[Rainfall] It's Never JUST an Interrogation.

”Trust nothing, believe nothing, least of all your preconceptions. The world is not what you make of it; it is everything that goes on behind the scenes.”
Dalatrass SMLW Hyree Gosha, 85th STG Exceptional Projects Coordinator

Spiza winced, shielding his eyes with his free hand as the lights blasted to life. This wasn’t just a spare bulb in his face; this was a torrent of photons, a rash of radiance, a flood of phosphorescence that made his retinas scream. Thank the Wheel he wasn’t actually doing anything; had he been doing anything aside from sitting in this glorified dentist’s chair, he would probably have been rendered a whimpering, convulsing mess.

In any case, he wasn’t interested in moving at the moment thanks to the breaks and bruises along the right side of his body. Truth be told, he was lucky; anyone else falling down that hole would probably have snapped his neck on the way down, and while cartilage may break more easily than bone, it was infinitely faster to heal. The medical cocktail he’d been served over the past few days didn’t hurt, either, and the last doc to check it out proclaimed (after much unwanted poking and prodding) that it would be mere days before the limb was back to normal.

Didn’t stop the damn thing from throbbing constantly, though. Neither did the fact that the aforementioned cocktail would make his liver explode if he tried taking anything stronger than an asprin – which would have really been helpful in light of…well, all this damned light.

He was tired, cranky, and filled with self-loathing after failing to at least kill the man at Noltric. Fuck it if his creativity was shot.

He jabbed feebly at his only source of shade – a mottled-looking technician who was busy angling what looked like cameras at the side of his head.

”Hey,” he muttered. Prod, prod. ”The hell is all this, anyway? I already did my brief – shouldn’t you be tossing me out at this point? And for shrellsakes“ – he shouted this to the room in general – ”could you at least turn that damn thing off?”

The aging salarian behind the mask didn't bother with something so time-wasting as eye contact. Swabbing at the blue-skinned salarian's skin with a pair of forceps and a wad of cotton, he gently removed as many traces of perspiration as he could. Not that the subject was helping in that regard much, oh no. This was a nervous one, it was, all buzz buzz buzz, hurry hurry hurry, have to get here, too much to do too little time to do it, to many benzodiazepines in the neurochemistry, typical spy with too much on his mind and not enough room to think, sad really.

"This will be infinitely easier on you if you try to relax," the salarian said, daubing away another sudden leak of perspiration from the younger salarian's brow. "This will be over all the sooner if you simply let me do my work. Perspire less, please, if you will; the electrolytes in the perspiration may alter the feedback between your neurokinetics and the electrodes, yes. Technician! Play something soothing for our guest. Maybe some Bach, I've had a lot of interest in Bach recently."

The salarian's features - aged, wrinkled, light green, and leathery - temporarily filled Spiza's vision as the doctor leaned in, holding a cumbersome and complicated network of electrodes and readers in his hands. Slowly, the spiderweb-like construct descended on Spiza's head like a crown of electric thorns, blinking like Christmas lights in the darkness.

"Very nice, good good good. Now, try to relax. There may be some... confusion as we synchronize your brain patterns to the imager, but try not to worry, this is all perfectly safe, oh my yes. If you feel you are about to have an aneurysm, please try to inform me beforehand, as it may effect the outcome of the test... yes, very good. Just relax. Technician, please administer some tetrahydrocannibol-36 to the subject. Don't worry, this will just relax you. If you feel like having a giggle, don't hold back, it's perfectly natural... yessss... synchronization is rising. The projectors are ready when you are, sir. By all means, proceed when you are ready."

The soft tones and melodies of some long dead Terran composer filled the sterile (fine ish, sterile ish) room as the technician (he was not a technician he was a wheeldamned specialist with two years of post secondary work in pathological microbiology two) obediently prepped the serum, clearing any air bubbles from the syringe before placing it along one vein.

There was a pause and he leaned in, almost conspiratorially.

"Hey this is going to mess with your perceptions a bit alright? It's going to help manage the pain too but you're going to be, well, out of it. When you feel it coming on don't panic, just relax okay? Okay.

You're doing great so far."

Of course STG tech (specialist) so the aforementioned warm and friendly talk wasn't without a purpose. At some point he'd managed to slip the needle through the skin, breach the blood vessel, empty the dosage into the salarian's circulatory system, and then set said recently emptied vial back on the tray in about the time it took the older man to realize he'd been stung.

Though really after a certain point that had less to do with actual skill and more to do with the fact that he'd just pushed about a dozen milliliters of narcotic derivative into Spiza's system.

A glance at his superior. A glance at the broad flat, mirrored wall that stretched across the far side of the room.

"Dosage administered. Vitals steady."

Ish.

Steady-ish.

“Uh, hey, wait a minute, doc, I was told I wasn’t supposed to be on anything else because of, uh, drug interactions—“

Spiza winced as the technician – yes, technician – slid a needle into his forearm. Oh shrell, he hated needles. He hated, hated needles, nobody said anything about needles, and now, hey LOOK, someone was shoving a plungerful of something into his skin—

Spiza gulped as a sudden sensation washed over him, as though someone was pouring an endless crate of packing peanuts on his head.

”…Uh, doc? I’m tasting the color green.”

"Yes, yes, that's all quite normal. Whenever you're ready, by the way. Tick tock tick tock."

Maybe he didn't have an ear for the finer arts, but this Bach fellow was doing nothing for him. Another salarian quietly emerged, scowling as technicians scurried from station to station. Not that he didn't appreciate the work of their specialists, but one couldn't help that they were making a habit of rather over-complicating things. His gaze floated back to their agent - one Emon Spiza. A name that he was growing sick of astonishingly quickly.

"Enough with the relaxants," A spastic motion of his hands follow, as if to clear the air around him. "We rather need Agent Spiza lucid, may I remind. And if he can't handle a few aches and pains, we might have our answer for what happened at Noltric."

You'd almost forgive him for his disposition. It'd been a few days of hell since Entish went up in flames. A few days of anxieties and paranoia. It'd be enough to give anyone a bad temper; write 'patience' off as one of their virtues.

It'd be disappointing to learn, then, that this was every waking hour of his life. And as a salarian, that was a lot of waking hours.

He stood before the lights, a grim expression dominating stony features. And if there were anything that he'd remind anyone, it was just that. Roughly textured features, gray skin - the personification of the immovable object.

"Now, activate the projectors."

“Whoever that is,” began Spiza, now entirely preoccupied with the needle mark on his arm, “please tell him to kiss my cloaca. I’m entirely aware the only reason I survived thanks to my own sonic dampeners, which I built for myself, no thanks to you, and—”

That was about the point that his jaw went slack, turning the rest of his protests into unintelligible mush. He kept talking, evidently unaware of his sudden speech impairment, but at least the research crew was spared his rationale for building them in the first place (a tale that involved nightmares, psychotic asari and a quarian that would not shut up about 20th-century human entertainment). He was obviously venting his spleen, though, too distracted by his own poor fortune and a rush of psychotropic substances to notice the rest of the crew donning…well, night vision goggles, of all things.

Perhaps if he’d paid attention and not been navel-gazing about his own problems, then he might not have been caught off guard when the lights cut out.

“Uhl lut’s zhusd duh lugeeig—uh—HGHHHT—“

Spiza nearly choked on his own phlegm. After being blinded by such searing light, the ensuing blackness was so intense, so immediately pressing, that it felt like its own, sapient awareness that soaked itself into his every pore. It blanketed him like some terrible boa, squeezing the air from his lungs, constricting his movements, seizing his limbs as he scrabbled on the grips of his chair.

And all the while that sensation, that feeling, that, that sensation of packing peanuts pouring down the back of his head, simply would not stop.

If there was ever a time he wanted to giggle as that batty scientist suggested, that was it; unfortunately, the signal scrambled between synapse and jaw, and he let out a strangled cry as he tried to wave them off with both arms.

That’s when he floated out of the chair.

"Synchronization at seventy-five percent.... eighty.... eighty-five percent.... ninety-three.... ninety-nine point seven nine percent. Excellent, excellent. Our young Mr. Emon Spiza is ready to begin showing us the contents of his brains, if you will. Not literally, of course, because that would leave a huge mess on the floor!"

There was a completely self-absorbed guffaw from the scientist as he quickly scuttled over to a bank of floating holoscreens, grinning like a corpse as his hands flew over the controls.

"Now, I must warn you, this projection is entirely based on Mr. Emon Spiza's perception of events and how his brain centers recorded them - we are leaving out any areas that may have been influenced by his own idiosyncrasies or prejudices. What is, is - but what isn't, isn't. So no sneaky asking me to enhance a blurry image or turn the projection to the left or anything like that. If Mr. Emon Spiza never saw the face of a person portrayed in this projection, then neither shall we. Now, with that caveat stated, let us begin."

There was a flash of green, red, and blue light. Suddenly, the room was someplace else - where, it couldn't be said. The image was blurry, out of focus, like a bad photograph.

"MR. EMON SPIZA, CAN YOU HEAR ME?" the salarian yelled unnecessarily, enunciating every shrill syllable that came out of his mouth. "I NEED YOU TO FOCUS ON THE EVENTS ON NOLTRIC. RELAX, JUST RELAX, AND PICTURE IT IN YOUR MIND'S EYE. YES, YES, TRY AND FOCUS. NOW, I WANT YOU TO GO BACK TO WHEN YOU LANDED ON NOLTRIC. TRY TO REMEMBER WHAT YOU WERE WEARING. TRY TO REMEMBER WHAT IT LOOKED LIKE. TRY TO REMEMBER THE TIME OF DAY, THE COLOR OF THE SKY, EVERY DETAIL YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND NOTICED. YES, GOOD, GOOD. YOU'RE ON NOLTRIC, HAVING JUST ARRIVED. YES, YES, GOOOOOOOOD. GOOOOOOOOOD. Director, you may begin your questioning."

He merely grumbled in response. About the third time that he'd ever stood in attendance for one of these things, and it was never any less disorienting. He glanced up at the chattering box overhead, flickering as a kaleidoscopic torrent of colour washed over the room. His eyes eventually settled on their addled operative, still somewhere between drooling and dreaming.

"Agent Spiza, be very clear." He leaned down, coming face to face with their subject. "Tell me-- tell us what happened at Noltric."

Spiza floated in the air, suspended by a field to prevent his limbs from seeking out or touching anything around him. Half-baked sensations soared through his core, and his optic nerve crackled merrily, splashing images through his mind’s eye like flashbulbs from a Fifties-era camera. Faint mutterings drifted through his inner ear, and as he drifted through his own personal Infinity, he recalled snippets of dialogue from old movies about mind control and “seeing” memories. Explains the pharmacy, at least, he thought to himself.

”EXPLAINS THE PHARMACY AT LEAST.”

AT LEAST________________________________________________________________________least

The salarian yelped in pain, clutching his temples in pain as his own thoughts echoed through his mind at deafening volumes. Every syllable reflected a hundredfold – no, a [i]thousandfold – and rebounded, smashing every characteristic of his voice, every minute vibration and scratch of his larynx, against his head, torso, and arms; pixelated axes shaped from the words “WTF” and “TOO LOUD” spun at him – he swerved to duck, and was clocked with the phrase “I wish I weren’t so damn high-pitched” instead.

It was like an assault with his own thoughts, he thought, dodging the same phrase as it whistled by, accompanied by the strains of Concerto en la Mineur.

Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore. Gritting his teeth, he stood rigidly still, taking each blow as they whalloped his chin, kicked him in the groin, and assaulted his eyes with blasts of “SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.” He slammed his eyes shut and balled his fists, and soon the only thing he could think about was the indoor fireworks as the skin of his eyelids brushed against his corneas.

The mental assault finally ended…just as the Doc started shouting in his ear. It was fitting, then, that as the holos swam into view the first thing they all heard was him screaming “SHUT UP SHUT UP I CAN HEAR YOU” in an odd, milky echo.

Hearing the other salarian’s voice, Spiza sighed inwardly and tried to imagine the scene around him on the day of the attack. As he did so, the scenery flared to life around him – flashes of light erupted, swayed, and began to envelop him as he seemed to rush forward, unimpeded, into a soaring sea of light and color. He should have been nauseous – he seemed to be blazing a trail that included hairpin turns at hundreds of miles an hour – but in his mental world, it felt like he wasn’t moving at all.

His hand flew up and caught a sabre carved from of the words “Oh. Sensory deprivation. I get it now.” and tossed it away.

As his body drifted in the air, Spiza slowly came to realize what the packing-peanut sensation was. It was running water, a cool spray that trickled past his horns and collected at his neck as he clumsily splashed his face from a sink.

The room solidified immediately on that revelation; Spiza found himself, whether outside or in his own mind, staring at his own reflection in the mirror. He was dressed as usual here – or at least what passed for “normal” in the sub-basements of Noltric Dynamics: White labcoat, styluses and datapads stuffed in his pockets, a HUD covering the right side of his face. The HUD had been his own choice, he remembered; a subtle, yet effective way of covering the nervous tic that pulled at the side of his mouth every once in a while. The suit felt odd on him; it felt…intern-y. Untailored. Like it was supposed to fit someone four inches taller than him. He looked down, saw the cuffs he’d hastily hemmed in on the uniform, and remembered that this was basically the case.

Stretching the muscle with a pull of his cheek, he paused and glanced around. The simulation wasn’t perfect; like the Doc said, anything that wasn’t directly in his field of vision was covered in an odd smear that blurred harder the longer “Spiza” looked away from it.

He closed his eyes, concentrating for a moment – not on anything in particular, so he wouldn’t be mentally assaulted – but more…considering the pitch of each word. The air seemed to pause as he did so; time stopped, water froze, air seemed to solidify around himt.


“Right. Like I said earlier,” he said, the words echoing around him. “I was, um. I was on assignment over here. Pretty much what I was doing a year ago, but…with a better setting.”

His mouth twitched; a too-familiar image of dead frogs flashed through his mind. He twitched and shook his head vigorously – he wasn’t going to start talking about Spain unless he had to.

He walked out of the bathroom and into a narrow hallway; the moment “he” walked outside, the bathroom dimmed out of view and the interior of the Sub-Basement came into focus. A great blurred smear covered the top of the building; similarly, other researchers’ faces came into focus and faded as he passed them on his way to one of the catwalks.

”The assignment was simple. Noltric was part of Eternal Spring. Project Eternal Spring was important to everyone. MIRC and STG had – have? - a standing agreement, thanks to Linron’s cock-up during the war. That is, the Union – that’s us – stays out of MIRC’s way, and MIRC helps rebuild the rep we lost in dragging our feet on the War.”

He rounded a corner and walked down sheet-metal staircase, his boots making short sksssh skssh noises as they burshed against the brushed aluminum frame.

”Of course, we can't just do that since we're STG spooks and all. And we were all aware of the SDU breach last year, so we letting them try sabotaging anything on our watch. Thus, Command's been taking all free members – including me – aaand stationing them at different Reconstruction-critical operations throughout the galaxy – like Noltric. Stay quiet, do research, keep an eye out for suspicious activity—“

His hand palmed the Haliat Stiletto hidden under his baggy labcoat.

”—and if something actually happens, take action as necessary.”

It was a marvel of cutting edge science, a fusion of the mental and technological to create a new paradigm and blah blah blah blah blah.

Blah.

Shrelling boring was what it really was, rather impressive really considering he was watching a junior agent of the Special Tasks Group engage in hallucinogenic assisted cross-examination

aka

do valiant battle with the specters of his own (not doubt horribly twisted because really STG who wasn't twisted somehow here) mental landscape

aka

trip harder than a trust fund Maiden on holiday break in Illium.

There was nothing for him to do, nothing to occupy himself with save keeping an eye on operative Spiza's vitals and biological scans to make sure he didn't trip himself into widespread cerebral hemorrhaging. Truth be told, well, brutal truth be told he didn't particularly care about...this. The interrogation/debriefing (who was it who said that the only real difference was which side was asking), the vaunted doctor and his precious toys, he didn't care.

This was all just so much background music. What was done was done, the man cradled inside the mass effect fields has fucked up, Entish was burning (still burning, they'd tried deploying condensate to hem in some of the nastier effects, it hadn't worked), and they were all about to be crushed under the Wheel for it.

He didn't sigh, he'd figured out early on enough that you don't annoy the scientists with a black budget when they've started up their monologues, rather he quietly swapped a screen of medical readouts for another, virtually identical screen and did his job like a good little drone.

"And something actually... happened."

Quiet hostility seemed to radiate from him - like a statue hewn from dry ice.

"As I understand it, we didn't put you there to react." He practically spat that last word out. "You kept an eye out for suspicious activity. At least, you were supposed to. Tell me what you kept your eye on - what the warning signs were."

Meanwhile, the good doctor was ignoring all of this dramatic bibble-babble while he monitored the agent's lifesigns. There was always some kind of drama going on with the black-suit crowd, always something dark, spooky, hushed voices in the black, booga booga booga. Nonsense, really. Honestly, he wouldn't truck with any of this penny-dreadful idiocy if it wasn't for the fact that they were bankrolling his projects with a very, very large bank.

(That reminded him, he needed to check on project Q and project Bezoar by the end of the evening, once he'd calculated up the trajectory of the Moon Asteroid and had a nice, hot cup of tea, oh yes, that would be lovely)

But all this fiddle-faddle was ridiculous. No model salarian he, if secrets be the stuff by which your salarianity was judged. No, let him be merely an individual mind, floating in the cosmos, learning and absorbing what information it could, like... a cosmic amoeba, yes, letting the knowledge seep into his pores and -

"Technician, apply a few tranq patches to his lower back and shoulders - yes, the porous areas, please. We're getting quite a bit of adrenaline spikes, and I don't want him to give himself a heart attack reliving this, yes, that's a good fellow."

Now, where was he? Oh yes. Dinner. Maybe a nice black salad, or mimzo pudding.

“You know what I noticed?” spat back Spiza, his hackles raised. ”I noticed about eight different security holes on my way out of the damn bathroom.”

As if to reflect this, the landscape buzzed and rewound itself, ethereal shapes and shadowy figures buzzing around him as they sped-walked backwards towards the entrance. Everything seemed to white out on him for a split second, and as he opened the door several figures became a little more distinct:

A terminal left open, its owner clearly called away. Just a few meters away from Eternal Spring.

A pair of interns, looking about the same rank he was, avoiding contact as they walked down the hall. No ID badges.

A small convoy of tourists, their features a blur – but tailed by two very distinct krogan bodyguards.

An important-looking Chief of Staff, being waved through instead of following protocol.

“Maybe you didn’t notice when you put me on point, but Noltric wasn’t exactly secure,” Spiza muttered. “Little things. Stupid mistakes. You had a big underground complex, complete with a nice “Authorized Personnel Only” sign at the entrance, but once people trusted you, you were free to make mistakes. People getting lax, giving preferential treatment to VIPs, the sort of stuff no amount of encryption’s going to stop.”

As Spiza rounded the corner and back up the stairs, he spotted a researcher passing a USD off to a second one. No big deal, probably just grabbing his notes…except that they did it while walking straight past one another without a word said between them.

“I made notes about this,” he said. “Stuff even H-K would have corrected while I was there, but I was told not to act on it.”

He glared in the general direction of his interrogator’s voice, toward a murky, half-remembered section of the room.

“Observe, stay quiet, talk only when talked to, don’t blow my cover,” he said, rattling off the instructions berated into him by his handler. “I figured you’d find a way to report it instead. Did you?”

He settled into a fit of biting laughter. More like a rattled bag of razors, really. He peered back at the projection ahead of them, watching perspective sharpen and fade with each glaring insecurity. And very quickly, that laughter died. He leaned back down towards their junior operative, squinting at him.

"Don't take us for idiots. It's a bad habit, Agent. What I did was irrelevant. And we knew Noltric wasn't secure. If we were confident it was, as you seem to think, this song and dance would never have been necessary." He hissed. "But I'm afraid we told you to be a spy, not play I Spy. Nothing in your instruction told you action was strictly forbidden. Everything in your instruction simply told you not to be seen doing it."

He stood up to full height. Not exactly impressive - he wasn't exactly reaching for the stars by anyone's standard. All he was looking for, however, was some weight. Easy enough to achieve when the other party was strapped to a dentist chair.

"I'll play your game, though. And from where I stand - five meters away from a projection of the inside of your brain - there's an almost impressive lack of due diligence in the simple task of observation. You saw eight security holes on your way from the bathroom, yet how many did you actually investigate? Agent Spiza, we could have used anyone to notice how many times Researcher A left his post unattended. We use agents to tell us where and why he keeps going."

For such heated language, his tone remained remarkably measured. Harsh, of course, but still. Rather collected.

"But you've forgotten the question. Let's start here: a USD was passed between two researchers. You clearly noticed." As if to oblige him, the simulator's recollection wound back to meet him. "Was this important? Something must have told you an attack was imminent. I want the immediate warning signs."

Shrell forbid that he didn't notice any.

Had he tried this two years ago, Spiza would have curled into a ball and started begging them not to kill him. Since then, though, he’d had gone through two major galaxy-wide conspiracies, humiliation on public holovision, the death and disappearance of all but maybe two of his only friends left in existence – and, lest anyone forget it for a moment – the entire shrelling Reaper War and the death of his only daughter. By pure accident, the salarian had gone through more horrors than most would go through in a lifetime, and he would be damned if he was going to let this pompous freak get to him.

“Mannovai Eredrae Ytmetto Kerack Qiqiqi Charles,” he said coldly, pointing at the first salarian, then the other, “and Jaeto Syndevon Kenklin Aerusiva Cablin Smeed. Both biological researchers, studied at the same school on Jaeto. Thick as thieves. Got assigned to two different projects, both on human grains – which meant they thought they both could trade info that was confidential to either poject. You know, without ‘proper’ channels.”

“Past” Spiza ducked into a corner as the two of them made their drop-off; the current iteration peered past each other at a third researcher. His own face wasn’t as identifiable as the twins here (the blurred image clearly suggested he never got a good look), but even at this definition it was difficult not to notice the diseased eggshell color of his skin.

“Current” Spiza spoke up again, a calculating look on his unseeing face, as the figure turned and scarpered off.

Charles, of course” – he said, spitting the human name out – “figured out the system first, and had probably been trading with Smeed for a week before I saw them at it. Second time, though, I wasn’t the only one who saw him, and I’m almost certain he was part of Charles’ team. Definitely the last guy he talked to before making other drops, though. Had been planning on finding out who he was that day, when…well, you know.”

When you fucked up up top.

“They? Probably benign. Their team? Definitely not. How, though, I don’t have a friggin’ clue. Something was happening there, but I never got the chance to find out.”

At the very least, it was progress. Names. Angles. Maybe less faces than he'd prefer. Couldn't have everything. You couldn't expect everything. Playing a bizarre jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces and a mosaic you've never seen before was par for the course, really. Were it so simple, they would be having a friendly chat with one Qiqiqi Charles within the next three hours.

The kind that involved black bags.

Of course, that much, like many other things, remained in doubt. Chances weren't even particularly good that he'd lived through Noltric at all. They had to get smarter than that. Always smarter. Already, abuzz with problems. Solutions. More of the former than the latter.

Too much to consider. Too much to think about.

And much to his dismay, a paradox. Always never enough.

"We're skipping ahead," he stated simply - the simulation slowly became indistinct, as if drifting out of focus. "Tell me what happened. You know."

That might have been a joke. Maybe. He broke eye contact with their agent, attention drifting towards the projection once again.

"Tell me what you were doing at the time of the incident. Obviously, you didn't win."

Could hardly even be called Pyrrhic, really.

There was a sudden blare of alarms and electronic warnings from the machines. A digital readout showed the young agent's neural patterns spiking while the salarian began to twitch on the table.

"Confound it!. You can't just skip ahead like that without warning me, director! The brain is a very delicate and sensitive organ! You can't just treat this young agent like a machine! There is no fast-forward button to the brain!"

The doctor roughly pushed aside some technicians and began fiddling with the controls himself, adjusting chemical drips and various esoteric devices as alarms began to beep alarmingly in the background. Slowly, creepingly, the lifesigns for Spiza dropped to normal.

"There. All lifesigns are normal. In the future, director, treat your agents with more gentleness, unless you wish to give them a full-blown embolism! The neural projector was not designed to be used as a mere toy!"

For the Director, the simulation merely shifted out of focus. For Spiza, it was like reality tearing itself in half.

There was no sensory equivalent – this close to the attack, his vision was like that of an oil painting. The director’s intervention was like ripping the canvas in half at the middle, turning the hop half of Spiza’s vision into a screaming terror of researchers pawing futilely at their orfices as a sonic attack shredded their minds to jelly, as the bottom half watched them milling around as normal only half a minute earlier. If anything, the tear – the seam between the two of them, the part Spiza had no choice but to watch, was the worst, as both realities bled into one another, and his mind tried to make sense of the image by combining people from both realities together.

The result was a mindshattering nightmare landscape of researchers shuffling about, heads lolling, bleeding uselessly from side to side, as they walked through a building that pulsated from “normal” to “exploding around them.”

As the world burned around him, as he felt both the pleasant breeze against his skin and the burning explosions following the Attacker’s escape, as his actual body lolled and twitched on the table, some small part of his mind wondered how many people had been killed in this chair.

As the world slowly, ever so slowly “righted” itself, Spiza felt his own body taking heaving, crackling breaths.

“Can we…can we not do that again?” he asked, quietly focusing on the vidscreen that had begun broadcasting the attack “outside” – and, more importantly, a pair of researchers who’d crowded around Eternal Spring in the meantime.

”Getting real…tired…of people trying to drive me 'round the bend.”

Some technicians were pushed; he, on the other hand, had the good sense to just drop what he was doing, clear out of the professor's way, and busy himself cleaning up the scraps from the tranq patches and other miscellaneous debris.

Nobody noticed. Nobody cared.

So nobody really minded if he moved a little slower than normal, if he took his time with disposal and sanitation so that he might study the projection itself at little better.

If there were one perk to being effectively invisible in this lab it was that. Unless he was botching something horrifically he was just a part of the scenery, a background piece. Not important, not worthy of attention. That thought might have stung once upon a time (and let's be honest it still did, his skin wasn't quite that thick) but being a part of this at all made up for it in a way.

The image flexed and the movement of his hands slowed to a near standstill as he watched. Was it macabre to be curious about this?

Probably.

Not that anyone gave a damn what he thought one way or the other.