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| [Arthur is standing in the Great Hall of Camelot, the Coronation crown heavy upon his brow.
He doesn't want to be here.
And suddenly he isn't. He's in the middle of lake, sinking...sinking into the murky depths. He looks down and sees his father's lifeless face disappearing into the darkness.
Arthur struggles against the water, it seems more like chains or that quicksand he encountered in the Perilious Lands.
The water is suffocating coming in from every side and somehow...the crown is still on his head. A King's Crown, a king's duties...
Arthur is drowning in them.] |
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| [[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.] |
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| She's a mermaid, slipping through the water even faster than her normal body could do, darting beneath the waves and breathing her element. Her tail, shimmering blue and silver scales, flickers to speed her along. Sapphires adorn her ears and neck. When she surfaces, finally, she rests on a small rock outcropping, and plays her harp.
The music is clear and lovely. When her voice joins it, lilting and enticing, it becomes irresistible. Nothing like it belongs to this world. Ships divert their courses, heading straight for the rocks, heedless and helpless.
The inevitable wreckage causes chaos. Men shout and struggle to keep themselves afloat. A black-haired soldier determined to reach Mercury finally comes close, only for the mermaid to grab him with unnatural strength and drag him beneath the water with her in a grasping and clinging embrace. She laughs coldly, stirring up a cloud of bubbles that entangle themselves in her hair that wavers with the current. She likes luring them to her.
These sailors and soldiers are far from the first. In the background, the remains of several ships pile up against the misty horizon, notably one marked as the SS Senshi.
[ooc: join in the mer-cury's mischief, be drowned or wrecked (or spared if you're a friend!), just swim together, anything goes. can tell me what you'd prefer.] |
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