Kathryne Keyron had been sleeping.
The first thing she became aware of was the fact that she was soaking wet. She had never been a big fan of water, she griped. It only made sense that her captors wanted to maximize her suffering. The question was, who were her captors?
She had gone to Lighthalzen in pursuit of a book. While working on her thesis in creating a new spell, a fellow scientist who had read some of her earlier works had sent her a letter mentioning a text in Lighthalzen that might have been able to help with her studies. After she arrived at Lighthalzen, things became a little…blurry.
What had his name been again…Wolfstein? Wolfhart?
She dismissed the name as unimportant. What really mattered, she thought, was that she take stock of her situation as quickly as possible and deduce the best course of action from there.
She was lying in a pile of shattered glass. A thick, viscous liquid seeped out from under her robes. She gingerly stood up and watched as the green liquid slipped off of her clothes, leaving her still drenched in what she presumed was water. The strange substance resembled something she had read about once – oxygen enriched liquid. The novel idea had been proposed a while ago, though she had never seen the actual substance in the flesh. She toyed with the idea of bringing some with her in a vial, for research purposes, then abandoned it. There were far more important matters at hand.
Glancing around, she strode over to a corner of the room and grasped her wizard's staff and spellbooks, which had been covered with fine silky cobwebs and a coarse layer of dust. Brushing off the detritus, she hazarded a guess that the laboratory had been abandoned for at least a year, maybe more. Though how long she had been imprisoned was still a mystery, at least she knew more about the situation.
It also appeared as though she had not aged. Had they been experimenting to find an elixir for immortality?
Clearly, she was in some sort of laboratory which had access to advanced technology. But it had been abandoned…why? Stepping over to the bolted door, she raised her hands in preparation for a jupitel thunder.
But there had been no need for preparation. Lightning sparked between her raised hands and struck the door, blasting a large hole with a blazing ball of light. She jumped back. Since when had she been able to instantaneously cast spells? She hadn't been aware of ever having that skill before. Perhaps…they had tampered with her memory. Or perhaps they had performed experiments on her, on her! She stewed in rage. She had read Lifenbolt's treatise against human experimentation and had wholeheartedly agreed with it. The moral and ethical implications of such research…not to mention the legality was wholly in question.
Perhaps that was why it had been abandoned. The researchers had been discovered or had been close to discovery, and decided that the project was too risky to continue.
Either way, here she was, in an abandoned laboratory, with amplified magical powers. She assumed that she was not alone. An operation of such sale, designed to kidnap and perhaps genetically or chemically modify a wizard of her stature would probably have targeted other classes, most likely a few select characters of the highest caliber.
No doubt there were alarms and safeguards in place to prevent her escape and to protect the laboratory. She would have to be careful, and if – if she found any others, she would have to convince them that she was an ally, not a foe, in case they attacked preemptively. And who knew? The possibility that other foes with similarly enhanced abilities lay on the other side of the door was one that she could not afford to ignore.
An unearthly whisper came from the other side of the door. Footsteps shuffled ever closer towards her position, and though Katherine Keyron did not believe in ghosts, she swore she saw the wisps of an ethereal aura approaching her. It was time. She had thought for long enough, and she was not the type who was all talk and no action.
She flexed her fingers in anticipation. It was time to see what she could do.
A/N: School? Midterms? What are those?