Lore: Destroy all that Binds

[Kyosuke]

Jhaptal followed as expected. "I've slept the same as always," he replied. For now, he dropped the subject about her restless sleeping, taking her word on it. Their breakfasts had already been laid out on the table by the servant and Jhaptal took his normal seat.

[Soran Nightblade]

When Reya had finished eating peacefully, she looked up at Jhaptal. "The swordsmith has begun forging your new toys," she said with a light teasing tone. "It took him some time to gain a sense of what I wanted him to create, but he has finally created a blueprint based on my descriptions. It should be completed within another week."

A servant entered and cleared the table. "Well then, I will leave you to your work, I'll be along to observe once I've finished some business here." Reya said calmly. She had ceased to bother with the pretext that they were seeking to extract any particular information from Soran, though Jhaptal was welcome to let the elf think so if he chose. The instructions were now quite simply to cause as much pain as he thought the elf's body could withstand before returning him to his cell. She had explained to Jhaptal that this was necessary to surpass her current mastery of her powers, but declined to offer any more detail than that.

[Soran Nightblade]

In the dungeon:

Soran sat against the wall of his cell, eyes closed, focusing on the sound of his slow breathing. He was exhausted, but had little success sleeping. Without a window to the outside, he had lost track of how long he'd been kept there, though assuming he could estimate by the number of 'interrogations' he'd tolerated at perhaps thrice a day, it had been a week. He raised his arm to swipe away the sweat accumulating on his forehead. It was difficult to recognize the hand he saw as his eyelids raised as part of his own body; both the gore and the pain seemed detached from him. He didn't even bother to look at the rest of his body. The pain he could distance to some extent, but his actual appearance was a reality check that served him no advantage.

He knew he was feverish, but it wasn't an infection; they had been careful to dress his wounds exactly such that they remained clean, but raw. Sometimes Jhaptal inflicted no new wounds at all; his unhealed injuries were enough material to work with to bring Soran to the verge of his limit, but never kill him. For what purpose? He didn't understand what was going on; that woman seemed to know something about him, but she never answered his questions.

Whatever their reasons, it seemed imcreasingly certain that he would not escape this place. The only question that burned constantly into his mind was how long; to what extent would they prolong this torture? His muscles still appeared strong, but every day there was less strength behind them. Eventually, this would kill him, and yet the elf still had no wish to die. He thought about it in a detached, mechanical way; about how long could a man survive on the rations he was given, considering the energy expended on adrenaline, blood loss, and the strain of tissue growth. But except for brief moments, he felt with certainty that he wanted to go on living, even in this situation.

He didn't understand where this hope came from, but there were moments, so fleeting he had to attribute them to delusion, where he felt as if Mizuki's presence was there with him. He clung to that feeling like a lifeline. The existence he led before he came here felt more and more like a distant illusion the longer he stayed here, but that feeling alone felt real. He leaned his head back and tried to sleep, wondering how the others were doing back home.

[Kyosuke]

Jhaptal took a moment to look up from the breakfast he was eating. "Thank you Lady Reya," he replied. He gave a slight smile to the thought that he would be getting a fun new weapon to play with soon. In any case, he didn't speak anymore and devoured the rest of his breakfast, then took off in large strides to begin the next day of torture with the elf. He opened the door to the dungeon and shut it behind him. "Still alive there Nightblade?" he asked.

[Soran Nightblade]

Soran raised his eyes ferally at Jhaptal. "As are you. Unfortunately," he said darkly.

[Kyosuke]

Jhaptal ignored the unnecessary comment Soran made. "Fortuneately you can remain in your cell for today," he said. Unknown to Soran, he had been slipping a dormant hallucinogenic poison into his food. Once it built up to the necessary amounts, it would begin to take affect, for now, the ninja waited for the telltale signs of dizziness to hit Soran before he began to manipulate his senses.

[Soran Nightblade]

Soran eyed his captor suspiciously. Something seemed wrong, but he thought it prudent to keep that to himself. To be allowed to heal for a day was a luxury he didn't intend to pass up. Part of him was thinking that if he could survive long enough, he would eventually understand more of his situation and be able to devise a way out of it. He knew his torturer had no potential use to him; to Soran, he was just an unavoidable nuiscence that he would have to tolerate as best he could. That woman who controlled Jhaptal seemed like the key to resolving his captivity, if he could just learn enough about her and whatever inspired her to keep him here. Soran struggled to believe in that strategy; he couldn't afford to resign himself to the alternative. Everything that kept him clinging to his life at the moment depended on that hope.

He eyed Jhaptal icily, watching for him to leave. A faint ripple in his vision made the ninja appear warped and yellowed for an instant before restoring him to his proper form. The rogue blinked, the hatred in his gaze thawing only slightly as he contemplated what had just happened, careful not to take his eyes from his captor.

[Kyosuke]

It was actually very nice that Soran kept his eyes on Jhaptal. Otherwise he might have missed that first wave of dizziness that hit the elf. He had to wait for the drug to take a stronger effect though. One of the effects the drug had was the weakening of his will, which would send his mind into a feverish state in which he didn't know what was real and what was not. He still had to wait for that to fully kick in before manipulating his hallucinations.

[Soran Nightblade]

It was not until several hours later that Soran began to realize something was seriously wrong. In spite of his wounds, he had thus far managed to remain fairly clear-headed, but as the time wore on he found it more and more difficult to keep his thoughts in order. That was particularly disconcerting to the rogue, because it made it harder to fend off thoughts of the things he normally kept sharply locked out. The reality of his situation and its hopelessness that he had willed out of existence was finally sinking in. Not only that, but memories of Mizuki and the others, and even things he never thought about, like the meaning of the scar that ran across his stomach that always gave him a sick feeling when he touched it. The rogue kept to himself in the small cell, outwardly appearing no different except to seem perhaps slightly more agitated than normal, priodically swiping the hair back from his forehead, though it only fell back unnoticed into his face. Inwardly, reality seemed to be ganging up on him, along with a nausea different from what he had known so far and a periodic blurring of his vision that had finally confirmed to him, without a doubt, that something was very wrong with his body and his head. He thought over the possibilities, remembering the effects supposedly produced by hallucinogenic plants. But he could think of no reason why such a tool would be used on him; normally its only function was in small amounts for pleasure or large amounts as a truth syrum to elicit confessions. Still, he saw little other explanation. Feeling his control swerve, he worked to maintain his focus and put the drug's effects in perspective of reality.

[Kyosuke]

Jhaptal had walked off a while ago, or so it must have seemed to Soran, to make it seem like he had kept good on his comment about leaving him alone for the day. Right after he had stepped out of the room, he slipped back into his secret passageway and circled back towards the dungeons. Silently he had been watching from a small slot in the ceiling, trying to discern when the drug would fully take effect.

Surprisingly the elf seemed to be fighting the effects off fairly well, and the ninja suspected that the elf knew that he had been poisoned in some way. That knowledge would make it easier for him to fight off the poison. To fix that, Jhaptal dropped a small ball containing some of the drug in air form in a corner of the room. The elf would be too busy fighting off the effects from the first dosage to notice him doing it. He hadn't done this before since a fully conscious Soran would have noticed the gas ball, from the misty gas spreading out from it, and recognized a poison being spread in the air. Now, the rogue's noticing was no longer much of an issue.

[Soran Nightblade]

Soran was not conscious of the mist in the air, or if he was, it was undiscernable from the yellow-orange tint that had already corrupted his vision. A wave of dizziness spread through the rogue as his head loosened even further against his will. The rogue stiffened and sat as still as possible. His mind felt like a bag of worms. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall, battling his own thoughts in silent alarm.

[Kyosuke]

Jhaptal saw that the elf's mental defenses were finally down and he was ready to be manipulated. After making sure that all the remaining gas was drained, he turned his attention to Soran and began to change his hallucinations to the ninja's liking.

Jhaptal had something he wanted to test out on the man, though there was no way to know if it would work. He put Soran's vision into a state of isolation, in which he would believe that only he was around. Of course, he doubted this would affect the rogue too much, seeing as he seemed to prefer to be alone at times, but normally people feared isolation so it was worth a try.

[Soran Nightblade]

Soran was too far gone to understand where Jhaptal's voice was coming from. Soon, it didn't register as a voice at all. He pressed one palm to his forehead dizzily, feeling pain arch through him. The shock almost pulled him out of the vision he was sinking into, but instead he found himself surrounded by ... nothing. He was in a blindingly yellow vacuum, alone. He felt this should matter little, but the weight of solitude pressed strangely on him. It changed nothing that he was alone. He knew that. But because his defenses had been tampered with, the very fact that it changed nothing oppressed him deeply.

He tried to pull away, to return to his usual understanding of reality. A part of him knew this was a dream, and yet it seemed as if the rationale that comforted him in 'reality' was suddenly nothing but wishful thinking; a pleasant delusion he used to escape the truth, which he was now engulfed in. He had always been alone. Even if he could pretend otherwise by returning, what would be the point?

No. No, there had to be something, he tried to convince himself. Gray, blurry forms with names he couldn't attach drifted into his consciousness. These were the people who had changed his reality, he knew in the back of his mind. They looked so fake. In the tangle of his poisoned nerves, he tried to remember if they had ever been real people, or if he had only imagined them. Panic was building up in him like pressure on a sling, reeling up to fire some destroying shot.

"Stop. Stop!" the rogue demanded to no one in particular, rising to his feet in agitation.

[Kyosuke]

Jhaptal listened to Soran's demands of stop and ended the vision. He estimated that with the amount of poison the elf had taken in, he would be affected for another ten hours at the least. He planned on using every minute of it. After a quick deliberation, the ninja began the next set of hallucinations. In this one, the walls began to close in on Soran, threatening to crush the elf until it slowed down. He had to be careful about what he had the elf experience, if the mind believed he was dead then his body would soon follow, and that would mean he failed Reya.

[Soran Nightblade]

Soran turned his attention to the problem of his shrinking cell, but the keen sense that he had been irrevocably divorced from the reality he once found a small measure of comfort in stayed with him. He moved to the center of the room, half-heartedly forming plans to combat the closing walls. He even reached out and gave one of the cell bars a firm tug, but only succeeded in reopening the wound in his hand. When he felt himself pinned between unrelenting panes of concrete, his ribs slowly splintering beneath the force, the image disappeared, and another took its place. After his first outburst, he endured the visions without comment, his reactions readable mostly from the rapid fluctuations in his dilated pupils. After many hours of hallucinated peril, he was left standing against the back of the cell, leaning heavily sideways against the concrete. He stood panting and barely supporting his weight. When the next threat failed to come, he slid down to his knees and leaned sideways into the wall with his shoulder and head, physically and psychologically exhausted from the yellowed visions that he couldn't control. Overwhelmed for a moment, he clenched his eyes and pressed harder into the wall, as if wanting it to just absorb him.