An operating room, there's not a sound sans the hum and beep of monitors, and the shuffle of a doctor's feet. The subject lies on the cold steel of an operating table, or what is left of him. Warm flesh is replaced with cold metal, and a scalp of hair replaced with a plexiglass dome encasing what is perhaps the most developed brain of the world, capable of influences in the material plane, bound by only his own imagination. Standing over him is the woman he loved. She was the first to hear it, and the only to see it. The scrape of a needle, once a fingertip, scrapes against the table in the form of a twitch. Her face went from wild shock to near cosmic relief, calling a doctor over at once to explain.
"He moved! He scratched the table!"
The doctor glanced from one monitor to the next, clearly impressed. "His brain activity has spiked some, but he doesn't quite seem to be conscious just yet. We'll just have to wait and see…"
The woman leaned downward some, upon the stark metal face, upon its dull, red lights where eyes once stood. Her voice is choked, but hopeful. "Listen. Please hear me, wake up."
"Brain Drain? Brain Drain! I'm talking to you, Genius!"
He glanced up, rather startled, almost as if he had been somewhere else. He was at the soda fountain, his eyes finally settled on the speaker. Valentine, Valerie, one of Christmas' good friends, and her second in command. They've never been a pair to get along. "What? Sorry, I think I zoned out a bit…"
"You don't say?" She rolled her eyes at his response, and for a moment, an instant, he saw something rattling. She had only a bloody socket where her right eye once stood, the optic nerve hanging out and over like a rubber band, her mask was tattered, revealing her face to be in a twisted gape, from it was a scream of pure agony, and it was all gone. "I asked if you were sick. You're pastier and sweatier than usual."
"...Under a little stress is all…"
"Stress over what? You've got a day off and you've been sleeping at your desk all day."
"Dreams and daydreams alike….I've been having them all day, and they're a bit on the draining side."
She lowered her mask a bit to convey a mildly concerned expression, when was he ever one to be freaked out over a dream? "That so…?"
A quick nod, followed by a drink floating over to him without having ever been touched. "They're...pretty graphic, even compared to the failed experiments."
"That bad?" She'd never heard him compare anything to those who failed in acquiring his psychic ability. The vague memory of his retelling a grisly fatality served as reason.
"That bad. Like hundreds of body parts and lives being flung off or lost at high speed. Most everyone died...myself included."
"Venus shit, John….that's the sort of thing you're dreaming up? All that mess didn't make you some sociopath, did it?" She reached upward to knock on his forehead a few times. It sounded different, metallic, almost, but he seemed to be the only one who noticed. Just what was going on…? The whole thing was feeling more and more like a…
"Dream…"
"Huh?"
"Hm? Ah, nothing…it slipped." He took a drink, and noticed that it had no taste to it, no carbonation, either. Come to think of it, his smoke didn't have any sort of flavour, either. He couldn't even remember the nicotine sensation.
"What the…?"
