Orchid strode up to the Ultratech building she worked in as a secretary. She had had plenty of time to glean secrets, keycodes and other levels of access. She entered the first level access code on the panel. "Access Granted" flashed across it in green lettering, then the security field went off and the door opened. She walked into the lobby nonchalantly, as if she were showing up for a shift. Hugging her coat around her, she made her way to the employee only room, punched her keycode, and disappeared from sight of the populace. Inside the employee back room sections, over the course of a few months, she had discerned a secret door in a short hallway. Security through obscurity. She walked over to where the door was, almost bypassing it, if it hadn't been for her sharp eye noticing the slight seam in the wall. She pushed on this seam, and there was a distinct click sound, and then the door slid away to reveal the room behind it. As she crossed the threshold of the door, it slid shut. The soft snick of the door closing behind her was like the teeth of a trap snapping shut.
Orchid threw aside her coat, now that she had no need for it. Her tight spandex outfit would provide no loose material to catch on anything. She saw the large blast doors immediately. The security telltale above them was red. Locked, of course. Orchid took notice of her surroundings. Odd, she thought. Each corner of this room has a number painted next to it. She studied the room a little more. There are barrels and other objects piled in the corners. She was just about to discard that information as trivial, until she made a loose connection. Wait. The corners are number one to four... like a four digit access code. But surely the passcode to these doors is not 1-2-3-4... Then she noticed the objects in the corner. Six barrels here... four there... wait, I got it. She took note of the numbers of objects in the corners. In the corner marked with a 1, there were four barrels. Across from it was a corner marked with a 2, with eight barrels. Corner 3 housed six barrels, and corner 4 had seven. So the combination is 4-8-6... wait. I see something behind them... She made her way to the fourth corner. Behind the structure of seven barrels were hidden two crates. So there is nine there.
She entered the pass code on the blast doors. 4-8-6-9. She pressed the "Accept" button. Immediately she realized she had been had. The crates didn't count! whipped through her mind as the panel flashed up "INCORRECT PASSCODE" in ominous red.
Nothing else seemed to happen. Then the panel read: "Incorrect passcode. Debilitating target."
"Debilitating target? What in the heck-"
She then heard a hissing sound. She looked up. Smoky brown gas was beginning to pour out of all the vents. She figured she had a minute or two of clean air, given the size of the room. She dashed back toward the door she had come in. To her dismay, it wouldn't budge. It was locked, or jammed. She tried to kick it in, to no avail. She began to cough. This caused her to breathe in deeply, where she sucked up oxygen and this mystery gas. Immediately she felt lightheaded. Knockout gas, she realized. She dropped to her knees, the world swaying and rocking. She coughed hard again, which caused her to inhale another deep breath full of sleeping gas. She pitched forward, falling to the floor unconscious. After a few seconds of breathing in the gas, the panel flashed on-screen to no one: "Initiating cleanup procedure." Fans now worked in the other direction, sucking all the gas out of the room, cleaning it. Then the blast door opened from the other side, and a figure emerged from it, picking Orchid up and carrying her through the door.
_____
Orchid awoke hours later. She had no idea how long it had been. She opened her eyes, but pitch black persisted. She panicked momentarily. Had she gone blind, or was it merely dark? She waved her hand inches from her face without seeing it. She had no way to know if the light or her vision was at fault. She sat in the dark for 20 minutes until a crack of light appeared in the darkness, the door to the room she was in being opened ever so slightly. At least it's not me, she thought. Did she dare go through that door? She decided she couldn't sit there forever, she had to do something.
She pulled the door open, her eyes readjusting to the light. As she walked through it, it slammed shut behind her with a thunderous clang. I guess I am not going back in there, she thought. Then a disembodied voice rang out over an intercom system.
"Welcome to UltraTech, Orchid. We have known about your treachery for a short time now. We know you are trying to sabotage us, but I am afraid for you that this is a far into UltraTech HQ as you will get."
The door on the other side of the room, which Orchid had already discerned as a pit fighting arena, slid upwards. Out stepped a very large robot.
"I know what you are thinking. Yes, Jago destroyed the original Fulgore... but naturally, we discerned its weakness and then eliminated them. Meet Fulgore 2.0. You are the final test of its abilities. Good luck."
Fulgore took a huge leap, landing with a loud metallic crash in the middle of the room. Clearly this one was much more mobile than the first. Orchid tried running around it, but it turned to face her. She wasn't going to outrun it after all. She tucked and rolled, hoping to snatch one of its legs and bring it off-base. She managed to do it. Fulgore crashed to the floor onto its face. Orchid attempted to get behind it to rip out its wiring as Jago had done to the original, but Fulgore swept am arm up behind it, slamming it into the side of Orchid's head. The impact of steel into skull immediately disoriented Orchid, and she fell sideways onto her back. Even before she had fully settled to the floor, Fulgore was on top of her. It grabbed a handful of her onyx-black hair, and with a quick motion, pulled her head up, at the same time punching her in the face with its other hand. The impact drove her head back down into the floor, bouncing it like a ball. Fulgore had already succeeded in dispatching Orchid's ability to fight, and it was only going to get worse. Fulgore pulled Orchid to her feet, then drew its arm back and nearly decapitated her with a clothesline across her neck and chest. It drove her head over heels backwards, and she came to rest facedown. Blood leaked from a corner of her mouth.
Fulgore received new instructions: "Finish her however you deem it." It was an experiment to see how Fulgore made decisions and on what basis. Fulgore had been programmed with a large database of combat techniques. Fulgore paused for a moment, scanning its database. Having selected something, it picked Orchid up off the floor, and then dropped her in a devastating backbreaker. Orchid screamed out in pain as she was driven across its knee backwards. Fulgore paused again momentarily, scanning for a follow up. Then it picked her up again, and hoisted her upside down. Running a short algorithm, it determined how to cause pain without crippling her. Making a small position adjustment, it then dropped downwards, drilling her into the steel floor with a tombstone piledriver. Orchid grunted in pain, and slinked to the floor, flat-backed. She was still conscious, but her eyes were closed. Fulgore was not through. Reaching down, it pulled her to her feet again. Wrapping its arms around her, it lifted her up off the floor with a bearhug. Orchid's eyes shot open in pain, but her scream was cut short as Fulgore tightened its grip. She tried to punch her way out of it, but the blows had no effect. Fulgore wrenched harder. It could have broken her in half immediately, but Fulgore's algorithms checked to see how much the human spine could endure, and then it gradually worked its way to that point. Fulgore tightened again. Orchid gagged and then spit up blood. She coughed a couple times, a spray of blood finding its way to Fulgore's shoulder. Fulgore then bore down on her harder, breaking a couple of her ribs with the hold. It then worked its arms higher and higher up her body, breaking more and more ribs in turn. Each snap sounded like someone breaking a branch off a tree. Blood was running freely from Orchid's mouth now as she was crushed harder and harder. Her eyes began to flutter from the lack of oxygen. Finally, Fulgore gave another jerk, breaking her back. She arched backward in a rictus of explosive pain, and then could no longer feel anything. She spasmed once and went limp. Fulgore then dropped her. She landed on her back, coughing and sputtering in a natural reaction to get oxygen. She tried to move, but could not. She was paralyzed from the neck down.
Fulgore then picked her up, broken ribs piercing and stabbing muscle. If she had feeling, it would have hurt immensely, but she didn't even know it was happening. One of her lungs was then punctured by the sharpened edge of a broken rib. Orchid couldn't feel it, but knew it had happened by her increased difficulty in breathing. Fulgore turned her around so that her back was facing towards it. It then wrapped an arm around her neck, put its other hand on her shoulder, and jerked each in a different direction, immediately snapping her neck. Fulgore had pulled Orchid's head around so that it was halfway between looking right, and looking directly behind her. Her body went slack. Fulgore than changed position, and wrenched her head around the other way, destroying more vertebrae. It then dropped Orchid's dead body to the floor. Taking three steps backwards, it initiated cleanup procedures. It incinerated her corpse with a sustained burning hot laser blast, and then sucked up the little ash that was left.
"Very good, Fulgore. Return to the lab for data analysis."
