By the time Kiros finished arguing with Odine, Laguna had left his desk to stretch out on a couch. He'd slipped an ice mask over his face, to try to relieve some of the tension he felt building in his skull. Kiros had taken a seat at Laguna's desk, and began flipping through the papers in front of him. As he turned one page, he gave a long, low whistle. Laguna didn't even have time to inquire before Kiros put the sheet on a projector. Laguna squinted through the ice mask and tried to interpret the picture before him.

"Okay, I give. What am I looking at? It just looks like a big red blob."

"This is a map of Seifer's brain. Or, more accurately, his brain's activity."

"So… this tells us what, exactly?" Laguna glanced away from the display and looked back at Kiros, raising one eyebrow quizzically.

Kiros sighed, and tried to interpret Odine's technical writing. "It means all of his neurons are firing at once. Every memory that he has is replaying at the same time. His senses, used to gather information about the world around him and understand the present, are hyperstimulated. And the cognitive areas of the brain -- particularly those areas used to piece together information, and make predictions about the consequences of future events -- can't switch themselves off. In essence, his brain is undergoing time compression and it can't escape."

"Ouch. No wonder he's a wreck." Laguna sat up and removed his ice mask, running a hand through his long, dark hair. Suddenly, the tension headache that had been drumming away inside his skull didn't seem so bad.

"There's more," Kiros said, flipping a page. "It seems that, in trying to make Seifer her Knight, Edea -- by which I mean Ultimecia -- put a piece of her consciousness into his mind…"

"What do you mean by that? 'Put a piece of her consciousness?'"

"Well, as near as anyone can tell, she tried to… junction herself onto Seifer, so she would always have a way to make her will manifest. Now that Ultimecia is dead, that last part of her willpower is still trying to assert control over Seifer, but it's also feeding off of him, trying to stay alive."

"So, eventually…" Laguna began, dreading the words he knew would come next.

"She will either control him or kill him."