Chapter Text
Pain; physical suffering or discomfort caused by illness or injury. Synonyms: agony, torture, misery.
That was all she felt when her eyes eased opened to grab a brief look at the dark chamber around her, before wrenching shut to attempt to clear the pain searing through her mind. Angel-- alone and curled into a ball on the dark floor, lit only by the faintly glowing pools of liquid Eridium that were covered with simmering crystals; like thin, fragile ice that froze only the top layer of water at the beginning of winter.
Angel’s thin, pale hands reached out, looking for anyone that could help her, but there was no one there. She couldn’t access any technology; the strain sent her into another wave of burning pain that felt like a thousand red-hot pokers being pushed into her head. There was one thing that she knew could ease this agony, and it lay crystalizing in pools on the ground. Her usually blue eyes were bloodshot and sore. It didn’t make it better that tears were blurring what vision she could manage, but she could see the Eridium, and that was all that mattered to her.
Standing was out of the question; Angel’s legs were too weak to hold even her frail frame, but something almost instinctual drove the young Siren to get to the alien mineral on the ground. She felt drowsy, like waking up from a nap in the middle of the day, yet she carried on.
With great effort, she propped herself up on her hands and began to crawl towards the solidifying pool of Eridium a couple feet away from where she had lay.
The crawl wasn’t as painful as Angel previously thought, it was working through the stiffness of her joints that was the hardest part.
“Great, I’m turning into an old man,” she thought jokingly, the tiniest smile drawing up the edge of her lips.
The violet crystal had reached all the way to the bottom of the liquid by the time Angel reached the edge of the shallow puddle on the ground and she was filled with panic when she saw.
“No… this… this can’t be happening.” She rasped, her voice coarse and barely audible from disuse. The Siren’s short nails scraped into the mineral, making a shrill, sharp sound and carving a thin, white line in the Eridium. Losing patience, Angel balled her hands into fists and started pounding on the crystalline surface like an angry child, bruising the bottom of her pale hands and forcing minuscule shards of the Eridium into her skin.
Exhausted, Angel surrendered that she would die there, and rolled onto her back to study the flickering white tattoos on her arm. In a flash, she remembered what she was, a Siren. At that moment, it was excruciating to use any of her supernatural powers to aid her, but the thought of the alien mineral drove Angel on. The girl placed her hand slowly onto the cool crystal and her tattoos lit up the room, casting white shapes onto the walls as her mind wandered over the familiar substance. She took a deep breath and fought through the stinging sensation plaguing her head.
A few seconds passed to no progress in liquifying the Eridium, the thought of ultimate doom covered her like a dark cloud until the mineral began to sink beneath Angels’ fingers and become a liquid once again.
The Eridium, shimmering and cold, was somehow comforting to the young Siren as she cupped a small amount in her hands and drank. For the first time in hours she felt like she could breathe, and brought another small handful to her lips, restoring some colour to her face.
The drowsiness ebbed off, as did some of the pain. A portion remained in the back of her mind though, like a splinter stuck in your hand. Angel ignored it and knew she couldn’t take being in this bunker one second longer.
Stretching out her legs, she took the steps to stand up and slowly rose to her feet. Two seconds after she victoriously stood up to her full height, Angel’s knees gave out and she dropped back to the floor. Drinking the Eridium wouldn’t get enough into her bloodstream as quick as she needed it to, but the broken injectors ten feet away from her would.
Giving up on walking, Angel army crawled over to the tens of tubes secured together with metal buckles but punctured by lots of bullet holes. Something irritating buzzed around her mind – curiosity; as the fate of the Vault Hunters was unclear to her, she wanted to know about it, though she needed to focus on the task in front of her. At the end of the broken tubes were fifty micro-needles, razor sharp and painful. Angel always had a fear of needles, ever since she was a child. At the doctor’s office back on Tantalus, she would hide behind her mother and cry for an alternative. That, of course, was when her mother was still living.
Angel examined one of the tiny medical tools attached to a clear acrylic tube and pulled on it. Luckily, a hole was already shot through the middle, and the rest was degrading from exposure to the Eridium anyway. So now she had a foot of tubing and a needle. Her fingers drummed on the glass of the injector as she thought over how she was going to do this. To the heart? No, she never had good aim with anything especially not when it came to life or death stuff. The shoulder was too far to reach around at, so the crease of the elbow it would have to be.
The syringe in hand, Angel crawled back over to the puddle. She was exhausted, even with the supplemental Eridium, the excessive movement had completely drained her of energy. The Eridium began to crystalize again, and she knew that her mind couldn’t take even the tiniest of phaseblasts to melt it back, she had to move. Now.
With the needled straw dragging behind her, Angel made her way back to the Eridium pile and sat beside it, jet black hair obscuring her vision. She brushed it away from her face and tucked it behind her ear while she trailed the tube through the purple liquid to fill it up. A couple tiny beads of Eridium leaked through cracks in the makeshift syringe, yet she continued until the clear acrylic was glowing violet and sealed it off the best she could.
Her small hand held the needle, a cold thing that she didn’t want anything to do with; but it was this, or die alone, like everyone who knew of her believed she had. Angel had written with her left hand before, and preferred it to her right, though it proved a hinderance in school when she had to wear gloves to hide her unusual secret. The veins in her right arm were nearly invisible as she looked for the telltale blue line, though they had become more purple then blue over the years on Eridium. Angel unhooked one of the black tubes from her side and tied it around what little bicep she had until it became uncomfortable. Finally, a line of indigo, no more then a couple centimeters long, but all she needed. The young Siren’s hands were shaking, and a cloud seemed to leave her mind foggy and light, despite her attempts to clear it. The thin metal tube was close to her arm, though she was hesitant, not wanting to stab it into her arm like a knife.
Out of nowhere, a light came on. Followed by another, and another. The sudden shift in shadow made Angel jump and hiss as she sent the needle straight into the crease of her elbow; she didn’t have time to complain about it though, as the lights were on, and that meant someone was on the other end, controlling them. Angel squeezed the sealed tube of Eridium into her arm and pulled the needle out with a painful tug. A small bead of odd-coloured blood pooled at the spot where she had accidentally stabbed herself, she let it bleed and got to her feet, the fogginess in her mind gone for now.
“If I’m well enough to stand, I can certainly walk.” Angel thought and opened the door to the other side of the chamber. Finally, she limped out, still weak and frail from the years of being totally static.
The hallway was familiar, yet not. The Siren recalled being led to the control core where she’d spent the last six years, before that, it was routine trips from Tantalus to Pandora and back. That was before the “accident” that caused her to be locked up. If she could break one of the giant glass tubes still churning Eridium… a sound of metal scraping metal jarred her attention towards the descending elevator. Running as fast as she could, Angel reached the far end of the hallway and hid behind a standard yellow and grey Hyperion box, waiting for whoever, or whatever to go away. Yet the elevator stopped a couple meters up.
The sound of hurried footsteps and more clanging was heard exiting into some other room, the security base of operations, as she recalled. Unfortunately, the bunker was built into a cliff, so the walls were way too thick to hear any voices, unless they were really yelling. The elevator shaft however, was a different story. Two loader bots, Angel concluded, defending one passenger. The passenger remained a mystery, as whoever it was boarded the ascension device and left, leaving Angel free to follow upwards.
Her nearly white hand slammed down on the button when the silver and mustard yellow doors were visible. Inside was a small fast-travel station, completely smashed and full of bullet holes. Angel reached out to touch the machine before retracting her hand when she saw the spray of blood on the metal. Still drying and bright crimson, on the other end of the room were a shattered glass desk and a row of computer monitors, all black or buzzing with grey static. Angel’s eyes widened at the sight of the dead body on the floor, unnoticed until she nearly tripped over it. A gruesome scene it was, head half caved in, blood oozing out his mouth, and a large piece of the glass desk imbedded in his neck. The girl dry-heaved into the corner a couple times until her stomach surrendered and stopped trying to reject the no food she had eaten.
A black and white striped travel mug was all that remained on the shattered desk. Thinking quickly, Angel reached over the deceased body and grabbed it; a shake revealed it to be about half full of some liquid, either water or some other drink. The Siren opened the lid and poured out the clear brown liquid that carried a sharp odor similar to rubbing alcohol, onto the cadaver. A moment later, Angel was back down at the Eridium tube thinking about how she would get the violet mineral from the chamber and into the mug.
Located at the end of the hall was a control panel with a clear glass covering to keep it away from unauthorized hands. Red and white buttons were arrayed in rows of three with small black lettering telling what each controlled.
“Main flow, electric, stabilizers. There’s less of a science to me then I thought if three buttons control everything.” Angel whispered to herself, almost as if she believed someone was watching and listening in on what she was saying. It was out of principal, as someone had been listening in on what she was saying for the last half dozen years. She hovered her hand over the button that read main flow and pressed down on it; somewhere in the base a loud alarm blared twice. The flow of Eridium to the control core slowed down but didn’t stop until about a minute after.
Angel walked up to the glass tube, Eridium had pooled at the bottom and lay still, bubbling slightly as oxygen rose to the surface in clear shiny spheres. With a thunk, the glass reverberated off Angel’s elbow strike, sending shockwaves up her right arm and a dark blue spot where the skin had started to bruise.
“Damn, I mean, darn.” Angel censored herself despite not needing to. She knew that glass wouldn’t break by just hitting it with her elbow, but possibly a crowbar or something like it, could collapse the tube and expose the precious liquid mineral inside. The young siren placed the cup down on the metal floor and walked over to the Hyperion supply boxes near the elevator. Searching through the first one yielded no results except for a couple separate boxes of Eridium in thin cylinders, she studied one of the cylindrical bars before continuing with her search. Another box contained loader parts, a leg, a dark blue-grey and teal arm submachine gun attachment, and a dozen “eyes.” Although she absolutely did not know how to use it, Angel picked up the gun attachment and two boxes of ammunition at the bottom of the box. As she was loading the Hyperion gun, a thought came to her mind; “What if I shoot the glass down?” The idea wasn’t totally radical, and the gun was simple to understand. Safety came off before you fired, the ammo went in via a magazine in the handle, and the trigger obviously released a bullet.
The plexiglass was at point-blank range of the gun and Angel sent two or three rounds of bullets into the clear glass before it splintered and fell to the floor with a sound like high-pitched bells; a pretty sound for a not so pretty situation.
Angel let the gun fall to her side and reached for the mug, diving it into the liquid and lifting it back up. It then occurred to her; how would she carry this across Pandora without spilling it over? It was, after all, just a coffee cup.
“Whatever,” she thought, “it will have to do for now.”
Thankfully, Angel found a gun strap in one of the boxes she’d opened earlier and swung the blue and silver thing over her back to continue what she was after.
Freedom. Escape.