Chapter IV – Lab Experiment

Harry suddenly awakened to a tight grip around his neck. He inhaled air with a guttural sound, trying to fill his lungs. It felt like his life was being taken away, but he could still breathe. The whole thing felt like a nightmare at first, but the surreal pain made it real. Why? His bulging, frantic eyes stared at the familiar girl before him—Eori, the princess he had seen when he first awakened at Sanbi Castle. A wheezy voice came out of him. “E—o—agh” He choked on his saliva. The pleasure on her face and her smile seemed almost charming, except for the fact that it was her hands squishing the life out of him.

“Argh—we’re doing this again. What’s your name?” Eori, sounding like an interviewer, loosened her grip on Harry’s throat.

The same usual feeling of drinking a gallon of coffee rushed in, getting rid of any grogginess—if he was even sleeping before. Harry felt his adrenaline peak, giving his screaming-in-pain wrists a fighting chance to break free from being forced to support his entire body weight. “WHAT? WHAT DID I DO?” The chains in his hand rustled and banged loudly against the wall as he tried to break free. His hanging feet decided to take action and kicked forward with all the strength he could muster—which wasn’t exactly much.

Eori ignored his feet kicking her thigh and crotch, at least at first. “Fucking stop it!” The more Harry struggled, the more her smile disappeared, leaving behind eyes seething with acute anger. She squeezed Harry’s neck with all her revengeful might, now truly squeezing his life out. She shook it violently, screaming in his face, “ANSWER THE FUCKING QUESTION!”

Harry’s ears ringed as his mind was still trying to flee whatever this whole thing was. However, his body began losing its will to fight as his lungs ran out of oxygen. The urge to breathe was now only growing stronger, feeling something looming on the horizon.

With a heavy sigh, Eori let go of Harry’s neck and adjusted her long purple hair out of her face. Her furrowed brow and serious eyes gazed at him intensely as she tautly stated, “So?”

With a deep breath amidst coughs, Harry felt live breath into his lungs again. “H—Harry.” The words came out of his mouth as soon as he could speak them.

With a displeased smile but still with the same serious gaze, Eori backed away, grabbing an open pinkish journal from the table and perusing through her notes. “Do you remember how you got here?”

Looking around this unfamiliar room, Harry’s eyes couldn’t see any details due to the blurriness of his vision, but he could mentally assume a few things. There was a writing desk to his left, a grinder in the corner, and a plethora of metallic pointy things shining on top of another table between the grinder and jars of macabre stuff stacked in the wall of the other corner. The grinder had the same bluish hues as the one he had seen on the ground floor of the Sanbi castle’s southwest tower. Same for the wall of macabre stuff, but this time it was even more festive in colors, with the jars in the bottom rows being on the redder spectrum, holding who-knows-what inside, while the jars in the upper rows banded in different hues from cyan, magenta, yellow, to black and artful mixes of them. Looking at the table in front of him, he saw a well-illuminated fost lamp as the only light source in the room, and by it, four mixing bowls all looking reddish with some stuff inside he couldn’t quite see. Inside each mixing bowl was something metallic and girthy. Three of these metallic girthy things were filled with the same reddish concoction.

“You fucking mute or what? I don’t have all day!” Eori picked a dirty knife from the same table and pointed towards Harry.

Even though the knife was blurry in his eyes, he knew what it was and what would happen. However, the memory Eori just requested was kinda malformed in his brain. Even other memories were kinda in an odd state too, as if they were all behind closed doors, and he had to find them one by one—like that unknown weird feeling of self-discovery first thing in the morning, right after a night of heavy drinking where you don’t even know your name or where you are for a split second. With the anxious feeling inside him now frantically searching for his memories, pieces of his day began to surface again. “I-I—left Sanbi Castle with Sinoi?”

“What else? What’s the last thing you remember?” Eori’s interviewer mood kicked into high gear again.

Harry could remember vividly getting into the carriage and things here and there, like when he saw the kids playing some sort of duel at some point. “I—thought I was going to pass by The Dead Wozen?” Harry’s memories were murkier after that point. “Wait—I did pass by it!” A single fuzzy moment came to mind, and it was seeing all the villagers happily dancing away. “Something bad happened after I saw the villagers all happy and dancing.” His eyes grew moist, while everything else afterward seemed blanked in a fog of war of agony, terror with loneliness sprinkled for added taste. “Please, just let me go! I didn—”

“SHUT UP!” Eori’s scream echoed in the room as she stomped towards a cabinet under the stairs, opening and taking out a crossbow.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Harry recoiled, grinning his teeth as he saw Eori putting a long, skinny wood thing into the other T-shaped thing she was holding. His blurry eyes couldn’t quite figure it out.

Eori pointed the armed crossbow at Harry, making an odd short double high-pitched call with her mouth before firing it off, making a sharp metallic bang on wood echo in the room.

Harry closed his eyes and curled up his body as the memories of what had happened poured in. His heart began racing so loudly, he could feel it pounding on the back of his head like he had a migraine. In the darkness of his vision, he could feel glimpses of being in a dark forest, running away from those same exact noises. The imminence of death and despair played with his heart as he could nearly feel an arrow stuck in his trachea while the warm blood poured down his throat, warming his chest as if he had a warm, cozy blanket resting on him. He gasped as he opened his eyes, trying to escape that feeling. He saw Eori putting the bow away, and with short, shallow breaths, he looked down at his own body. The arrow was snapped in pieces, lying on the floor to his left—probably after hitting the same hard wall Harry was chained to.

“And now?” A scientific glint emerged in Eori’s eyes as the same vicious smile began rising on her face.

“My throat—I—someone—killed me—” Harry spoke those words as he felt the agonizing terror and ensuing peaceful bliss at the same time—the dichotomy of those two feelings seemed to be washing away each other, leaving Harry with just the anxiety sense that he had to do something, but no idea what it was.

“Dammit—which variant of thirty-seven I used that day?” Eori spoke under her breath, rapidly flipping through the pages in her girly pink journal.

“It was you! YOU KILLED ME!” Harry’s mind unlocked what Eori said right before she killed him. He tried to break away again, but the chains around his wrists hanging him high from the ground made it impossible. “WHY?”

“I SAID SHUT THE FUCK UP!” She bashed the journal in her hand against one of the mixing bowls towards Harry, making it fall on the ground with a big wet slop sound, while the metallic bowl kept ringing against the hard floor until it stopped kicking around. Eori looked at her mess, sighing heavily. “You know? Fuck it. Let’s go to the next variant in the queue.” She picked up a massive syringe from a bowl and approached Harry with it in full display.

Syringe? Harry dropped his jaw at the sight of the behemoth thing in her hand. The needle girth alone was likely twice or three times the ones used for blood donations. A person prone to white coat hypertension would for sure have an anaphylactic shock if they saw a doctor holding that thing. Harry felt his veins scream in terror as his body clutched, preparing himself for the worst. His neck suddenly felt like it was pinched—like a phantom-pain type of pinching you feel right before you get a vaccine.

With a vicious smile, Eori seemed to grow optimistic again, even appearing to ignore the mess she created. She precisely squeezed the syringe, letting just a bit of the reddish concoction out of the tip of the needle.

Like a sun piercing through the clouds, that nearly macabre-looking smile pierced through Harry’s foggier recent memories, bringing a bright, clear vision to his mind. “That night! It was you! But—but why?” Eori’s unique, overly pronounced ear-to-ear grin in front of him was the exact same as the one appearing on that amalgamation of bodies burned in his murky memories. Harry could now vividly see her girly naked figure on top of him as well. Her long purple hair, perky breasts, tantalizing nipples, and smooth-as-a-bald-man privates shone in the greenish moonlight as she sat on his face no longer felt like a hallucination.

Eori shoved what appeared to be a third of the needle deep into Harry’s belly button. Her vicious smile grew even more assertive, reddening in the face as she bit her lips. “What did I do to you, then?”

A piercing cold pain invaded Harry’s belly, irradiating through his body as the sensation of something stuck deep inside him kept calling for his attention. “Ahhhh!” He screamed in pain while the cold sensation from the metal syringe quickly began to wane, allowing another sensation to be felt instead; a warm liquid seemed to emerge from within his belly button, tickling his skin as it gravitated down his legs. Looking down, Harry saw blood trickle out of his belly button, covering the massive syringe stuck there. He groaned as he tried to speak out loud, “Ahhh—Y—you sat—my face! Urgh!”

Eori slowly pushed the syringe further in; her eyes had a mix of pleasure and scientific glint as they took mental notes of his reaction. “Really? If black market Mind Enabler can be that shit, then I can do better—”

With another grunt as his inner organs begged for mercy, Harry’s brain went blank as a surging wave of cold sweat hit him, making him look pale. “What—what—do you—want from me?”

Eori squeezed the syringe dry with constant pressure, slowly letting the red liquid deep into Harry’s body before taking it out and placing it back on the table, farther away from the mixing bowls—possibly preventing cross-contamination.

Meanwhile, the cold liquid deposited deep inside him felt like it had sand on it, hurting his insides if he moved slightly, even if he was taking a deeper breath. Unlike that night, he didn’t feel his senses tingling. He didn’t seem to be feeling anything—at least not at first. Maybe, just maybe, there was something different—like that odd feeling where you don’t know if you are high or not right after inhaling something of dubious quality.

Her sense of pleasure still coursed through her face as she grabbed a scalpel and approached Harry. She held him by the throat with one hand while the other ran the scalpel down his chest, making a thin superficial cut. “Do you feel this?” Eori asked, looking at the blood pooling on his chest wound, releasing the grip on his neck.

Harry looked down and had a jerking reaction. Somehow seeing that there wasn’t a massive syringe poking his belly button, and it wasn’t bleeding either, just felt incredibly weird—as if it was still there even though he saw Eori putting the syringe back on the table. His brain jolted again, now telling him his chest was being cut apart even though his eyes saw it had already happened. “Why? Why—” Harry froze with his mouth open for a few seconds. “Eori? Please! I didn’t do anything!” His droopy voice spoke pleadingly, with the scalpel pain kicking in, bothering him like a paper cut.

Eori grabbed Harry by the neck, holding it firmly in place, and banged his head against the wall. “STOP IT!” She glanced over the scalpel injury on Harry’s torso, finishing healing by itself, then she slid the scalpel on Harry’s stomach, making a deeper cut. “Let this be your fucking lesson.”

Without a flinch, Harry felt one of Eori’s hands move towards his throat while the other did something he couldn’t see. “M—my head hurts—”

“What else?” Eori’s voice sounded feminine, but the probing tone sounded like a yandere girl suspecting her boyfriend was cheating.

“My chest—” Harry shut himself up, now feeling a tight grip on his throat. He really wanted to move his hand to scratch his chest; his brain told his hand so, but it didn’t move or even flinch.

Eori backed off and watched over Harry as she held her bloodied scalpel. Her proud smile looked almost as if she knew what would happen.

Looking down, the same jolting feeling appeared as his brain tried to cope with an apparent dissonant reality; his torso was healed while his gut was sliced open vertically. His innards poked through the wound, curiously wanting to plop out. However, he only still felt his chest being itchy—it was like he was in VR watching somebody else’s body being messed with.

“Dammit! Now he had to go and shit himself too!” Eori’s grating voice slowly echoed through Harry’s brain. “Mixing Time Slower was fucking stupid.”

Wait—is this me? His voice slowly developed in his head as the pain of his guts and blood pouring out of his belly kicked in, but no scream came out of his mouth. Even moving his eyes didn’t seem actually to do anything. His ears were now picking up a bunch of jumbled noises that sounded deeper and deeper coming from Eori as if everything was progressively grinding to a halt.

Harry froze in space and time—at least, that’s what it felt like. His mind was still full of thoughts, sensations, and worries, but he couldn’t process them. It felt like he had taken a massive hit from a dank bog, getting so unbelievably baked from the real sticky-icky-icky that his mind could only say Bruh.

Opening his eyes slowly, Harry regained the sense of who he was; his name came back to him as if it had been on the tip of his tongue for a while. The basement’s cold, slightly stale air smelled like piss, and the only light source in the room was slowly dying—just like him on the inside. Harry’s back felt the moist cold wall, while his shoulders and arms felt nothing but a constant numbness. Using what was left of his willpower, he moved his heavy head up to look around the room. The blurriness of his vision after an arm’s length was still there, and even though it was kinda dark, he could tell exactly where he was but not how he got there. Wait—how long have I even been here?

Memories poured in, all blurred with one another, with some blurrier than others, while some were somewhat vivid, with a few even feeling psychedelic. However, all these memories shared core similarities—he was always in the same spot, seeing an amalgamation of bodies converging to the same purple-haired girl experimenting on him. He kept seeing her injecting stuff into him, abusing him, and sometimes even slicing him open. He couldn’t figure out the order of it and what she was saying in the memories, but he could still feel the associated pain and what appeared to be either a vicious grin or an attentive seriousness. Not even a single tear came out of him; he felt too tired to even sob his heart out in this dark lonely basement. I just want to go home.

The muscles in his neck began to cave under the weight of his head, making it fall forward. Harry wet his dried lips, holding back his growling stomach as the thought of the food he had at Sanbi Castle came to mind. Harry could almost taste the purple-meat sausage on his dry, raspy tongue; the burst of chicken flavor, specifically from dark meat mixed with bone marrow, made him salivate a slaty sliver of thicker spit. His stomach rumbled even more when he remembered that the fat within the sausage balanced the other spices out to create this smooth meaty goodness palate.

He then saw Eiri’s face in his memories, specifically when Eiri explained what the role of Sanbi-eye would be. Plus, you could think of it as having a stable job for the next thirty-nine years, just traveling around the countryside in a peaceful job which does have its own charms. Eiri’s voice echoed in Harry’s mind as the realness of his current situation was getting way too fucking real. Was Eiri lying all along? She did not help me during dinner when Neferteri gave the contract, so maybe it was all a lie? Then is the story about me being from the slums even true? Harry let out a long, pained breath—I don’t know anymore. Maybe everything is a lie, including the stuff about Itagiba asking whoever it was to create a fake skin that matched what Maiara wanted. Harry moved his tired eyeballs towards the stairs leading up somewhere unknown. If only I could escape—but where would I go? I don’t know where I am; I don’t know anyone; and I guess I can’t trust anyone either, even Hiromi—

Crackling steps in the stairs gave Harry a familiar signal, bringing an anguished feeling with it. He felt his heart wanting to race again, but it was sluggish to do so, beating arrhythmic instead as he saw a familiar girly body dressed in pajamas walking downstairs, eating a sandwich. Wait—that’s Eori! Harry could now see clearly the face of the girl with purple hair experimenting on him, unlocking all other related memories and feelings too. The feelings themselves were so many and so intense that one would go crazy trying to process it all—maybe Harry somehow didn’t go crazy because he was too weak to feel anything thoroughly.

Meanwhile, Eori’s hands were full. One hand carried a tantalizing half-bitten sandwich that had red and purple meat contrasting the hearty amount of leafy greens. On the other, it was a mug with a blackish liquid. She finished the sandwich as she approached Harry and lifted the mug towards his mouth.

Without saying a word, Harry opened his mouth and tilted his weighty head back like a baby bird in a nest. The blackish liquid tasted of black honey, mostly diluted in water. There were still clumps of it; some had to be pieces of honeycomb that nearly choked him as they slumped down his throat. The diabetic, nauseating taste was not there this time—maybe Eori had done something to it, or perhaps it was the only thing Harry had eaten or drunk in a while. “Thank—you—” The words quietly slumped out of his mouth.

Placing the mug on the table, Eori seemed keen to observe Harry’s frail body, paying close attention to his face. “Who are you?”

“Harry—” Even the sound coming out of Harry’s mouth sounded half-dead as he felt a warmth tickling his esophagus and down into his belly.

“Look at me.” Eori held Harry’s chin with her hand. “And who am I?”

Looking face-to-face at this beautiful pink-eyed girl with long, voluptuous purple hair dressed in comfortable, cute pajamas, Harry knew who she was, so he spoke up, and this time his voice not sounding as dead, “Eori.” He averted his gaze from her pretty pinkish irises as an energetic feeling radiated from his stomach into his body.

“Eiri?” Eori asked point-blank. “Look at me!”

“Yes.” He remained looking at her with a visible frown and droopy eyes that seemed to be just about to break into tears. “I’m sorry—but I still remember everything. Please—please, Eori! Make me forget! Ple—”

Eori threw the empty mug on the wall across from Harry, making a loud bang that sounded like a shotgun had gone off. “FUCK OFF! YOU’RE THE ONE WHO’S SUPPOSED TO MAKE THIS SHIT EASIER! I’m not getting any results, and now I have to fucking babysit you too!” She then took what appeared to be a salt shaker and shook it into the fost lamp, bringing it back to life and brightening up the room. “Don’t you fucking dare!” With a sneer plastered on her face, she slumped forward by Harry and picked up the wooden bucket that smelled strongly of piss. With a large groan, she strained her face and lifted the bucket towards the sink. Removing the stopper from the sink, she dumped the piss down the drain and doused vinegar into both to curb the piss stench. Placing the empty bucket back where it was, she added the end tube of Harry’s pee cup back into it. “Don’t you fucking dare shit on me again!”

With his sphincter tightening up, Harry did all he could to prevent that. Although, not like he had anything on the tank either—a benefit of a diet consisting of nothing but black honey. His eyes were bothered by the brighter light, but he kept on silently trying to follow along with what Eori was doing, now seeing her gruntle as she struggled to remove what appeared to be a barrel from underneath the sink, put a cork on the top hole, then continually scratch it on the floor as she kept pushing it closer to the stairs.

“Argh—why the fuck didn’t Mom tell me I had to do all this shit too!” Eori kicked the barrel against the wall near the stairs, then proceeded to place a new empty barrel underneath the sink. “I’M SO FUCKING DONE!” She carefully washed her hand by sliding up the handle of a barrel above the sink—even cleaning in between the fingers and the wrist, too, like she were trying to avoid the plague or the next hot pandemic. Only a trickle of water came out from the handle rather than an angry gush. With sweat forming on her forehead, she gleaned back at Harry’s feeble gaze. “What the fuck do you want? I’m busy.”

“I’m sorry—” Diverting his eyes from the purple-haired girl in pajamas, Harry clenched his mouth shut, afraid of anything else slipping out and making things worse.

Harry glanced again through the familiar basement and its eerie scientific vibes. Even though anything farther away than an arm’s length was still blurrier than the pixelated privates of a JAV, he could still infer enough details to know there was no way out—except the stairs. His arms usually screamed in pain at him, but lately, it seemed they were growing accustomed to their new position above his head—or perhaps it was a lingering effect of whatever concoctions Eori injected. Harry had no idea anymore, and neither did his dangling feet. They tried everything, from trying to use the table in front of them as support to get his hands free to simply just kicking Eori in her cunt as hard as possible. However, all he ever gained from disobeying was getting slapped, punched, kicked back, strangled, and sometimes the temporary sweet relief of death when Eori would slice him up. He glanced silently towards Eori, his mind ran out of any further defense attempts, or possible plans—or simply gave up. Hard to tell at this point.

Eori, meanwhile, was busy writing away at her desk. Her hands moved precisely, not lifting the winga feather from the page as the continuous line zigzagged, forming letters, each having its own invisible boxy boundaries. These boxes were then connected to create words like cursive handwriting, with all letters, including space, combining into one another at half-height instead. Reaching the right end of the page, she would dip the feather in more ink by pure muscle memory and continue writing in the line below at the same speed. By her, four macabre-looking jars contained quite the selection: one brownish with chunks of something stalky; two reddish ones appeared closer to arterial blood in color, with one having a fleshy, stringy thing while the other looked like whiskers; and the fourth one was filled with a darker blood-red fluid, rather close to venous blood. A clean mixing bowl and a single empty nari gel glass were also by her side, all waiting for Eori to concoct another experiment.

Eori laid the winga feather to rest, then curled her hair with her finger. “What colors did the dice land in the duel with Maiara?”

“Sorry—but I don’t—” The memory of that moment in the duel unlocked in his mind, growing vivid. Though exact details were vague, he could still hear the big metal-colored dice banging on the ground as the crowd eagerly awaited the results. “—something with white, blue—red too? Maiara did go on the first turn—I went on the second, before—”

“Before what?” Eori checked for split ends on her hair, taking glances at Harry.

He saw a clear vision of the enchanting crowd roaring as he tried to drive the knife into Maiara’s belly while his body barely held it together, only to see a flash of her legs coming rushing to his neck, sharply ending it all. “Before Maiara kicked me and—I died,” Harry spoke quietly as a sinking feeling came stronger in his chest.

“What about before you woke up? Do you remember anything new you haven’t told Eiri before?” Eori continued to play with her purple hair. “Any names? places?”

“I-I—don’t think so.” Harry glanced back at Eori. Crossing gazes with her attentive pinkish eyes staring him down. Wait—did Eiri tell Eori everything too? So they were working together! Feeling a void filling in his heart, he opened his mouth to just spill everything out—like a dying corpse soiling itself, “I still have these feelings that some things just don’t feel normal—like I thought they would look different—like that sink. I don’t think I’ve ever seen barrels used like that.” Harry squinted, trying to capture additional details of the sink’s appearance. “I don’t feel like I belong here—I’m sorry, but I just want to go home.”

Eori jotted down something in the journal, sighing heavily as she softly chewed the winga feather. She seemed lost in thought for a mere moment, at least until she threw the feather on the table and blurted out, “You know what? Fuck it! I give up on thirty-seven.” She waved the journal to let the ink dry, then closed and shoved it on the smaller bookcase hanging on the wall above her.

Harry felt a jolt of energy coursing his insides, seeing the vicious grin forming on Eori as she grabbed the jars by her and walked to the macabre corner to store them away. The sinking feeling became a subdued terror as he saw Eori grab what appeared to be a short blade on her way back. His innards told him to run away, but his numbed hands, limping feet, and tired mind didn’t seem to want to partake in that rodeo of trying to escape again. “Please—can you not make it hurt so much?” He blurted out quietly.

“Nope!” Eori’s vicious grin was now forming from ear to ear, picking up the mixing bowl and laying it down at the bottom of his feet. “It will taint the nari gel!”

Nari gel? An agonizing pain struck Harry, seeing a scoop-sized chunk of meat and skin being flayed off his left triceps. Blood pooled from the wound and dripped down his armpit. In his mind, he saw Eori bursting into anger, making it far more painful if he fought back. “ARGH!” He contained the scream that slipped out his mouth to a loud grunt escaping his nose. He clenched his jaw tightly, nearly breaking his own teeth.

Eori dropped the scoop-sized hunk of meat into the mixing bowl below with a wet plop sound. With a massive grin from eye to eye, she began taking scoops of meat from the other arm, from the belly, and legs—her eyes seemed to concentrate on making equal-sized cuts. “You’re making it go quick and easy this time—good!” She then flayed a perfect slice of Harry’s chest as if she had skinned plenty of animals before in her lifetime.

Harry felt surges of pain and adrenaline run down his spine, his body uncontrollably trembling. A hot sweat began surfacing on his skin alongside the blood pouring from the multiple wounds. “AHHHHH!” A scream came out from Harry, feeling a deep pain strike his privates. Tears ran down his face as his hands shook the chains violently. He wanted to see what Eori was doing, but his head didn’t muster the courage to look down. He felt like his innards were plopping out through a gaping hole where his dick used to be—at least it felt like that.

“Don’t move!” Eori muffled Harry’s scream by holding her hand over his mouth, then tore off smaller slices of his face, from the cheeks to forehead, then a bundle of hair while she was at it. “Open your eyes!”

The pain all over Harry’s body began to equalize into a kind of generalized numb unwellness. His ear heard Eori’s request, but his eyes clenched further, disobeying her demand and his pleading brain. His body suddenly shook violently in despair as the would-be pain he felt in his eyes became real when the blade forced itself into his eye socket, violating it forcefully.

Eori attempted to carve out his right eyeball; the blade was going deep in his eyesocket, ready to scoop out his eye. “Dammit! I popped it!” Eori shoved Harry’s head forward, shoving her fingers inside his eye socket. “I told you to open it! But no! You had to fucking disobey!” Her tone grew snappier.

Harry felt a piercing pressure pain deep in his head as Eori fingers raped his eye socket. Next was an acute, pinching pressure that rocketed itself from the socket and deeper into his brain. His other eye opened, and he saw his own deflated eyeball in Eori’s hand with a stringy white thing in her hand. His body shivered as the ambient cold air was seeping into his brain. The abusive pain, terror, and shock began to morph into warmth and numbness he felt over the rest of his body. Harry could feel the sweet relief of death approaching him once again, letting him escape away from this miserable room.

“Don’t die on me yet.” Eori was washing her hands in the sink.

Harry heard Eori’s words echo in his head, sounding like she was further away as his blurry eyes grew even blurrier. Wanna—go—home. He could nearly feel his soul detaching from his body, leaving this shitty physical realm behind.

From clouding darkness enveloping his senses, Harry felt a touch of a soft palm on his skinless chest. A burning, itchy sensation came into his flayed flesh as his left eye saw Eori unclenching her fingers, scraping her nails in his flesh, firmly holding her palm against his chest.

The five white soul flame rings in her forearm, with the smallest one near her wrists, and the four balls of red double helices strand zipping around Eori’s forearm clashed ahead, fusing into her palm, then into Harry.

Harry felt a hot-bothered itching deep in his chest exploding through his body. The sensation started accumulating and grew more intense in his wounds. His right eye itched so much that he would rather have it scooped out again than deal with it. The sweet relief of death unbinding him from this plane seemed to be reversed—he felt as if he was no longer sinking in an ocean of darkness, but rather a force was pulling him towards the bright surface even though he didn’t want to.

“Open your mouth!” Eori said as she shoved a hefty dose of black honey down his gullet, nearly feeding him the same way farmers do to geese to fatten them up for some deliciously buttery rich foie gras.

Feeling his mouth violated by a large spoon, Harry’s throat demanded a gag in response.

“DON’T FUCKING PUKE ON ME!” Eori pushed Harry’s head out of her way.

A mixture of gag, cough, and breath all kept trying to happen simultaneously, but there was only one pipe to share all of those actions—a classical race condition. Despite wanting to breathe, Harry felt like his only action was to hold in the urge to breathe and swallow this diabetes-inducing sloppy grainy, thick paste with a big forceful gulp.

“There’s more!” Eori shoved another spoonful down Harry’s throat with one hand, but this time not as forcefully rapey.

Taking a deep breath after another huge gulp, Harry felt a warm, fuzzy feeling in his esophagus slowly running down towards his stomach. This feeling began to spread in his innards, radiating through his body, somehow making his wounds feel even more itching and hot. He flinched and squirmed around like a coked-out addict wanting his fix. His head kept swinging around while his tied arms and legs twitched, trying to escape this horrible torture akin to being tied down and furiously tickled by hundreds of feathers. His mind would do anything and give up everything to make it stop—even a chance to escape this basement if it came to it.

“Stop freaking out. You’re just making the Body Heal take longer.” Eori said, grabbing the bowl with meat scoops and blood from beneath Harry. She placed it on the table, grabbed a cutting board with an ultra-sharp knife, and carefully sliced the blood-soaked meat into thin strips—like she was trying to make fajitas.

With his left eye, Harry saw her carefully slice the scoops of his carved flesh as if he had just placed a special order to the butcher, and he was standing there, waiting for it while thinking of what to cook for sides to pair up with his mouthwatering meat. IT HURTS! Harry meandering hyperphantasia of a summer cookout was hindered by what he felt like a rat was let loose inside his right eye socket, trying to scratch its way out. He felt a moistness develop in the area as a sharp, throbbing, shocking pain made him want to shriek like a rageful primate. He felt his lungs filling up and his vocal cords ready to scream until they tore up, but at the last second, his mind held back that urge with another internal guttural scream that half-escaped through his nose. The thought of Eori flipping her shit and making his pain worse was more than enough to force him to contain it all back.

Eori continued slicing Harry’s meat, including one that looked rather spongy and phallic. They all fell prey to the knife without exception. In between precisely cutting chunks of meat, Eori glanced towards Harry, seeing him tightly clenching his entire face, screaming more through his nose as his flesh healed up in mere seconds. With a crisp nod and a developing vicious smile, her lips began forming words, “Not bad.”

Harry’s right eye began to emerge from the darkness within his eye socket, feeling tender—like when you get sand in your eyes. In his vision, he saw a shower of stars that was so bright it looked like he was staring at fireworks blowing up in front of his face. He tilted his head back as the feeling grew more intense, right before his center vision began returning to him, expanding outwards to bring his peripheral vision back on line. During that healing process, he could see it clear as day for a few seconds as his right eye grew—just enough to see Eori slicing open one of his testicles. Immediately looking down at his wounds, his brain assumed the worst, but they were all gone, and his lower, floppier member was there again, still growing. Only blood remnants dirtying his skin were proof that it all had happened. With a heavy sigh, he spoke with a brittle quiet tone, “I’m sorry! Please—just let me—just let me die!” A handful of salty tears came running down his face. “I’M SORRY!” A sobbing arose from deep within, but not many tears came out.

Eori didn’t flinch. She focused on finishing slicing the chunks of Harry’s meat and adding them all into the mixing bowl. She washed her hands, grabbed a scoop of ground nari stone, a bluish grounded crystal, and added it to the mixing bowl. “Don’t you know how I made the Fake Eye that Eiri gave you?” Grabbing a large wooden spoon, she began to mix it up with vigor, adding a bit of vinegar to the mix.

In Harry’s memories, it felt like it was yesterday that Eiri was being playful with him, trying to make him swallow that grotesque concoction to fix his eyeballs. His sobbing slowed down to a sniff; his tearful tone could only reply, “I—I guess no?”

Continuing mixing while carefully checking the texture of the macabre slurp, Eori replied without looking at him, “It was someone’s eyeballs. They sold it to a harvester, the soul energy department bought it, and I used to make a Fake Eye for you.” She added a bit more grounded-up nari stone, bringing the concoction to a jelly-like texture.

“So—so—you’re a harvester?” Harry spoke inwards, his body almost flinching, expecting Eori to flip her shit and throw a glass bottle at him for his supposed probing questions.

With sulking lips, Eori now started to portion the jelly into glass containers, carefully letting equal amounts of Harry’s meat into each nari gel jar. “Fucking retarded!” She stated in a somewhat aggressive tone, corking one portion of the nari gel with a loud hand stomp on the cork, then holding it up towards Harry. “I’m a fucking scientist! You’re my Soreno to experiment on! What you see is the final product.”

Something clicked in Harry’s brain; looking at the nari gel of his own flesh, he said, “Wait—are you selling me? Like—people to look like me?” With a gasp, he continued, raising his voice, “Is this how I am repaying my debt? But—”

“No, fuckwad!” Eori’s tone began to sound angrier as she finished corking three more nari gels. With the leftovers in the bowl not appearing enough to fill another nari gel, she grabbed a spoon and started scarfing it down into her mouth like a starving dog. Curling up her toes, she looked like she was holding her breath to swallow the whole thing down as quickly as possible. Banging the empty bowl back on the table, she wiped her mouth with a small towel. She then held herself on the table’s edge, grimacing towards Harry, her teeth dirty with red gel. She looked like she gagged, but it was probably a wet burp instead. She kept holding herself against the table as her body involuntarily twitched uncomfortably. A feminine grunt coming out of her began with her feminine voice but ended in a masculine voice, sounding pretty spot-on to Harry’s voice.

With an open mouth, Harry could not believe what his eyes were seeing; Eori’s clenched face and fists held back what had to be immense pain. She tilted her head back while her bloodshot eyes looked like someone let hungry rats trample through her insides. Ow fuck—is that? Harry saw Eori transforming into a copy of himself right before his eyes—he couldn’t see every detail of it, but she was undoubtedly turning into himself. The bone-crunching noises coming from her body sounded like a chiro was adjusting every bone at once. The flesh visibly moved beneath her skin as her hair turned black from the follicles in her scalp and down its length. Why is she doing that? Harry nearly felt like he was the one in pain, seeing a near-identical copy of himself reeve in agony—the only difference now being her long black hair.

“As expected,” Eori said, but her, or perhaps his, voice sounded like Harry’s. “So what does looking at yourself feel like?”

“I—” Harry watched Eori undress, leaving her pajamaes on the floor below, revealing the rest of her, or technically speaking, his body manliness—or lack thereof as he for sure wasn’t the prime example of sexual appeal. Harry’s eyes were drawn to an identical version of his manly bits. The weirdness of the situation seemed just out of this world. “I—ahhh—not—sure?” He gulped, seeing how Eori’s face was exactly like his; apparently, even the shitty eyes as well—based on how much they squinted at each other.

With the usual vicious grin, Eori, or rather long-haired Harry, came closer to Harry with a rather feminine hip swinging and rubbed her manly finger up and down on his chest. “Your eyes suck!” A vicious girly laugh came out in a masculine voice.

They are now talking with a fake you. Eori’s voice from before surfaced in Harry’s mind, making a chill run down his bones. “This is for the fake me!”

“You’re not that much of a retard after all! Eiri, Sora, Aurora, and even Itagiba think you’re still out there, wasting the kingdom’s resources with the Sanbi-eye role. Meanwhile, I’m simply putting you to better use.” Eori went back to her clothing on the floor, bending forward to grab it, showing Harry a view of her, or rather his, butthole—looking like it was done on purpose.

Looking at it by accident, Harry’s mind went blank, and his face expressionless. He closed his eyes tightly, but the blurry image of his own butthole winking at him was burned in his retina and now in his memories.

A cackle sounded in the room. “How did that feel?” Long-haired Harry placed her girly pajamas in front of her, hiding her manly looking nipples.

With his eyes still tightly shut and his head trying to disappear into his neck, Harry just responded with a dissonant hum—the winking butthole still corrupted his imagination.

Eori scratched a chair on the bare floor, bringing it towards Harry. She then stood on it.

Harry felt the long-hair version of himself getting awfully close to him; he could nearly feel and smell her manly bits about to touch his face. He clenched himself even more, waiting for the worst, but then he felt something happening to one of his wrists. A clacking sound followed by his numb left arm falling limp by his side made a sharp pain go up his shoulder. The other arm now held his entire weight, dislocating it from his shoulder. With another clack, his body was released, and he crashed onto the ground like a disembodied ragdoll. A prickling sensation took over his hands, going up to his forearms, while his shoulders and back felt tender and weak.

“Don’t move!” Eori got down from the chair and picked up a new set of chains from the closet below the stairs.

The cold, damp floor felt like he was in a five-star hotel bed. He could have taken a nap right then and there, but he saw Eori approach with shackles in hand. In his mind, he saw an opportunity to stand up and take off running, but his feeble body didn’t respond. Instead, his body went ahead and moved his hands towards her before his brain had the time to think of anything else.

Eori placed chains on both Harry’s hands and feet. With her manly bits still flapping, she walked back to another one of the closets beneath the stairs and took out a mop. “Clean this shit up!”

After cleaning the basement with Eori, with him doing all the grunt work, she brought him to where he was now. He looked in front of him, towards the slanted walls of an unknown bathroom, on the second floor of a house he had never seen before. In his peripheral vision, he could see manly bits hanging. Looking down at his own, it looked like a clone, as even the right-slant crook was there too. In his lap, his arms rested with pieces of hair and dried blood dirtying his skin, while his wrists were shackled by a robust chain that was tight but not too tight as to hurt him. His feet also suffered the same fate, ensuring he wouldn’t get far if he were to escape. I guess at least I’m no longer hanging from the wall?

Eori pulled his head back and continued scrapping a very sharp razor on his skin, giving him a clean, precise shave despite squinting her eyes.

In Harry’s mind, a fear of that razor gouging his neck kept him silent. I guess all I can do now is not piss her off.

Eori seemingly stopped shaving Harry’s beard. Her eyes surveyed his body with a specific scientific glint in them. “Were you always this hairy?”

Harry looked at his kinda hairy arms. “Not—sure? I was fatter—that I remember.” With a frank tone, Harry glanced at Eori, but all he saw was a near mirror image of himself looking down on him, except she was clearly hairless compared to him.

Eori stroked Harry’s eyebrow, then hers, perhaps measuring density. She then looked at her hairless chest, arms, and legs. Raising Harry’s arms without asking, she carefully analyzed his armpit hair against hers. “Something is off. I will investigate more after dinner.” Eori kept on shaving Harry. “Your neck beard is shit, just like the fat pricks from Tolerideme.”

The memory of flesh being scooped out of him came back to mind, and with it, the pain. He remained silent as his body tensed up. Suddenly, Arukia came to his mind. Maybe I am from Tolerideme? She did say I reminded her of them!

Finishing shaving the last spot of his beard, Eori walked over to the sink to clean the razor, sliding up the handle attached to a barrel by the sink to let out a trickle of water—just like the one from the basement. She pulled a sigil ring from the mirrored cabinet above the sink and chucked it towards Harry. “Fill the bathtub!”

Harry reacted poorly, letting the sigil ring fall on the floor near his feet. Picking it up, he saw a familiar two-finger hole on the back and a large plaque in front, but the logograms on the plaque looked different; one was four stacked horizontally curved lines, while the other was a plus sign. This is not Body Restore—something plus? Wait! Water Create? Harry saw the writing on the back plate. Ohhhh. I get it now. Remembering how Eiri used Body Restore to heal him, he wore the ring on his right middle and ring fingers, then with the same hand, he tried to clench the fingers while leaving the palm exposed. Wait—is that right?

With a shallow laugh, Eori stood there, watching Harry play with his hands like a school kid who watched far too much shonen. “Are you that stupid? You tap the sigil ring on the other palm while laying the fingers flat, then clench the fingers to start the spell.”

Doing so, Harry managed to follow what Eori said, but nothing happened. The five rings and the fire going up the arm were not there at all—he basically looked just like any other weeb making ADHD-fueled obnoxious hand gestures.

“Try again!” Eori came closer, crossed her arms, tapping her feet, carefully watching over Harry. A slightly annoyed frown began turning into a suspicious squint, then a slightly vicious smile formed.

“I’m sorry—I’m sorry!” Harry said in a trembling tone, unable to even look at long-haired Harry as he began expecting the worst to happen next.

“That’s fine,” Eori said in a severe manly tone, pulling the sigil ring from his hand, wearing it on her right hand, and starting the spell flawlessly in her left hand, making a trail of ghastly harmless white fire emerge from her middle and ring fingers, and rush up her arm, in a vein-like pattern, towards her back. Afterward, five circles of white fire popped into existence around her left arm—surging from the white fire in her forearm. Eori turned her left palm towards Harry. “Now try to feed.”

“Sorry, but how?” Harry felt her hand was on the cusp of slapping some sense into him instead.

“Like this.” Eori clenched her right hand but left her middle and ring fingers out flat—as if she were flipping the bird. A bluish fire emerged and waved back and forth excitedly to become whatever its master demanded. She then fed the spell into the other hand, making roughly a ball of marble-sized water appear on the smallest ring and spin around like it was trying to escape. “Now, do it too.”

Harry repeated after her, but nothing happened—not even doing with the other hand or both hands.

A silent Eori fed the spell using her other hand again, then released it into the bathtub, making the white flames clash and disappear into the back of her hand, coming out as water from her palm.

Harry’s eyes were mesmerized by the unrealness of it, yet it was real. He could not deny it as he touched the cold-ish bathtub water, feeling it was about ambient temperature.

Eori went back to the mirrored cabinet and chucked another sigil towards Harry. “Figure it out yourself if you want to heat it—if you dare to try anything else, I will fucking scalp your entire skin.”

Harry, with his blurry eyes, saw Eori quickly close the door, then he heard it being locked. Rushed footsteps followed after going down the stairs. Alone in this tiny bathroom with a slanted roof, he looked out from the window up top, but his blurry eyes saw nothing but unknown forests. In the far distance, he saw what appeared to be a smokestack coming off a chimney or a small forest fire—there was no way he could tell.

A significant shadow passed by, blocking the sun. Looking at it, Harry saw a big-ass bird gliding up high. Its blurry shape looked like a plane flying up high, but it was going too slow for it; plus the shape was not quite right. There are no plane trails at all—Harry felt that the sky was missing something he was accustomed to. Yeah—there’s supposed to be at least a few. A sinking feeling began emerging inside him. Maybe Tolerideme has them? But how do I even go there? Looking at the apparent endless forest, he sighed as he felt an itch coming from his chained wrists. I guess it doesn’t matter even if I find out where I am. I can’t remember my parents’ faces, let alone anybody else’s. But what if they recognize me instead? But how would I know?

Harry tried to imagine this safe haven, but his corrupted memories seemed dissonant—something about a grayish large-looking city with metal-looking boxy things that had to be cars everywhere. His phantasia then added lights in the middle of the streets that flashed from red to green, then yellow, then back to red. The symphony of light brought the sound of a reeving engine and horn hooking that felt like they were coming right from outside the window. Is Tolerideme that different from Sanbi Kingdom? I remember it being red and something about the three smart ladies in that book, but not that. Wait! Would they even take me in? Would I need the badge too? Something in his mind, unfortunately, clicked. Is that why Sinoi took my badge?

Harry felt a sinking feeling—perhaps his fate was sealed the moment he awoke in that tower.