“Alright, you can pull the hood off.”
The relief that Melissa felt as the black covering was pulled from her head was immense. She sucked in a deep breath, eyes still squinting after having spent God-only-knows how long acclimating to the darkness. Her ears briefly rang, as even the relatively quiet room she was in seemed a great deal louder without that cloth muffling everything.
There was a little series of tiny cracks as she craned her neck back and forth, briefly taking in her surroundings. From the moment she’d been sat down in here, she’d suspected this was some kind of medical examination place - that suspicion was proved correct as she caught sight of the various cabinets labeled with all sorts of medical terminology that she didn’t quite understand. From the exam bed she was seated on, Melissa could see three other individuals in the room with her: the two armed Marines who’d escorted her here, and a bright young lady in a lab coat who smiled at her.
The blonde took a seat in a chair next to the bed, her bright blue eyes seeming to dance with energy behind those half-rimmed glasses. “My apologies, Sergeant,” she stated, her voice tinged with an undeniably scandanavian accent. She typed something quickly into a tablet whose screen Melissa couldn’t quite see. “I hope your trip wasn’t too rough.”
Melissa shrugged. “Coulda done without getting smacked in the head. Or not hardly being able to breathe for however the fuck long it took to get…” She trailed off. “Wherever this is.”
One of the Marines simply rolled her eyes, the other giving her a dirty look before returning her gaze to the woman in the lab coat. “An unfortunate necessity. This… project… requires the utmost secrecy.”
“Yeah, kinda gathered,” she muttered under her breath in response. Honestly, this whole experience - it had to have been the weirdest fucking thing she’d seen. Pretty impressive feat, really. After a solid decade in the Corps, she thought she’d seen everything, but the selection process for whatever insane spec ops group was being run here took the cake. Two months of hell on earth, working her ass off every day in some nightmarishly grueling training, an intensive review process that dug through every single thing she’d ever done, and finally, being dragged for days through more vehicles she could count, before finally being dragged in here.
“You’ll understand why soon enough.” The blonde smiled, standing up and waving for Melissa to stand up. “I’m Doctor Larsen.If you’ll step on the scale, Sergeant Ramirez, we can get started.”
Pretty standard stuff. She nodded, heading right over with a bound in her step that caused the dark locks of her just-below-regulation-length hair to bob up and down. The doctor was quick to start taking measurements, though… it wasn’t quite the same as her usual physicals. Lots more measuring bodily proportions that she usually didn’t think about. More than once, she found the blonde poking the exposed parts of her olive-tone skin, noting various little scars, testing the firm muscles on her athletic body. Weird, though not entirely unpleasant.
“Hm.” The blonde hummed with an amused expression on her face. “It looks like they actually got your assessment right. What a wonderful change of pace.” She quickly entered a few more points of data into her tablet, before grabbing a set of papers from a nearby countertop. “Your health seems to be excellent, as reported, and you’ve passed all the background checks.” She presented the papers to the sergeant with a proud look on her face. “It looks like I have the honor of welcoming you to Prometheus Company.”
She squinted. “Proma…. Whata?”
One of the Marines snorted, as Larsen let out a small sigh. “Yes, yes, definitely a jarhead,” she said under her breath, before returning to her upbeat expression. “Your new CO will explain all the relevant details. Your papers will tell you where to go.” She gave Melissa a brief touch on the shoulder, seemingly to reassure her. “Good luck, Sergeant.”
With that she was sent off in short order, the Marines who’d escorted her thus far only briefly following before heading into some sort of guard barracks. Left alone, Melissa found herself heading down the sterile concrete halls of what looked to the best-maintained base she’d ever been in. Everything was clean, high-tech shit along the walls, visible inside various rooms through the windows - shit. This place had a budget.
A budget, and not a single man in sight.
It finally hit her as she passed around a corner that everyone here was… well… female. That was…. Well… it was different. Her confusion further grew as she noticed the wide variety of uniforms on the personnel moving about. Those weren’t just American camo patterns; she recognized Russian, Canadian, British, French, Israeli uniforms, plus plenty more that she couldn’t even place. The Marine had been on her share of joint ops, but this took it too a new level.
She huffed, deciding she should finally look at her new orders. Might be nice to know where exactly in this chicken-shit outfit she belonged. Looking down at the papers, she skimmed through, finding the sector of the base that her quarters would be. CO’s name - and on seeing the name of her unit, she found herself pausing, reading it over to confirm exactly what it had said.
"You gotta be shitting me."