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Chapter Two

"I also fucking hate needles," Chrono Sandstalker commented in exasperation as he poked himself in the leg with his prepared syringe. His eyes went wide as he screamed out in pain, removing the needle just as quickly as he had inserted it. "Not vein, not vein!" he whimpered angrily. Fumbling for an instant to hold onto the needle, he gripped the glass cylinder hard between his short stubby fingers and only loosened his grip the next moment when he thought he might break it.

The light brown wolf closed his eyes and leaned forward while sitting as he took in a long, hard breath and tried to ignore the pain. "Son of an ewe," he groaned as a moan could be heard over to his left. Glancing over, Chrono saw the Sargent First Class drifting into consciousness, his arms flailing about as if trying to knock over an non-existent alarm clock. With a groan, the man dropped his arms and began to ask what had happened.

The light orange wolf ignored him. Biting his lip, Chrono looked back to his leg. Not the right place, he grimaced as he looked at where he'd placed the tourniquet. That fucking bastard, Witty. Witty. What kind of name is Witty... sounds like a Dr. Wily knock-off, he chuckled harshly. And now I'm pissed, again. He growled, I just can't win! There's nothing I can do! Why is there nothing I can do?!

Shaking his head, he knew the strap of the tourniquet was lower on his leg than it was supposed to be. Just... take it all in, he considered as he tried to take a breath and calm down. Wiggling a bit in place, he pulled the tourniquet closer to his thigh and tightened it up again. Firstly, you need to drug yourself so both your prior damage and your self-inflected needle stab can go all numb and you can try to collect your thoughts. He nodded, agreeing with that perspective. Just... take some time to do this one task and then go back to yelling inside your own head.

After another deep breath, Chrono repositioned where he'd been holding the needle, straightening his aim with his other hand as he once again slid it through his fur and under his skin. There... that's how it should be. Injecting the liquid who's name Sandstalker could always remember but never quite know how to say, he felt his leg go numb as the local anesthetic traveled quickly through his limb. Allowing himself a brief smile, he breathed a sigh of relief as his upper leg lost all sensation.

"Oh shit," said Buster as he had visually taken in all of his wounds and realized what had happened to him. Chrono rolled his eyes, Oh, right. Of course I can't have any time to myself because I'm all the way back here with these two... people. OK, Buster is fine, but fuck Conner. He growled softly, glancing over to the black and white colored wolf. "Why can't I feel--"

"Serious wounds, possible brain damage... you don't feel it because your body doesn't want to... yada yada yada," Chrono replied in aggravation, cutting Buster off just like last time. I don't need this right now, Buster. I need to think... or lash out. Maybe I need to lash out. Rolling his eyes as his own self-depreciating thought, Chrono twirled the syringe between his fingers as he looked over. "Don't move or you'll only make it worse--oh, and Conner's been smashed by an I-Beam though he'll be dead in short order," Chrono said as he threw the needle at Okororaven, smashing it on the hard earth just beside the other man's head. "Be a good repeating source of annoyance and shut the fuck up while I think and patch my leg." The tip of Chrono's tail flicked in agitation.

Having turned his head to avoid the shattering glass, Buster looked back over at Chrono. "What the fuck, Sandstalker?"

Chrono growled, 'What the fuck', indeed. "Maybe I should start keeping count how many times you say that exact phrase," Chrono jeered as he continued to be interrupted. Lashing out, OK. Keeping it bottled up is bad. Nothing I do matters, so let's just... let some of that out, he considered, preparing his needle and thread. He did his best to focus on what he was doing with his hands rather than letting his mind dwell on the failed conversation with Witty. The misplaced injection was a cruel reminder of how easily he could be hurt and how lucky he'd been in the days immediately preceding this one. "It takes focus for someone to do this to their own leg correctly," he added as he frowned at his less than stellar attempt at sewing himself up this particular morning. "So just shut up for a few minutes and--"

As Buster tried to move and perhaps sit upright, there was an "Oh shit!" from the other side of the stones to Chrono's right. Right, because Conner's gotta wake up and make a commotion too... just like always. _ Always._

"Stonemason?" Buster called out, with Chrono mumbling the name as well, knowing all of the other man's lines. "Mason?" Buster asked, "Mason man, where are you!?" Chrono synced his lips in time to Buster's words, then twirled his hands in the air mockingly. The blue-eyed man frowned at the orange furred one, not sure what had come over him. "What's wrong? Report!"

"I'm so dead," Mason whimpered.

"So true!" Chrono nodded and gave a smug smile to Buster. Yeah, just... they still don't matter, so lets let some of this out. "Don't worry, though... he's also a spy," he said, winking towards Okororaven. I do love saying that... Conner's reaction is always great.

"Wh-What?" Conner's voice asked from behind the stones that Chrono could just barely see over from where he sat. He wasn't ready for that... if he'd just been accused he would have reacted better, but he's wounded and hurt and takes a second to gather his thoughts before saying: "What kind of crazy--"

"Seven minutes isn't a lot of time to... gather information," Sandstalker began by interrupting Conner, "but I know you were sent to spy on me--well, not me_... us_..." Chrono motioned his hand between him and Buster. "Because otherwise you've no idea if either or both of us are not quite who we say we are--while we scouted this 'potential terrorist outpost' which, by the way, we all know is a bullshit line fed us from on-high. Probably Homeland." Chrono knit his brow, his anger still flowing over him as he made a sloppy pull of his thread. To correct it, he had to stitch the next length of thread closer to make up for it. "Terrorist, riiight... fucking special ops experiment clean-up or some other bullshit, I dunno." The last part of that thought he had said somewhat softer, mostly to himself.

Stonemason moaned a bit as Buster looked over at Chrono, his right arm laying over his chest as he tried to feel one of the posts that was sticking up out of him. "What are you talking about?"

A valid question, as always, Chrono growled softly as he considered ways to answer that inquiry. I've told him before, and not told him before. Its a waste of time, he determined. My squad--my real squad--is out here looking into this area for our new commander or ers... and these two got assigned as their own squad's scouts as some kind of forced, joint operation that I know for certain was unwanted long before I found out what Conner really was. Black Ops indeed... I guess that would be me_, if I even cared any more._ He looked over at Buster, and shook his head. Waste of time.

"If I explained what was happening, you wouldn't believe me. I know. I wouldn't either were the situation reversed," the sand-colored wolf shrugged softly as he finished with his thread and needle, pulling out the medical wraps from his bag. "Therefore, I wont waste my time. I'm just going to let Conner here die from his wounds while I jump off that fence going through you," he said, motioning to it with his free hand, "and thereby shorten your life from a few hours to a few minutes like I have the past few times."

"What... what in the flames?" Buster asked, completely confused. "You're eye's all smashed up... that blow to the head must have knocked something loose."

As Chrono finished wrapping his leg, he reached up to do the same for his left shoulder. "I did take a blow to the head, but it's more a blow to my 'everything else' that I'm having trouble with at this point," he sighed. "You're next statement, by the way, is very politely warning me that I shouldn't be moving... that I should be waiting on a real medic." Shaking his head, he looked over at Buster as he opened his mouth to say something more, but Chrono again interrupted him, this time preemptively. "Yeah, I might have been knocked a little crazy... I dunno. It would be quite the kicker if my concussion has given me a fantastical delusion that continues to repeat itself while I'm back in the medical wing of the base in a coma... but I kind of doubt that."

"Anyone... help me?" Conner asked from where he lay, his voice getting soft as he began to fade out.

Chrono stood up and looked over at Stonemason while kicking the ground with his left leg to loosely test his stitches. Moving cautiously with his numb foot forward, Chrono stepped over to Buster and looked down at him. "What?" the husky-patterned wolf asked as Chrono leaned in and unlatched the combat knife from the center of Raven's vest. "What are you--?" But as Chrono began to smile and pull it away, Buster grabbed his arm. "What do you think you're doing with my knife?"

"He's going to bleed out anyway," Chrono stated simply and then shrugged. Quickly he wrenched his arm away from Okororaven, still holding the combat knife. Turning, he took a few steps over to Conner as he said simply, "I'll help." He knelt down next to the white wolf behind the small wall of stones, just out of Buster's view. This isn't your fault, Sandstalker admitted as he readied the knife in his left hand, situating himself behind Conner's head. But, he mentally added, I can't kill Witty again anytime soon, and you probably deserve this anyway...

"What can you do?" Conner asked still sounding a little dazed as he looked up at Chrono. "What are you doing with--" was all he could manage as Chrono reached down and quickly pulled the knife across the white wolf's neck, spilling blood all over his fur. It pooled in the already big stain of blood at his back from his prior damage. Putting his dark brown replacement hand over Conner's muzzle, he kept the man from making too much noise as died.

"What the fuck, Sandstalker!?"

"Well, that's twice in only a few minutes," Chrono commented about Buster's words as he moved the blade along between two of his metal fingers. Wiping the blood off on his chest, he stood up and looked over at Buster. "I kind'a thought, well... I've more recently taken that anger out on you so... I figured why not? Conner's turn. Slit throat. No biggie." He then pointed the knife at Okororaven. "Say another word, and I'll do the same to you. Pinned to the Earth isn't a good position to be in to defend oneself," he added in a threatening tone, bordering on a snarl as he watched the other man.

Buster's lips pulled back from his teeth in a silent growl, locking eyes with Sandstalker. Before he were to ask 'what the fuck' again, Chrono stretched his legs one final time and ran towards the downed man at the fence. He jumped and landed on top of the railing like so many other Monday mornings. Buster screamed out in pain as the poles penetrating his body ripped his flesh further, making his wounds much more life-threatening. Using the forward momentum of the loose fence as it bent partly over the cliff, Chrono jumped out and into the darkness down below.

Taking the same path that he had just a few days earlier, Chrono continued downward into the structure. Thus far, though he had been distracted thinking about his last encounter with Witty, he had managed not to make any slips and fall to his doom. Turning a corner, he came to yet another familiar corridor, worn and falling apart by the apparent age of the place. The floor had obviously been a trap, set off at some point in the past to uncover a set of large open pits lined with spikes. Overhead, the ceiling was partly broken, revealing beams made for evenly spaced handholds across most of the room.

Running up the wall to one side of the doorway, Sandstalker kicked off of it and launched himself into the room over the nearest spike pit. Grabbing the top of the closest beam above his head, he began to move forward one hand after the other across each of the supports. His metallic hands gripped the surface well as he had to zig-zag across the ceiling of the room from one broken portion to another, not even bothering to look down at the spiked-lined floor. As he did so, he began to talk to himself just as he had been doing off and on for the entire day.

"Groveling at his feet," Chrono frowned, taking a breath between movements with his hands over his head. "Castrating myself in front of him," he continued, dwelling on his last interaction with the supposed doctor. "He just wants to hurt me. For what, I don't know... what powers? He wants my power... what fucking power? The power to be a loser and go crazy and just off the--"

Interrupted by a sudden beeping, Chrono lost his grip for a moment, his hand slipping. All his weight on his left hand, he would normally just re-find where he needed to put his other hand, but the place he had stopped at was a slick part of one of the supports where a small, broken water pipe was leaking slowly onto it just like the place where he woke up each Monday morning. "Just my luck," he commented to himself as his heart raced. He knew if he didn't regain his handhold that he would plummet into the pit below.

Too late! Chrono didn't have enough time to relocate where to put his hand and he slipped completely off the beam. Looking down, he saw he was near the edge of the pit and he put his hands out. Grabbing the edge of the floor, his legs went down into the pit and one of them went right onto one of the longer spikes. The pointed metal pole ripped up through his fatigues along his lower right leg and up into the machine bits of his orange-colored replacement limb.

"Fuck!" he yelled out as the beeping from his left ear continued. "Who is calling me!?" he demanded as he put one elbow further ahead of him than the other along the floor and slowly began to inch his way forward even as the grip of his wet hand continued to slip. Finding a wire that crossed this small bit of remaining floor, he grabbed ahold of it and began to pull himself up one hand over the other. Growling softly at the pain, he managed to get up fully onto the floor.

Rolling over onto his back, he pulled his right leg up to eye level to survey the damage. "Yes, Palin... let's not give people with replacement limbs the ability to shut off the pain should something happen to it... fucking ewe," he groaned. Reaching into his medical bag, he pulled out a small metal tool. It looked like a cross between screwdriver and a set of pliers, the red handle just the right grip for the short length of his fingers.

As his left ear kept beeping, Chrono held the tool closed so that the tips created a single flat surface like that of a flathead. Using it like a wedge, he jammed the device through where his pants had been ripped and screamed out from the self-inflicted damaged. Using the gadget like a lever, he pulled open the side panel on his leg. Peering inside with watery eyes, he looked at a set of wires that ran lengthwise inside his leg.

Releasing his grip slightly, he allowed the tool to part somewhat at the end into two distinct sides. Wiggling just one side of the instrument under the yellow wire as quickly as he could, he gritted his teeth at the thought of what would happen if he'd remembered the wrong color. Pulling the thin cable up and out from his leg a short distance, he yanked hard on the tool, snipping it.

The pain in his leg went away immediately. Or, more accurately, the connection inside his mechanical limb that sent signals of pain back into his nervous system became disconnected. Regardless, as he lay there on his back, Chrono was finally able to reach up and flick the little gray rod that was vertical at his ear down to horizontal. It was only at the very moment in which he saw the red light turn green that he realized that no one was supposed to be calling him. His heart raced again... he'd already handled the call with his commander just moments earlier and wasn't expecting another for a half hour or so when he would fail to be where they expect to meet up with him.

"Private Sandstalker... are you there?" came his commander's voice. With his communicator's microphone down it had automatically answered the call. Even though he'd said nothing, the line was now open.

He said 'Private' which means someone nearby is listening to his conversation, Chrono considered. "Ye-yes, sir," he answered, unsure. After doing this for so long, everything about his time down in this place was calculated. He could tell an entire log of all the events that happened over these few days and in what order, sometimes down to the second. This call... this wasn't supposed to be happening.

"Those stealth fighters that came from your direction... NORAD showed one of similar design heading your way for an instant before it vanished again. Might be technical issues on a prototype model plane. You said you were still moving along near the surface earlier, correct?"

"A-affirmative," the confused young wolf replied. Stealth fighter... this direction? What? Chrono sat up and looked around the hallway. Just ahead of him lay the second pit of spikes. He was sure he was about to be asked to keep an eye out for the plane but the path he'd traveled to get down this far had a lot of drops without easy routes back to the surface. He couldn't be sure of the fastest way back up from where he was.

"Know you'd have reported if you saw something, but keep an eye to the sky. This could be North Korea... you know how faulty their shit is. Base is secure now so we're regrouping to head your way. ETA twenty minutes," the voice over the communicator spoke in his ear.

"U-understood," Chrono blinked, sitting upright. He put is left hand over his chest as he could feel his heart racing. Something different is happening and I'm stuck in this hole--what did I do different? I called Conner out for being the spy, he considered, looking around and deciding his best chance to get back to the surface was to head forward and find a shaft or broken elevator that might lead back up. But I've done that before, he continued to think. No... must make sure to do everything I've done up to this point again next time if I can't figure out--

"Private?" he asked, but Sandstalker knew his tone translated his words as simply: "Are you alright?"

"Yes, Alpha. --I mean sir. Sorry, sir," Chrono said, trying to think of what procedure was appropriate here. He hadn't done the military stuff in so long without just quoting the same lines day in and day out that he had little experience these days in tackling new conversations. "It would take a while for me to explain my distraction. Chrono out," he said, flipping up the communicator's microphone back aligned with his prosthetic ear. There was a light 'beep' as he ended the call.

"Love ya, Alpha, but something's changed and I need to find out what it is," he said to himself as he slowly got to his feet. Kicking the ground, he couldn't feel the impact properly with his pain disconnected. Taking a moment to collect himself, he looked over to the nearby wall. Moving towards it, he ran up the rusted surface and jumped out the way he'd come, back towards the overhead beams. Grabbing the closest one, he went back to moving one hand in front of the next across the room in the direction he'd already been heading.

"Stealth fighter... little vague," Chrono considered, "but I know they don't have much to go on." And, it was true... each Monday morning the base he was working out of was attacked by fighter jets without call signs or markings to indicate a country of origin. He knew when they would arrive and could call back to Ian and give him a head's up or otherwise ignore them. He even figured out a way to get back to base in time to see them, but none of it ever seemed relevant to his situation beyond the fact it was happening during this five day period..

"Then again, as Martha always tells me, there's no story without coincidence," he commented to himself. "Big underground facility that's never appeared on our scans of the Earth until sometime in recent history, special stealth planes that have no claimed country of origin, and a time-loop that runs at most from Monday to Friday," he said as he landed on the other side of the room and looked around the next corner. "And now, there's another, similar plane that's never been reported to have appeared on any previous days, outside flying around," he sighed, as he stood at the edge of yet another cliff.

At the corner where he now stood there had once been a set of rooms and hallways. Like the rest of the base down this far, much of the earth was carved open and left with giant chunks of it missing. Like much of the complex, the rooms here were seemingly ripped apart as much from some kind of force as they were from the obvious degradation of materials due to age. In this case, Chrono stood at what may have previously been a cross-section of hallways but now only had a single direction off to his left with a very narrow ledge.

Moving towards that corner, he sighed knowing it was still the only real way around this expansive pit. Sliding along the left wall, he pressed against it, his tail touching the flat surface as he moved. With both hands outstretched beside him to help keep his balance on the narrow ledge, he walked sideways at an even pace. Though he moved cautiously, one foot behind the other, he still kept a good deal of his normal walking speed as he traveled the narrow ledge.

Chrono slid along what remained of a hallway. The only lights in the area were the dim blue LED's etched into the walls just like most of the earlier corridors. Down below was darkness, though he could just barely make out the jagged remains of floors, ceilings, walls, equipment and the like far below him. Falling here, like just about anywhere else in the building, meant death.

"Wish I could feel my leg," Chrono commented to himself as he reached an inner corner and moved carefully over six inch wide ledge and towards the other end of the expanse. "Still," he said, picking up where he left off, "Walls with different races painted on them that vaguely resemble cadens, a language that doesn't look much like it came from anywhere in Earth's history..." he sighed. "Since, as far as I know, no one on Earth knows how to screw with time... we start getting into alien intervention."

He sighed to himself trying to consider all the options. "Of course, even if aliens are likely to exist in the universe, its still hard to believe that they'd be here screwing with me specifically." Frowning, "Witty takes this all very personally, but I haven't done shit to him... unless, of course, I'll be doing shit to him in the future and he's come back in time to screw with me." Chrono paused against the wall for a moment, thinking that possibility over.

Looking down into the darkness, he frowned a bit at the prospect of some grander time-based shenanigans he was simply yet to be privy to. "Looping time doesn't necessarily mean time travel," he reassured himself. "But how the inferno would I know? All I have is TV and movies to go on at this point... I'm missing pieces to this puzzle... I need to find that ship," he said with conviction as he reached the farthest end of the room and firm, undamaged land to stand upon. "It's different... and if I wasn't expecting my hopes to be dashed, I'd try having some right now..."

Even though Chrono had taken breaks between each long section traversed, eventually his body would become tired and worn with the constant activity. The repeated instances of near-death would also wear on his psyche with stress and therefore further increase his chances of missing a hand-hold or losing his balance. The knowledge that this was so would add tension, thereby compounding the issue of stress and the fear of death even further.

It was because of this knowledge that he had learned to force himself to sleep for periods of time... because were he to end up dead, he would be back at square one on the first day and have to do everything over again. Of course, him waking up on Monday would be directly after a fall, a gun turret ripping him apart, drowning in a flooded corridor, being crushed in a trap, tripping an explosive, or any number of other painful deaths that he would get to experience in full before waking up with an 'Oh, crap' on that first day.

Somewhere above the surface, the day had transitioned beyond dusk and into night. And, just passed midnight, the light brown wolf reached one of the resting places he'd discovered on some Thursday long ago. During his journeys down into the large complex, he had made note of locations that could be of use as a places to sleep. This particular room stuck out in his mind not just for its smooth, cold, metal floor, but also in part due to its lack of any real structural damage.

The room looked as though it had been a school room back whenever it had originally been used. There were single seat, desk and chair combinations that may have been in rows at some point but were currently all thrown across to one side of the space as if a large wind had rushed through and pushed them all aside. A large computer screen within the wall on one end of the room may have been used as a high-tech white board, though it had been smashed long ago, fragments of it scattered over the floor.

None of the lights in the room or anywhere else in the surrounding hallways seemed to be working. The lack of functioning illumination created a deep rich black that would have been impossible to see through were it not for Sandstalker's own personal technology. Fortunately for Chrono, his eyes could double as flashlights when it came to moving around in dark spaces. Though his left's function for such had long since broken in his initial Monday-morning fall, the right eye gave off enough light so he could see within the all encompassing darkness.

There was a stack of devices that resembled tablet computers in one corner, lit on fire. The orange-colored wolf wouldn't die from the smoke in just a single night so he left them burning. The occasional popping sound could be heard as one component or another was consumed by flame as time went on. They worked as make-shift kindling in the meantime and would, if history was any judge, still be burning when he woke up. Beside him on the floor lay the small lighter he'd used to set the tablet devices aflame next to a single pair of MRE packets, already emptied.

Chrono lay across the floor, his arms and legs bent inward, pulled up against his body. He'd not bother to remove any of his equipment or disrobe in any way. Like most days, he felt that it would have been too much a bother and tonight was no different. His tail was curled up between his legs, barely reaching across his chest to cover his nose with its dark brown tip. His head curled inward, he rested his muzzle on his right arm as his body twitched with the presences of unfavorable dreams.

In his sleep the young man trembled. Chrono's sleep was often troubled and tonight was no different, his mind creating images he'd rather not experience. The pain from from his wounds would often return before the day was out and that pain was nearly always felt in his unconscious self by way of less than pleasant dreams.

On this occasion, he was playing out a trial for the murder of everyone he'd ever cared about. His mood and disposition was one of guilt due to this having been the time in which everything had finally moved forward beyond this week. Unbeknownst to him, his uncaring experimenting finally had lasting consequences this time as he saw no other course of action than to plead guilty to all the charges presented. They were all dead, all of them, and every bit of it was his fault...

To think, it had all been on a lark.

Just as the dream revealed him walking down a long corridor to a well-deserved gas chamber with guards on either side of him, a shaking could be felt throughout the prison. The walls and floors began to quiver and no one else seemed to notice. Taking a moment to consider the lack of events leading up to this point, Chrono became half awake... just enough that he realized he was dreaming.

He broke into a run, This can't be happening! As he yelled out, he turned to face guns being pulled on him and the hallway began to fall away into the distance. Horizontally, every person began to fall off the floor and towards the other end of the hall as if the entire building were flowing out like a juice pitcher emptying its contents. What felt like a giant slab of wall struck the wolf in the back and he yelped loud enough to force himself awake.

Slamming his metal hands onto the floor, his paw pads took the impact in stride. However, their impact created a vibration through his body that aided in waking him from his slumber. Glancing around he saw that it was the same barely lit room that he'd fallen asleep in an hour or two before. Over to one side, the small fire flickered to create shadows that bounced and swayed against the vibrating walls.

All around him the room shook... the few pictures on the wall shuddered in place and loose bits of the ceiling began to give way and fall. "Oh, crap," Chrono said to himself as he only had enough time to push up from the floor when chunks of the ceiling started coming down all around him. Leaving his lighter and food packets behind, he scrambled up onto all fours and broke into a loping run out into the hall and forward further into the complex.

Walls began to take too much pressure from the shaking floors above and started to break free, throwing debris into the darkness ahead of him. Still on all fours and moving fast, Chrono spared a forward motion of his left hand to swipe his microphone down to alongside his muzzle as he yelled out, "Flashlight!" In the next moment, the darkness became lit and though it cast deep shadows ahead of him, he used it and his knowledge of the hallway to plot his course as everything continued to come crashing down all around him.

This shouldn't be happening! he thought as his heart raced. Why is this happening!?

Chrono knew that somewhere just ahead of him was an elevator shaft, but through all his previous exploring he'd never successfully traversed it. It was several stories tall leading almost all the way to the surface at the top and stopping about the same level as Witty's lab down below. He had deemed it too dangerous to travel after many attempts and if past experience was any indicator he'd have to spend time prying open the elevator doors. As it was, a spontaneous earthquake was no time to try and do anything that required either time or being careful.

Never having the opportunity to stand up, his body bobbed and weaved through falling metal, concrete, and whatever else as it exploded from the ceiling and walls as Chrono continued to move forward on all fours. He easily passed fifteen miles an hour as he growled his discontent at a slab of wall that grazed his tail and almost pinned him to the floor. Slamming his hands onto the ground he pushed himself forward, his feet struck the floor the moment his hands left lifted which propelled him forward with great speed. Never tried to smash into the elevator doors going full speed, he considered as he didn't have much of the long hallway left to traverse. Increasing his pace even further, nearly doubling it, he reached the end of the hallway and carried all his momentum into a leap at the door.

The best way to break down a door is generally a jump-kick into it, just beside the latch, but since elevator doors have no latch and Chrono had no time, a full shoulder-slam on his left side was all he could muster. It was only in the instant right before impact that he realized in his haste that he'd chosen his wounded shoulder as his focus. This, he knew in an instant, is going to suck.

Old as they were, the elevator doors didn't want to give way without effort. The center of the doors bent inward towards the elevator shaft with the impact. The metal that they were comprised of had become brittle with age and snapped near the outer edges of the doors. Each was flung by the collision into the wide open space beyond them with Chrono himself traveling freely into the darkness right behind them. With nothing but open air all around him he had no choice but to continue flailing as he plummeted down into the shaft.

Tumbling into darkness the young wolf was left screaming out as the wraps over his left shoulder ripped apart, scabs ripping open, and blood spraying out from his wound. His shoulder dislocated, he was unable to pull up his left arm to find something to grab ahold of to stop or slow his descent. Were it not for the light coming out his right eye he'd have been completely blind, but even so, it could only light the right side of the direction he was currently looking as he plummeted through the air.

Flailing about, he managed to catch sight of a set of cables running vertically up the shaft in the darkness. With little time to consider anything other than preventing a dozen or more story fall, he pulled up his right arm up to try and reach the only thing resembling salvation. He lucked out and managed to wrap his good arm around the bunch of them.

Chrono managed to reduce his forward momentum as he spun around the thick wires, twirling in a downward spiral as his right arm held his body against the cables. The friction ripped open his cloths in a vertical line under his arm and rubbed against his underarmour as he descended. Pulling his legs together, he gripped hard lower on the cables with his white metallic feet, praying to a deity he no longer believed in that he would cease falling before his limbs gave out.

After sliding a few feet further downward he'd managed to bring himself to an eventual stop. Hanging there on the cables, he could hear the rumbling all around him. Very little of the shaking that he could make out from the walls around him was actually trembling within the length cable he had wrapped himself around. Thinking this odd, he used this moment to take a deep breath in an attempt to try and calm himself.

Looking around, he saw that the space was just as large as he remembered it. It was perhaps big enough to have eight elevators spaced out in the shape of a large square, a gap left in the middle for service transport if it was needed. His tongue out the side of his muzzle, Chrono held fast with the pads on his hands and feet, their extra grip designed to take the place of general service gloves. He panted, looking up to make sure that nothing else was able to come crashing down on him from above.

It was only as he looked up that his ears recognize that the rumbling was no longer above him, only around him. A closer listen seemed to indicate the din to be traveling downward. "What in the flames?" he wondered, his head turning to look downward as his ears moved around, trying to find what direction this quake was moving. No, he considered, Not a moving quake... has to be a moving... thing_._ His ears swiveled and he picked up the rumble again, lower, as it seemed to cease being in the walls all around him. It's moving down--! he realized. "Siri... Estimate Altitude," Chrono commanded aloud.

"One moment... I found this for--" an electronic voice began to speak, but Chrono cut it off.

"AR, Display Altitude," Sandstalker demanded as he looked to his left to try and see if he could figure out how bad his shoulder was by looks alone. Well, it wont kill me, he thought as he frowned at the now deeper wound that bled down his disabled arm.

There was a beep in his left ear and digital lines appeared against all the walls in the shaft including the ones beyond the reach of the light of his right eye. Based on the distances displayed and where he knew he had been a moment ago he could estimate that the rumbling was inside the long diagonal shaft that led from the basement lab area into the direction of the surface. Chrono frowned a bit. "OK," he said to himself, "Something is moving down the shaft which heads to the hanger... but that shaft is blocked at the top. I know. I checked."

Loosening his grip a little at a time, he began to slowly descend down the long vertical shaft. "Maybe part of that rumbling... was the stealth fighter blasting open a the hole to the big corridor? I dunno..." he growled to himself as his tail flicked in agitation, "But two sets of different somethings in the same day must be investigated. I've got to--" He blinked, glancing around, "Why am I talking to myself?"

Shaking his head, he looked downward. Realizing the floor was nowhere near him and that he was still tired, he moved with a cautious haste. I can't easily get up and out from where I am anyway, so following this little quake has got to be my new course of action. Having convinced himself that his best option was to head towards the hanger and labs below, he proceeded slowly down the long set of cables and further into the Earth. With any luck, I wont be stuck dangling long enough to pass out and fall to my doom...

Chrono yawned as he walked across the top of the rubble that made up seven different smashed elevators and lots of bits of building at the base of the long vertical shaft. Sighing to himself, he hobbled over towards an open door off to one side of the large open space. Heading through it and into the hallway beyond would probably take him in the direction of the main lab excluding any large missing chunks of building that might make traversing the distance impossible.

"I always knew taking the elevator would be the fastest way down..." he said wryly as a smirk crossed his black lips. Holding his left shoulder with his right hand, he walked lop-sided through doorway ahead of him and into an unfamiliar hallway. Glancing around, Chrono made note of the fully functioning lights that were more common the closer he got to the lower levels and the power generator below. Reaching up to his muzzle with one hand, he opened his jaw in a long yawn. Sitting down slowly, his tail over to one side of his body, he took stock of his limp arm and sighed. It had long since lost proper blood flow due to being dislocated thusly become numb and tingly.

Chrono frowned deeply. "Eh... closer to the top of the list of things I hate to do," he sighed, a little irked. Reaching over with his right hand he interlaced his fingers with those of his left. Pulling his limp arm up he raised his left knee and placed his hands on the front side of his shin away from his chest. Grimacing at the very idea, he let off a long and low growl at the anticipation of incoming pain. He leaned back slowly, biting his lip in expectation as his arm shifted gradually rotating until it 'slipped' his shoulder back into place.

"Fu--" he yelled out for a long minute, his head leaning back into a howl, "--ck!" He gripped his hand over his shoulder and whimpered softly. Lowering his head he could feel his eyes water up with tears. "Fucking inferno... just... gah..." Chrono grumbled to himself. His ears laid flat against his head as he whined softly. "Fuck you, Martin Riggs, you fucking badass," he chuckled in pain. "I defy anyone to do that and just walk it off in half a second," Chrono laughed in pain an exhaustion as he laid back flat on the floor and closed his eyes. Given his lack of proper sleep for the passed few days, his unconsciousness from fatigue at that moment probably shouldn't have surprised him...

Somewhere in the world above it was early Tuesday morning.

The orange furred wolf lay asleep just outside the large vertical shaft which had at one point in the past housed quite a few elevators. The hallway junction he lay sprawled across headed west, east, and south of where he currently was. The rooms opposite the elevators were made of glass, though their contents were blocked from view by what appeared to be a layer of white sand. The hallways themselves looked to be in fairly good condition, though the doorways far to the east and west seemed to be locked shut with red lights glowing as buttons on the digital keypads displayed atop their frames.

Chrono woke with a start. He no longer remembered whatever dream he had been having, but he quickly recalled that he had been in a hurry when he had passed out. Classic, he thought to himself as he got up on his prosthetic legs, stumbling a bit as lack of feeling in his right leg threw off his balance for a moment. Character is in a hurry, has plenty of time to get to his destination... and then promptly goes unconscious and wakes up late, he sighed, shaking his head. I'll remember to leave this part out when telling the story to Martha later...

Looking around at his surroundings, he could make out what appeared to be an old desk and chair set up kind of like how a receptionist might have one configured. He frowned a bit, thinking it odd the chair was still upright until he saw it was bolted into the floor as he passed it by.

Stumbling a bit as he continued to get reacquainted with his damaged leg, he held his shoulder and moved south towards the only door that looked like it might open. To the side of the door on its frame was a black digital panel filled with a blue and green LED readout that displayed its information in the unusual language found all over the complex. In all his time stuck repeating this week he'd still never been able to figure it out, though it wasn't like he had tried very hard. He was no linguist and it was unlikely he was going to pick up much of a language from a keypad anyway.

Sighing, Chrono knelt in front of the door and looked at all the little colored squares that were probably numbers. Well, no, they might be letters, he considered as he rubbed the fur at the end of his chin. Regardless, their appearance on the panel was obviously part of some digital keypad meant to take a code of some kind. Since the door didn't automatically open when he approached it, that meant that--if 1past experiences were any indicator--it would require a proper access code. If he was lucky, it wouldn't lock him out from too many bad attempts.

Standing up, the young wolf made a quick walk along each of the other two hallways to make sure the other doors were actually locked. They were. Frowning he walked over to the desk at the intersection in front of the elevators and looked across the items on it. A tablet like the iPad-looking devices he saw in the school room far upstairs laid on the desk, but it had no power. The shelves of the desk had thick latches on them that looked like they might take thumbprints as a means of security... and whatever creatures had been using this place long ago certainly weren't his own race and thus Chrono didn't have a chance of them opening for him.

Letting out a breath of resignation, the orange furred young man stepped back over to the one door that appeared active and stared at the keypad with his brow furrowed deep. "I hate you," he told the inanimate object.

Reaching up towards his left ear to flick down his microphone he found that he only touched air. Blinking, he ran his fingers over the length of the metal triangle at the top of his head and discovered at its base that there was a small bit of snapped metal making a somewhat jagged point out from the side of his head. "Check out Chrono with his real, battle damage!" he said mockingly to no one in particular, punching the air like a boxer from a toy commercial he had seen when he was small.

Taking his left hand, he reached inside the giant rip down the front of his digital camo fatigues and realized for the first time that the straps for his weapon holsters all seem to have been lost sometime during the miniature earthquake incident. Figuring he could just check the bottom of the elevator shaft later if he really needed them, Chrono moved his hand over his chest and pressed a button to dislodge from his light chest armour his impact case covered iPhone. Checking the glass screen, he was happy to find that it hadn't been damaged like the rest of his equipment.

Holding the home button until the speaker chimed, Chrono sighed again and knelt once more in front of the keypad. "Siri, note," he spoke as he stared hard at the spacing of the LED lights. "One, one, one, one, one, one," he said as he pressed the top left icon on the keypad six different times. The display made an angry sound, blinked red for a moment, and then cleared the display. Over to one side there was a single red dot that lit up. "Looks like three chances," he said in irritation.

Holding the home button again until it beeped, Chrono rolled his eyes and spoke, "Add to note: return, one, one, one, one, one, two," and it made the error sound once again. "And no one was surprised," he commented to himself as he let the display clear and hit five ones again until there was a three at the end.

As he finished the third wrong answer, the display changed to all red symbols. Dropping backwards onto the floor, his tail over to one side, he sat and stared up at the keypad. "Now... if this is like the other ones, I should be locked out for about five minutes or so," he said, looking around. "Then... all I have to do remember the code if I ever come to this screen again." Putting a hand to his forehead he realized, "I'm talking to myself again."

Chrono tool a breath and tried to clear his mind. Let's see... five minutes, he thought to himself, rubbing his chin. Standing up, he tapped his numb foot for a moment as he considered killing time. Smiling to himself, he reflected on his usual method for dealing with time-locks and shrugged. I've nothing else to do... might as well...

Sometime in the now distance past, Chrono had seen a movie in which the main characters were thieves who maintained the timing of their involved plans by singing a song they knew the words to. Years later, on some previous Wednesday, he had discovered he liked to sing. Putting two and two together, it was easy enough pick a song which would take about as long to sing as it took the lock to reset. It helped. Because otherwise, he'd just be standing around in an empty corridor with nothing but his thoughts... and he had learned that his thoughts weren't the kinds of things he wished to be left alone with.

"The World is Saved; Four minutes and fifty-four seconds," he decided as a somewhat ironic choice as he turned and begin and walk the corridor. "The living room's dark; save for light being cast; from the big TV screen and the imminent sunrise; that's teasing the once starry sky; with whispers of morning," he began, taking the time to meet the pitch as best he could remember it and lengthening the chorus into a howl as he sang.

All things considered, Sandstalker was a very good singer. His melody was in time to the music as it was originally written and his pitch was flawless for the long notes spread throughout the piece. About a minute or two into the song, Chrono was moving to the walls and jumping against them, kicking off and doing a flips as he sang. Effectively, he had created an imaginary rhythm game to keep himself occupied not unlike a really involved exercise routine.

It was so much wasted time, he knew, but he had no where else to go. The other doors of the adjacent hallways were locked and climbing back up the elevator shaft would require far too much time an effort without even taking into account how dangerous such an escapade might be. I'd like to be moving forward, he considered during a long howl, but this roadblock prevents me from making progress.

And thus, Chrono continued to sing.

"--a few great events; leak back into your head. From the time that you spent; traversing the land; battling evil, fighting the darkness; just sword in--" the keypad beeped, and the indicator lights turned green, "--hand?" It had only been about three minutes, and Chrono hadn't yet reached the end of the track. "Your memories creep in," he continued as he ran towards the door and slid on his knees towards it, stopping just in front of it. "With the edge of a smile," he grinned, reaching up with his hand. "You realize again; what you'd lost for a while," he sang as he incremented the pass code once again to the next digit. It revealed red characters and beeped a negative as he then reached for his phone and proceeded to make a note.

"You're gunna think back much less; on how you saved the day," he added with a bit of a groan as the second attempt was denied. "than on all-l-l-l; the experience gained." He sighed and the stopped singing. "Because if you ever manage to save the fucking planet, no one's going to know... and so saving the day is going to be far less memorable than recalling how many hours and days of your life you've lost to being stuck behind a locked door, or backtracking from a dead end, or laying pinned under a fallen ceiling and the floor as you're forced to--" His third attempt was denied, and the keypad locked again. "Damnit!" he roared, smashing his fist into the wall beside the door.

An hour went by like this. Chrono would begin a three minute long song and sing until he was able to access the panel again. Eventually, he started varying up the different icon he was using, and not caring so much about the length of his songs. There were two rows of five symbols, so he kept calling his entries from one to zero in his notes even though he didn't actually know what the symbols were he was poking. When he had filled his memo up a good ways, he would use the find feature from time to time to make sure he wasn't about to enter a code he'd already used.

One hour stretched out into many and with his food left behind he grew hungry, angry, and bored. During some of the periods between attempts, he searched the elevator shaft for his weapons. He found both his P90 and Five-Seven, though the straps for the holsters of each had ripped--most likely from sliding down the cables--and could no longer be worn. All the other doors in the shaft were covered up by the remains of the seven different lift devices that had crashed there. Since the shaft had spaces for eight elevators and the only door open was the one that had no to debris in front of it, he had to assume that one elevator must remain somewhere far above.

With so much time lost through the course of the day, Chrono suspected that his reason for going downstairs was meaningless by now. Whatever had caused the big quake that made its way down into the building might have already left. Maybe its down here, maybe it's not, he'd growled to himself at one point. But its taking me too long to get through this damn door!

Leaning his head against the panel as he poked it with codes, the light brown colored wolf felt his eyes grow heavy. Eventually, during one of the periods when the panel's lights were all red, Chrono's eyes shut from lethargy. When he shook himself awake, he swore that it must have only been for a moment, but when he glanced down at his nearly dead phone he saw that it was just before dawn on Wednesday morning.

Forgot to turn off Location Services, he thought to himself as he already knew from experience that the battery could have lasted him into Friday if he'd remembered to do that. Yawning, he stared at the keypad with his eyes partly opened and tapped the screen. A negative beep replied. Again he entered in a code and again it beeped a negative at him. Chuckling to himself he smirked and decided to go for a relevant number. "Oh yeah?" he asked, "How about... zero, nine, zero, three, two, zero."

The doors beeped an affirmative and slid open with a dull 'whoosh'. Blinking, Chrono's head jerked towards the open doorway. His ears dropped flat against the side of his head as his eyes narrowed and he let out a soft growl at what he considered to be a very suspicious coincidence. September third, twenty years after the turn of the century, he thought to himself as he reached over and picked up his P90 from beside him and held it at his center as he moved cautiously through the doorway. Martha always says that there is no story without coincidence. But... she also says everything happens for a reason... nothing is irrelevant in a story, he considered as he moved forward a few steps, going quiet.

The space before him was a long hallway that was lit just as well as the corridor behind him. On either side of him were two long white walls with thick glass in tall slits that would normally allow one to see inside were it not for more of the white sand-looking texture that seemed to fill the inside of either of the two rooms. Maybe its foam? he wondered, making an active attempt to stop talking aloud to himself as much as he had been. Like in Demolition Man... to put out a fire or something?

A sound came at his ears from far up ahead and his eyes looked forward once more. His gun at the ready, Chrono mentally prepared himself for an auto-turret sliding up from the floor or a laser deathtrap or any number of other situations that this immense complex had come at him with in days long past. He could feel the throbbing in his chest pick up as he once again stepped into the unknown, his ears swiveling as he tried to pick up where the noise was coming from.

Sounds like someone talking, he considered. Talking in that alien language, he thought with a frown. Still, he'd never had an audio recording play for him when he approached before. Yet another thing that's different this time, he nodded to himself as swallowed hard and approached the left wall just in front of him. The lab on that side was not filled with the white sand as the others were, perhaps because there was a large crack and a hole in the side of the glass which allowed the audio to reach out into the hallway.

Looking around inside the office, it appeared as though the voice was coming from a monitor that was facing away from the glass. Frowning, Chrono could see that the door leading into the room came from the side away from the glass to which this hallway did not connect. Growling a bit at not being able to get to the source of the sound or even see if there was a video attached to it, he reached back with his P90 and prepared to strike the edge of the broken glass with the butt of his gun.

Suddenly Chrono felt a tingling along inside of him that he couldn't quite understand. It tickled him beneath his fur and crawled along over his very being. Freezing in place, he put a hand against the glass to try and compose himself. What is that? he wondered, having no frame of reference for the feeling. It was then that he turned towards his right and into the direction of where he knew Witty's lab was much further into the structure. Shivering, he tried to understand what it was he was feeling. The experiment, he seemed to realize without knowing how. It's gone off.

Sure enough, a white light seemed to bleed through the walls as if coming through from the great beyond. The scent of the world was wrong and a slight hint of blue tinted his vision at the edges as the energy struck him as it had so many times before. Like a pure whiteout, the energy covered him all over and filtered through everything around him like a hail storm of tingling electricity crashing into him with the loud buzz of an electrical current as it passed some great metaphysical horizon just beyond his understanding.

Before his consciousness faded out he was left with a single thought: This isn't supposed to happen this way...

The familiar pitter-pattering of water dropping out of a pipe high above woke up the young wolf once again. Somewhere just to his right side was a current of water that flowed passed him, around rocks, and towards the cliff's edge to his south. Groaning as he sat up, he muttered a familiar, "Oh, crap". His left eye squinted closed slightly from the black eye he'd received however many hundreds of days earlier. Touching it lightly with his right hand, he couldn't help but make a mental checklist of all the wounds he had received.

Jerking his hand away as he suddenly realized where he was, and looked up the long distance to the surface above him where he could just make out the broken bridge in the dim light of the morning sun. "Son of an ewe," he frowned as he put his right hand down onto his left shoulder, feeling the fragments of cable that poked out from around the gash's edges.

Sighing, he placed his hand on his right side and the medical bag that was there. Unbuttoning it, he reached in for a vial and syringe as he glanced to his left and took in the view of the black and white colored wolf to his side. There was Buster, same as every Monday. His M4 Carbine's strap was wrapped around his right arm as he lay sprawled there, not yet moving.

That experiment has never gone off before either Friday at dusk or I got to Witty, Chrono considered as he took the items from his medical bag that he used each Monday to patch up his leg. He placed them in a neat line beside him. As the man to his left began to groan, though, Chrono quickly unbuttoned the Five-Seven's side holster. Pulling the gun out in one deft move, he fired one of its silenced shots into Buster's head, splattering his muzzle outward towards the ledge. Turning right, he leaned back and onto his side as he placed another shot in Conner's head, preventing him from waking up during this cycle as well.

"Not today, boys," Chrono said with a grim determination. "Today... I find out what's different..."

End Chapter Two

A Day of Change