That was the first time I ever saw Don get truly mad. He would always carry his irritation expression but he was never that infuriated and it's all because I got mad-more the reason to never do that again. I sigh quietly when I hear the air conditioners shut off all at once and in a few minutes, the cold air begins to dissipate. Don still isn't back from the basement and Topaz put me back in prison without anyone to guard me. I can't shake the guilt off me, when I see him again, I have to apologize. The air conditioners must have turned back on because it's suddenly freezing again. But I don't hear them humming like they usually do; I would sit by the bars where the lights hit the floor but I find the dark has more comfortable corners.
"That's the right idea, remain in the darkness, tsk," a man at the opposite dark corner says. What-where did he come from? Am I dreaming? I quickly get to my feet and rub my prickly arms. "What, who are you?" I ask, profusely rubbing my arms. Wearing a black robe with a dark blue outline, a face that's darker than my old school shoes appears in the corner; hair hidden by a loose hood, he chuckles and takes a step towards me. "Is this-"
"A dream?" he finishes for me. "Not at all, tsk." His colorless eyes observe the environment and then focus on me. "I can see that this is prison, tsk. What was your crime?"
"I don't-know," I answer honestly, seeing my breath. "Why are…you here?" The longer I talk to him, the more familiar he sounds.
"To see you of course, I take it you don't remember me, tsk. A child accused of a crime she's not even aware of? Poor, poor child," he starts walking towards me, his robe whishing side to side. "Would you want to hear a secret?"
"Stay away from me, please." Something about this man makes me terribly afraid. I can't put my thumb on it but I have such a bad feeling about him. I side-step towards the bars with him following me menacingly-his face fixed in a permanent amused expression. "Please."
"The secret is I can free you from this prison," continues the intimidating stranger, picking up the pace. "You don't have to be here anymore, tsk. Do you want that?" I never wanted freedom more than right now, I guess this is how Seth felt when he left me. I'll be away from Don and Professor and I won't have to take another painful, exhausting test ever again or have to deal with Don's anger. Freedom is getting my bo staff from that park and finding Seth again and bringing him back. I reply firmly, "No." I'm now against the bars in the dim-lit light, feeling safer than I did in the darkness. Freedom is something I want to grab with my own hands, not from anyone else's. "Oh? Why is that, tsk?" wonders the stranger, his scary coal eyes burning into me. "Don't you want to leave here, tsk?" He steps into the light, closing in on me. "Let me help you Mia, tsk."
My heart pounds wildly as if it's dying to get out of my body. How does he know my name? Who is this guy? "I can take you to Seth, I'm sure he wants to see you again."
"Seth, you know him?"
"Of course I do. Better than you do-now come along with me, tsk. Why don't you want your freedom Mia? Tsk." My hands grip the bars so hard I'm afraid that I'll break them. The part of the eye's that is white is blue on this man and his eyes are pitch-black; the light illuminates his facial features as he closes in on me. His strange utterance makes my skin crawl. "I haven't seen you so scared in such a long time, tsk."
"Wha-?"
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Don's agitated voice makes me turn for a second. I've never felt so relieved. "I see, tsk," mumbles the intimidating man. When I turn to the man, any trace of him is gone. I sink to the floor to catch my breath and stop rubbing my arms when I realize that the room has returned to its room temperature chilliness. "Someone you're plotting to escape with?" I'm so relieved that the stranger is gone that I forgot about Don's tantrum.
"N-no. Please don't let him get me-I'll stay in here quietly as long as he doesn't get me," I plead, much to his surprise. Every part of me wants to stay in the cell as long as it keeps him away. "Who is he to you?" asks Don suspiciously.
"Not my friend. I don't know who he was." I can't shake off this feeling of familiarity though. Did I ever meet him before? No way, I would have remembered-right? Well he's gone now so there's nothing left to do but apologize to Don again, but first I have to calm my nerves. Covering my face, letting out another sigh, I apologize to Don formally about yelling at him.
"You're entitled to your feelings," he replied grumpily. As he gives me his back I catch him frowning, and not that angry frown he always has, the sulky kind.
' ' '
"When the guards found the farmer's home, they also found Princess Gissel with a knife in her chest. The farmer's son ran off, free of crime but will always live with what he made the princess do. Prince Jai sobbed and cried over his wife's death and found a note she wrote before she died. It read: 'It is impossible to wait for a prince in shining armor to save me, I can only save myself. This is the only way, if any young girls or boys ever read this, please know that you can't rely on anyone to save you but yourself."
"Was the prince sad for a really long time?" I asked her.
"For a month he was really sad but remarried and lived happily with his new princess."
I wake up from my nap, rubbing my eyes and stretching my arms. It could be nighttime right now but how would I know in this cell? "Don…how did you get to be so strong?" the question makes his shoulders hunch up. "I'm sorry I just…want to know." If I was as strong as he is, I'd be able to get Seth back for sure. He won't answer anyway, he never answers me. "Chaos Emeralds," he replies stolidly.
"Huh?"
"Chaos Emerald energy runs through me. Collecting seven of them makes me even stronger."
"Without them, would you be weak?"
"Like I said, Chaos Emerald energy runs though me, weakness is impossible for me. I was born powerful."
"That sounds nice," I reply longingly, craving the power that he has. "I wanted to know…'cause if I was strong like you, I would beat Seth." Speaking my thoughts aloud keeps my mind off the persistent pain in my pelvis.
"Why are you obsessed with this guy?"
"I'm not-I just-I don't know."
"You're-" The lights shut off, leaving the room in total darkness. Fortunately I can see like a bat in the dark but I'm not sure if Don can. "I'm going to talk to Professor. It could be a blackout from her experiments." The sliding door closes and Don's out of the room. Why do I have such a bad feeling about this, I never had a fear of the dark before. My worst fears are confirmed when an explosion makes the bars of the prison clang and cling against the floor, nearly hitting me as they bounced all around. The figure in the darkness has me trying to squeeze farther into the shallow corner.
"Professor, there's a blackout downstairs," I say to her as she taps noisily against the larger-than-life keyboard. Without turning, she waves her hand. "No there isn't, an alarm would have gone off and it would have shown on my screen, duh. Is your head with you today?" responds Professor like a parent annoyed with their child.
"How can you see with so much clatter on the screen?" There were numerous files open, one labeled "Mia exam 1" and another named "Mia X-rays". Those are the results from the three tests she took and I'm sure knowing Professor, she'll want to double-check for anything. "I'm trying to decode something important-"
The deafening boom downstairs makes Professor fall from her seat in a daze. On the way down from her fall, her hands slide against the keyboard, bringing up ringing, red error messages galore. I offer to help her up but she declines. "God I'm only thirty-five." Along with the error messages, the floor plan of the fourth floor of where Mia's being held comes up. The message underneath reads: Damage on fourth floor. "Shit, go get Mia up here! She's probably tapping into her powers." The Professor told me that once she re-tests Mia, she'll reveal all her plans and discoveries to me. It's a mystery to me as to why she's testing only Mia as opposed to that chatterbox girl and the cursed swordfighter named Risa.
When I take the elevator downstairs, the lights are back on and where the bars used to be is a giant hole. Observing the inside, the tightly-packed bars are on the inside of the prison which means someone on the outside broke in to get Mia unless she pulled the bars from the inside which I highly doubt she'd be able to do. Nonetheless, she's not here and I had better find her before she gets out of here. I walk past the jail cell and turning the corner, I notice that the double emergency doors ever-so-slightly swinging still.
Downstairs I hear some clattering. Only the Professor's trash room would have something to trip over since there's so much robot shit there. Speeding downstairs and opening the fifth level doors, I quickly glance around the brightly-lit room. I step over the broken parts I smashed yesterday, looking for a trace of blue hair. "I know you're hiding down here. I'm going to find you faster than you could run," I warn. Blue hair springs up from behind an abandoned desk covered with uncompleted robots. "Don! Thank goodness!" she exclaims, running towards me while stumbling over the junk. Thank goodness? If she wanted to break out there's no way she would rushing toward me so eagerly. Looking at her Band-Aid-covered face now stained with oil smudges, she looks oddly relieved to see me. "Before you bring me back, you have to believe me, that man from yesterday is back. He broke me out of prison and tried to take me away and I made a break for it down here-I'm not going along with him, I promise you."
"You expect me to believe that?" I respond harshly. Like Luke, she has those pleading, teary eyes that tell me she's not making up this up, I doubt she can hit the bars hard enough to make an explosion anyway. "Stay close to me."
"There!" she points toward the man I saw in her cell yesterday, who suddenly appears at the other end of the room. He looks like a man who's spent too much time in a factory filled with soot; the intruder steps towards us slowly. "Towards the elevator, move," I command and she runs ahead of me quickly while I follow her. Inside the elevator I punch the number eight, which is the biggest floor in this underground lair. We shoot upward as the man in the dark clothes smiles a toothy grin and remains on the bottom floor. Mia sighs while covering her eyes as if she can still see him, I've never seen her so afraid of anything. Maybe it's the promise I made to Luke or my old feelings for Angelica, but I want to keep her away from him to the best of my abilities. When we reach the eighth floor, we step out of the elevator. The Professor's lounge room is too extravagant for a broke, mad scientist but I have the feeling it's going to get messy in here.
"I like this game," his deep, slightly amused, tone causes Mia's relieved face to shift back into fear mode. I push her towards the flat-screen TV and she hides behind it as I face the coal-faced man behind me. "I will hurt you." Without hesitation, I send a fast ring towards him and he fades away into a reddish mist the same way those Heartless from Luke's world would when they were destroyed. "Not enough."
"Mia, towards the back, go!" she gets up from behind the TV and runs for the pool table in the back of the room. She stops when she bypassing the pool table. The man, unscathed from my attack, stands there with his arms outstretched as if wanting to hug her. I watch her pick up the pool stick and throw it at him, it bounces off him as he moves towards her. "Get down!" She obeys and I send the same golden ring flying towards him. As it hits him, he disappears again. "You are strong for your age young man." Mia steps back as if the mist is poisonous and joins my side. "He might meet us in the elevator, take the emergency stairs, follow me." I kick the sliding door open to the kitchen, the biggest part of this lair, and the door flips in the air and crashes against the counter. Running through another opening that leads into the bedroom, ironically the room that matches the amount of money left in her wallet, there's the man again sitting on the bed. Next to the bedframe is another sliding door and I punch it out and lightly push Mia in front of me. The back room is her library filled with books from scientists and a few books that she's written herself. But all that is a blur to me as I run in front of Mia and open the emergency doors behind a huge bookcase. She stops to catch her breath on the railing and then looks worriedly at me.
"I'm so sorry-"
"Back to the fourth floor, move." The dim lights flicker before returning back to normal. What kind of man like that has skin like ebony? Not even an average black person can be that dark, only animals can get that black. What's so important about Mia that he's hounding her? I'll ask her later once we get to the fourth floor and I destroy that man who's obviously related to the Heartless. I lose my footing as if something tripped me and slip down the staircase, rolling down and banging against the wall as Mia helplessly watches. "Don! Are you okay?"
"Fine," I pick myself up easily. "Come on, why're you still standing there?" Her fearful expression gives me a clue. I turn towards the man at the bottom of the next staircase. "You."
"The cat and mouse game was fun, I haven't enjoyed myself in such a while. I'm sure you enjoyed some exercise too Mia, tsk," he says playfully. He's got eyes that remind me of solar eclipses. "The game is over now."
"I don't know why you want this girl so much but I'm going to make sure you don't leave with my prisoner."
"Oh? Brave words for someone who's going to be betrayed in a short while." I immediately turn to Mia but she looks at me with those honest eyes that Luke had. She gasps while staring down at my feet. "No!" cries out Mia. Suddenly something squeeze my neck with hands lacking warmth.
I watch powerlessly as Don's faceless shadow slams Don against the wall, strangling him while holding him up effortlessly. While Don tries to push himself off the wall, his shadow doesn't move an inch despite how strong Don is. This is crazy, that man made Don's own shadow hurt him. He tries to snatch his shadow's hands and he's successful but as he pulls on them his shadow remains still, its only movement tightening its hold on his neck. "If you want your friend to live you have to come along with me, tsk," says the ebony-colored man.
"Don't," coughs Don as his legs become still as they dangle in the air. I thought Don was the strongest person I knew-seeing him as helpless as I am makes me want to drop on my knees and cry.
"I have to! Ok stop please, I'm coming-" I hurry down the steps while looking back at Don. His shadow releases him and returns to take its place underneath his feet and copies him when Don falls on his behind.
"Good, you have your father's softness."
"My dad-?" The man snatches my face and for a few seconds I lose my breath and his hand drowns me in darkness. Does he know my parents?
J.G.P.
Wow what a sick dude. The bad sick not the cool sick. Hope you enjoyed this!