Yusei wanted to run all the way down through to where Jupiter was, but as soon as he made it through the first door, he found that was going to be impossible. This room was small and cramped with desks, and he had to slow down to pick his way around the mess of paper that littered the floor. The door on the other side opened silently on its own, indicating where he should go. Tensing, ready for some kind of trap, Yusei moved forward.
Jupiter's voice came over an intercom in the room as he walked.
"I can see you're angry," he said, almost a laugh at the back of his voice. It made Yusei's fists curl up and his throat close with rage.
"You hurt my friends," he said.
"Oh, please, you speak of Miss Izayoi? She's hardly a friend of yours as much as she's mine."
"Shut the fuck up. You don't know what you're talking about."
Jupiter laughed, and Yusei almost had to stop, he was so angry that he couldn't stop shaking. He kept going, though, moving into the next room. Another office, it seemed, with dusty, cracked computers. How far in was Jupiter?
"You've known her for all of...what? Four months?" Jupiter said. "She was under my tutelage for something around...two years, at least."
"'Tutelage?' You mean brainwashing," Yusei snarled.
Jupiter only laughed again. Yusei almost tripped over a box as the door in front of him slid open and led him into another hallway. He looked both ways, and saw another door swinging open. He walked towards it—Jupiter had him completely in his hands, he knew. He could be leading Yusei anywhere. This was almost definitely a trap. But Yusei was willing to take the risk if it meant getting his hands around this man's neck.
"Miss Izayoi was a particularly gifted girl," Jupiter said as Yusei made his way to the next door. "Her powers hardly needed any encouraging, but her mentality, that was something we had to be sure of. Divine asked me to...play with her programming, as it were."
Jupiter snorted as Yusei's blood boiled.
"Divine was such a fool," he said. "I had to do all of this almost from scratch, you know. He could play with her heart, of course, but the heart is such a fragile, wavering thing—case in point, she attached to you very quickly even after her so-called devotion to Divine."
"She didn't attach to me," Yusei snapped. "Aki is her own person."
"You'd love to think that, wouldn't you?" Jupiter said, laughing. "She hasn't been her own person for a very, very long time...and hopefully, soon enough, neither will you."
Yusei's rage quieted just a tiny bit with the introduction of a cold chill in his blood. And it wasn't just because of Jupiter's words, either.
It was because of the room that he had just been lead into.
This room was no office. It was a wide space, white and sterile, lined with hospital beds. Each bed was surrounded with computer screens and wires and little trolleys full of doctor's instruments. Most of them were in various states of dust and disrepair, but a handful of beds looked new and cared for.
And another handful of them were stained with blood.
Yusei's stomach twisted and he had to hug himself tightly around the waist to steady himself.
"It looks beautiful, doesn't it?" Jupiter teased him from the intercom. "This is where I used to do all my studies. The root of where a psychic duelist's power comes from...I was so close to figuring it out, before you and your friends had to come along, and ruin everything."
It was the first sign of anger or irritation that Yusei had heard come out of the man's voice, but it quickly smoothed away.
"Do you want to know what happens in this room?" Jupiter said, sounding gleeful. "I have a feeling you'll find it entertaining."
"Shut up," Yusei snarled.
He still felt sick, but he forced himself to move forward down the hall.
"Divine was too quick with the dial on the electroshock machines sometimes," Jupiter said, in spite of Yusei's warning. "I didn't let him play with the experimentation too much. He killed the children as often as he awakened their powers."
"Shut up," Yusei said again.
"Occasionally, though, the corpses had their uses," Jupiter said. "I learned quite a bit about the workings of the normal and psychic brains while I was researching...I even found a surprising truth—that psychic duelists have no different a brain than ordinary people. What causes their powers to appear, then?"
Yusei tried not to look at a bed that seemed to have recent blood splattered over the pillow, and glimmering tools on the trolley beside it that were coated with a thin sheen of blood. He swallowed through the bile.
"I still haven't figured it out," Jupiter continued. "The brain certainly reacts when performing psychic activities, but not in any recognizable way...I've started to believe that the true powers rest in the soul..."
"Stop talking."
"Oh? I thought you wanted to know what I did to Miss Izayoi. Fascinating process, really. Classical conditioning, subliminal messaging, a bit of mind-altering drugs at correct doses when she wasn't expecting it, occasional molding therapy disguised as mindfulness techniques. Miss Izayoi was my favorite experiment. Quite a success story, if I do say so myself."
"Don't you dare talk about her like that!"
Jupiter's laugh sounded like nails on a chalkboard and it was all Yusei could do not to start punching furniture right then and there.
"Does it distress you?" he said. "Imagining Miss Izayoi strapped to one of these beds? She's been in this room before. In fact, your other friend, Lua, was just in here a bit ago as well."
Yusei felt like he was going to black out.
"You bastard."
"As for Miss Izayoi, she's still in her unsightly rage. I'll have to realter her programming again...I may have misjudged how powerful the effects of the original Callisto Project were."
Yusei swallowed again, trying not to trip.
"Your stupid arcade game?"
"It wasn't a game at first, of course," Jupiter said. "I just found out later that it would be more efficient to...outsource. You know, it was first made just to screen for powers...later I learned how to alter it...and how to extract souls from bodies."
Yusei almost froze—he was almost to the end of this horrible room with its horrible scent of despair and decay.
"Is—is that what you did to Lua? And Crow?"
"Quite," Jupiter said. "Particularly strong powered individuals find their souls consigned to a very interesting little pocket dimension, known as the Outlands...that place is a realm of complete darkness. Against it, the spectrum of the soul can easily be studied from an outsider's perspective. Add a little monster or two, and I can see how the soul reacts under stress, and what happens when their powers finally awaken under duress."
"You bastard," Yusei said. "I'm going to make you bring him back. I'm going to make you bring them all back."
Jupiter laughed.
"Will you really, though?"
The door finally opened and released him from the hellish hospital room behind him. Yusei tried to hide how relieved he was to escape it as he stumbled into the next room.
This room was even bigger than the last one, a large, warehouse kind of room. The floors were a pure, sterile white, and there was a balcony running around the top, glassed off, probably an observation deck. In this room, there were lines of strange, futuristic looking machines along the walls with various colored screens and various readouts, that even Yusei couldn't comprehend. Some kind of strange, white, egg shaped pods sat on one end, looking like they were sprouting out of the ground like odd bulbs. Something about those set Yusei on edge, and he backed off a little. He turned in a slow circle to take in the whole room. There weren't any doors except the one he had come into, so this must be the endgame. He raised his Duel Disk, prepared for some kind of assault. It was too quiet all of a sudden.
"Where are you?" Yusei said. "I'm warning you—I'm done playing your games! You're going to tell me what you did to Aki, and how to undo it."
A chuckle echoed around the room, and Yusei's eyes whipped up to the large observation deck.
He appeared at the window, then—he was a tall, broad shouldered man, with a thick, square-ish face and a blocky nose, his head entirely bald and his eyes deep sunken. He looked foreign—English, or American. His white lab coat was neatly buttoned up, three pens placed in a perfect row in his breast pocket. His lips curled upwards ever so slightly.
"Get down here," Yusei snarled, lifting his disk. "Duel me."
Jupiter just laughed, and it was even more disgusting seeing his smug face while hearing the horrible sound.
Then all at once, the floor snapped at his feet. Yusei swore, jumping back—it was too late, there were prongs jumping out of the floor and clamping around his body like a tight cage, catching him between them like he was a fly caught in a pair of tongs. He struggled to reach for his disk, but he was trapped, his arms were pinned to his sides and these weird plastic prongs were squeezing him too tightly in. Goddammit—he had fallen for the trap!
"What I did do to Aki?" Jupiter said, and Yusei bristled at him using her name so familiarly. "Well...you're going to find out soon enough...because you'll be experiencing it."