The Widow's Web 01 (Patreon)

I've been getting kind of hassled by the person/friends of the person who I was doing a co-op campaign with to do Embracing the Stereotypes. So, I'm not working on that right now. I don't need more hassle right now, not in the busiest part of my life with my non-writing job.
So here's something fun!

So, allow me to present the new Patron-Guided story: The Widow's Web!

As seen on TV, or in this case as voted on here on Patreon!

Gonna be keeping chapters for this one shorter, 2k to 3k words, and hopefully be able to update at least twice a month!

I'm also gonna be better about tagging here on Patreon.

One thing in particular, if nothing else, is I'm going to be tagging 'Sex' or 'No Sex' on each chapter, so people know its going to be SFW or NSFW so they can be, uh, circumspect about reading it whereever they are. Like work or something.

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Darkness had a taste, and her mouth was fucking full of it. Copper and ash and something underneath that might have been her own blood. Or someone elses blood. She wasn’t sure, but it was almost definitely blood. Which should strike her as really fucking gross, but didn’t. She should probably spit it out too, but she couldn’t make her mouth work. In fact, she couldn’t feel her body at all. That should have frightened her, maybe, but the fear was somewhere…disconnected and far away, just like everything else, floating just out of reach.

Then there was a voice. Soft. Warm. It curled around her the way…the way that it’s owner once had? And she…she thought of hands in her hair and a laugh she decided instantly that she’d crawl through glass to hear again. She loved the owner of that voice. Adored her. Would have killed for her, would have died for her, and would have done it happily. She didn’t remember her name -which she hated, fiercely and suddenly- but she knew that much.

Another voice came after, so close on the heels of the first that something told her their proximity to one another was important somehow.

This voice was female as well. It had fire to it, fire and confidence, but the way it made her feel was so very different. She loved them, of course, she knew that. Just as fiercly as she loved the first voice, but that love was so thickly saturated with regret that it hurt. She was in pain, thinking of that voice, a pain that was thick and sour. She’d hurt her, or failed her? She didn’t know how, or when, or why, in fact she didn’t know her name anymore than she had the first voice. But she knew that she’d done something that could never be quite undone, something that had caused her pain, and that she’d forgiven her. Which, somehow, made it worse, though without the details she couldn’t even imagine why.

Then a third voice, and this one was a man’s, and something in her chest clenched tight and hot at the sound of it. Anger, bitter and old, coiled up alongside something that felt embarrassingly close to hero-worship. She hated that voice. She loved the man who owned it. Both of those things were true at the same time, and neither of them made any sense, and she didn’t have the strength to sort them out. She didn’t want to have the strength, not right now.

Remembering that voice…it makes her feel heat. Not arousal, not embarrassment, not even -at first- rage or hate. No, she remembered the heat of fire on her skin, hot and thick and all around her, and on the heels of that heat came the hate. The rage, and they were tied together intimately. Whatever fire she’d been near, she’d hated something about it enough that her vision had gone damn near red with it.

Something shouted in her ear, close enough to hurt in spite of how muffled it was, how it sounded like her head was underwater. It frowned, confused. Was she dreaming? Was she dead? Was the voice…?

There was another shout, more urgent this time, and she tried to claw her way towards it. She tried to rise from the darkness, tried to rise towards the voice shouting to her, and as she rose it cried out one last time.

“WAKE UP OR YOU’RE DEAD!”

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I jerked awake, eyes flying wide as my head whipped around. Fluid and darkness were all around me, the only light I could see being a dim glow coming from somewhere beneath me, and I had no fucking clue where I was. All I knew was that I was surrounded by water. My hands slammed against the curved glass around me an instant after the realization landed, panic flooding through me as a shrieking, animalistic voice in the back of my head howled that I couldn’t breathe, that I was drowning, that something was covering my mouth, my nose, my eyes…

I wasn’t drowning.

I realized it a half-second later, an instant before I could reach up to tear the facial obstruction away. A good thing, too, since that ‘obstruction’ was a large mask that was keeping me from drowning. A mask that seemed to be the only thing that I was wearing, judging by the feeling of the fluid pressing against every inch of my bare skin, and I thought momentarily -absurdly, perhaps, given the circumstances- of a bacta tank from Star Wars. More specifically, I thought of Luke from Empire Strikes Back, and the damn diaper they’d had him in, right before he’d gotten out and made out with his twin.

Hot.

The subconscious thought flickered through as it always did when I thought about that scene, before the fact that I was naked and suspended in some sort of tank reasserted itself over the half-delirious nostalgia, leaving me to try and move. To reach around the tank or the mask for some sort of release, an emergency shut down or even a help button of some kind. That was quickly crushed by an all-new panic, because I couldn’t move easily. Managing to reach the glass a moment ago seemed to be the limit of my movement, my limbs oddly sluggish -more than being underwater could explain, at any rate- for reasons I didn’t understand, and there wasn’t even some sort of strap or leash that was responsible for it.

My whole body strained against whatever was slowing me down, muscles screaming with effort that produced almost nothing in the way of results. It felt like moving through molasses, like my body wasn’t listening to my brain, and the harder I fought it the more the panic climbed, clawing up my throat until I screamed wildly through the mask.

Then, without warning, something happened. The light beneath me flickered, the whole tank shuddered, and the fluid around me lurched alongside it.

There was a low, mechanical groan -one that I could feel vibrated through the glass at my back-, and the level of liquid holding me suspended began to drop. Fast, faster than should have been possible, fast enough that I could feel the vortex of it as it went racing away through some drain I couldn’t see. My feet found the bottom of the tank, sending me falling against the glass ‘front’ of the tube, and a moment later I was sprawled across the floor on my hands and knees as that glass slid open and sent me falling on the floor outside it. Thank God for the mask, I probably would have broken my fucking face open if it wasn’t for the fact the damn thing covered my whole face, and a moment later pneumatic hisses heralded the sudden loosening of it’s hold on my head. It fell to the floor with a clank, and as the cool air of the room around me hit my soaked skin and hair I retched, and retched, and I retched.

My sinuses and throat burned, my body bounced between convulsing and shivering as I struggled to breath. How long I stayed like that, on my hands and knees with cold air around me and colder metal beneath me, I didn’t know, but it can’t have been long for one very good reason.

“Come on, get up! Unless you want to die, get your ass in gear!” a feminine voice, with a hint of an accent, snarled from somewhere in the ceiling, and I stumbled to my feet with a furrowed brow, trying to remember why I recognized that voice, before grunting in pain as I lost my balance and slammed chest first into a nearby railing.

No, that wasn’t a grunt of pain, but a squeal, and hitting something with my chest had never hurt so much before. And my chest felt…heavier, than it used to. Heavier, and bigger, and a whole lot softer, and I looked down to confirm that my investigating hand -the one not clutching the railing I’d fallen onto- was in fact groping and massaging a spectacularly feminine pair of tits. The sort of tits that would have had me stopping dead and trying not to stare like a complete caveman in my old life.

Alright, so I was a woman now, that was…a thing, and I have a massive…

“Stop feeling yourself up and get moving! If you stay there, you’re not going to be able to escape in time!”

I snatched my hand away from my chest like it had burned me. It hadn’t, but the heat crawling up my neck felt close enough.

Later. Freak out later.

“Who the hell are you?” I croaked, and the voice that came out of my throat was wrong too, higher and rougher at the edges from the retching. I coughed, spat something thin and bitter onto the metal grating, and looked up at the ceiling. There was nothing there but a grille, a dull red light pulsing behind it, and more pipes than I could count. “Where am I?”

“Does it really matter who I am?” The voice crackled with static, but it didn’t do anything to hide the sarcastic bite. “And if you’re so desperate to know where you are, look at the fucking wall and catch a hint.”

I did as I was told, even as I got my feet steady underneath myself, taking in the sights of the room that my…my tank had been in. It was large. Not quite cavernous, but certainly very large, and I could see a dozen other tanks aside from mine -they were lining the walls, mine was in the dead center of the room-, alongside surgical tables, computer stations, centrifuges, and all manner of other scientific gadgetry. A laboratory, in other words, and I had a sinking feeling in my stomach almost immediately. This was all looking very familiar to me, familiar enough that I had a damn good guess who the woman speaking to me was, and I very nearly threw up when I finally saw the confirmation I had been rapidly coming to dread in a massive splash across one wall: an octagon, with four white portions and four red ones, forming a shape I’d learned to hate.

The emblem of the Umbrella Corporation.

Perhaps one of the most incredible, widespread, ingenious organizations in media. One that pushed medical and biological science to a degree that defied belief, with a staff that were some of the most brilliant people in their world. Unfortunately for everyone involved -including the members of Umbrella, anyone living near their facilities, and eventually a good portion of the human race- they didn’t generally have the ethics or wisdom to go along with that intelligence.

I didn’t always jive with Ian Malcom’s lines about science from the first Jurassic Park movie -saying that ‘nature had selected the dinosaurs for extinction’ when they were flattened by an asteroid the size of Mount Everest, not been out-competed, would never not annoy me- but they damn well applied to Umbrella.

And Cerberus, now that I thought about it. They both had an unfortunate tendency to invent something, and then get themselves -and a massive amount of other people, usually innocents- killed when the thing in question got out of their control. Not a flattering comparison, for either side of it.

Oh, my savior(?) was saying something again.

“Focus, God damn it! This entire city is busy burning down around our ears! You need to get out of that complex as soon as possible!” she snapped, and I could hear her rolling her eyes, which was fair enough.

“Right, okay.” I croaked, shaking my head and regretting it immediately. “Right, experiment, Umbrella lab, that’s, that’s very bad.”

My legs didn’t want to hold me. I tried walking anyway, using the edge of the now-empty tank for support, and almost face-planted all over again. Everything felt wrong, still. Too light and too heavy at the same time, like my nervous system wasn’t working quite the way it ought to be. I looked down at myself for half a second, confirmed I was indeed naked and streaked with kind of pale, faintly blue-tinted fluid onto the floor, and decided that modesty could take a backseat to the very pressing issue of not dying in a horror game laboratory.

At a guess, I was in fucking Racoon City during the events of Resident Evil 2 and 3, which was both good and bad. On the one hand, those were my two favorite games in the series -or, at least, the Remakes were. I’d not been allowed to play the originals, young as I’d been at the time- and so I was pretty familiar with the way things played out. On the other hand, I’d have to deal with Tyrants, the Nemesis, zombies of various other kinds, and William Birkin. Oh, and the serial kidnapper-rapist-murderer that liked to turn his victims into stuffed display pieces, while getting the entire police force that relied on him for guidance and trusted him to lead them in protecting the city slaughtered.

Yeah, I needed to kill the Chief as soon as humanly possible.

The only question was, did I try to clear out what I could from the labs? Or did I get the fuck out of here before it got as infested and over-run with various ‘experiments’ and creatures as it inevitably did in the games?