From Murder to Dust

25 - Isolated

When I woke up, I was still in the cell, and Papyrus still wasn't next to me; I was still alone, it seemed, and without any idea of how long I had been there, I was also lost. I tried to get my mind off the most important thing at the moment, and thought of something else. Thinking about Paps was great, but I had to think of something else. They said they were going to look at my soul, right? What exactly could they look at? It had to be something important, but I didn't want them to look at it: if they found out it was the only thing keeping me alive, they could use that to manipulate me, or even control me entirely; I couldn't let that happen. I went over my rule in my mind: my life was not more important than my friends, and I would not be controlled; if I allowed myself to be controlled, it would be selfish. They would have had to kill me first. I established that rule foremost as I heard footsteps approaching. It didn't matter what I wanted; what mattered is that I didn't betray my friends, and I wouldn't hurt them either. I had to handle this carefully. I hoped Paps was okay.

"All right, we're taking you to the lab." Somebody said, but I didn't know who he was; Nightmare was going to begin teaching us about the different universes and their inhabitants soon, but we hadn't begun that yet.

I heard the door open, which wasn't new, but instead of simply teleporting me to where they wanted to go, I was handcuffed and walked; perhaps they were on a budget. When we reached our destination, there was a small exchange.

"You got him?" Ink inquired.

"Does it look like we got him?" The one from before would have facepalmed if he wasn't holding me.

"Eh, formalities. Bring him over here."

Their so called 'little' lab turned out to be a fully-fledged testing facility with every gadget you could ever imagine; inside the facility, there were weapons, medicines, things I'd never seen before, and a ton of science-based characters, who were no doubt workers here. In the back of the room, which was, unfortunately, where we were headed, there were a few more devices that looked rather menacing. The one we stopped at was a quaint half-room with a chair in the center surrounded by scanners and other various devices; I could already tell that I was going to hate this. I was more than happy to ruin my streak of compliance at this time, opting to do anything except allow myself to be trapped; it was to no avail. When I was fully fastened into the chair, which was starting to become a trend now, I felt sharp prick followed by a rather soothing feeling overcoming me, which wasn't enough to make me fall asleep, but I was docile; I hated being docile. I couldn't even fight as my soul was gently coerced out of my body.

When my soul was showing, I noticed a lot of shocked faces; I guess they hadn't seen anything like it before, which was honestly quite likely, since Nightmare said there was no previous cure for a magic deficiency. He had probably created the first, and these scientists didn't know what it was; they began testing, scanning, and invading my privacy in an attempt to figure out what was on my soul, which would have been amusing if it didn't hurt. I would say that the only flaw in their machine was the fact that I could hear every word they said, making it easier to figure out what they knew about the magic restorer - the name Nightmare gave the device until he could think of a better one. 

"Well, the device seems to be creating magic or siphoning it from its suroundings in order to filter it into his magic stream, but the rate at which it is doing that is absolutely toxic to normal monsters!" A scientist told Ink. "In other words, he shouldn't be alive right now." If only they knew.

"Then how is he alive?" Ink asked. "He isn't even using any magic! Where is it all going?"

"We're going to find that out now. This is actually quite a complex device for the materials used in it."