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Chapter 12: December

Joan walked down the street with confidence. She was one of the chosen ones, the ones that even through all of the Incidences still had never caught the plague. Even among their group many would not be able to make the same claim. To her the ruins of what used to be apartment buildings and office buildings were nothing more than an amusement, a sign of how easily the entire human civilization has crumbled because of their response to a little chaos. Already as a simple result of the chaos thousands if not millions of people have died worldwide. But the death toll is not at all of interest to her. To Joan, humans are such fickle things and the fact of how easily their world was destroyed is proof of all that. That so many have died is no more of interest than the fact the only thing on this road still intact, let alone still in as perfect of condition as if it was just put up is a particular advertisement along one of the walls of one of the buildings. To further accentuate it the building the advertisement is attached to is more or less a pile of rubble, but that part of the wall the ad is on is still there in perfect form with the perfectly clean ad on top of it.

The building she wanted to go was a few blocks away. This one was very deceptively designed and maintained. To the outsider this building would look just as broken and decrepit as all of the other buildings around it. But to those who knew otherwise all of the damage was purely cosmetic. Painstaking effort was taken to ensure that the building looked as destroyed as possible but once you get past the exterior of the building it was very much still intact. On top of that most of the floors were below ground. Getting in the first few layers of the door were pretty easily done. It wouldn't do to keep the outward appearance and yet still have a high tech security door. Even the entrance hallway is just a camouflage for the entire building structure. Down a few hallways would lead one to an ordinary looking room. On a particular wall of that room is a hidden panel that releases a keypad elsewhere in the building. She touches it and heads to the other room. Another measure that they took is that there's only a short period of time before the keypad will no longer show up.

Joan makes it to the keypad and tries to type in the last password she had been told but after hitting the final button an error message shows up. Joan stares at it somewhat perplexed. She is positive that it couldn't be the result of having made a mistake in the typing process. But just in case she moves her hands back to the console to try and type it in again. She's stopped by a voice coming from that room's intercoms.

"I apologize," their leader states in what is likely a recorded message, "but routine protocols have required that we change the entry code again. The correct code has been set to the names of all six targets and then your own name. I apologize for the inconvenience."

Joan shrugs before going over to the console and typing in the password.

"Paul Mikael Anebel Kristen Lauren Lewis Joan," she types into the machine, causing a door right next to her to open.

She walks through and as expected the door closes behind her. A second later she finds herself being lowered rather quickly in their elevator. After a few floors the door opens up again and she finds herself in a rather dimly lit room with a figure sitting in a chair at the far end.

"The change in the entry code was necessary. I apologize for the inconvenience," the figure states.

"It was no problem, my lady. Did someone gain access to the facility?" Joan asks.

"Almost. A couple of looters had broken into here a few days ago. It was very apparent they were trying to seem like they were just there to steal and destroy. They did a good enough job at it at first. They took a good ten minutes going through all of the rooms, breaking and scrounging for what they could. But then as soon as they got to the first room they decided to split up. Then not only did the other one pretty much head straight to the second room but as soon as he got there the first just happened to accidentally fall into the panel. They even managed to type in one of our sequences into the console. It wasn't the right one and was one of the ones in an another country but it was the right code."

"Do you suspect Him?"

"Jahorii? Not really. It's too sloppy to have come from his brain. If he had wanted to come in here and take us out he would have done so in such a way that would have likely succeeded. I would not put it past that man to kill us all if he thought it would help and if he thought that he would have tried to kill us a long time ago and not simply try and interfere. No, he has no interest in our deaths and quite frankly if the old fool came back here I would let him rejoin. It's too late for him to do anything about it now anyway. My guess is that it is from one of the other facilities made to look like He was doing it as a sort of power grab."

"I see," Joan comments as a wave of dizziness comes over her for a brief moment as she could almost swear she could see more individuals in the darkness but that feeling passed quickly. "I must ask, though, was it really necessary to kill off all of the leaders of the other nations?

"It wasn't," she comments, "but it was more than useful for the next stage. Things are progressing perfectly and completely according to our designs. But if the leaders were still in place there would be a lot of resistance towards handing over the fate of the world to our control. True we have never intended on keeping this control but it is essential to move on that we have control over everything. Without a structure of support we shall simply fill in that power vacuum and then balance things out."

"Speaking of which, you never did give me a note nor a chess piece to go deliver for this month's target," Joan comments.

"Don't you worry about that. All of the arrangements have already been made. There is no reason to send you out to do just about anything more to carry out the rest of our plan."

Joan stands there with a puzzled expression for a moment before a sharp pain begins to surge through various parts of her body. She crumples to the floor in response to the pain and looks up, seeing the eye shine effect from the other individual's somewhat elliptical pupils staring down at her with interest. At this moment Joan instantly knew why it was that the room was so dark compared to how it normally is.

"Lady Ukeiuwa, I don't understand," she reaches an arm forward at the other individual, seeking a reason or cure for this state.

"It's quite simple," the other figure responds, her eyes continuing to watch the other. "It was always supposed to be you. The agent had been applied over a long period of time to the extent that all that was needed was the right trigger. The chess pieces never had anything to do with it other than to throw people off the right scent. That and to keep you from figuring it out as well. The real trigger has always been my name, embedded in the third letter in a sequence of words."

"The password," Joan grunts, finding it odd how a large majority of her upper body doesn't really seem to be feeling all that differently.

"Exactly. It always had to be you. Technically there is one more role to play in the chess analogy I have been using with all of the targets, that's the person playing the game. That is why you were chosen. It was fitting to have one of our own, one of the puppet masters to this game, to be the one chosen for the last event. With this last event Operation Prism will be complete and the leaders of our group will be able to go out as we truly are. But don't worry, we'll make it up to you in that your form will be all the more glorious than any of the others," she comments as she moves over to somewhat comfort Joan, a black furred arm moving to her back.

Knowing what is going to happen Ukeiuwa helps Joan remove her clothing, two small ridges beginning to form along her back. Joan is still somewhat perplexed at what's going on with her. Not so much that she's undergoing a transformation but rather of the fact that the pain seems to be particularly focused on only a few parts of her body. Much of her face, her arms and the entire front half of her body seem to be completely un-phased by what's happening to her while her back and legs seem to be under the most pain. On top of that she seems to be experiencing some sort of really bad headache as the pain is focused on two small parts on her forehead.

"I should go back up," Joan grunts through the pain, half dragging herself to the elevator. The other figure just watches her go. "This far down will be shielded from my burst but only if I'm on the surface. If I bursted down here it might cut off the air conditioning."

Though still too far in the shadows to make her out clearly, the short moment she looks back Joan sees the almost predatory grin on Ukeiuwa's face as well as what looks to be a tail swishing back and forth behind her. Knowing time is of the essence, though she doesn't bother spending much time dwelling on that notion and instead pulls herself into the elevator and tells it to go up to the surface level again. While on the ride up she begins to explore how much her body has changed already but due to the poor light and nothing to really go by she does it primarily by her sense of touch. The first thing she decides to check on is her head and notices that a pair of horns seem to be growing out of her forehead.

Joan perplexes on that for a few seconds before continuing the exploration of her body. Her face still feels completely human. She obviously wouldn't be able to tell if her eyes have changed in this elevator but she can tell that her canine teeth seem to have grown slightly larger. She moves further down and finds nothing at all different on her chest though she can feel coming out of her back a rather long and almost lizard-like tail that at the rate it was growing would easily become longer than her hand. Her feet also seem to have changed. Doesn't look like any mammalian species but certainly a digitigrades food with three toes that are very widely spread from each other; and yet her legs still seem to be completely human in appearance. She can already feel the burst beginning to build up within her body.

The elevator stops and she crawls out. She raises an arm to cover her eyes as she tries to let her eyes adjust to the light again before looking around at her body. Her arms and torso seem to still look the exact same as they had before this change that had begun to overcome her. Her legs, however, looked a much darker, almost reddish brown color. Her tail was similarly colored but with a somewhat mottled green effect to it as well. She could feel the power of the form and it was almost intoxicating. A spade-like shape begins to grow on her tail and she revels in the sensations of this new body, her mind only briefly recognizing that now her body is somehow finding the sensation of pain pleasurable. She finishes her examination by looking back and seeing to bat-like wings. Neither seem to be nearly strong enough to be able to provide any semblance of the word flight and at most might only make it so she'd fall slower but she finds herself developing a sort of pride for those appendages. As the building sensation begins to reach its peak she cries out, but in joy rather than anything else as a violet light shoots out from her in every direction.