Nott and Fatale - Four Times We Met - Backdated

[ax_goblin]

Nott was staring at the older girl in front of her where she stood in line for her breakfast tray. She knew she probably wasn't supposed to, but she couldn't really help herself. They'd only just released her back into the cafeteria because Caleb was feeling better, and after so much time mostly shut up to herself since she'd got here, all of the other inmates were new and fascinating. She stared because this girl was wearing one of the collars they put on you when you were being 'bad,' and she couldn't help wondering what the excuse was in her case. And - okay - she did stare because this girl was BLUE, as blue as she was green even, and she'd never actually seen anybody with such vivid skin as hers before.

She was staring so hard that Nott actually startled a bit as the person working the line shunted a tray at her, and Nott squeaked her distress as she clamored to catch it before it could slip off of the railing. They'd blame it on her for sure if she made a big mess that held up the line. No, it didn't make sense, but that's what would happen.

Pam was concentrating on keeping her head down. It wasn't natural to her, these days; she'd been pretty fucking smug since the last few procedures had taken and she'd started her knife training, and while she wasn't thrilled about not being able to turn off the blue anymore, she was still hoping she'd figure that out. But they'd been watching her close ever since she'd fucked up the month before, she had a whole new appreciation for eating after a week spent without, and a real desire to not have anyone trigger the shock collar around her neck. Better to keep it low key and not draw attention

Her resolution to that effect was blown when someone behind her let out a squeak and fumbled their tray. Spinning around, Pam grabbed hold of the tray to stabilize it (yay for the new hand/eye, who the hell would've thought she'd be using it in the cafeteria?) and looked up from it to glare at whoever was being a klutz.

No one there. Not until she looked a whole lot lower, anyway. And caught sight of a little kid who was as green as she was blue, and with seriously huge floppy ears. "They're not gonna give you a new one if you drop that," she pointed out as she let it go and turned back to grab her own off the line.

"AHH!hhh-aha, haha, I, I know," the girl blabbed in shocked, clumsy response. "Uh - thank you? That was... I didn't think anybody could move that fast," Nott stood up on her tiptoes and reached with both clawed hands to collect her tray more carefully this time, trying to swallow her heart back down into her chest from her throat.

"Enhanced hand/eye, they call it." Pam shrugged, trying to look casual. She'd paid for it - fuck, but she'd paid for it, she hadn't been at all sure she was going to live through that one - but it'd been worth it. Or so she kept telling herself, anyway. "What's your thing?" She picked up her tray, looked around to see if Alex was there yet, and started for an empty table once she realized he wasn't, leaving the kid to follow her or not, her choice.

"My 'thing?'" Nott started to think about how to answer, but the older boy behind her was telling her to move already, and Blue Girl was striding away like maybe she didn't even care what the reply to her question would be. But that might just be because the guards had turned to look and see what the squawking and hold-up to the breakfast line were about. She hastily trotted after Blue Girl to catch up, toe-claws whisper-clacking on the floor.

"I, uh... Look like this?" Nott stood awkwardly beside Blue Girl's seat for a moment, not sure if she was being invited exactly. "And... I eat weird stuff. And I can do a couple of spells."

"Spells?" Pam's eyebrows climbed, and she gestured towards one of the seats. "Like the kid with the cat?"

Nott's face brightened (as much as a green face could brighten) at that. "That's Caleb!" She pushed her tray up onto the table first, so she had both hands to help get her into the seat next to Blue Girl's. "I'm sort of like him, I guess, because of the magic. But he's so much better at all of it than me," she said in the direction of her powdered eggs and dry toast and cup of orange juice. "They say maybe I can learn from him, to do what he does."

"Yeah, you manage your own cat, look me up," Pam requested, lips quirking just a fraction. Caleb she could do without; the handlers seemed like they liked him even more than they did her. She liked the cat, though; it reminded her of the stray that had hung around their trailer for a while, until one of her mom's boyfriends had run it off.

Bella, she reflected, had really loved that cat. She pushed that thought aside automatically, just like she did whenever she thought of her sister, and turned her attention back to the kid. "What's your name, anyway?"

Just imagine. Being able to eat all the cats you wanted!

"I'm Nott," the girl offered as she tried to scoop up some of her eggs with a triangle of toast. "Who're you?"

"Pam." She eyed the kid curiously as she dug into her eggs. Green, ugly as fuck, and able to eat weird shit. None of which was all that far off from the "could turn blue" she'd started off with herself. "Did they say how they were gonna teach you to do Caleb's thing?"

"No," Nott admitted after stuffing the entire slice of toast and its eggy cargo into her face within two chomping bites, looking up at Pam with crumbs and bits of egg smudged around her mouth. "But when I eat stuff, it turns into other stuff inside me, I guess? So it's already like a crappy version of what Caleb does with his magic."

"So what, they figure they can get you to shit gold?" Pam's eyebrows rose. "Sounds like it'd hurt. A lot. But if you can do it, you might make it here."

Nott flinched a little. Not really because of what Pam said. It was because of how her Handler had said almost that very thing about making gold. They want you to make gold. You're going to make them gold, if I have to force it down your throat and wait for you to shit it out again. He had not been kidding.

"It doesn't work like that," she mumbled quietly. "It changes in my belly, same as food."

Pam frowned. "Well, that's basically what happens with food, right? Unless you throw it up, but I'm thinking that'd hurt even more."

Nott wasn't sure Pam got what she was trying to say - but she wasn't all wrong either? "But when it's done it isn't gold anymore. It's - y'know, the usual. Only I can make spells and stuff with the energy if I want."

"Oh." Well, why hadn't she said that to begin with? "You might want to lead off with that," Pam pointed out sarcastically, pointing her spork at the other girl.

"Sorry. I never had to talk about it before," Nott occupied her fidgety four-fingered hands by opening her juice. "Uh, what about you? What do you - what's 'your thing?'"

Stupidity forgiven (she was just a little kid, after all), Pam grinned smugly. "So far? Got the blue thing going that I started with," and no reason to admit that she'd been able to turn it off until recently, because she'd figure out how again eventually. "I can teleport. Killer hand/eye, which you saw." She shrugged almost casually. "They'll add something new soon. They always do." And it hurt more and more each time, but no reason to tell the kid that. Besides, it was worth it. She was pretty sure it was, anyway.

Nott looked up from sipping her juice, large yellow eyes going a bit bigger and rounder still, jaw hanging. "They just gave you teleportation and reflexes and stuff? Like in the movies?"

"Not quite like the movies." Pam grimaced and put her spork down on the table. "They do some kind of fucked up DNA thing, and I spend time in the infirmary, and when I get out they test to see if it worked." She shrugged. "It's got it's downside? But I haven't died yet. Everyone else they tried it on did."

The green girl made an anxious expression. "That's awful! I don't care if it maybe gives you more powers, I don't wanna die like that," she thought out loud. What about Caleb?

Her eyes searched Pam. "They're not doing that to everybody are they?!"

Pam shook her head. "Nah. They haven't done it to that many even, I don't think." She gave the girl a sympathetic look. "If you can do Caleb's gold thing, you're probably safe. They're not gonna want to chance fucking that up."

Nott gave a deep sigh of shaky relief. "Ohgood," it came out as all one word. She wasn't sure if she could make gold after all, but it did make her feel better to know Caleb would be alright.

She gulped the last of her orange juice and then chewed her way through one side of the plastic cup it had come in like that was dessert. "Congrats on not being dead."

After staring for a few long moments at the sight of the girl chewing her way through her cup, Pam blinked. "Yeah. You too."

************




Pam bent to one side, then the other, stretching. Her handler had said he had a surprise for her today, which she took to mean she'd be fighting someone twice her size with iron skin. It wouldn't surprise her; they were getting pissed off that all she'd managed to do with the new light bending abilities was to change her skin and hair color back to what they had been originally.

Nott's Handler had more or less said the same. We're trying something different with you today. Don't embarrass me. But she didn't know what to expect when they escorted her to the large empty training room with the mirror windows and the mats laid out on the floors. Was that-?! Those old dark stains were blood. Ugh, gross. And... Not good.

"It's YOU," Nott loudly announced the obvious, as the doors were locked into place behind them. She padded warily towards the older girl on the mats. "But you're not blue anymore." Her mind scrambled to try and remember what Pam's deal was. Something about teleporting and... Killer hand/eye, she'd called it. Oh no.

"You've got to be kidding me," Pam announced, ignoring the kid's observation entirely and planting her hands on her hips. "What am I supposed to do here? She's gotta be like eight years old."

Nott's ears flattened back a bit. "Eight?! Who's eight? I'm-" She paused, one ear cocking as she stumbled over the word she wanted momentarily like an unexpected math problem. "A tween! ...Ish."

The intercom came on. "Nott hasn't been participating with the basic combat training classes with the enthusiasm that is expected of her. Pam, you're going to encourage her participation in the program with a firsthand demonstration of what a more advanced participant can achieve. We expect to see a practical combat application for your light manipulation techniques today," the voice said pointedly. "Short of lethal force, all powers and techniques are permitted. The match will end when one of you is unconscious. The loser will spend a week in solitary confinement to consider their failure here today. You may begin." The intercom fell silent.

Fuck. She was screwed.

Taking out the kid was no problem. She'd always been good at combat training, and they'd been giving her extra ever since she'd picked up the hand/eye ability. She could have Nott unconscious in five minutes at most.

But then what? Mostly, she didn't give a damn about the other kids at the Center; they showed up, they were around for a while, they died, end of story. No point getting close, especially since they'd started pitting her against them in hand to hand training. But for all she said otherwise, Nott looked like a kid, and she really wasn't okay with knocking her out, let alone putting her in solitary for a week. But if she threw the match, there was no way her handler was going to believe it, and she was going to be in even deeper shit than she'd be for not using her new light powers in combat.

She couldn't afford that. The staff - well, they didn't like her. She was pretty sure they didn't like anyone. But they were usually pleased with her, and she counted on that. "Sorry, kid," she said as she launched herself at the younger girl - then formed a portal and dove through, effectively disappearing from sight. She reappeared behind her and aimed a kick at her legs, figuring on knocking her down. With any luck, she'd knock herself out.

How did you brace yourself when you had no way of knowing where an attack was coming from?! Nott yelped as her legs collapsed right out from under her, but at least she recovered well. She was, if not much else, quick and slippery, rolling back onto her feet to face Pam with her heart thumping like a jackrabbit on a construction site with a tiny little hardhat. "You don't have to do this," Nott tried desperately, holding up her hands as if in surrender or defense. She didn't think it would work, but it didn't need to. All she needed was the moment to prepare her spell, and to wait for Pam to charge her again.

"Kinda do, kiddo. Nothing personal." She threw a blow and followed it up with another, then dropped down and tried to swipe Nott's feet out from under her again.

Nott wasn't strong or trained or anything like that. She couldn't take many hits, not how Blue Girl was landing them. What she did have was good reflexes, and she was a fast, tiny target. Nott dodged out of the way of the one-two punches at the possible last moment, falling (again) as Pam did another one of those sweeps and promising herself not to fall (hah) for another one. But it bought her enough time to finally do something back.

She caught Pam's leg as she fell, baring her teeth as much in surprise as anything where she pushed a magical jolt of lightning through the other girl from her hands. "It feels personal," Nott squawked.

"Ack!" Pam fought an urge to pull her leg back and instead kicked out, trying to send the other girl flying. Based on how her leg felt, she was going to have one hell of a burn there later, but after the number of times she'd been shocked in the course of training (not to mention the collar she'd worn for a few weeks just recently), that low level a blast wasn't going to slow her down any. On a positive note, though, the jolt shocked a flash of light out of her, surrounding her like an aura or a split second - with any luck she'd be able to convince her handler that it had been an intentional attempt at blinding her opponent or something. "Trust me, you don't want to make it personal," Pam countered.

An oof! sounded from the smaller girl as she was shunted away, and she squinted against the flare of light, but it didn't seem to hurt her any?

There was the thing Nott had been working on earlier today... They were trying to get her to hold on to some of her wonky spell components in her belly instead of digesting them right away, like a big meal slowing the whole works down. She'd made it happen once... If there was some of that stuff left, then was another spell she could use.

"Hey Pammy," Nott called in an almost melodic screech. Retain the spell components. Retain the spell components. She reached for that place where the gut-magic happened, for that strange moment of perfect mental and physical balance where her tummy flipped like on a rollercoaster with something arcane - "Did you hear the one about the girl who ate the food coloring? She dyed a little inside."

As a joke, it was pretty corny. As a spell focus.... Nott cast the magic, counting on it to briefly incapacitate the other girl with a forced fit of body-wracking laughter.

It wasn't funny. It really wasn't funny - and yet, Pam found herself laughing hysterically. Which meant - fuck. Another spell. She was really starting to hate magic.

Nott had a moment to feel accomplished before she realized the bigger problem. She'd managed to get the other girl off of her and keep her from attacking, but it wasn't going to finish the job. It wasn't going to count unless Pam got KO'ed.

She crept closer to the hysterical blue girl, awkwardly trying to figure out how she should - What should she do?! She could grab her head and slam it, or... Nott glanced at her claws. But she didn't want to hurt Pam too bad. That seemed like too much.

In other words, Nott hesitated.

Pam didn't. She laughed a few seconds longer than the spell compelled, using the opportunity to get into position - then grabbed Nott's hand and pulled, even as she threw herself back onto the mat. Nott went flying over her head with enough momentum to hit the wall, and Pam somersaulted to her feet.

A startled cry flung across the room in the wake of the goblin girl, ending abruptly as Nott smacked hard into the wall and fell into a heap on the floor. She started to pull herself back up, momentarily dizzy, but she wasn't as fast as she had been before and she definitely didn't have another spell at the ready.

Unfortunately, the room didn't contain anything throwable - Pam wasted a moment glancing around just to make sure, hoping she could remain out of range of the kid's spells. Once she determined there wasn't, though, she teleported across to the other girl, grabbed her shoulder to spin her around, and with her hand still there, holding Nott still, threw a punch that would hopefully send the kid back into the wall.

The trick Pam did with popping in and out of space across the room made it so Nott couldn't even dodge. And this bigger girl actually knew what she was doing, how to move and beat people up. Nott's head snapped back against the wall, pain overwhelming her wits, and she lifted her hands to try and punch back, but it was...she didn't...

She hated solitary.

"Take a nap, kid," Pam said as she let go of Nott's shoulder and watched her collapse to the ground. She looked to the windows where the handlers were watching. "She's out."

"I hope you're not proud of your performance," her handler said as he went to unlock the door and escort her out. "Honestly, what the hell have we been teaching you, that it took you that long to take out a ten year old? Also, you're going to have to do a hell of a lot better with the new light powers than that."

Pam snuck a glance back at the green skinned kid, who was being scooped up by her handler, then assumed a properly chastised expression and focused her eyes on the ground in front of her. At least she wasn't going to be spending a week in solitary. She hated that.

************




Pam watched the shower water longingly, trying to figure out how to work this.

She needed a shower. Desperately. Sure, she'd been washing up whenever she could, with soap from the dispensers and those antibacterial wipes they kept in the infirmary. She didn't stink - if she had, they'd have probably found her by now - but her hair felt gross and she could only imagine what it looked like.

On the flipside, she could only imagine what she looked like in general, these days. Definitely downside to being invisible. Or maybe an upside right now, all things considered.

She took a deep breath, and headed over to where Nott was standing, getting ready for her shower. "Hey," she whispered. "Can you leave the water on when you're done?" Maybe she was being paranoid - in fact, she was pretty sure she was - but it just took one of the handlers (or one of the lab rats, because she wasn't fooling herself, she wasn't exactly popular with any of them) to notice water turning itself on and she was caught.

Assuming she was still alive to be caught, a small voice whispered in the back of her mind. She pushed it away, but found herself holding her breath, waiting for Nott to reply, because if the younger girl could hear her? There was a good chance she still was.

The thing to understand about Nott in the showers was that she didn't shower. Brief splish-splash type sink baths and wet towels with soap in more serious situations were it. Not unless she was forced in and punished if she wasn't all-over damp when she came out again five minutes later. Which is exactly what they did here.

This day, like most shower days, she had her towel wrapped tightly around herself as she approached the shower and a clenched little rock of a fist holding that towel together at one side. (At least she was smaller than most kids that the towels were supposed to dry off?) The hissing streams of wet heat were evil as far as she was concerned. Showers always got to her nerves and made her miserable.

Nott was just working up the nerve to loosen her towel and take her turn charging under the spray as if into battle when the disembodied voice startled her into a jump. "W-what is - who is that?! Who said that? Pervert!" She spun around looking for the speaker... But there wasn't any???

"Would you keep your voice down, moron?" Pam hissed. "It's me, Pam. Can you just leave the fucking water on when you're done so I can get a shower without anyone noticing?"

Pam? "Pam the blue girl, Pam?" Nott tried to look in the direction of the voice, but she still didn't see anything, so she turned back around again. She wanted to argue, but what was she going to do if the guards heard or noticed she was taking too long and came in - blame the ruckus on the person nobody could see? "Well - I still have to have mine first." Her hands and arms grabbing the towel pulled them tighter to herself. "Just...don't look. Don't look at me, okay?"

"You're not my type anyway." Pam rolled her eyes and turned her back. "Fine, not looking - I'm facing the wall. Can you just hurry up and shower so I can wash my hair? Please? Or turn on the water so I can get it wet and wash it while you're showering, whatever?"

Nott glanced over her shoulder for Pam, but without being able to see... She turned on the shower, and sort of flashed the spray of the shower head by opening and closing her towel quickly. Then she tucked the towel back into place at one side of her chest, got her hair and face wet with a shudder, and backed away from the water to start scrubbing it off with the corner of her towel immediately.

“Are you...invisible? Is that your latest power or something?” Even so, creeping in and stealing somebody else’s shower was super weird.

"Bending light. It got stuck on invisible and the handlers are pissed. They can't find me." Pam stripped off her scrubs, tossed them into the corner, and snuck a peek to ensure that Nott wasn't actually using the water before getting under it. "It's been two weeks now." She moaned softly as the hot water sprayed over her.

Nott snuck a peek when she thought Pam was in there, so curious if she would see water rolling off of the shape of something she couldn't see, or it the water would look normal....? "Wait, why - what are you doing here?! Why haven't you run away?"

"Because they're watching the doors?" Pam scrubbed some of the combined body wash/shampoo that came out of the dispenser through her hair. There was more to it than that, of course - she wasn't about to go anywhere without Alex, and she wasn't altogether sure she wanted to go, anyway - but it was the simple truth, and all Nott needed to know. "Besides, where the fuck would I go?"

"Literally anywhere else," Nott blurted. "How're they watching the doors for - they HAVE to open them for - ah nevermind," she realized they were just about out of time. It didn't make sense to her at all, but okay. "I guess, if you really can't go... I could tell them where you are? If you're stuck... If you... But you don't want that, do you?" They were horrible to kids for no reason. If they thought they did have a good reason... That could be really awful for Pam.

"Not until I can figure out how to turn off the invisible. Really not a fan of electric shocks, thanks." Pam rinsed her hair, washed herself off as best she could, and grimaced at her dirty scrubs. She was going to have to put them on, wet, unless...

"Any chance you can throw those in the laundry with yours?" she asked Nott hopefully. After all, it wasn't like anyone was going to see her naked.

Electric shocks? "I have fully no idea what you're talking about," Nott admitted. "But my time's up, and there's no way I'm sending out an extra pair of scrubs for laundry that aren't even in my size," she eyed the lump of dirty, soggy clothes in the corner, then turned for the exit into the changing area. "Good luck with your...thing."

"Thanks." Pam made a face at her back, then turned to consider the pile of scrubs for a moment before walking out and leaving them there. Hopefully it would at least be a while before anyone noticed them. She could be all the way across the facility by then.

At least, she reflected, she'd had someone to talk to for a few minutes. Feeling more alive than she had since she'd last seen Alex, Pam made her way out of the shower room, hoping someone had left a towel behind. She could deal okay with the cold, but wet footprints would be a dead giveaway.

************




Salvation and armageddon don't look much different when you have no idea what the fuck is going on.

The building shook, the fighting and dying and shit breaking apart all over the place turning everything upside down. No one stopped and explained it as it was happening to them, the ones locked up in there like animals, who the guards were fighting or whatever was going on. It was scary, but what could anyone inside a cell do about it? Only at one point, the automatic locks on the cells where the test subjects were held all disengaged, the power systems spazzing out.

The emergency lighting still worked in some places, but not others, Nott discovered as she picked up her collection of pains from the cell they'd put her in after what happened with Caleb and scrabbled through the chaos. Yelling and screams and gunfire echoed down some of the hallways, and she avoided those as much as she could. Smoke and fire had begun to fill others - maybe she could use one for cover if she had to, but that could be really dangerous. Nott was small, sneaky, and had all kinds of distractions going on around her, and that's how she encouraged herself as she made her way towards the exterior of the complex. She could do this, she insisted to the sheer panic coursing through her body, tripping on a corpse and flapping about with a whimper to regain her balance. She had to do this. This was the only chance she was gonna get. She had to be brave.

At least she knew Caleb was gone already, sent somewhere else. Or...she had to hope that was true. She kept trying to send him arcane messages, just in case, but it seemed like he was too far away to get them. Or...could he just not answer them?

Nott halted abruptly, senses on high alert as she heard but didn't yet see something just around the corner. She slapped her back against the wall, stopping her breath, to wait and see if the thing would move at all. Had it noticed her?!

Fatale had stepped through a portal just a moment earlier, her eyes automatically scanning the hallway for threats. She didn't know who the fuck had broken into the Facility, or what it meant, but she knew this for sure - she was getting out, she was getting Alex out, and before she did either? She was going to teach each and every one of the handlers and trainers and scientists just what a brilliant job they'd done.

She had a knife in each hand that she'd taken from the portal shielded training room when the locks had undone themselves; both were liberally covered with blood, as were the scrubs she was wearing. She seemed oblivious, and in fact, she really was. It wasn't important to the mission, and the mission, self-assigned as it was, was everything right now.

She paused, hearing a furtive noise from around the corner, and her eyes narrowed. Other than herself and Alex, she hadn't seen any lab rats around the place in days; Caleb and Nott had either fucked up somehow or the scientists had finally decided to take them apart to see how they did their tricks. Or maybe she'd killed them; she had a fuzzy memory of fighting Nott she was pretty sure was recent. Either way, it wasn't likely to be either of them, so it was either one of the invaders or a target

Either was fair game. Fingers already toying with the knife in her hand, she smirked and opened a portal to the far side of the next hallway and stepped through.

Nott didn't have time to stop and wonder about how the something from around the corner had disappeared and then this thing in front of her appeared right after, and where she'd seen that before. The only thing she had time for, as she saw this particular something coming at her out of nowhere, was to reflexively swipe at the shining glint of a thing flying at her head while letting out a shriek. She'd cast the spell to conjure up an invisible spectral hand, just in case. And as she watched what turned out to be a bloody knife clatter to the ground at her feet - it was a good thing too. "That would have killed me," she pointed out in a terrified whisper, staring at it like maybe it was about to try again.

Fatale frowned as her knife hit some kind of barrier and bounced off, landing at the feet of someone who - fuck. She shook her head, trying to will away the sight of the kid she was almost positive she'd killed just two days before in a sim. Or what she'd assumed was a sim - she didn't really check too close anymore. It was better not to know, to just assume that all the opponents were holograms. All the opponents until today's, anyway, but today's were the ones that counted. "That was the idea," she barked out, and walked over to retrieve her knife. "If you're actually here? Get the fuck out of here before you do get killed."

The invisible hand grabbed the blade of the knife before Pam could reach it, pulling it back and raising it high as if it might need to defend Nott from the blue girl. Pam looked... Like the crazy girl in the horror movie who was going around killing people.

"Don't come any closer," Nott warned, though her voice wavered and her yellow eyes were wide. "...Don't kill me," she pleaded as she tried to start backing away, to turn the corner for the hall Pam had left empty so she could run. But they both knew that she wouldn't get very far. Not with the things Pam could do.

"I'm not - uggh! Fine, keep the fucking knife, I've got more. Just get the fuck out of here." Fatale waved her hand dismissively at the girl and turned to walk away, another knife slipping with practiced ease into her hand. There would be more targets in the labs, she reflected, even as "don't kill me" echoed in her mind. She'd heard that before, she knew she had. Except that time, she hadn't turned away, had she?

Nott took the knife into her own hand, dismissing the spell, and stared after Pam for a moment. She seemed... At least, she sounded okay? Like, not a stab-happy psycho?

Nott hazarded a glance over her shoulder, and then looked back at Pam. "Do you know how I can get outside from here?" It felt stupid to admit, but with everything going on, it was so easy to get turned around, or to find a hallway collapsed or occupied or... "All I want is to go."

How to get out. Fatale opened her mouth to give a snarky retort, then paused. The power was out. She'd been able to 'port into the training room, help herself to the knives, and 'port out. Which meant....

Fuck. There was no way to test it - or at least, no way to test it without going through herself and jeopardizing the mission if she couldn't get back in. But it was probably safer than Nott wandering around inside a war zone, which was what the labs had turned into. Without turning around, she opened a portal near the younger girl, using a set of coordinates that had been drilled into her head a few months earlier as part of some kind of test, she couldn't remember what. "Instant exit. It'll take you..." she frowned, trying to remember, then shrugged. "Chicago. Near the big Metra station, I forget the name. From there you're on your own."

"Chicago?" One side of the room to the other was one thing. But could Pam really send her that far? ...How far was that even, when Nott didn't know where the Facility was?

She eyed the portal warily, remembering what Caleb had told her. We’ll head to the closest major city when we get out, then make a plan from there. "Is that the nearest major city?"

Fatale frowned. "Fuck if I know. Probably? It's the one I have the location of. Take it or leave it. I've got an appointment with some doctors." She toyed with the knife in her hand, sending it twirling between her fingers in illustration.

Maybe Nott should be gleeful to hear the scary girl was going to go all murderhobo on the doctors. They were, after all, terrible people who had done terrible things. But hunting them down to kill them when Pam had the option to leave anytime she wanted...

Nott edged closer to the portal, because Pam was a lot of things but she didn't actually think she was a liar, and it had to be a safer bet than the alternative - then stopped again, looking back at Pam. "They told me Caleb was sent somewhere else," she explained. "But... If you do see him, can you send him where this thing goes?"

"Yeah, fine. Same bat time, same bat channel." It wasn't like it took much to make the promise; if she saw Caleb (unlikely) and he was willing to believe her (even less likely), she'd open a portal. Whatever. "Go. I've got shit to do." And she had to find Alex. Hopefully he'd stayed safe in his room, but she wasn't prepared to count on it.

Hesitating for another moment as Nott debated if it was crazier and stupider to trust Pam and go through with this or crazier and stupider to take her chances running the nightmare halls of the Facility, she pulled together the last of her courage. "Uh... Thanks," she offered lamely. "Hope you make it out okay."

Then Nott took a deep breath pushed through the rift in space - and she was gone.

Fatale watched her go for a moment longer, then nodded and closed the portal. Right, that was that. She pushed the encounter aside, letting it tangle with her other already vague memories of the green skinned girl, and turned her attention back to more important things. Somewhere, there were at least three more "doctors" and a handful more trainers (unless whoever the people who'd broken in had already taken them out). She wasn't leaving here until she could promise Alex they were all dead.