The Sprawl Saga, Ch. 1

	Darkness. A feeling of nothing.

	Suddenly, light.

	Mark Hadley slowly rose his torso off of the cold concrete floor, aching slightly. Opening his eyes and looking around him, he saw the familiar walls of his workplace, the concrete lower floors of Sandwolf Corporation. Staring at the blank grey wall in front of him, he noticed that something was off. [i]this isn't work, this is Genetics Division. But why am I here...[/i]
	As he stood up and dusted off his beige lab jacket, he came to realize that he did not, in fact, know why he was in the wrong building. In fact, he couldn't remember what happened at all the past day. Beginning to realize that something was wrong, he began to walk down the hall to the nearest room when he noticed a vaguely round hunk of metal sitting on the floor a few feet away from where he got up.
	Hadley, a split second later, recognized this shape as one of his projects at the Robotics Division. "Sakes, it's Colin!" he said aloud as he kneeled by his inert robot. He rotated Colin around until his viewer faced Mark, confirming that Colin was inactive, as his screen was entirely blank.
	Hadley quickly pulled out a small set of tools from his coat pocket and opened up his robot from a metal plate in Colin's back. Upon unscrewing the plate, Hadley noticed that much of the internal wiring on his creation was pulled loose from its various connectors. [i]A good thing that it was only wires,[/i] he thought, [i]I was scared there for a moment.[/i]
	After assessing the damage, Mark re-connected the loose wires and put the cover plate back in. [i]I hope this works...[/i]
	Colin then came back to life. His screen came back on, pre-programmed with a set of electronic 'eyes' appearing on it. With a soft whoosh, the roughly sphere-shaped robot began to hover off the ground. When he was several feet off the ground, Colin said in a slightly tinny voice, "CLN-125 is now active."
	"Colin! Thank Polion you're all right. Status?"
	"All of my functions are operational. Thank you for asking."
	Hadely, at this point,  noticed more strongly the silence of the hall. The fact that this floor was completely devoid of others, even considering the nature of the building, was extremely odd. "What is the time?" he asked Colin.
	"It is 12:33, Ludsday, Tuveron 11, 5372."
	"What is the date of your last activity log?"
	"Tuveron 10, 5372."
	"Interesting. Please repeat last entry in your last activity log."
	"I was shut down by Mark Hadley at 17:43. Reason stated: 'Goodnight, Colin'."
	"Yes, I remember that. So neither of us remember what happened this morning?"
	"Affirmative."
	"I remember [i]something[/i] happening..." Hadley pondered.
	"My last recorded activity was at-"
	"I realize, Colin. This is troubling... Where is everyone?"
	Colin responded by humming loudly for a few seconds. Afterwards, he responded to Mark's rhetorical question by saying, "I detect 2 sources of life-indicative heat on this floor."
	"What? Where are they?"
	"One of them is facing 0.1 meters to my front, and another faces 50 meters to my left side."
	[i]The first one is obviously me. I should fix that when I get to... [/i] Mark thought, [i]Wait, priorities. Where did basically everyone else go? This is [/i]bad[i].[/i]
	"Colin, Follow that second life-sign! Maybe he knows what happened here."
	"Affirmative," his robot replied as he turned left and floated down the hall; Hadley closely followed.
	As he walked down the sparse hallway, Mark felt a distinct sense of unease. [i]This is the Genetics Division. Could something have killed them all? Sakes![/i] "Colin, ready your primary defense weapon," he ordered.
	Colin silently drew a small defense laser module out of a slot on his top, with red tip glowing faintly.
	As he followed Colin down the long hallway, his sense of dread only increased. He came across a row of burnt-out (or were they cracked?) bulbs, only making his descent down the corridor more dark. As he approached a door on his left bearing the words "OFFICE: Dr. Gorado Matuso. Head of Reconstruction Subdivision." [i] Is this the room? Could Gor be in there...[/i]
	"Colin. How close is the life-sign now?"
	"1 meter to my front," Colin said with a brief hum.
	"Here goes nothing," Hadley said and  opened the door.
	Luckily for the scientist, The life-sign in the room was a familiar face.
	The doctor whose name was on the wall, nicknamed Gor by his friends, was a native of Sandwolf's location, the large city of Myonkee, the capitol of the so-named country, the Myonken Kingdom. While Hadley was technically born there, he never considered himself a native, so to speak. For one, he was of the entire wrong species.
	Dr. Matuso, was, in fact, a dragon.
	Upon opening the door, Hadley was met face-to-face with the orange-scaled dragon. Matuso, who was nearly half a foot taller than Hadley, looked upon the intruder with momentary surprise. Mark immediately noticed that he was looking rather distressed; he had several bloodstains on his flank and front claws, and his beige-coloured Sandwolf-issue carrying sash was torn in places. "Mark!" he exclamed.
	"Gor! Thank Polion you're here. What's going on?"
	"I don't have a bloody clue. I wake up in here, and then I find that several projects' containments have been breached, and I can't reach anyone else. What are you doing here?"
	"I wish I knew, Gor. What happened to you?"
	"That's the weirder part. Some attacks from an projects Iv'e never seen before. I shut myself in my office just to get away from the things. Have you seen any?"
	"No... I checked with Colin over here," Mark said, pointing to his robot trailing behind him, "It's just you and me now."
	"What the fuck? That can't be right, Mark," Gor replied with a grimace.
	"I trust Colin. You know that."
	"Well, it's certainly... Odd."
	"Have you seen anyone else?"
	"Nope. I can't even get on any global networks. It's freaking me out."
	"Me too. Is everyone else... Dead?"
	"I don't know, they might be. Sakes, we need to get out of here."
	"Good idea. Since no one's out there now, leaving soon would be nice. "
	They then both crept out of the room. Mark, after he saw Gorado come out into the hall, noticed that the dragon walked with a slight limp in his foreleg, with  a gash across it as evidence. "Gor, your leg! How badly are you hurt?"
	"I've lived through worse, let's keep moving," he replied.
	"You should at least bandage it."
	"I said I'm fine."
	As they both walked towards the floor elevator room, Hadely with a look of concern and fear on his face, Matuso with a look of determination on his, and Colin with a blank look on his screen, Hadely only felt worse about his situation. [i]Why did I have to be in Genetics of all places today? What happened to Sandwolf? To the global netowrks? To...[/i]
	The thoughts of Hadley were proptly interrupted by his friend suddenly stopping at a small door marked "STORAGE: 3A". "Oof," he said as he accidently walked into the stopped dragon.
	"Sorry, Mark, but I thought of something," Gor said as he opened the door to the storage closet.
	"What is it?"
	"We might need these," he said as he pulled a defense baton and a tranqilizer gun out of the closet, "We don't know how many projects got loose."
	"Good idea."
	"Take this," he said, passing Hadley the baton.
	"Thanks," Mark replied as Gor strapped the gun to the side of his carrying sash, "But what's the tranqilizer gun for?"
	"For if you need it," Gor said, "I have weapons of my own, if you know what I mean."
	"I kinda guessed so, yeah."
	After walking down several halls and checking several empty rooms, the three finally got to the elevator room at the north end of the floor. There were a series of two small passenger elevators and a larger elevator for moving the larger of projects. On the wall was the Sandwolf logo, a stylized wolf's head in red, and the words "FLOOR 5-B." While the lights were on with thier usual dim glow, the call buttons on the elevators were not lit up; in fact, one of them was smashed open, electronics visible.
	"Looks like the elevators are down," Gor remarked.
	Mark replied by walking over to one of the elevators, pressing the call button multiple times, and saying "Yup, they're down. Great."
	"We should take the stairs, then."
	"Our elevators aren't going to elevate, so... yeah."
	"They're over here," Gor said in front of a door off to the side of the room, labeled unobtrusively "Emergency Stairway." He opened the door with a slight heave, and they parted with a light swoosh.
	Being on a basement floor, they took the staircase leading up. Considering the stairs were used only for emergencies, the stairwell was even less lit that the preceding floor, and moderately dusty. Hadley coughed a few times in response to the dust on his way up. "Have you realized how creepy this place is when it's like this?"
	"Eh, I work here nights often enough," Matuso replied, "But, yes, it's [i]pretty[/i] creepy right now, I have to admit. Let's hope we can find someone who knows what's going on."
	"Yeah. Colin, has there been any network activity in the past hour?"
	"Negative," Colin responded.
	"I hope so too, Gor. I hope so too."
	They then trudged up the stairs silently for a few moments until they reached what was the door to the first floor. Hadely pushed open the door, which swiveled with a slight groan, and walked through it into the main area.
	"Woah," Hadley softly said.
	"This isn't... This isn't Sandwolf at all," Gorado said in reply.