his bad arm by virtue of being damned sure only to move it at the elbow. Before long, most of his half of the hair had been cleared, save for a ferociously tangled knot about six inches from her head that he had earmarked for closer investigations.

"I think I might have something."

"You can say that again."

Dresden, who wasn't visually impaired, could see right away that the bag had been secured in such a way that removing it without removing hair would be nearly impossible. That wouldn't ordinarily be a problem, but the Major's hair went down almost to her knees. She was clearly quite attached to the stuff, and removal of the bag would take out a rather large chunk.

"Shit. The only way to get this thing out is to take some hair with it,"