A few days after Penny’s adventure in a zombie infested city, she was disguised as Valentina Santiago again and with the help of Aicaria Dias, was transporting a few truckloads of components, materials and equipment to a military base. She was contracted to upgrade a building under construction with her holographic training technology. The people in charge wanted every room, hallway, staircase and basement being able to be used as a training environment and were paying her seven figures for the job. Valentina even brought some grunts from her company to help with the moving and installation of all the equipment, while she and Aica took care of the more delicate components and making sure everything was put where and how it had to be put. By her calculations they would be done in 4 days if they worked with efficiency, but let’s not kid ourselves, she didn’t expect anything like that happening, so all in all, they should be done in a week.

While working om the building, Valentina also installed hidden cameras and microphones with selective invisibility on the, which she planned on using to spy on the training of the army, be them special forces, green berets or other elites. And if she was lucky and the other party was careless, maybe even some classified information or mission parameters.

During the work hours, Valentina and her team worked on the construction site side by side with the builders and when she got home, Penny continued being fascinated by her previous idea of xenomorph avatar and zombie annihilating experiments. She started with something simple, making a new robot body to act as her avatar in dangerous dimensions and environments like outer space and underwater. The new body was less inconspicuous and more geared towards strength, speed, fighting and exploration, but could still easily pass for human if she controlled it at lower settings. She boosted all the sensors to new levels, increased the efficiency of the magic parts so it could cast for longer or stronger spells and also installed a new power source to compensate for the increased power drain. Also she may have been inspired from Terminator Dark Fate and included a large quantity of micro bots in its construction, but who could blame her?

During the second day, Valentina, with the help of the construction crew, figured out where all the wiring for her machines would be placed along the walls and planned the placement of her tech accordingly. She instructed her people where to place the holographic boards and projectors, how to securely install them and hide the cables going to them, while also learning all sorts of tricks from the construction crew about… well construction. Later that day, Penny send her avatar to the planet where Ripley and her crew first encountered the alien eggs. She had already cast selective invisibility on the avatar, so it was easy to sneak around the others outside the ship and collect an egg or three in the pocket dimension. Hey, what? She has experiments to run. First she had to see if an egg would open for a zombie and face hugger attach to it. The second egg was for a normal human that would then be bitten some time before the chest burster exited the body. She wanted to see if that would infect the alien with the zombie virus and what effects it would have. The third and the first if it didn’t attach to a zombie, would be used on normal people and the full grown alien scanned to make her xenomorph avatar. And before someone started preaching about Penny not treasuring human, if fictional and other dimensional, life, let me reassure you, she was planning on using umbrella corporation cloned bodies before them getting their new memories implanted or ones meant for the outbreak tests and were otherwise going to die. Some may say that wasn’t any better, but we got to do what we got to do. Even if Penny didn’t got to do it and was just doing it because she was interested. Oh, and she also scanned the hibernation pods or cryogenic pods or however their official name was. You never knew when one of them could come in handy and if not, she could always sell the technology to NASA or some medical company or save it for her own and then sell them individually. For now, she constructed a few surveillance drones and then went to bed.

The third day on the base was spent installing hydraulics on the floor of a large room, maybe as big as a gymnasium. Valentina and her team carefully installed the pistons, connected hoses and purged air from every single one. The majority of their time would be taken by covering the entire floor with the pistons, checking the system and then covering everything in an elastic sheet similar to rubber. Then covering that with holographic boards so they could simulate terrains like hills, cliffs, barricades and many more with just the press of a few buttons and a lot of programing. Anyways, after Valentina left the base later that day, Penny proceeded working on her project and getting ready to experiment on zombies and xenomorphs. She put her VR helmet on and send her avatar in the dimension of the Resident Evil movies and more specifically Resident Evil: Retribution where the main character, Alice, is held captive in a U.M.B.R.E.L.A. Corporation facility used to run outbreak experiments. Penny teleported her avatar around, found the rows of clones suspended on racks and where and how they were transported, then found an instance where the virus has just been released and they had not cleaned the zombies for the next test, so she released one of the eggs and a surveillance drone to watch what was happening. And something did indeed happen. Penny guessed that the Resident Evil zombies weren’t as dead as they should be. The transformation was more in the lines of a mutation that turned them into biological killing machines and not so much into reanimated corpses. Sure some were reanimated by the virus, but from what she knew from the lore, that was because of a regenerative effect, which still meant they were technically alive with increased rage and not working higher brain functions. But that still made them perfectly viable hosts for the face hugger to attach itself to. Now she just had to see what came out when it burst out.

Next the avatar put an egg on the chest of a clone that was going in a simulation and was sure to be infected and another in front of a clone that was way in the back row and wasn’t expected to be used any time soon. She release two other surveillance drones to follow the clones and record everything that was happening to them. She even attached biological and more invasive scanners for when she needed to scan a grown xenomorph and make and avatar in its image. Hours passed without much happening and Penny got a little bored, so she went around deactivating explosives, then she left the drones to follow their targets and went to sleep. Tomorrow after work A.I.C.A. would tell her what happened and show her the scans and recordings and hopefully she would have the results she was hoping for.

The fourth day was mostly the same as the third when it came to working on the base. They put more hydraulics, then covered them with the sheet and then holographic boards. They made sure there were no errors in the system and when the entire room floor was covered it was time to go home. Tomorrow they would finish the building and the day after, Valentina would install the computer controlling the entire system. So, after the work at the base was finished for the day, Penny got back to her experiments from the day before. Her drones had followed the targets and recorded everything from the last moment she saw her targets until now and still continued recording. The first egg had hatched and attached itself to a zombie and after fast forwarding she stopped at the moment when the face hugger detached itself from the face and curled up on the ground. Another round of fast forwarding until she spotted the body starting to look like it was convulsing and she left the recording to run at normal speeds just in time to see the chest burst open and the alien crying out in triumph or birthing joy or just cursing in its alien screeching way, after which it quickly scurried around the zombies in search for cover. The drone continued following and monitoring it all the time. While waiting for more developments on that recording, Penny looked at the other two in sequence. She looked as the second egg opened and the face hugger attached to the clone body, then as it detached, then the clone was imprinted or something, so it could react believably during the simulation. She followed the recording as the host was infected and then turned into a zombie, while the alien as still inside. When the chest of the zombie burst open, what came out wasn’t the same creature as the one from the movies. This one had jaws that parted four ways, like the zombie it came from. That led Penny to some very interesting theories. To her it looked like the first alien could choose which genes to absorb to make itself stronger, faster and smarter and not compromise itself with dangerous or mutating its physiology genes, so it came out pretty much intact. She still didn’t know if it absorbed some of the regenerative properties of the zombies. The second one on the other hand, while absorbing genes from its host was forcefully infected by the virus and mutated into its current form. Now she just had to observe what other changes the two xenomorphs would exhibit and compare them to her control sample, the third egg that attached itself to a normal clone and produced a normal chest burster and hopefully a normal xenomorph grown alien body, which she could scan for her avatar blueprints. Now she just had to wait and watch as the aliens grew up big, strong and murderous.

The fifth day, Valentina and her crew finished installing all the equipment around the new army base building and were just finishing some minor finishing touches as their work day came to an end. Valentina left the base and went home and so Penny continued her observation of the life cycle of the alien xenomorphs. Since the last time she observed them, they had shown remarkable growth and were now fully mature specimen. She had her scan of the third alien and was observing the other two at the moment as they were on the hunt. The first one, she named him George, was showing less caution and more aggression when compared to the movies and the third specimen, but she still wasn’t sure if that was as a result from the host or just individual differences between members of the species. The second one, she named him Steven, had stumbled upon gun totting zombie NAZI? And was completely dismantling them and shrugging of body harm like it wasn’t there. The acidic blood even helped in eliminating the competition. The third one was busy murdering and mutilating all the clones around him and by the looks of things, starting a nest. She didn’t know how that would work out without more eggs or a queen, but continued to observe. Anyways, this one she named Reggie. He was her favorite so far, such a handsome killing machine. It was perfect as her new avatar and maybe she could even construct a small pet toy to keep when she pulled pranks on people. She observed the monitors a little longer and then went to bed. Tomorrow she would have to finish her job at the base and then would have all the time to watch her abominations at work.

It was day six of the army base project and today the only ones here were Valentina, Aica and the army personnel. The other workers had finished their work on the building and weren’t needed for the installation of the supercomputer, which Valentina didn’t tell the army is super and only told them would control everything happening in the simulations. And even if they found out, what would they do to her legally? So they would leave her alone and run their simulations and maybe use the supercomputer to run war simulations as well. The AI inside wouldn’t allow them to use it for something truly dangerous. Anyways, she installed the computer in a room with sufficient cooling, showed the ones responsible how to run it, program simulations and everything else and then left the base with her payment sitting in her bank account.

Penny turned on 3 monitors and started watching what her aliens had done while she was away. What she found was total carnage and chaos. Everything at the facility that had been living or undead was now dead and her 3 aliens were the only moving things left. But by the looks the first and third were giving the mutated second alien, she was sure that wouldn’t last for long. It seems they could feel something wasn’t right with this individual and were circling him with threatening intent. The two sprang to action and a fight for survival ensued. Those aliens sure loved going for the chest and brain when attacking. Suffice to say, the mutated alien was killed, but not before he managed to strike at least one blow to the other two, and by Penny’s quick calculations, the chances of them mutating from their wounds were very high. And if she was right, the world would have to cope with two organisms made for killing and then mutated to be even more dangerous. But that wasn’t something Penny cared about. While she was monitoring the life cycle of the aliens she instructed A.I.C.A. to use her avatar and steal the facility’s servers full of all their medical and other research, so she had a lot of studying to do in the future and a lot more inventions to patent or just use for toys.