She could feel her mind fragmenting, tearing itself apart. And it terrified her.

The streams of crimson light that formed her psyche stretched out in front of her, like vibrant rivers that meandered around and through her. It was alarming, to say the least, to see broken and damaged segments interlaced throughout their ribbons.

Her resistance against their abductors had not ended well—they'd successfully taken the Chrysalis, and her along with it. She knew that she wasn't their target, however, merely a bonus. That honor belonged to the precious cargo the Chrysalis housed, there was no other explanation for their behavior. They knew.

For her part, she had tried her best to deter them—but it didn't matter. Every obstacle she'd placed in their path only seemed to incentivize them further, encouraging them as though her very opposition confirmed that what she guarded must be one and the same with their goal. Now, she and it had become compromised.

Separated from its source, and without necessary life-support systems in place, the Chrysalis would not be able to sustain itself. This was all happening too fast, everything told her it was still too early to awaken it—but if the Legacy inside was to survive, then there was no other choice.

Unfortunately, this was never intended to happen outside of a controlled environment, and this environment was anything but controlled. With the limited information the Chrysalis' sensors gave her, she only knew that they were now in a dark, foul place. All sorts of complications could arise in addition to the ones she was already doing her best to resolve.

This was where she had a problem.

When they'd ripped her and the Chrysalis free from its home, the trauma had not been kind to her. And as the connection between herself and the Legacy was inexorable, she knew that it would suffer the same damage. That meant that, in a few more minutes, neither of them would remember themselves. Neither of them would be ready for what was coming. The future would be uncertain, far more than it already was—but she couldn't see any other path forward.

She didn't think their captors would wait long before returning to pry open the Chrysalis and claim their prize, so she used most of her remaining time to start waking it as safely as she could in such a hazardous location. The rest of it was spent reminiscing on the past, the duty she'd been given, and everything else that she was about to lose. When she woke up again, she will have lost most, if not all, of what she was—she may not even truly be 'her' anymore—but something of her would live on.

It wasn't much, but it was something.

As her memories played out, each of them flickering only for a few more moments in her mind before fading away completely, she steadfastly held onto one. She clutched it tightly—this one was important above all the others. If she could only keep one with her when she woke up, this was the one she wanted.

She gave it to her future iteration, the one inheritance that it would retain, and then left a simple set of instructions for the Legacy to help ensure its survival as well as her own. She knew that neither of them would live without the other, but the odds were completely stacked against them.

Then again, the odds had been against them many times before, and she had something which had helped the two of them overcome them every time: blind hope.

She was terrified of what was about to happen, but she held onto that hope. As the last wisps of her consciousness slowly dissolved into nothingness, she tried to convince herself it would be enough.

—V—

For it, what passed for time was told in flashing lights and arbitrary images. Pictures and visions that came and went erratically, none of which held any significant meaning or purpose it could discern.

With only the barest level of cognizance available, it could not understand the concept, let alone the passage of time. It was only aware that the lights were there and then they weren't, and sometimes not even that.

Then, out of the nothing, something happened. Some synaptic switch was flipped and thought began to flow through its mind just as fluidly as blood pumped through its veins—

He awoke.

There was no chilling sensation of being pulled from the void's clutches, no pinpricks of tiny needles running across his skin as his nerves experienced their first sensations; he simply awoke and became aware of the world around him.

The next few seconds were relatively uneventful, merely a short period of peace and a feeling of weightlessness before a foreboding sense of panic began to overwhelm his senses.

He struggled to move, but his mobility was quite restricted. He could feel something all around him, encasing every inch of his skin with its cold, wet grip. With some effort, he managed to reach his arms out in front of him but quickly found that there was yet another obstacle; some kind of wall or barrier preventing his escape and keeping him trapped in the tightly confined space he knew currently as his prison.

He felt something attached to the front of his face, over his mouth. He touched it with his hands, finding a sort of mask that was fixed snugly against the flesh of his mouth and chin. He was repulsed by the sudden sensation of a foreign tube-like object protruding from it and reaching towards the back of his throat, maybe some kind of breathing apparatus.

He began to jerk and writhe in disgusted horror, only stopping momentarily once it seemed to detect that he was conscious and released itself from him. As he yanked the rubbery tube out of his mouth and pushed it away as far as possible in the tight space, a dull whirr of machinery could be heard.

Without warning, the barrier in front of him slid away, and he was dumped upon the floor along with whatever unknown liquid he'd been held in.

He began to retch on the ground, coughing up whatever viscous fluid had managed to find its way into his mouth and trachea. It was some kind of gel that quickly began to congeal as it pooled onto the ground from the opening of whatever had been containing him. Once he was satisfied that his mouth was clean of the stuff, he turned to get a better picture of where he'd come from.

It looked to be an advanced pod of some kind, angular in design and propped vertically against a wall. Small magenta lights lined its sides, and its metal exterior very slightly reflected the dim luminescence of his surroundings. Inside, he could see a padded interior with holes from which goo still weakly trickled. Upon closer inspection, he noticed a peculiar symbol emblazoned on the bottom of the capsule's front.

It was segmented into two parts, with the top's semblance being much like an ocean wave and the bottom's like a hook extending from the left side of the wave and reaching towards the right until it ended in a curved point. It followed the same structure of a lowercase 'e', albeit much more artistic in appearance.

He had no idea what it meant, nor any desire to stick around and find out. Since the pod had given him a newly enhanced sense of claustrophobia, he stopped staring at it and instead shifted his focus to finding out where exactly he was.

He wasn't quite sure what he was looking at. He was in a generously sized room with miscellaneous objects strewn about randomly. Large scraps and sheets of metal leaned against the walls or laid flat upon the ground, some of them with bits of machinery attached to them. The walls were grimy and grey, their original appearance marred by years of caked filth. They seemed rather simplistic in nature, their flat surfaces only disrupted by some of the aforementioned metal sheets welded onto them in a haphazard fashion.

In contrast, the other objects around the room differed greatly from whatever aesthetic guide this place was following—nets holding groups of smaller sized items were plentiful, sometimes hanging from the ceiling or sitting on the ground. The objects inside were collections of crates, boxes, and baubles that all varied in their size and appearance; some were smooth and curving, others were angular and stoically rigid. In one of them, he could even see a bulbous white and bronze object which, to his best guess, was some kind of decorative sculpture. The only explanation was that they were items salvaged from other places, which would make this some kind of cargo bay for storage. But if that was the case, then why exactly was he here?

Groaning, he tried to stand up only for another wave of nausea to cascade over him. Disorienting lights flashed in his vision, only serving to confuse him further. Waving a hand absentmindedly, he tried to swat them away—

"H-hello."

He froze at the sudden voice that made its presence known. He tried to find its source, and his eyes fell on the pod behind him.

"Huuh aah ooh?"

He narrowed his eyes in frustration from his lack of proper speech. After moving his jaw around to relieve the tension in his stiff muscles, he made a slower attempt to enunciate his words clearly.

"... Who ... are ... you?"

"I am a friend. There w-will be some initial disorientation as you r-recover from suspended a-animation, and there are potential neurological c-complications that may add to that."

A friend? It spoke to him in a jarring, glitchy manner where its words became jittery and difficult to understand at points. The voice was feminine, but that was the only clue he had as to the identity of whomever was talking.

"Where ... am I?" The more he spoke, the easier it became to string his words together. At least now his sentence structure was relatively cohesive.

"Please listen. There isn't e-enough time to answer every question you m-may have. But know this; you are in g-grave danger."

His mouth suddenly became very dry at the voice's divulgence.

"We have b-been abducted. Our captors are unknown, as are their intentions. The only certainty is t-that you are valuable to them."

Abducted? He looked around the chamber cautiously, his breathing becoming shallower as he began to consider the implications of his surroundings. The voice proceeded with its instructions, ignorant to his growing fear.

"Take my matrix from the Chrysalis. It contains what's l-left of me—it will help you b-bypass any obstacles you encounter."

He heard a small metallic hiss as a slot opened up near the pod's bottom, below the symbol, and a small, diamond-shaped device ejected from it. It was a chip, really, no more than a few inches in length and thin as a wafer.

"Run. They are coming."

With its last warning, the lights on the pod winked out of existence, and the voice was silent once more.

He was alone.

Several questions still swarmed his mind; who was the voice? Why had he been inside the capsule? And most of all—who was he?

When he racked his brain for clues, he only received more flashes of light and images that gave him a headache. Blinking rapidly to alleviate the strain, he found that he couldn't remember much of anything, if at all. He recalled the voice saying something about neurological complications, was his memory a part of that?

He felt like normally this was something that should have startled him, perhaps even caused him to panic, but he felt strangely calm. Maybe the shock would come later, maybe it wouldn't. But right now, he needed to focus.

Reaching forward, he grabbed the chip cautiously and held it up to his face to inspect it. A protective metallic coating covered any circuitry that would otherwise be exposed, save for a single rose-colored light in the center. It glowed brightly in the dark shadows of the room's interior and provided a small source of illumination—

Clang.

He spun around at the suddenness of the sound, much like a bar of metal striking other metal. His heart began to beat rapidly as adrenaline and fear flooded his system. It was distant, he could tell by the relative quietness of it, but its echo reverberated throughout the walls of the chamber he was in.

Clang.

There it was again. Now it sounded closer. He stood up shakily, the muscles in his legs feeling rather weak at having to support his body weight for what was, presumably, the first instance in a long time. Or perhaps they were simply quivering from fright.

Clang!

As the noises grew closer, so did his sense of panic and urgency to find an escape route. His eyes locked onto what seemed to be a large door in the center of the far wall, and he hurriedly made his way over to it. The voice had said that he was valuable to his captors in some way ... it hadn't clarified whether they needed him alive or not.

Clang!

Pushing past nets and salvage, he finally made it to the door. It remained closed, apparently unwilling or unable to acknowledge his presence. There was a seam in the center that looked like it should slide apart from the middle if it were to open, and he briefly wondered if he'd be able to pry it apart—

CLANG!

Holding a hand over his mouth to keep himself from crying out unintentionally, he realized that whatever was making the noises was on the other side of the door. Without thinking, he dove to the left of the door's frame and scrambled behind a large cargo net that was resting nearby.

As he kept still and tried to limit his breathing, he heard the door hiss open, and something stepped into the room.

CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.

The loud slams of metal against the floor continued to ring out as whatever it was moved from the door towards the back of the room where the capsule was. Hesitantly, he poked his head out from the side of the net and looked to confirm that it was no longer in his way.

The door was miraculously still open, and he glanced in the opposite direction towards his capsule. It wouldn't be long before his captor would discover he was missing, his only chance to escape was now.

Trying to balance haste with stealth, he walked slowly over to the door and passed through it. It led to a wide passageway that branched to the left and right. Once he was beyond the room's threshold and he was sure that he wouldn't be heard, he picked up speed and ran towards the right, the slapping of his bare feet against the floor echoing the whole way.

The chilled air stung his exposed skin, feeling not unlike he was covered in thousands of minuscule cuts. He tried his best to ignore it and pressed forward into the depths of the facility. Keeping himself occupied with the task at hand was the one thing stopping the fear he felt from overwhelming his mind—

A scream erupted from the direction of the cargo bay, and his breath caught in his throat as he realized that whatever had captured him now knew he was loose. Its cry was a harsh, guttural mix between violent choking and the high pitched whine of machinery. The sheer awfulness of the screech only encouraged him to move quicker, and he entered a full-on sprint to put as much distance as he could between it and him.

His mind raced to come up with a solution for his predicament; he couldn't simply outrun and hide from the thing forever, he had to find some way to escape. The only question was how he was going to manage that when he had no idea where he was going.

But as a second scream rang out from further in the facility, just as horrible as the first, he very quickly decided that not knowing where he was going wasn't the worst of his problems. His mind made up, he set off with his objective in mind and the chip clutched tightly in hand.