002: experiments in drowning ☄

[no-hometown.livejournal.com]

[[OOC: Warning for medical torture.]]

[There's the smell of water and metal, and another scent, sharper and acrid: a bitter chemical smell, overlaying everything.

He's been here before. It's the room with the tanks: vats full of water, treated with--he doesn't know what. Some substance. He's the only one in the chamber. It's fully automated. The researchers are somewhere else, watching him on a screen. They learned long ago not to stay in the room with the experiment when it might be distressed.

He is hooked up and bound to a mechanism, something like a mechanical arm, hanging a few feet above the water. He cannot move. He's drugged--enough to be pliant, but not enough to be unconscious. These things happened when he was younger, but he is an adult now. Somehow, it's happening again.

The arm goes down suddenly, without warning, plunging him into the water. It stays down, holding him there. An emotionless, practical drowning. One minute, two minutes, three... He keeps his eyes open. They glow in the dark water.]

Subject heart rate regular ... duration of submersion ... five minutes, three seconds ... brain activity normal, brain waves Beta

fifteen minutes, twenty seconds ... heart rate decreasing ... note presence of Gamma waves

twenty minutes ...

[He breaks all known records. He is the perfect subject, the perfect soldier, their miraculous device. He holds his breath until he can't anymore, then he loses control, loses consciousness. He opens his mouth and the water rushes in, filling his nose and mouth and lungs. That's the idea. To see how long he endures, and then to see how he drowns. How he revives. All but dying, then returning to life. If dying is an art, he does it exceptionally well.

At last, the arm pulls him up. No one comes to help him. His lungs expel the water without assistance, and it runs down over his chin. He starts to breathe again. He regains a hazy kind of consciousness, but he doesn't open his eyes. When he opens his eyes, the arm will go down again.]

Comments

[waterfell.livejournal.com]

[She's wearing a lab coat and a dispassionate expression. His struggles don't seem to move her in the least. Instead, she simply notes down her own observations. She is no longer the girl who would have insisted that science needs more than this chillingly detached treatment, now. Dreams and romance were thrown away years ago.

As it continues, Doctor Mizuno no longer conceals her pleasure. Humans shouldn't be able to do this and yet he is, and even as he passes out, she allows herself a cold smirk of triumph: the experiment is a success yet again, and that phenomenal resistance is subject to her will, trapped for her to watch and observe, to push even further, beyond even more limits.

After her own dreams this month, someone drowning such a short distance away feels like a thrill. She turns to one of the other researchers.]

As expected, the experiment is going beyond our hopes. We should raise our expectations.

[She has even more in mind.]

[no-hometown.livejournal.com]

[The experiment doesn't ever end. He thought it had, but it hadn't. He'd left the lab, but it had kept going. The professor hadn't released him. His years in SOLDIER, his performance as a general--

It had all been part of one long test. Leading up to something, but he doesn't know what.

The professor hadn't let him go. All of SOLDIER is just another experiment. Even Angeal and Genesis were subjects, unbeknownst to them or him. As soon as one test ends, another begins, and how can he break free from the cycle? Is there nothing he can do?

At last, he opens his eyes. He can't keep them closed forever, waiting. He has to face the truth.]

[waterfell.livejournal.com]

[No, the cycle never ends: Beryl who took the shitennou, the shitennou who took a senshi, the senshi who took the minds of her classmates - one and the same with the researcher refusing to let go of Sephiroth. None of them pity their victims, and Sephiroth will come to have no pity for his, either.

The cycle of the experiments doesn't end, either; but before she can give the next orders (in the dream, of course she's the head of the team) she sees his eyes open. She gives the various monitors and their readings a sharp look. He seems too alert.

Well, it doesn't matter. With the opening of his eyes, the arm goes down again. The truth is imprisonment and futility.]

He's very energetic.

[no-hometown.livejournal.com]

[This time, Sephiroth struggles. He should be able to free himself, even bound as he is. He has that power, but something has made him weak. He can't use any of his energy attacks, at least not at the moment, not yet. He finds himself more or less powerless now, because of whatever it is they've done to him.

He can't get free, but he struggles nonetheless, straining against his bonds beneath the water even as he holds his breath and endures the test. His chest aches.

But he is more than human. His body could last a half hour under the water, even longer. It's his mind that rebels, resists, rages.]

[waterfell.livejournal.com]

He has a lot of life left. That's good.

[She seems utterly unconcerned by the fact this could result in some of the researchers being hurt; she has faith in her own power, after all. She seems equally undisturbed by the fact she's watching a human life be treated in this manner.

After all, she's coldly watched the end of a life before: Viluy.]

It won't be my head if he breaks those restraints.

[no-hometown.livejournal.com]

[He will keep his eyes open until he blacks out, though he can't see far in the water. The walls of the tanks are opaque, and being submerged is like being submerged in darkness as well as liquid. He keeps struggling even though it makes everything more difficult, more painful. It would be easier to give in and do as he's trained to do, act as he's expected to act.

It's not all at once that the water begins to heat. It's little by little. They don't bother to warm it for him at all; withstanding the temperature is part of the endurance test, after all. But there is some other factor involved, and the temperature or the water begins to rise, first so slowly that it's only a degree or two, perfectly normal and explainable.

By the time it's five or six degrees warmer, it's become a definite trend.]

[waterfell.livejournal.com]

[It's always easier to give in. No matter how rebellious she still is herself, no matter how much she resents that control over her destiny and her life, that life goes so much more smoothly if she complies, if she focuses on the ways her plans overlap with Kunzite's and she just snaps back I was going to do it anyway instead of I hate orders.

Something doesn't feel right. With her own sense of the Water, she can feel that change even before she looks at the temperature readouts to confirm it. (Is that his own doing? He couldn't be using a fire spell in that tank. How is he doing it?) She notes this down, too, through slightly narrowed eyes, already trying to piece together the puzzle.]