Chapter 1
The lab was silent as a grave in the cemetery the only noise defying the sacred silence where the heart monitors and the computers running in the corner. Some cobwebs were near by on the roof and dust on some books that had there worth as discarded.
Though the lab looked old it was neat in a horrible way, the place sterile but contaminated with lies and clear blood. The test subject 017 was in a pod- a so called creation by Misako herself saying she made a break through in the human race.
Those that give her the reason to use her own son...
The peace was absolutely terrifying, syringes played the desk filled with toxins ready for administration, the vile samples from different species on a rack, inorganic micrograms inside sealed containers added to the horror of the place.
“Goodmoring Llyod~“. A female voice of sweet accent sounded through the door, “I hope you enjoyed your rest, cause your gonna need a lot of energy today for today’s test”.
The creature or thing didn’t move, it remained motionless, the sound of the chains on its arms added to its quiet defiance.
She walked up to the pod, and knocked gently; “if you think defiance is going to work just remember your father and what happened to him”.
Suddenly the motionless creature snapped back and hit the pod surface reaaveling a face that only cried out spite, hate and fear. The woman smiled and whispered “Do all you want but that couldn’t save your poor father could it?~”
Lloyd snapped back at snarling his fangs at her but she just smiled and went to the desk, this lady is his mother Misako, who turned her own son into a living nightmare.
~
The sterile smell of the laboratory didn’t just mask the scent of the ocean; it masked the scent of death. Misako moved with a terrifying, calculated grace, her lab coat snapping against her heels like a shark’s fin cutting through water. She didn’t look like a mother; she looked like an architect of a new, twisted world.
“Misako-san,” the young scientist, a man named Chen, called out nervously. He was holding a tablet that flickered with Lloyd’s vitals-jagged red
“He won’t break the glass, Chen,” Misako interrupted, her voice as smooth and cold as polished marble. She didn’t even look at the man. Her eyes were fixed on the tank, watching the way the green-tinted water swirled around Lloyd’s pale, scarred shoulders. “He knows what happens when he breaks things. Don’t you, Lloyd?”
Inside the tank, Lloyd didn’t respond with words. He couldn’t. His vocal cords had been surgically altered months ago to accommodate the high-frequency clicks and whistles of a deep-sea predator. Instead, he simply drifted, his long, emerald-and-gold tail twitching in the current. The chains around his wrists were made of a heavy, non-corrosive alloy, anchored to the floor of the pod. They kept him upright, a living crucifix of science
The lab was a beehive of activity, but it was a silent one. No one laughed. No one talked about their weekend. The only sounds were the mechanical hum of the life-support systems and the occasionalclinkof a glass syringe being laid onto a metal tray.
Misako stepped closer to the glass. To anyone else, she was a pioneer. To Lloyd, she was the monster that haunted his every waking second. He remembered a time-vague, like a dream fading at sunrise-when she had tucked him into a bed with warm sheets. Now, the only thing she tucked him into was a pressurized cylinder of salt water and chemicals.
“The marrow extraction is vital, Chen,” Misako continued, her fingers tracing a long scratch on the outside of the glass. “The way his cells regenerate under extreme pressure is the key to the serum. If we can stabilize the mutation, we can eliminate human frailty entirely. No more disease. No more aging.”
“But the pain, Ma’am,” Chen whispered, looking at Lloyd’s face. The boy’s eyes were sunken, surrounded by dark bruises of exhaustion. “Without the sedative, the procedure will...”
“The pain is a data point,” Misako snapped. She turned her gaze to her son, her expression devoid of any maternal warmth. “Pain is how we measure the body’s will to survive. And Lloyd has a very,verystrong will. He inherited that from Garmadon. It’s a pity his father didn’t have the constitution to survive the initial trials. But Lloyd? Lloyd is my masterpiece.
At the mention of his father, Lloyd’s body surged. The water in the tank hissed as his tail slammed against the back wall. The chains jerked, bruising his wrists, but he didn’t care. He lunged forward, his face slamming against the glass just inches from Misako’s.
Up close, the horror of his transformation was undeniable. His skin was translucent, stretched thin over a skull that was beginning to change shape. Gills flared rhythmically on his neck, weeping a dark, oxygenated fluid. His teeth, once the straight teeth of a schoolboy, were now rows of serrated ivory, designed to tear.
He let out a sound-a guttural, vibrating thrum that rattled the glass. It wasn’t a cry for help. It was a promise of execution.
Misako didn’t flinch. She reached out and tapped the glass right between Lloyd’s eyes. “Temper, temper. Do you want to end up like the samples in the back room? Dissected and labeled in jars because they weren’t ‘viable’ enough?”
Lloyd’s snarl faltered. He backed away, the light in his slitted eyes flickering with a deep, soul-crushing angst. He was alone. He was a “thing.” He was a number on a clipboard. The realization that his own mother looked at him and saw only a “breakthrough” was a wound deeper than any scalpel could reach.
As the scientists prepared the massive needles for the day’s work, the lab’s power hummed at a higher frequency. The “bees” moved with renewed vigor, setting up the restraints and the monitoring leads.
“Prepare the Subject,” Misako commanded, moving to the main console. “Increase the pressure in the tank by two atmospheres. I want to see how the scales react to the stress before we begin the harvest.”
Chen hesitated, his hand trembling over the controls. “Misako-san, that pressure could collapse his lungs if the transition isn’t perfect.”
“Then we’ll see how perfect my work is,” she replied.
As the pressure began to climb, Lloyd let out a silent scream, bubbles of air escaping his lips as he clawed at his throat. The agony was immediate, a crushing weight that felt like the entire ocean was trying to squeeze into his chest. He looked out through the glass, his vision blurring, searching for a face-any face-that held a shred of mercy.
But he found none. Only the cold, sterile eyes of scientists and the terrifyingly proud smile of the woman who had birthed him once, and destroyed him twice.
The pressure within the glass cylinder rose with a low, mechanical whine. Inside, the world was becoming a vice. Lloyd’s vision began to tunnel, the edges of his sight fraying into dark static as the weight of the water tried to flatten his very bones. Through the haze of pain and the silver curtains of oxygen bubbles, he saw Misako’s face-distorted by the curvature of the glass and the lack of her own soul.
“He’s stabilizing,” Chen whispered, though his voice was thick with a nausea he couldn’t quite hide. “Gods, look at the bone density readings. It’s... it’s working. But the neurological pain receptors are firing at maximum. He’s feeling every second of this.”
“Excellent,” Misako murmured. She leaned in, her breath fogging the exterior of the tank. “Record the rate of tissue compression. We need to know exactly when the human heart fails so we can mark the moment the siren’s heart takes over.”
Lloyd’s hand-claws scraping uselessly against the reinforced plating-slowly went limp. The agony had reached a crescendo where the brain simply stops processing it as feeling and starts processing it as an ending. He looked at the chains, then at his mother. He thought of his father, Garmadon, whose final screams had echoed through these same vents months ago.
In that moment of absolute, crushing angst, Lloyd didn’t want to be a miracle. He didn’t want to be a masterpiece. He wanted to be a boy again, playing in the dirt, far away from the crushing depths of the sea.
But the “Project” required a monster.
~
Up above the sea, at the shorecoast of Ninjago, a boat with supplies guns, rope, hook and lines had been stocked at the side.
The smell of fresh fish and wet sand filled the air, the moist sand of the coast was cool under ones feet. It feel reassuring. “Kai come on!” A female voice called out; across the beach was a bungalow not that big but accommodating.
The sun hung low over the horizon, casting a shimmering gold path across the water that made the surface of the sea look like hammered coins. On the shore, the bungalow stood as a quiet sanctuary against the vastness of the ocean.
“I’m coming, I’m coming!” Kai called back, lugging a crate of extra rope and a rusted, heavy-duty hook. He tossed it into the boat with a dullthudthat echoed against the wooden hull. “You’re always in such a hurry, Nya. The fish aren’t going anywhere.”
Nya stood at the prow, her eyes fixed on the distant line where the blue of the water met the pale sky. “The tides are changing, Kai. If we want to hit the deep trenches before sunset, we have to move now.”
They pushed off, the engine of their modest fishing boat sputtering to life with a familiar, comforting rhythm. For hours, they worked in a practiced silence. The nets were cast and hauled, the scales of sea bass glinting like silver under the midday sun. It was a good haul, the kind that meant they could afford a few days of rest.
As the afternoon waned, the weather turned peculiar. A thick, unnatural mist began to roll over the waves, smelling less of salt and more of something metallic-like copper or ozone.
“Let’s pull into that outcrop,” Nya suggested, pointing to a jagged, desolate finger of land that didn’t appear on their usual charts. “The currents are pulling too hard. We can rest there until the mist clears.”
They docked in a small, shadowed cove. The sand here wasn’t white or gold; it was a bruised, dark grey. While Kai began to secure the lines and check the engine, Nya’s curiosity got the better of her. She stepped off the boat, her boots sinking into the damp, cold grit.
“Nya! Where are you going?” Kai shouted, wiping grease from his forehead. “Stay close to the boat, the fog is getting thicker!”
“Just checking the perimeter!” she called back, her voice already muffled by the haze.
She wandered toward the base of a towering cliff. It looked like solid stone, but as she rounded a jagged pillar, she saw it-a narrow, vertical split in the rock. It looked like a wound in the earth.
“Kai, you need to see this,” she whispered, though he was too far to hear.
She stepped inside. The air changed instantly. The warmth of the afternoon vanished, replaced by a draft so cold it felt like a physical weight against her skin. But it wasn’t the temperature that stopped her heart.
It was the light.
Strung along the damp, jagged ceiling of the cave were industrial lightbulbs, encased in rusted wire cages. They hummed-a low, electrical buzz that felt wrong in a place so ancient. Thick, black cables snaked along the floor, disappearing deeper into the darkness where the cave began to slope sharply downward.
“Electric lights in a desert cave?” Nya murmured, her hand hovering over a cable. “What is this?”
“Nya! Get back here right-” Kai’s voice cut off as he rounded the corner and saw the glowing corridor. His anger evaporated, replaced by a sharp, instinctual dread. “Is that... a bunker?”
“It’s a passage,” Nya said, her voice trembling with a mix of fear and a strange, magnetic pull. “It goes under the sea floor, Kai. Look at the moisture on the walls-it’s not dripping, it’s sweating.”
Against every survival instinct they possessed, they began to descend. The further they went, the more the natural cave gave way to reinforced concrete and steel plating. The “hum” grew louder, turning into the rhythmic pulse of heavy machinery.
They reached a massive, pressurized bulkhead. It was slightly ajar, the heavy seal hiss-hissing as air escaped. The smell hit them first-antiseptic, burnt hair, and the unmistakable, cloying scent of blood.
Kai stepped over the threshold first, his crowbar raised. The sight that met them was a jagged fracture in their reality.
The lab was a graveyard of ambition. In the flickering red emergency lights, they saw the silhouettes of fallen men in white coats, their bodies twisted in ways that suggested a frantic struggle. But beyond the bodies, in the center of the room, stood the shattered remains of a massive glass pod.
“Kai...” Nya choked out, pointing to the floor.
The air in the deeper reaches of the lab was thick, vibrating with the dying hum of cooling systems. Kai’s boots crunched on shattered glass, a sound that seemed loud as a gunshot in the oppressive silence. He looked at the bodies, then at the flickering monitors, and a cold sweat broke out across his neck.
“Nya, this is enough,” Kai whispered, his voice jagged with a fear he couldn’t hide. “This isn’t a shipwreck or a cave. This is some kind of government hell-hole. If the people who did this come back, we’re dead. We’re leaving. Now.”
He reached for her arm, but Nya didn’t move. She was staring at a corner of the room where the shadows seemed to be breathing. A trail of violet water and dark, thick blood led behind a heavy surgical table.
“Kai, look,” she breathed, her voice barely a thread of sound.
“I don’t want to look! I want to get back to the boat!”
But Nya was already moving. She stepped around the table, her breath catching in her throat. For a second, everything was still. Then, the shadows exploded.
With a shriek that sounded like tearing metal, a figure lunged from the darkness. It was a blur of gold hair and sickly green scales. Lloyd, fueled by a final, desperate surge of Misako’s stimulants, threw himself at Nya. He didn’t see a girl; he saw a white coat. He saw a needle. He saw a cage.
“NYA!” Kai roared.
Lloyd’s webbed hands, tipped with jagged claws, swiped at Nya’s chest. She stumbled back, the force of his momentum knocking her toward a rack of glass vials. He pinned her down, his serrated teeth bared in a feral snarl, his tail lashing behind him like a whip.
Kai didn’t hesitate. He swung the iron crowbar, not to kill, but to defend. The heavy metal connected with the side of Lloyd’s shoulder with a sickeningthud.
The creature let out a choked cry and collapsed to the side, sliding across the wet tiles.
“Don’t touch him, Nya! Get back!” Kai stood between them, the crowbar raised, his chest heaving.
Lloyd didn’t get up. He lay on his side, his long emerald tail twitching spasmodically. The stimulant was wearing off, leaving behind a body that was broken and a mind that was shattered. He was bleeding from a dozen cuts-some old surgical scars, some fresh wounds from the glass. His gills flared frantically, struggling to pull oxygen from the damp air.
He looked up at them, and for the first time, the “monster” mask slipped. His slitted eyes were wide, brimming with a terrifying, heart-wrenching mix of hatred and pure, unadulterated terror. He tried to hiss, but he only produced a weak, bubbling sound. He looked confused-staring at Kai’s iron bar, then at Nya’s face, as if he couldn’t understand why they hadn’t started the “tests” yet.
“He’s... he’s shivering,” Nya whispered.
She pushed past Kai’s protective arm.
“Nya, no! He’ll rip your throat out!”
“He’s dying, Kai!” she snapped back, her voice cracking with angst.
She knelt beside the creature. As she reached out, Lloyd flinched so hard his entire body convulsed. He tried to pull himself away, his claws scraping uselessly against the floor, a low, pathetic whimper escaping his throat. He was a predator designed for the deep, but right now, he looked like a kicked dog.
“Hush,” Nya whispered, her voice falling into the soft, rhythmic tone she used to calm the sea when the storms were high. “Shhh. It’s okay. We aren’t them. I promise, we aren’t them.”
She slowly laid her hand on his shoulder-right where the human skin met the scales. Lloyd froze. His eyes locked onto hers, flickering with a soul-crushing desperation. He looked like he wanted to bite her, but he didn’t have the strength left to be angry. He just closed his eyes and leaned, almost imperceptibly, into her touch.
Kai lowered the crowbar, his eyes wide as he watched the scene. The “thing” he had just attacked was small. Too small.
“Nya,” Kai said, his voice dropping to a hollow whisper. “Look at his neck. Those aren’t just gills. Those are stitches.”
Nya looked at the surgical marks, the ID tag on his fin, and the sheer agony etched into the boy’s face. She looked back at Kai, her eyes shimmering with tears.
“Kai,” she said, her voice steady despite the horror. “This isn’t a creature. It’s a boy. Someonedidthis to him.”
She looked back down at Lloyd, who had finally stopped struggling. He was just breathing-shallow, pained gasps-his head resting on the cold, sterile floor.
“I think he needs help,” Nya said, her voice echoing in the silent, blood-stained lab. “We can’t leave him here. If we leave him here, he’s just another discarded book on the shelf.”
Warning Slow Updates pleasedon’tsteal!!!I won’t be avalblie to continue this but please be patient!! Due toschoolresuming!I love ya guys, thanks so much for the 308 reads on /REBEL KISS/ I REALLY APPRECIATE!!!Stay safe❤Flower🥀
