The P. P. A. Project: Revelations

Chapter Seventeen - The Puppet Master

Chapter Seventeen – The Puppet Master

How could you do that to your brother?

You can’t understand why. I am not going to even try and explain it.

He can’t do this alone.

He can do this alone. I have more faith in Perses doing the right thing than I ever had in myself.

Are you sure about that?

Yes, I am.

*

Drifting in and out of reality, the voices were starting to come back to me of my sister. It amazed me that, even in this moment, she was putting faith in me. Was this the plan the whole time? Was the purpose of this journey to bring me here and eliminate the key that held this all together… me?

My mind was in the orb and saying goodbye to the ones I loved. I still didn’t know how I’d gone from the mission we could only do ourselves to this place… trapped.

As I pondered these thoughts, the blood loss so severe I might have died at any moment, Ethan entered the room he had long ago left. I was sure it was to torture me more. I had an arm dislocated, broken leg and god only knows what other injuries, but it didn’t scare me. I needed to keep my head. I needed to be the hero everyone thought I could be.

Without words, Ethan held his hand over an empty spot in the center of the room and a light glow started to form from the ground. It lifted until it was hovering over his hand and from it, images filled the room. They started out very pixelated until finally they cleared and it was as if we had been transported to the facility where many bodies, stitched up and being experimented on, medical tables. Just as I thought these were the same bodies both Pandora and myself had been exposed to, each soldier, each a man who sacrificed himself for the cause, began to burn up from fires being lit below them. The rooms we searched and the information we attained, all disposed of.

I then saw Scarlet’s face in the fire. She stood at the head of the room watching as the bodies burned and then opened a door, turned and disappeared. I don’t mean that as in she left, either. She completely disappeared. Turning my head, she was then standing next to me, eyes red and her sister standing just behind her.

“Sc-Scar…”

“Her name is SJ-7X6. She is a cyborg. I suppose the two of you grew fond of one another.”

I began to laugh. My nerves were all shot, the shock of anything wasn’t really affecting me, not anymore. I remembered our kiss and the way I felt saving her and when she entered a room. I remembered what it took to get her attention and how hard I tried to do things that she approved of. I was just a kid and it showed. I really did just fall right into their laps.

Nothing surprised me anymore. I was saddened but not surprised. Ethan clapped his hands again and we were in the room with the cyborg and the alien-man. While I might have been a human, and an experiment, I felt very much crowded by these two creatures.

Ethan patted the cyborg on her back and before my eyes, her hair retreated into her scalp, the clothing absorbed into her body and she was nothing but a platinum metal figure with glowing red eyes. The structure was the same as the girl I had come to care for only she was completely different.

My mind started to drift away again as Ethan explained to me how she came to creation. I caught that she was a diversion, a way to open up the romantic passion that the fires of my darker insides needed to awaken. It wasn’t her love that they needed, it was the breaking of my heart. It wasn’t until I remembered she was with my family at the time that I snapped back into reality, my eyes focusing once again, and I listened to what the monster had to say.