#thank u garrrrr for letting me explode him with hammersss

[itsnotamatterofif]

Goood morning campers, I’ve been awake since 6am for reasons unknown so I put our lad through suffering. Have a bit of ‘Hydra gets over pressured during testing’, hope this is okay!

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17012020 - an unknown stretch of land south of Manchester.

For likely the first time since he's been conscious, the new DOT-113 tanker has been left alone.

It's cold out, incredibly cold, but that doesn't bother him - he's cold all the time anyway, the chill has become second nature to him, but the snow that settles by their wheels is new. It has a fun texture too, as he scrunches a ball of flakes into his hands with a satisfying crunch.

Frustratingly, he doesn't know why he's been left alone. He's left the research centre a few times, sure, but usually to be taken from one repair shop to another for various parts and upgrades before hastily taken back again. This time, they pulled to a stop on a stretch of exposed track, fields stretching around them as far as the thick January fog will allow. The diesel that brought them here - a kindly, older chap with a well-worn dent in his left side - uncoupled quietly, wishing them well, and making his way further down the track, leaving DOT-113 abandoned.

At first, this was fine; the tanker knows someone will come back for them eventually. There's been far too much work put into them to be dumped in the middle of a random track, plus leaving him here to rot would pretty much be polluting, which is almost entirely what the company stands against. It's just the why that's messing with him - this feels intentional, from the engine leaving him behind to the specific placement of him down the track, but he can't figure out what test needs him out of the yard and onto the tracks like this. There's a grogginess in him today, though, like all of their new parts that were put on yesterday aren't quite fitting together properly, which isn't helped by the bleakness of his surroundings

There's a crackling in his ear, static and painful, and he jumps at the suddenness of it all; the speaker has only been used once before, a strange test a few months ago where all the engineers had  to bunker down in a distant room, watching through cameras dotted around the room like hawks, and he didn't much like it then either.

"All clear," a voice reads through the speaker, and he spins to anticipate movement, but nothing shifts. As if the world holds a breath, nothing around him dares to even move; even the glass, dancing in slight breeze, seems to hold its position, but nothing changes. There's no jump scares, no explosion, no unexpected traffic on the lines, nothing. So they relax, roll their shoulders that were filled with tension, and take a deep breath of cold, wet January air.

Then pressure starts to build.

It's not an unfamiliar feeling, definitely not painful; they've been over pressured before, quite frequently in fact. Pressure capacity has been something that's been tested on him time and time again in various environments, so he knows this routine. In a few seconds his safety valves will blow - if pressure is still rising after ten more seconds, he's to activate the manual release which should solve the issue.

As expected, there's the familiar whistling pop of the safety valves on his collar, one then the other in perfect rhythm. Shutting his eyes tightly, he waits, ten, nine, eight, seven...

This is becoming uncomfortable.

Once they hit one, scrambling hands reach for the hand crank, peeling away the layers of padding and armour to reach the pop out wheel. With a hiss, the system gives, the familiar, if slightly strange looking vent in their right side opening wide; a cloud of gas erupts from it, white and cold against their hands as the water from the air seems to freeze against the vent instantly. There’s a second of relief as they take that second to grab one shuddering breath, before it soars back up. The billowing of gas from out of the two safety values and the relief vent doesn’t seem to be letting up, and the top half of his blank, unpainted armour is frosting over as he watches solid ice forming on all three valves.

Trembling hands drag blunt nails across the valve on his side, scratching and digging at the ice obscuring the exit. A few pieces shave off, but no large chunks like he wanted, and he can feel the ends of his fingers go numb as desperation sets in. Whatever pressure is stuck within him just isn’t shifting and he needs it to shift, he needs it to shift soon; he can’t see his gauges, but he can imagine exactly what they’re saying.

“Uh, Sir?” They call out to the expanse, praying there’s someone around to hear, “it’s not- the pressure’s not shifting like usual, something’s wrong- shit.”

A series of quiet warning beeps alert them to the fact that their left most safely valve is an icicle, and there’s a distinct lack of gas billowing from in. Instead, the pain is building as he grabs a stick to try and poke at the ice, like knifes or forceful hands in his tank, pushing and scraping and wrenching-

He can’t die here, he’s survived every test so far, he has so much to do. He doesn’t even have a name yet.

Something cracks and shatters forcefully; the ice, on their safety valve, the force of the escaping gas finally stronger than the ice. They’d breathe a sigh of relief if he could, but the pressure is so that they cannot expand their chest to breathe. So he goes back to digging at the bigger vent on his side, stabbing at it now, just trying to create whatever gaps in the ice they can before everything freezes completely-

“Air moisture overpressure scenario complete,” a staticky voice from the speaker says, and its distant in the tanker’s hearing to the point where he hardly registers it under the panic, “hold right there, DOT-113A60W, an engineering crew will be with you shortly.”

He nods mutely, ears mostly full of the cracking of ice and the rush of escaping gas. The pain has tunnel-visioned him, but he’s determined, now; he’s got to hold out until the team get here, because he’s strong and he survived this, and he wants them to know that.

They just have to hope they get here soon.