Warped

"Have you ever been this far down in the labs before?" Cassidy's voice rang off of the cold metal walls and Piper winced instinctively, like something could hear them. Her leader had assured both her and Sparrow that there was nothing down here to harm them any more but it still felt wrong to speak so boldly in here.

"Not any further than the entrance," Sparrow admitted, looking over his shoulder. When the labs had first cracked open and the ALbertos had spilled out, he and Piper had hurried to find anything they could pillage from the place. When faced with hordes of other dinosaurs that had the same idea, they had barely stayed a day. Cassidy had been down further, of course, typical of their enterprising leader. The threat of death would never stop the pink raptor from looting as much as she desired.

"Be sure to keep your claws to yourself for a while, scope out anything interesting but leave it where it is, we can always pick it up on the way back but I don't want you to be overloaded once we get down deeper," Cassidy warned, "And stop looking around, you're making my feathers twitch." Easier said than done, Piper thought to herself, just the smell of chemicals in the air was enough to make her nervous, let alone the threat of any lingering inhabitants. They had already passed through the gardens abandoned by the Dacens, some still lung to their agrarian life but the part of the level they moved through had been truly deserted. Cassidy said this was the safest route for that very reason, no defensive farmers willing to defend their plants with their lives. They'd had enough plant shenanigans from Atalantis, thank you very much.

The lights overhead continued to buzz as they left the second level, breaching the third by squeezing through a partially collapsed door. There was a secondary source of light this far down however, a pale green that shone through vats of liquid that sat in rows that stretched along the perimeter of the rooms. Most of the tubs were empty, just bubbles sitting in water that seemed thicker than it had any right to be. Some were certainly not empty. Piper approached one of these vats and stared in awe at the specimen inside. Lit by the sickly green lighting, a dead Para body floated within the fluid. It has to be dead, not just from being submerged but from the way its organs protruded from its chest, like they had burst out with a sudden urgency. She could make out lungs strangled by intestines, a heart twice the size it should've been and a single discoloured kidney, even in the green light it seemed pitch black. 

"Ugh, poor fucker," Cassidy winced as she joined Piper next to the tube, "Should've warned you about this shit."

"What happened?" Sparrow asked, not bothering to hide the queasy horror that was bubbling up within him.

"So you know humans made us a long time ago right?" Cassidy asked. The twins both nodded. "Alright, then, you might know that they made us in the image of ancients that came long before even humans. Once they had created their replications, the humans wanted to go further. They wanted us to be faster, stronger, invulnerable. They made us smarter than we ever had the right to be, and then kept pushing. I don't know what they did to this poor leafmuncher but they pushed something too far. You'll find all sorts of preserved specimens like this down here, all experiments gone wrong."

"That's... incredible, I've never heard humans summarised like that before," Piper said softly, her eyes still on the Para. If she let herself read too much into its expression, she could've sworn it was frozen mid-scream. 

"Aw, thanks Piper," Cassidy said brightly, "Kaiwi usually just calls me a nerd when I talk about this stuff."

"You're still a nerd, this shit is just cool," Piper said bluntly, sending Cassidy a withering look and turning back to the Para. "You have to admire their ambition," she said to herself.

"Do you?" Sparrow asked incredulously, "It's horrific, they should never have interfered with things like this. They obviously had no idea what they were doing!" He had long since turned away from the preserved body, feeling the bile rise in his throat the longer he tried to parse the tangled organs. He only hoped that such a catastrophic aberration meant that the death was quick and painless, though he very much doubted that. What disturbed him more was his sister's fascination, she had circled the vat for a while now, like she was burning the image into her mind. He sent a pleading look to Cassidy who cleared her throat.

"Need to keep moving, we shouldn't hang around in one place for too long," she said pointedly before making for the next door. Piper followed but her eyes stayed on the Para for as long as she could manage.