Time to be Heroes (Tag: Morpheus, Neo, Smith, Molly, Karolina, Trinity, Cypher(?))

[trinity_matrix3]

-Continued from here (Put our Heads Together) and here (A Prison Within a Prison)

The rescue party, composed of spunky little Molly, Karolina and Trinity, stood behind the colossal statue in the square of 7 World Trade Complex, with their backs pressed against the equally massive marble base. They had not even made it into the building and already

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[neo_thematrix]

Following a frustrating and unsuccessful attempt at reuniting with Trinity after he had found her at Morpheus' apartment, Neo had realised that Morpheus and her were apparently back but also stuck in this new Matrix. Plunged into a meditative trance and with his eyes still closed, Neo focused on the code of this new Matrix, accustoming himself to its new parameters, limits and characteristics, but mainly looking for Trinity's and Morpheus' location. He had agreed to serve as a guardian of this new Matrix but the well-being of his friends and companions was for him a foremost priority.

Within a few minutes, Neo distinctly sensed two residual but very clear echoes within the code: Morpheus and then Trinity has successively called for Neo, probably requesting his help.

Tormented by an internal feeling of guilt not to have been able to respond immediately to the call of his two allies, Neo frowned and kept focusing of these recent calls for help. He was about to zero in onto their location when an electromagnetic wave swept through the code he was examining. The shock made him open his eyes and fall on the couch he was previously levitating over.

"World Trade Center!" he immediately said, before even realising that he had located them.

Jumping on his feet, he put his trench coat and boots back on, before running into Morpheus' office room. He grabbed the guns and ammunitions he had laid on the desktop and attached or stuffed them on himself. He was still attaching one last holster to his right thigh when he started running towards one of the apartment's windows.

Please forgive me for not answering your call for help earlier, my friends. May I reach you before anything sombre happens.

After swiftly opening the window and stepping on the ledge, he closed it down and jumped. Through the cloudy skies and above the city lights, Neo flew at the speed of sound towards the location, towards Morpheus and Trinity, towards danger.

[cute_hats]

Molly dashed after Trinity at Karolina's urging. The bullets had been whizzing by as she had been hiding, but she had shown no concern whatsoever. While she had never been hit by a bullet before, she felt invincible and immortal all the time. This was in part because she was eleven and in part very justified by the fact that nothing else that had ever hit her had hurt her. As she ran after Trinity with Karolina flying over head, it was also in part because she knew that Karolina wouldn't let her get hurt, and neither would Trinity.

If they weren't caught up in such a crazy situation, she would be dazzled and in total awe of Karolina's using her powers to the max. As it was, she was actually trying to outrace Trinity as they ran towards the building. She was totally going to pull a Juggernaut and run right through the wall! Of course, her hole might not be big enough for Trinity to run through standing straight up, but she would try. Sometimes it totally sucked being short!

"Move! Coming through! Watch this!"

She splayed her arms up and out a little so that she could make the biggest hole possible and as they approached the wall she just didn't stop. Instead, she ran right into the wall and through it, pulling something of a Looney Toons moment and having a body shaped hole right down to her arms up and off to either side.

"Aww..that sucked."

She looked a little put out as she turned around and batted bits of the wall out of the way so the hole would at least be big enough for the other two to easily follow. Sometimes these awesome plans of hers weren't quite as awesome as she tried for them to be. Stupid shortness. She had hoped to leave a bigger hole the first time around so she wouldn't have to do this. Sooooo freaking embarrassing.

[smith_matrix]

Why? Why isn't the connection being established more quickly?

His left hand back on Morpheus' bald head, pressing it down firmly onto the headrest of the half-reclined chair, and his right hand grabbing Morpheus' arm, Smith kept his eyes on one of the monitors. After finally capturing Morpheus, Smith had brought him to this vault inside Building Seven of the World Trade Center complex, and hooked him up to an array of electronic devices replicating the equipment used by rebels to disconnect other humans from the Matrix. But something was apparently preventing the Disconnection Protocol from establishing a link with the Zero One's mainframe computer.

Something coming from within Morpheus' code!

Before he could investigate any further, reports flooded into his earpiece from the 12 Agents and 20 soldiers deployed throughout the basement, staircases and lobby, as well as immediately outside the building: three women had apparently launched an offensive against their stronghold. Smith looked down at Morpheus with impatience in his eyes.

If you think that you can prevent the connection from being established with that kind of fail-safe mechanism, you...

Smith's train of thought stopped dead in its track as his eyes widened: no rebel had ever developed a fail-safe mechanism of this apparent strength and complexity, as it required extremely advanced programming skills and was designed to protect highly-sensitive programmes -- not some worthless, despicable rebel like this Morpheus.

Unless something inside of him is worth such a high-level of safeguard, like...

"The lobby wall has been breached," announced Williams stoically over the Agents' network, interrupting Smith's thoughts again.

"Wipe 'em out," replied Smith on the same network, without having to say the words out loud. "All of them."

[short_green_tie]

Morpheus hung forward in the chair. He hardly needed Smith's hand on the back of his head holding it down as he didn't have the strength to lift it any more. Indeed, he wasn't even quite in his right mind due to the white flashes of agony that were now becoming less intermittant and more constant in his head. It was like having a migraine, only infinitely worse.

He had to hold out; he had to resist Smith until they could get to him. Trinity had never failed him before and he knew that she would not again. The Matrix was not destined to come under Smith's tyranny and the truce was not destined to fail. Of this he was absolutely certain. He had to hold out, he had to remain concious, he had to...

Suddenly, Morpheus's head went completely limp under Smith's hand. He had passed out. Almost. More accurately, the Oracle Program had shut his consciousness down so that it could divert 100% of it's energy and focus towards holding Smith's drugs and thus his hacking back.

Don't worry hon, I'll take it from here.

[trinity_matrix3]

Impressive. Bending a little to run through the new hole in the wall that her petite friend had plowed through, Trinity sprinted forward quickly, placing her body in-between Molly, Karolina and the oncoming Agent. Pushing forward, she drew her weapons only when she was a foot away from Agent Brown. Expecting to hit her, the Agent pulled his fist back at the same time that Trinity pumped his head full of lead. The Agent fell into an electrical spasm as he dropped to the floor, only to be replaced by the officer who he had shifted into.

A soldier rushed at her with his rifle. Jumping into the air and flipping around him, she landed behind the soldier and grabbed him from the back, forcing his gun clad-arm on his colleagues. Pressing on his trigger finger, a spray of bullets raced out to greet the three other soldiers. Another soldier rushed at her from the side. Kicking her right leg up, she caught the soldier in the face and he stumbled back, momentarily stunned. Turning her attention back to the soldier she was holding, Trinity grabbed his head and twisted quickly to the side, satisfied when he slumped to the ground with a thud.

What the… Her legs suddenly dangled off the floor before she went flying back into Molly. Finding herself sprawled on her back, she quickly got up and watched as the Agent approached. Anger bubbled beneath her skin as she recognized him.

Agent Johnson. His face was engraved in her mind. He killed me. Focus on that anger. Use it. Smirking over her deep scowl, she fired at him with one arm, anticipating that he would duck and fired towards the other soldier with the other arm.

They were still heavily outnumbered: there were five Agents and five soldiers running in from the outside of the building while Trinity was still grappling with Johnson and the soldier.

[neo_thematrix]

Still in flight, Neo could examine the details of the Building Seven's surroundings. There was action down there: numerous Agents, lots of NG soldiers, bullets flying everywhere, three women storming the building.

Trinity!

His heart skipped a beat when he realised that she was in the middle of that rumble. Pushing the limits of his Matrix rules-bending abilities, Neo increased speed, causing several building windows to shatter as he flew by.

It seemed that Trinity was getting help from two young women, apparently as determined to get in as Trinity was. She had succeeded in running pass the first wave of Agents deployed outside the building, thanks to an impressive shield of light spread over the entire courtyard by the young lady. But Trinity was now in the building's lobby, facing more Agents, more soldiers.

Inside the building's lobby, Trinity and her second companion were now facing five soldiers in addition to Agents Johnson and White. It was crazy of them to take such a risk, but Neo understood that Morpheus was probably inside that building and requiring some help: they were risking their life for him. And their escape route was blocked by the five Agents deployed outside the building and now converging towards the hole through which Trinity and her companion had entered.

Agents Williams, Wilson, Moore, Taylor and Harris, running with their guns drawn, were now in a tight formation outside the building, close to the hole, ready to fire through it and catch Trinity and her friend in a deadly crossfire.

When Building Seven was finally in sight below him, Neo didn't hesitate. He flew down at full speed like an arrow and, in mid-course, he rolled himself up into a tight, rapidly-revolving ball, closing his eyes to focus on the code around him, which he would need to alter, and to brace himself...

The wide shield of light had started to dissipate above the courtyard when Neo crashed directly onto the group of Agents like a massive bomb, making the ground and structures shake within a two-mile radius. While Agents Williams and Harris got literally crushed by Neo's weight and impact, the three others were sent flying away from the building wall at great speed, blasted away by the powerful impact.

As Trinity continued struggling against the Agents and soldiers in the building's lobby, Neo stood in a fetal position within a deep and wide crater, directly under the hole through which Trinity and her companion had entered. Surrounded by a large dust cloud, with Agents Williams and Harris buried in the ground under him and barely visible anymore, Neo paused to recover from the effort of such an attack. However, he still could pull out two of his pistols and fire one bullet in each of the two Agents at point-blank range, forcing their re-materialisation into another shell.

[burningpainting]

Karolina tucked her arms in at her side to glide through the hole Molly had punched in the lower half of the wall. The girl had obviously hoped for a more impressive display, but she'd managed to get them inside the building without having to go through the more secure lobby. Karolina stumbled to the ground and keeled over, hands on her knees and eyes shut. Her head spun and swam with the effort of blocking the shower of bullets; her whole body felt like tenderized meat. She'd have to be very careful with the last of her energy reserves, or else she'd be deadweight on this rescue attempt.

Shifting rubble alerted her to the soldier coming up behind her. She ducked out of the way, the butt of a gun barely missing the back of her skull, and kicked out sloppily with her foot. The desperate lash connected with the soldier's ankle, and he tripped backwards. Karolina looped a streamer of light around his knees and swung him like a bat towards a two soldiers taking aim on Trinity, who was busy with another Agent. The three of them went down in a sprawl, gunfire spraying wildly as they convulsively gripped their weapons. Chunks of ceiling rained down on those in the hall. The man Karolina had used as a racquet was riddled with holes, becoming even more deadweight to hold them down and block the entrance of more reinforcements from the lobby.

She looked wildly around for Molly, who she hadn't seen since she'd punched through the wall. Where had she gotten to in the melee?!

The ground underfoot gave a gut-wrenching lurch, pitching everyone inside the building to the ground or into walls. Karolina fell over a pile of ceiling tiles, wincing as sharp edges cut into her arms and skinned her knees through her jeans. It felt like something had blown up in the parking lot! She had no way of knowing that Neo had just pulled a meteor act, or that Agent Jackson, the man she'd lashed to the roof of a Hummer, had been crushed as the SUV was sent bouncing and rolling by the concussion blast.

[cute_hats]

Molly had quickly ducked to the side of her hole as Trinity and Karolina dashed through so that she wouldn't get trampled. She quickly saw the reason for the rush, as lots of Agents and soldiers were converging in from the outside towards the hole she had made. Also, Trinity was saving her from what would have been a vicious Judo attack to her head from an Agent. Totally awesome. She was being saved from an Agent by Trinity.

While she was watching Trinity take on many soldiers at once, another one drew a gun on her. He looked torn though. After all, he was pointing a gun at an eleven year old kid. Terrorist or no terrorist, she was a little girl.

"I'm sorry mister, but you're one of the bad guys..." She hauled back with her leg and punted him out the hole and up into the sky.

When she turned back to look at Trinity again, she saw another Agent coming for her and she tried to shout out a warning, but it was too late. He had picked her up and thrown her back..right into Molly.

"Whoahey!" She flailed and scrambled under Trinity until the older woman got up to square off against the Agent.

Meanwhile, Molly backed away to let Trinity do her thing. She didn't want to be in the way, even though she did really want to show another Agent who was boss and punish them for being so mean. Soon she was standing next to the hole. She'd take out whoever came through. That was a good idea. They needed a rear guard with all of those people outside. She would just...

THOOOM

The whole building shook. People fell and bodies flew. Molly was able to keep her feet, but it would take more than that to put her down. Or keep her down for that matter. But what was that? She looked all around and up...right at a massive chunk of ceiling falling straight towards her. It must have been damaged loose from the impact since the structural integrity of the building had already been damaged by her hole.

"Aw maan..."

It crashed on top of her and all around her. This would take a few minutes to try to get out of. Total suckage. She wanted to be kicking butt!

[smith_matrix]

Smith kept receiving reports in real-time of the futile but annoying attempt of the rebels to penetrate the building. He had expected this to happen, hence his choice for a fortified vault in the basement of the most secure building in New York. Unflinching, Smith kept his eyes on the monitor, still wondering what justified the presence of such a powerful fail-safe mechanism within Morpheus' code.

"What are you hiding?" Smith asked rhetorically. "What do you need to protect so dearly?"

Then, a massive blast wave shook the entire basement, sending waves throughout the vault and shaking up the electronic equipment. On the Agents' network, Smith had temporarily lost contact with seven of the Agents deployed in the lobby and in the courtyard outside the building.

It's him!

Smith didn't need to wait for confirmation of his arrival, but he was still surprised of the speed at which he had reached the location. Clenching his teeth in exasperation, Smith looked back at Morpheus who had apparently lost consciousness.

Excellent: the drug is finally working. No more barrier to my connection with Zero One's mainframe now!

As he finished his thought, Smith noticed something strange on Morpheus' neck. At the base of his neck, the tiny hole made earlier by Smith's syringe injecting the gamma aminobutyric acid drug into Morpheus' blood stream seemed to reopen. Soon afterwards, the purple-coloured liquid drug started to ooze out of Morpheus' neck and onto the chair headrest.

Rage instantly consumed Smith as he almost sensed -- almost smelled -- the programme which had interfered with his plan. Instinctively taking a step back, and as the electrodes slowly started to detach from and slide off Morpheus' bald head, Smith whispered:

"The Oracle..."

[short_green_tie]

Morpheus's head lifted to look at Smith. His eyes glowed a powerful shade of the green light that normally composed the Matrix code. The voice that came from his lips was not quite his own; it was deep and baritone, the voice of a machine almost and very close to that of the entity Neo encountered in the Machine City and yet, it carried unmistakable traces of the previous Oracle's voice patterns.

"THE EYES OF THE ORACLE MUST BE FREELY GIVEN, MR. SMITH. SURELY YOU MUST HAVE KNOWN THAT."

The smile on his face was as warm as hers, but it was also extremely eerie basked in the green light emanating from his eyes. Then, as suddenly as the episode began, it was over as his the light faded behind quickly closed eyelids and Morpheus's head slumped forward again.

For the moment, the glitches in the Matrix stopped. The Oracle program was no longer in danger of being hacked unless Smith continued his attempts. As quickly as the terrible storm had blown up, it dissipated.

[trinity_matrix3]

The reverberation of the impact rippled throughout the building like a small tsunami. The wave sent Trinity and Agent Thompson sprawling forward. Trying to balance herself, she fell forward and on top of the Agent who had landed, ungracefully, on his ass. Both grimaced in disgust as their piercing gazes met. Trinity brought her head forward quickly and butted Thompson in the head. His sunglasses cracked under the pressure but he was undazed. Pulling herself up, Trinity looked around to try to locate the source of impact. Instead, her face turned white with horror when she saw a piece of the ceiling fall on Molly. She could not know that Molly would be fine.

“Molly!” she yelled out shortly having heard the name from Karolina. “No.”

Agent Thompson had gotten up, and when Trinity turned back to him the full force of his fist met her face. As her face drew back from the force, a small spray of blood flew from her mouth. Wiping it with the back of her hand, she looked at the crimson trail with anger. Renewed by her hatred and worry for the young girl she kicked out lowly and swept Thompson clear off his feet. Stepping heavily on his throat she pulled the gun to his head and quickly shot him at point blank range.

Trinity glanced at a bruised but otherwise fine Karolina, flashing a look of concern as her gaze landed again on the rubble. She was about to make her way to the pile but another person started shooting at her out of nowhere.

“Help her.”

Looking at the direction of the bullets, she walked away and out of sight, making her way towards the shadows of the building.

[neo_thematrix]

Having caught his breath, Neo stood up and tall, covered with grey dust, his broken sunglasses laying at his feet in the bottom of the crater. Clenching his teeth as the pain of a broken rib and several deep cuts spread through his body, Neo refocused on the situation at hand.

Focus, Neo.

Leaping forward, he then slowly flew horizontally through the now-much larger hole in the building wall, appearing through the dust cloud like a levitating ghost. As he landed inside what seemed to be the ground-floor main concourse, with a very high ceiling and several large pillars, Neo immediately saw Agent Thompson lying on the floor and starting to twitch as the Agent-to-Human Materialisation programme got activated. He also saw Trinity, alive and well, and already walking away towards the lobby where three soldiers had started shooting towards their general direction.

Neo saw the young lady, standing up from a pile of rubbles with a few bruises, but only saw the code of the young girl, buried under another pile of debris.

Damn! Thank god, she's still alive!

Without a word, but with a violent feeling of guilt consuming him internally as he feared being responsible for all these rubbles falling down on them, Neo immediately ran towards the pile of debris, closely followed by the young lady. Extending his arms towards the mass of plaster and concrete, Neo closed his eyes and applied all his mental strength to lifting all these debris at once. The child could immediately feel the weight of the debris disappear while they started to levitate upwards all together -- slowly but surely.

[burningpainting]

Despite being perfectly well aware of Molly's strength, Karolina still shouted in alarm as the ceiling came down. After all, if she'd been knocked unconscious she might be honestly hurt under there! She didn't need Trinity to tell her to dig Molly out, but she was surprised, in a detached, preoccupied sort of way, that the other woman was just walking on alone.

She dove for the hummock of ceiling tiles, plaster and aluminum piping, inteding to filter a light streamer in there and blow the debris off, but she was be bypassed by a thin man in dark clothes. Karolina raised her arm instinctively to knock him back, but pulled up short when she caught his face in profile.

I do believe that's Keanu freaking Reeves she'd actually met the actor once, at a movie premier with her parents. She'd forgotten how pasty he'd been in these movies.

The rubble shifted of its own accord, floating into the air or rolling away in ways that defied the natural inclination of collapsing rock. Karolina went to her knees beside the mound and tore away the pieces that seemed too large for Neo to budge with his mind. She used her bare hands, opting to conserve energy for now. Her fingers were scraped and bleeding bright blood by the time their combined efforts unearthed a smudged elbow.

"Molly!" Karolina grabbed hold and gave a tenative tug, hoping the girl was indeed conscious and able to shift the rest of the rock herself.

[cute_hats]

Molly found that it was actually kinda hard to get out from that much heavy rubble. It restricted motion so it was hard to focus her strength to push any out of the way. When she was able to straighten out her arm a little and push at some of the broken bits of material, more shifted and fell down to take it's place. She fumed. Outside, the others were probably getting all kinds of action and here it was gonna take her a freaking hour to get out. Well, she could charge on out, but she'd learned that conserving her energy could actually be pretty strategic.

Then suddenly, the a lot of the weight lifted and just floated up in the air. She peaked out of the hole over her face into suddenly free air instead of more stone, cement, and other materials. And there was Karolina! She wanted to tell the girl not to hurt herself, that she had it, but the last really huge piece may have left a hole for her eyes but not her mouth. So instead she just pushed upwards, using just enough strength to move the giant piece of ceiling enough to crawl out of. She'd also learned that she could control how much strength she used to conserve, too.

For several moments, she dusted off her overalls, looking kind of frustrated that she was so messy. Then she noticed Neo.

"Oh wow. You're Neo! The One! I can't believe you're all here and you're all real! Did you do all that?" She looked at the floating debris and then realized that she should step away from under it. "That is totally cool. I'll bet you're hear to rescue Morpheus, right? That's completely awesome. Will this be in the Matrix 4? I sure hope so!"

She glanced over at Karolina to point out that that was freaking Neo from the movie, but stopped when she saw how messed up Karolina's clothes and hands were. Molly immediately took the hands into her own and looked at them.

"Oh Kar! You shouldn'tve! I'm the invulnerable one!" She looked up at Karolina, sad. "Now you're hurt..."

[burningpainting]

"Invulnerable doesn't mean invincible, Molly," Karolina smiled; Molly's hands glowed where some of her alien blood smudged off. "And anyway, it's not like I need to worry about hitting anybody, so a busted knuckle won't kill me."

She reached behind the eleven year old and pulled a pink knit hat with dangling pompoms from the stones. "Here, you don't want to forget this."

[cute_hats]

"It doesn't?" She looked briefly confused. Her vocabulary wasn't perfect, of course. "But it's gotta hurt..."

All was forgotten when she saw the hat. "Yes! Thank you! I totally wouldn't!" She hugged Karolina tightly around the waist.