The D-Class holding cell was devoid of any details. White walls, white floor, white ceiling. The bed was just a block of some sort of foam. No pillow or blanket; those could be used for strangling or suffocating oneself. In the same vein, the sanitary facilities were just a pit latrine and a single tap in the wall.
Dr. Charles O. Gears never expected to find himself locked up inside of one, but he also never expected those lunatics to be able to just march into one of the Foundations best defended installations like it was open day. Admittedly, he had erred.
In here, he had enough time to contemplate this fact. He only noticed they were under attack when two men with guns knocked at his office and politely asked him to surrender. No alarms, no gunshots, only soldiers rounding up Foundation personnel in the holding cells. They reserved an entire cell for Gears alone though.
He actually had a fairly good estimate of how much time had passed when the door was opened; eight hours, give or take. Two Insurgents stood in the hallway, their faces hidden and their voices muffled by the gas masks they were wearing. "The commander wants to see you. Follow me."
Gears figured he had not much of a choice and followed them through the intentionally labyrinthine corridors of the holding area. The facility was barely recognizable. Judging by the marks on the floor, somebody had dragged something heavy around. Most of the Foundation seals on the wall had been smashed or sprayed over with red paint. Both the lighting and the heating were off, making the empty rooms he passed by feel even more uncomfortable and lonely than they used to.
Some of the containment cells were gaping wide open, as abandoned as the rest of the head quarters.
The Insurgents led him to an inner courtyard. The red glow of the setting sun was all that illuminated the scene. To Gear's surprise, a few snowflakes were gently dancing through the air.
A lone women stood with her back to him in the centre. Albeit the chill, she had her coat tied around her hips. The soldiers saluted.
"Ah. Dr. Gears. Come closer." Her voice was soft, but emotionless.
One of them gave him a small shove as he didn't moved. He stumbled forwards. They stepped back when he slowly approached her, but made no sign of leaving.
"Who are you? Why am I here?" Gears asked.
"I want to show you something. And as for who I am…" she turned around and starred into his eyes with overt disdain.
Gear's mind raced. Should he know her? She looked too young to be any of the Insurgency's big ones. Not withstanding the fact she was called 'the commander' earlier. Yet she knew him. Perhaps a double agent or turncoat who once worked under him?
She slightly tilted her head. "You really don't recognize me." Not a question, more a self-assertion. "I'd like to believe they made you forget, but no amnestics could do this without turning you into a weeping infant. Seems like you really just didn't cared about me, father."
Gears backed off, although they were separated by many meters. "Allie?"
"Yes. Your flesh and blood. Coming to betray you." Her voice was just as monotone as Gears', but clearly radiated deeply rooted contempt for him.
"They say the greatest respect a child can pay to their parent is surpassing them in what they're doing. But I don't respect you. That's why I came to destroy you and everything you ever worked on."
Gears said nothing.
"The father I remember wouldn't have given up his family for…" she made a sweeping gesture "…this. The Foundation is a cult. A bunch of old men getting high on their own power, playing shadow government and locking away all this potential you were to blind too see."
She suddenly stood directly in front of Gear. He didn't see her move, it was like space itself warped from one moment to the other.
"You would like know how we did this. How we conquered the Foundation." Gears nodded slightly. To be honest, it annoyed him to be blindsided like that.
"Soon you will know. Soon everyone will know. We will make all this fantastic power accessible to the world. We will create logic out of illogic, me and my insurgency. Alison Chao's Insurgency. And I will make you watch how we rip apart that veil you fought so hard to protect."
Although her face was as expressionless as her father's, she seemed to revel in gloating over him.
"Look at what we have accomplished. In less than two decades we studied and created more than the Foundation in two centuries. Instead of condemning what we didn't understand, we learned to harness the anomalous. You had all these wonders and what did you do with them? Lock them away instead of helping humankind. Who is the real villain in this story?"
She made a brief pause after that rhetorical question, which Gears used to get a response in. "I probably deserve this for not being around during your teenage rebel years."
She slapped him, quick and hard. In the cold of the early night, the burning sensation in his cheek was the only thing Gears could feel.
"You're pathetic."
Allison waved the two armed men over to grab Gears by the arms. "I have nothing left to say to you. Now excuse me, it's time for your little princess to become queen."