If this were a movie, there'd be an aerial view of the giant building Morai was being kept in, slowly panning out to reveal that it was surrounded by a vast ocean of natural landscape with no other sign of life in sight. It was a fitting coincidence that Morai had found herself here at the latter end of the winter season, where things die and are reborn in the coming months. The tricky thing with humans, however, is that they have to change voluntarily.
"Let me explain the situation to you," Agent Layton said. Morai had just woken up from her return to the Realm of Dreams, and had found herself tied down to a hospital bed. Pain was surging throughout her body as the serum started to wear off, and everyone was watching with curious eyes to see if it would produce any change in her "unfortunate behavior".
"You are the sole prisoner here at M23. You've done great harm to society, but as everyone now knows, you have also wrenched it from the cold, dead hands of oblivion numerous times. The International Police sees it fit that it should try and return the favor," the agent explained. He was sitting in a bedside chair with his eyes pointedly gazing at the wall instead of Morai.
"There are few Pokémon here, and the ones that are have been trained specifically not to look you in the eye, as has the entire staff. After that serum wears off, we'll have several means of controlling you and your power, so I'd keep that in mind while considering my escape plan."
"Oh, stop it," Morai weakly chuckled. "You're exciting me too much."
The trainer wiggled her wrists and and ankles as best as she could, trying to stretch. She was admittedly as curious as everyone else to see what the lack of serum would do to her, but in the current moment she felt the same way she had ever since she first took it, if not in pain.
"I'm awfully thirsty," she said. When Agent Layton returned with a glass of water, he had to hold it to her lips so she could drink it.
"I was hoping for one of two things that are both red. This isn't either one of them," Morai said with a sly smile as she licked her teeth.
"I'm afraid you won't find a drop of either here," the agent replied with an unamused frown, and Morai matched it with her own.
A nurse walked in, and Morai's smile returned. The young woman was small and had brown hair like her own, and Morai could see in her furtive blue-eyed gaze that she had been extensively warned about the dangers of not looking her in the eye.
If I can play this right, I can catch her unaware.
"I need to draw blood," she said tersely. "To test the serum levels over time."
Morai laughed.
"Yeah, like that'll happen. That's my jo—ooh!"
Morai jumped a little at how suddenly the needle went into her arm. She bared her teeth at the nurse, then shook her head and closed her eyes, leaning back into her uncomfortable pillow. She let out a noticeable sigh, trying to draw the eyes of her potential victim up to her face. The trainer opened one eye just enough to see if the police agent was paying attention and saw that he was attending to something on his phone.
Neglectful fool, Morai thought with a grateful smile.
The prisoner waited a few more seconds, then popped her eyes open to see the nurse jump and quickly avert her gaze, but it was too late. Morai caught herself before yelling "Gotcha!". A big self-satisfied grin on her face sufficed instead.
The woman silently finished bandaging her mental captor's arm before taking another needle and putting it in her own, filling a vial and undoing the strap holding Morai's arm down. She handed it to Morai, who took the vial and lifted it above her mouth, and Layton looked up just in time to see her finish it off.
"Hey!" he yelled, jumping up and grabbing Morai's wrist with extreme intensity.
"Let her go," he quietly warned.
"Who, me?" the nurse asked. "I made the idiot mistake of looking her in the eye, why's it her fault?"
"Let. Her. Go."
"Alright, alright, fine," Morai sighed, the red fading from her eyes. "My apologies, sir. Please don't throw me in pri—oh, wait!"
Morai laughed a hearty, self-amused laugh before she was cut off by a stabbing increase in pain.
"You've been awake for less than an hour and you've already managed to continue your escapades," Layton said. "That doesn't bode well for the rest of your future. To think...who you used to be...Are you okay, Amanda?"
"Y-y-yes" a wide-eyed Amanda replied, staring straight into the ground. Morai could sense the dramatic increase in fear emanating from her mind.
"My compliments, Amanda!"Morai called with a smile as the young nurse hurried out the door with her hands over her mouth. "Amanda is definitely quitting. I was hoping you'd hire people with more backbone. This won't be as fun."
Morai tensed up as another wave of pain hit her. Layton tied the blindfold back around her eyes.
"Your so-called fun is going to be very short lived. That pain is only supposed to get worse. If Dr. Colress is right, we've got certain painkillers if—"
"No, I can take it," Morai said through gritted teeth. "I don't run from pain."
Layton suddenly changed the subject.
"What were you going on about in your sleep?" he asked.
"Hm?"
"From the time you first went out to the time you got here, you've been mumbling and moving in your sleep."
Morai blushed a little thinking about how she had been watched in her sleep for hours upon end as she fought with another version of herself in the Dream Realm.
"I might be a little more off my head than you know. I have very intense dreams."
The police agent crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow, and Morai shrugged. Who was she to explain her lucid psychic dreams to some stranger? She grimaced as another wave of pain came over her body.
Colress's prediction had been right. As the next few days passed, Morai grew increasingly exhausted and her pain only worsened. Not being able to move only exacerbated her troubles until she became so drained that she wouldn't have been able to move anyway. The prisoner drifted in and out of consciousness, and every time she was lucid she opened her eyes to see and hear nothing but the black cloth tied around her head and the faint voices of people she didn't know. She was poked and prodded occasionally, and to her great dismay there was nothing she could do about it.
One of those days, Morai awoke to the sound of Ingo's voice reading something from a book at her bedside. She lied still and gave no indication that she was awake, only listening to the barely audible words of her former friend and the reason she was here in the first place. The trainer didn't know how to feel about his presence, but she had to admit that the small amount of familiarity was something to appreciate in her so far cold and dark captivity. When she drifted off again, she could've sworn that she found herself in the Realm of Dreams again, but she couldn't remember.
As her terrible detox was coming to an end, Morai awoke to the feeling that someone was sitting by her side. She considered this for a moment, and it took time to muster up the energy to say something. The prisoner had been lying stone-still with a grimace on her face for the past day, her chest rising and falling choppily as she struggled to freely breath.
"Hello?" she muttered. She almost expected to receive nothing but silence in return, but to her slight surprise, someone was in fact there.
"Hello, Morai," a friendly feminine voice returned.
"Do I know you?" Morai asked hoarsely.
"No. I was hired as one of the nurses," the voice replied.
"Didn't you hear what happened to the first nurse?"
"I did. She quit, and I did too, but I asked to stay and help on my own free time."
Morai let out what would've been a chuckle, had her vocal cords and lungs not failed her.
"Why in the world would you do that?" she asked.
"Because I think you're interesting," the voice replied matter of factly.
"You sound like my favorite target. Is your morbid curiosity so intense that you'd stick around at the risk of injury?"
"Well, right now you're practically harmless. Besides, you're alone and in a great deal of pain. Having someone to keep you company isn't so bad, is it?"
"No, I guess not," Morai muttered. Her entire body tensed up as the remainder of the serum made fiery dying attempts to stay in her bloodstream. She felt something else that initially made her jerk. The warm touch of her mysterious visitor's hand rested on her cold forearm.
"There's no need to react like that," its owner said. "I'm harmless, too."
"Why would you do that?" Morai asked again.
"I don't like seeing people in pain."
"We're very different, then," Morai replied, then the silliness of her visitors statement prompted another question. "Even terrible people like me?"
"I think everyone could use some love," the voice replied.
"You remind me of someone I know," Morai said. "And that's a foolish sentiment. A dangerous one, too. You shouldn't give kindness to people incapable of giving it back."
"I'm guessing that if you were free you wouldn't return the favor. I don't expect you to, so it's alright."
"You baffle me," Morai sighed, clinching her teeth as more pain hit her. "I'd like to know what you look like. You should take my blindfold off."
"It would be foolish to take your blindfold off, but I can tell you what I look like."
"Save it," Morai interjected. "I want to guess and compare it to when I see you with my own eyes. Assuming I haven't scared you off by then, at least."
"You haven't told me to move my hand this entire time, so that's a start," the voice said. Morai could sense the smile in her sentence without seeing it, and it made her blush. Still, she didn't demand that the mysterious woman move her hand. Strangely enough, it seemed to ease the pain, even if by a very small amount.
Once the serum had been confirmed to be entirely out of her bloodstream, everyone watched Morai even more intently. It was hard for them to tell, however, as she still couldn't move or see, and no judgements of her actions could yet be made. Morai heard the sound of the room door opening, and gave the same response she had given to the sound ever since she had woken up the first time: the raise of her head and the bare of her teeth. It was pretty much the only thing she could do.
"It's just me," Ingo said.
"Ah, thank goodness. It's just the one who shot me."
"How...do you feel?" he asked. Morai could sense the hint of hope and curiosity in his voice. He was clearly hoping for even a glimmer of his old friend to shine through her impossibly dark soul.
"It's hard to tell in this state," she simply replied. She wasn't lying. "If I haven't changed at all, what would you do?"
There was no answer. The sound of the door opening once again made Morai tense up and give the same reaction she gave Ingo.
"Well, I have good and bad news, depending on who you are and how you look at it," a voice said. "Oh, wait, you can't see me. Can we take her blindfold off?"
"I wouldn't risk it," the voice of a guard standing outside the door said.
"I think we can handle it," Ingo said. He stood up and untied her blindfold, and she squinted at the first sight of any light in days. She immediately went to everyone's eyes, but they, of course, averted her gaze.
"I'm a temporary doctor here until the new main guy arrives, so I'll skip over my name and get to the important part," the woman explained. She had long deep purple hair and wore glasses over her matching eyes, which stared directly at the papers in her hand. She kept her distance, standing almost outside the doorway.
"Your most recent tests suggest that because of your prolonged use of the serum, your brain activity is more or less the same as when you were on it," she said matter of factly. "This means that you're more or less...stuck...as who you were. Now, this doesn't mean that it can't be helped at all. It just might take more time than we thought."
Morai laughed.
"It's fine news to you, Morai, but I'll be damned if the people here and your friends don't try everything they can to help you," the doctor added.
Morai's smile twisted into a frown. She clinched her fists beneath the tight straps holding them down. They had started to stick to her skin, and she twisted them back and forth as she wiggled her toes and ankles.
"And if all you lot can do is not nearly enough, what will you do with me then?" she asked.
"We're counting on a better outcome," the woman replied.
I'm afraid you'll be sorely disappointed, Morai thought.