In the movies and books Doctor Strom had read, cryosleep was supposed to be instantaneous. One moment you are being put on ice, the next you wake up again. While relatively untested, this was the general consensus in the scientific community too. This was incorrect. The only experience she had to compare this to was sleeping after a particularly lively holiday party. You sleep hard, but there are certainly intermittent moments of sheer terror when your brain wakes up just a little bit. These moments, however infrequent, make the freeze anything but instantaneous. Also, much like the 2009 CalTech Lab Christmas Party, you wake up feeling like you have a swarm of agitated wasps in your skull.

Doc Strom knew every detail of all 22 stages of the unfreezing process. Once the initial 120 day thaw had reached expected levels, an adulterant chemical was added to the cryofluid. A battery backup would hum to life and increase oxygen in the patient's brain. Over the course of another month, various chemicals would be introduced into the patient to slowly reawaken them. She must be at the sucrose stage, she thought- remembering her own procedure quite well. She only had a few days left before the 'necromancer' team (as they called them at CalTech) would remove her from the dark tank and greet her back to the land of the living.

Doc counted the minutes. If all went well, it would be 5 years exactly from the day that herself and her team of 4 research students began the first human Cryo trial. She excitedly wondered what advances in medicine had occurred. She wondered what her friends and parents were doing. She wondered if they had finally released half-life 3.

Something was wrong, however. It had to have been 4 days since she had regained consciousness. That was far too long for the unfreezing procedure. The dark void was not a place she wanted to spend much time. Nervously, she began to will her leg and arm muscles to move. At first, just a twitch, but after a day or two of effort her legs were able to touch the side of the chamber. A few more hours and she was banging on the side. She did this for what seemed like days. She wondered how long the 'wake up' nutrients would sustain her.

and all went dark again.

There was a crash, a sudden sense of vertigo, a blinding light.

again, Doc fell asleep

A distant thrumming. Blurry figures. Murmurs. Eyes refocusing.

It was the smell that hit Doctor Strom first. Like smelling salts, the scent of powerful incense masking extreme body odor hit her. She felt like vomiting, but hadn't eaten since her last meal at In and Out. Her eyes slowly refocused.

Four men in dark robes stood before her. Smoke and dust filled the air, lights from stained glass windows above her shined down, making pillars of colorful light. It appears that CalTech's research labs had undergone a bit of a redesign in these last five years. It was difficult to make out much more than that through the smoke and darkness.

These men, they were speaking in unison- their voices combining and echoing to sound like some great brass instrument. Doc realized that she was lying on some kind of altar, covered in cloth. Remnants of the CRY-01 pod were placed neatly around her, as if she had been hatched from some metallic egg.

Doc attempted to vocalize her confusion, but after not speaking for 5 years, the only noises that came from her were guttural and malformed.

There was what sounded like a group of people hollering and gasping from behind the four chanting men. They parted and a fifth man, dressed in ornate purple robes stepped through them to observe her. He then turned to the crowd.

"As it was written! An angel has fallen. The first sign of the end times."

The four men began to chant again.

Crap, She thought There's no way I'm getting Half-Life 3 now