After a couple of hours of testing. Exhausting, tedious, agonizing testing. Needles, X-rays, MRI’s, cat-scans tissue samples, system scans, nerve tests, chemicals, machines, sharp objects, loud noises, and somehow only three explosions. (These testing zones were built for non-humans often times the necessary reagents and assays are highly volatile, I must say I am impressed) It was finally over. I hung around the corner of the room as I tried to recuperate, I nearly died 8 times and actually died once. Ethics codes don’t seem to take immortality into consideration, and the people working down there knew that very well. But that doesn’t mean I don’t intend to do something about it.
While Freyaa always seems to be morally ambiguous in how she talks about things, I doubt she would let this sort of thing slide if she knew about it. It’s funny actually, she used to be the one who held greater moral integrity between the two of us.
Freyaa was reading through the results mostly muttering to herself. “You heartless bastard!” She exclaimed out of nowhere. It felt like she was trying to tell a joke or make a pun but the timing and the context just wasn’t there.
“Excuse me?” I responded with concern.
“I’m being absolutely serious here.” She nodded almost snickering to herself.
“Really?” I raised an eyebrow.
She started muttering to herself what seemed like mostly detached words with mentions of Falon cloning procedure but not enough for me to figure out what she was actually getting at. “You know what I mean right.”
“N-no…” All I was hearing was nonsense. After some vague mention of that one guy who turned himself blue from using excessive amounts of colloidal silver, it was more than apparent she was grasping at straws.
“There was a lot of issues in general like…” She began muttering to herself again, so I just blocked her out fixing my gaze on a peculiar device on the table next to me.
“What is this box?” I asked knowing full well I wouldn’t get a response. There was a projection with some scanned hand-written notes and a diagram of something resembling a star. I clicked the button out of habit and the projection phased out in a static before the contraption lit ablaze with a small fire. “That was against my better judgement.” I grimaced.
“You literally don’t have a heart” Freyaa spoke up and cut through my distraction.
“Oh. Well.” This must’ve been what she was attempting to joke about before. “That’s… Disheartening.” This is how you make a pun Freyaa. She only rolled her eyes in response. I tossed the device into the small metal trash can to the side of the table. I already knew where the fire extinguisher was but I just did something really stupid that I was not quite ready yet to own up to. “So wait, how am I alive then?” I said stepping in front of the trash can in hopes no one would notice.
“Didn’t I just say?” She looked up from her papers, “Silver.” It was increasingly obvious that she didn’t have an answer. “Y-you know antimicrobials or some garbage.” She hid her face behind her book. It was at this point I realized what she was really trying to do. She was just saying random key phrases and jargon hoping I would come to the conclusion for her so she wouldn’t have to consult anyone else without a baseline.
“Are you hiding something?” I queried despite myself blatantly hiding something. The fire seemed to be well contained and hadn’t set of any detectors. It felt really awkward to bring it up now.
“N-no, I know what I’m talking about!” She insisted.
After a quiet inner battle, she let it escape, “I-I’m not a doctor.” She was in no way a human medical doctor, despite her capabilities, she only had experience in specific subsets of the human body. Specifically, she was a bit a savant of neurological systems of humans, non-humans, and animals. There’s no other way you could create a falon clone without her capabilities. But outside of her field of expertise she didn’t know, or rather, she didn’t care to know which often lead to these sort of stand offs.
“Now that that’s settled, can we direct our attention to the flaming garbage can.” The fire was starting to get out of hand and there was no way I was going to avoid confrontation when she drops the book from her face.
“Fire!” Seemingly out of nowhere Shiro came running with a chair.
“Wait! what are you-!?” I couldn’t even finish my objection as Shiro swung the chair down onto me completely missing the garbage can. But the chair didn’t break, instead it just sort of phased through me and settled itself on my midsection. I didn’t know how to respond.
I had nothing to say, nor Freyaa, and neither did the garbage can. Shiro tilted his head. “That’s now how chairs work Orion.” I couldn’t tell if he was being serious or snarky.
“I am aware of that.” I said with an unimpressed look, “Did you really think a chair could put out a fire?”
“No…” He looked like he was tearing up a bit as he realized how poor his attempt was.
“And how exactly does this physics?” I asked to no one in particular. This shouldn’t be physically possible and yet here we are. I rested one arm on the chair legs and the other under my chin as I tried to make sense of what just happened.
“I’m sorry!” Shiro whimpered, that part wasn’t his fault but I’ll take it anyway.
I could hear Dr. Nurse come in and she said something to Freyaa that I didn’t quite catch.
Shiro gathered himself and made a more determined expression. “Alright, hold still.”
“I don’t quite trust you.” I backed up, he followed. “You know what? I am perfectly fine living the rest of my life as part chair and you know-” He gripped the top two chair legs tightly. He looked me in the eyes with a stern expression and I gulped in response.
“Hiiyahhh!” He yelled yanking the chair. It was working but I was starting to fall backwards. Before I knew it, I had slipped halfway through the wall behind me into a dark room. I could just barely see that someone else was in there.
“Food?” They questioned.
In my panic, I managed to slip the lower half of my body through the wall trying to distance myself from whoever it was that thought I was food. Shiro called out to me but was muffled by the thickness of the wall.
As they got closer to me I screamed.
“Food?” They questioned again.
“No! Stay back!” I pleaded to no avail.
“Food!” They said in a rather giddy manner. They came really close to me and I closed my eyes tightly.
I peeked a little only to find they weren’t trying to eat me but one of the buttons on my lab coat.
“Why did you just eat one of my buttons?” But as it seemed they didn’t actually eat it but rather they just ripped it off with their teeth. “What are you?”
“Food. Stay.” The only obvious thing here was that I was the one being referred to as food. Almost calculated, they tossed or should I say pegged the blasted button right at my head in just the perfect spot to make me wince in pain. “Sorry, food, turn around.” I wasn’t about to follow their instructions after that but I should have.
“Turn around? What do you mean?” The sudden shearing pain lasted only a few moments, I couldn’t quite tell what was going on. As my body fell to the ground I realized wit ha certain sense of awareness that my head was no longer attached to my body. I was dead only for a few moments.
I came to with some arguing blurred out in the background. I sat up and tried to look around but I couldn’t. I reached up for my head that wasn’t there completely startled not only by the fact that I was decapitated but that somehow my body was moving without my brain and somehow, I had consciousness? In both my head and my body? I wasn’t really sure what to make of it.
Dr. Nurse quickly stitched my head back to my body and they began to inexplicably fuse back together. In just moments my senses where connected once more.
“Oh good. You’re not dead.” Dr. Nurse said putting her box back on her head.
“Wait, where are you going?” I have so many questions.
“Please don’t eat me, I have another zombie to catch.” She said as she backed away.
“What?” I said puzzled. She left swiftly not saying another word. It probably had something to do with the one who kept calling me ‘food’ but I sure wasn’t about to get confirmation on that. ‘Wait does that make me a zombie?’ I thought to myself but something about it didn’t seem quite right.
“You’ve really lost your head Orion” Shiro smiled, this time I knew he was just being snarky.
“Shut up.” I sighed. “I think I should get going.” I placed my glasses on my face only for the right lens to crack as soon as it was settled. “Before anything else happens” I breathed in annoyance.
As soon as I reached the elevator door, I noticed he was following me. “Why are you following me?” No response. “What is it?”
He responded by signing something to the degree of “You said.”
I pulled off my broken glasses and pulled out a spare I had stuffed in my coat. What was he getting at now? Oh yeah. I told him to shut up, didn’t I? “I didn’t mean indefinitely”
“Ohgood. Freyaatoldmetomakesureyour-headdoesn’tfallofforsomething.” He responded all in one breath, I can’t help but to think he was really just waiting to do that.
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