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━━FRANCIS COPPERFIELD, although gifted with audiokinetic powers, felt a deep emptiness within her chest and couldn't help but think to herself, time and time again, 'why me?'. She was nothing more than a test subject, she would tell herself, raised in a laboratory on the outskirts of Talbotton, Georgia; with her ability of sound manipulation being all that she was good and needed for.
At the age of fifteen, she, and a group of eight more test subjects - the only ones willing to sacrifice their lives to live a better one - made their attempt of an escape. People followed Francis, it was hard not to; she was so self-assured, broken and internally pained but so confident in her leadership. She would never call herself a leader, though, and anyone who did [think of her as one] had never, in her own words, followed anyone else to compare her to. 'I'm hardly an influencer,' she would tell her friends during their scheduled lunches.
After their fleeting plan was a success, each of them went their separate ways in separate directions, to settle in separate locations. They said their thankful and relieved yet sorrowful goodbyes to one another before parting ways.
She laid low, keeping to herself in her own quiet isolation, so not to get caught and imprisoned again. Her lonesome venture became her downfall, and only lasted for a year, when she was cornered by a group of suited-up men, and coming through the middle of the pack was a boy she knew; a boy who she trusted. A traitor, she thought, and the thought had always stuck in her mind from that day. Seeing him stood there, so smug, so healthy: it made her angry.
The place that they took her to; the place that she saw contained all of the kids that she had previously escaped with, and all of the kids that she'd had to live with in the other Hell, was nothing like that of a normal National Laboratory. The further she was guided through, the more she saw it to be something like a Concentration Camp; a horrific sight of torture rooms, experimental darkness, with the combination smell of blood and sweat drifting through her nasal cavity.
'Talbotton', the building read, a singular word, just the name of the town in which the laboratory rested; how it hadn't raised any suspicions - nor how it hadn't been seen, being in the middle of nowhere, after all - was dumbfounding to Francis. 'Talbotton' was far more brutal in their treatment, unless you excelled exceptionally in their experiments - experiments that, Francis had come to find, were far more heavy and inhuman - but even then, it was merely a pat on the back and an extra packet of candy of their choice.
Francis came to the realisation that she excelled far more than the others, and had been beneficial to whatever the 'Talbotton' scientists had been seeking. It wasn't something that she aspired to, it meant that the experiments got more profound; worse, now that she was no longer a beginner, but had attained to an advanced level. They assumed, or perhaps they were just unbothered, that she would be resistant to the pain. She was not. In fact, she felt every bit of it: from the harsh needle injections into her veins, to the continuous aching ring in her bleeding ears from the Void. She despised the idea of being the 'favourite'. She saw people die in front of her own eyes, because as long as it was the weaker subjects that were the targets, the Talbotton Guards had authority to torment and kill just for fun.
