Chapter 3: PROPHECY
There was a PROPHECY, foretold by the Underworld's mortal seer: All will fall before the High-Rule.
***
Though in the comfort of her room, her father continued to plague her dreams.
Her father would keep yelling at her. Zephrite's father blamed her for her mother's death. This caused on-and-off abuse and neglect for Zephrite, she could recall. She didn't know what it meant, when her father would scream at her and hit her, but she knew that her father hated her guts just by the things he would say.
"Don't you feel guilty? Do you feel anything?" Alcohol often poisoned his words. "I never said that. You're imagining things..."
Zephrite learned a new Feeling the day her father first hit her. Her throat would burn, and her face felt very hot. Her eyes welled with tears. It only made her father angrier. Zephrite didn't understand. Why was it this way?
As she aged, a VOICE would whisper to Zephrite, telling her to kill her father. Where did the VOICE come from? She hadn't bothered to ask.
"It is the only way." "You know you want to." The VOICE was relentless. So she did - it was true that she wanted to. A human's life was delicate, Zephrite learned - so easily it would diminish.
Once she did kill her father, she felt no remorse. Anxiety tightening her chest, she hid. Young and naive, she was easily found, but it was not the cops that found her.
Humans from the Bad Place her father worked for had cleaned up the scene before the cops could arrive. She was locked up and taken to the Bad Place. A "Lab"; a classified research facility of an organization named Xeno Discoveries and Science. The Bad Place was one of the many things of the Underworld, with a happy face covering it; the public organization was that face.
***
Once they threw me in this room, they tried to feed me Human Food. I didn't want it, so I bit off the human's hand instead, and I tried to eat it, but it tasted horrendous - so I didn't. He screamed and hit me. I didn't understand. It reminded me of Dad. Is that why I had these dreams, still?
He returned the next day with a bionic, fully functional hand. He told her they'd do a "secret experiment". What did it mean?
She felt disgusting after. She realized how wrong her body felt, like she was in the wrong body; a body that was not her own. She loathed her every curve, the reason why unbeknownst to her. The loathsome feeling was not unfamiliar to her - the event had only worsened it, which made it more apparent. But... the things she felt, it was much more than "hate". She didn't understand it.
The name Zephrite made my skin crawl, everytime the humans would say it. I... didn't like humans.
All of these unfortunate events gave her strange emotions she'd never felt before - confusion, anger, sadness, frustration - all things her mother never got to teach her.
The moment she entered the Bad Place, she was then forced into foreign experiments and tests. Sometimes she would catch a glimpse of the other residents of the Bad Place, all creatures she'd never seen before.
The Bad Place's "tests" had tested her pain tolerance, along with other almost miscellaneous questions that the humans wanted answers to.
"Can the powers be duplicated? Extracted?" happened to be one of them.
Zephrite didn't care. She wanted to leave this place.
***
Trapped in her dream world, the thought of her father had pointed to memories of her mother. She didn't know much about her, but she did know that she'd died during Zephrite's spawning. As humans would say, "birth".
Ever since birth, her third eye has been an indicator of the other soul that accompanied her own. It would talk to her sometimes. She called it "Ca-troll".
Welcomed into reality, her skin crawled. The hairs on her arms rose, and her arm became bumpy with goosebumps. She was disconnected from dream world. There she was, in her room.
I will leave the Bad Place. The day has come.
"Don't trust the voice. Will you heed my warnings?" Ca-troll queried.
"No. I'm leaving tonight."
Weekly Power Status
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