[ I think my post rivals TJ's. It really is ridiculously long, so I'm going to spoiler out all events belonging to the relatively recent past. ]
...The laboratory was poorly lit. Green screensavers - or something similar - glowed to the right, where a pair of computers sat on a desk. Angela moved closer and found that their keyboards were mangled. Strange images filled the screen of a third computer. Deformed humans? What a strange sort of screensaver, Angela thought, and took a picture. She then turned and took some shots of the whole lab, catching Perry and Eyone in a couple of them. She flipped back through the shots and made a face. Her camera's flash was weak and the photos were poorly focused. It would be hard to make atmospheric shots in this light.
Angela turned her attention to the monitors, rattling the keyboards, pressing buttons, and quickly growing certain that they were unresponsive. The computers themselves were out of sight. Leaning an elbow on the table, she wondered what would keep a group of monitors active for so many years. How long had this 'project' been abandoned, according to the Profs? She couldn't remember. Ages. But the computers were working. So was a monitor above them. The animated video on the screen caught her attention and chilled her blood.
"What the hell?" she whispered.
Misa, meanwhile, had split from her owner and gone to scout out the perimeter of the lab. There was a lot of dust in the corners, but nothing very interesting. She snuck between desks and sniffed the air. Nothing here, either. Coming out onto the open carpet, she glanced back at the moving images on the screen, failing to comprehend them. The center island, though, seemed promising. She leapt nimbly onto its surfce, ignoring the liquid-filled capsules. From her vantage point, she could see all around the lab.
..."Bum bum bum bum..." Eerie in their inanity, the unanticipated first bars of 'Mr. Sandman' floated through the room. Angela's skin crept as she tried, without moving a muscle, to figure out where it was coming from. Eyone's exasperated attempts to turn the music off gave some explanation. She relaxed and followed the tune to the radio.
"Make him the cutest that I've ever seen..." The delicate, fuzzy music seemed to fill the darkness, giving the room a kind of intimacy. Angela felt very strange. Surely this was a dream, or a movie, perhaps. She found herself tapping her foot in rhythm with the song.
"Eyone, turn that stuff off!" Perry cried. "I kind of like it," Angela protested. "It's catchy."
Trying to turn it off, Eyone flipped the radio over and discovered... "No batteries?" Angela choked. She had to feel the radio for herself to believe it. "There must be some internal power source," she suggested. "Wait, check the tape slot." The chorus to the song repeated. Angela closed her eyes and nodded along with the song. She even tried to hum. "Mr. Sandman, bring us a dream!"
Opening the tape cassette slot, Eyone found that there was no tape in the radio. "Okay, so there
must be some internal power source," Angela concluded. "It can't run on air. Right? The laws of physics still apply, don't they?" She tried to joke. It came off rather flat.
Vico seemed to be incredibly irritated by the music. "Just turn it off!" he cried, clutching his temples. Angela looked at him with sympathy in her eyes. "Headache?" she asked, trying to put her arm over his shoulders. He shrugged her off angrily, grabbing the radio out of Eyone's hands and smashing it to pieces on the ground in one violent gesture. Silence descended.
Angela took a step back from Vico. "Whoah. No need to get violent on us." Things of that sort made her very nervous. "Hey man, it's okay." Eyone said. Vico stood with his eyes closed, rubbing his temples and breathing heavily.
...Angela found the file cabinet. Luckily, the drawers were unlocked. She pulled up a chair and opened the lowest drawer, ready to dig into files and memos. What she found, though, looked like personal documents. There were hand-written letters and photographs. "This doesn't seem to fit here," Angela commented. She clicked her tongue, busily taking out stacks of papers and spreading them out on a desk, intending to go through them at her leisure. The drawer was stuffed, and the papers piled up without consequence. Angela decided to leave the letters, whose script she could hardly read, in the drawer. She started searching the drawer for photos, bringing out a few dozen. "Are these vacation photos?" There were waterfalls, forests, beach towns, roadside landmarks. She judged that the photos were from different vacation spots, taken over a long length of time. Nothing in them looked familiar.
One photo stood out from the rest. It was a picture of a boy sitting on his father's lap. There was a description on the bottom: "Mr. Fuji and his son on April 23rd 1987." Fuji...that was a familiar name. Wasn't it the name on the memo in this building's first room? Angela was glad she'd photographed it.
The photo seemed important. The owner of his drawer had to be either Fuji or his son. Angela decided to take it with her. After a moment's pause, she gathered up all of the photographs and stuffed them into her backpack, behind the granola bars and extra clothing.
Meanwhile, Eyone inserted another tape [where?]. The trio listened to what seemed to be a researcher's log. To Angela's mind it paralleled the video loop with the Uxie and...explosion. Creepy stuff.
"What we are doing now is cloning a Human but adding the genetics of the legendary Pokemon. This will allow us to have a subject who is willing to speak when we ask it questions on its power." Angela had taken a class in genetics and was pretty sure that wasn't how it worked. But what did she know?
As the tape played, a television screen came on. Full of apprehension, Angela listened to the second surprise video. But this one seemed to be live. A live person in this building? Angela's heart leaped. It didn't seem to be possible...but how else could this Matthew character have predicted those footsteps?
As Eyone threw the tapes into his bag, Misa, still on the central island, gave a warning cry. She was looking through the window at a lumpy, man-shaped sillhoutte. As Angela watched, it turned its head and revealed glowing blue eyes. Her heart pounded. She was seized with an irrational belief that, if the THING chose, it could just walk forward through the window, as though it wasn't there.
Vico started to scream. The THING was looking right at him, as though piercing him through with its glowing blue eyes. Its eyes! He was speared on that gaze, caught in its beam, snared like a fish. He screamed as though his life were being wrung out of him, and when the last drop was gone, her grew silent. His head snapped back and he collapsed to the floor like a ragdoll. Angela watched, rooted to the floor, as pieces of the broken radio rose into the air and reassembled themselves into an entire machine.
The song began to play again. "Bum bum bum bum..."
Cold metal in her hands snapped her back to reality. "Uhh...Hold this, Angela!" Hardly thinking, she aimed the pisol at the THING and fired with a jerk, squeezing her eyes shut. (What about the glass? Would it deflect the bullet? Could she even hit that thing? Angela wasn't thinking.)