Wordlessly, the entity turned away, and began speaking with the octopus.

"Quite the charmer, eh?" muttered Erci from beside me as he stood up, before pulling me to my feet as well. I nodded in agreement, and the three of us lingered at the edge of politeness as the octopus and the bundle of tangles spoke in hushed tones. Occasionally, a tentacle would wildly gesticulate toward the door, us or in the others' face, but their conversation was very quiet apart from some . Likely not to cause us any harm. Erci made the mistake of leaning in to catch some words, but the two of them turned toward him and the octopus-being shooed him away, after which they continued on as though nothing happened.

Eventually, just as standing around was getting awkward, the octopus-being jabbed one of its tentacles toward the floor with finality, and the floaty being sort of... sagged. It took me a moment to realize that that was its version of slumping shoulders in defeat, and it beckoned us over with a wave of its garment.

"Follow me. The Host has decided to allow me use of the facilities."

I didn't have the gall to chuckle at that, as I wasn't sure if they would actually murder me, so I held my breath as we followed the being deeper into the building. We took a right, then another one and two more, and somehow ended up at a staircase, which the tangly being quickly floated down. The octopus was behind it, gently beckoning us down as well.

***

Alright, so the architecture couldn't be normal, because apparently nothing here can be, but I'm pretty sure that the room we were now standing in was situated directly underneath the assembly at the center of the entire platform. It was circular, and the ceiling held some sort of metal iris, through which a thin beam of light pierced into the center of the room. It was large, perhaps seven or eight meters in diameter, and the center was entirely taken up by a metal table with a multitude of strange devices jutting from the floor and ceiling around it.

It reminded me uncomfortably of an alien surgery table where they stich extra hands to your head or something, but I swallowed the comment. Erci looked as uncomfortable as I felt, and I discreetly leaned over as the octopus and the floating tangle did... something to the consoles donning the room all around us.

"If they start torturing, or experimenting, you gotta stab 'em and take me away from here. I don't want to end up gutted because of this stupid orb." I held up the stupid orb to drive home the point of it being stupid.

"Indeed. I shall aim for eyes or eye-like parts. What makes you think that you are first, though?"

"Also this thing" I glanced toward the stupid orb once more.

Our conversation was swiftly and effectively ended by the room springing to life - the metal iris contracted, then dilated; the beam of light turned into a pillar, and screens all around us chugged to life in an eye-watering display of electric blue text scrolling down them. One by one, they booted, until a larger screen we'd not yet noticed lit up as well, directly opposite the door.

A series of metallic clanks signified the activation of the central piece, and the table rose a little, and then tilted toward us, most of the robotic arms retracting toward the ceiling, folding up against it.

"Lie down here."

***

Eventually, I sat. Naturally, I was the first one to go, because of course, and only a bit of encouragement from Erci, as well as a pained noise from Tangles was needed to get me to step up to the central dais.

I brushed Raven off my shoulder, and she landed on Octopus' head, who fussed about with their tentacles before sighing and getting back to what they were doing along the walls.

The metal was cold against the back of my neck.

"This will hurt very much. Not optimal equipment." was all the warning I got before two of the arms lowered from the ceiling, and pinned my shoulders to the table; Two more got my ankles, and yet another two fixed my wrists to the cold metal. I tried to struggle against the restraint, but found they wouldn't budge.

I wasn't sure if they broke the skin, because I didn't feel any real pain, but they seemed to radiate an unnatural cold nonetheless - until ol' Tangles, the jokester, laughed morosely and pressed a button to the side of the room.

"Wait, wha-" The rest caught in my throat.

Because then, it actually hurt.

The metal spikes resting on my extremities seemed to cool down, and then I felt something enter my body from their points of contact, feeling all the while like something was drilling into my bones.

I cried out, and Erci lunged forward, spear in hand, aiming for Tangles' eyeholes, but the being simply caught the spear and gently leaned it against the wall. Then, it caught Erci as well and leaned him against the wall too.

"Do not interfere." A condescending pat on the head, and then it was off.

It swept around the room, and I felt the cold in my shoulders turn to heat, quickly followed by my ankles and wrists, before the heat turned back into cold. Then it switched again. And again. Faster and faster the two sensations came, Tangles jabbing like mad on three different consoles at once.

Then, I felt something move. Inside my shoulder.

"Oh, Jesus! What are you doing?!"

The temperature switch was now so fast it was imperceptible, the spikes pinning me in place feeling like a median between the two, when I registered movement inside them.

It felt like something was crawling along my bones, up and down, into my arm and my chest alike, my legs and feet, my fingers and forearm. The sensation stopped in my right arm, and turned to fire, before the arm gave a mechanical groan and a shower of sparks rained down on me as it was fried. The Worldstone glowed brighter.

The effect on my left side was much more insidious, and the sensations simply slowed, then ceased, and I saw some sort of decay or rust spread along the metal spikes jabbed into my right arm, flaking off metal and dust before the thin filaments simply disintegrated into ash and gently floated down.

The Worldstone gave another pulse, this one somehow more menacing, and all of the screens all around us began acting up, displaying bouts of static or sparking wildly, until Octopus abandoned their post by the door and scuttled to one of the consoles. It typed madly, and I saw some sort of film of energy spring up around the table I was lying on, which caused the glitches to dissipate and Tangles' frantic typing to cease. It looked at me once, eye-glow squinted in annoyance, then got back to working on the devices behind it.

This time, a variety of machinery unfolded from above, simple metal bolts replaced by strange emitters, cylinders and moving parts, all of which held both of my arms in place - my left was fixed with what looked and felt like a band of fire, a variety of glowy bits arrayed around it, while my right was simply impaled with even more vicious spikes. A couple of different robo-arm devices also focused on my hand in particular, seemingly emitting some sort of vibration in space, because I could see the air around the Stone waver a little bit. I was pretty sure these ones actually broke skin.

This time, the sensation of crawling along my bones was not stopped, the one in my legs had already ceased at some point, completely paralyzing them to the table. The same quickly happened to my arms, but the right one still seemed to take longer than the left one.

When it was all finished, another metallic clang rang out, and I saw a device bigger than all the others spring forth from the ceiling, lowering down toward my chest.

It wavered a moment, then pointed directly at my heart and began glowing - I eyed the outside world in fear, spying Erci still leaned against the wall, seemingly paralyzed with hatred burning in his eyes, gaze locked on Tangles, who didn't give him a second glance.

The new arm finished glowing, and started pulsing, first faster, then slower and slower - until it seemed to find the right rhythm. The rhythm of my heart.

One-two.

One-two.

It slowed some more, and a thin beam of green light shot out, connecting with my chest - I seized up, and my heart stopped - before continuing.

One-two.

One-two.

The thin beam was now pulsing along.

It began slowing once more, and to my horror, I noticed that my heart was slowing with it - I tried to excite my heartbeat, hold my breath, try one of my mum's breathing exercises for slowing heart rate, but to no avail. I'd lost control.

And it kept slowing.

When it got to twice a second, I began to feel weak.

Once a second, and I didn't have any strength left.

Once every two seconds, and I saw black encroach on my vision.

It seemed to stabilize at once every five seconds, and my pulse became stronger - I could feel it in my neck and face, and slowly, strength returned to me, alongside an eerie calm - like I couldn't be excited even if I wanted to. My emotions weren't gone, they simply couldn't act upon my heart anymore. Never knew how much impact the heart holds over emotional response.

The rhythm steadied, and I lay there, careful not to move or use any more oxygen than I needed to, and spied another mechanical appendage sweeping down from the ceiling, this time toward my head; It paused in front of my left eye, shone a slight red light into it, followed by blue and silver, and did the same to the other eye.

Then, it moved to my hairline, and swept a curtain of light up and down my face, top to bottom, right to left, before retracting a little.

I felt the table raising itself, the robotic arms moving with it, and it tilted forward, then began spinning, until I faced the larger screen.

On it was a 3D rendering of a human brain, but it had some strange structures in it. I was pretty sure there wasn't something in front of the prefrontal cortex, and the scarring along the edges... it was strange.

In my addled state, it took me a while to realize that this wasn't just any old brain, this was mine. I had those things. The scarred tissue. The strange lobes. The weird structures and knots.

"This looks very unright." Said Tangles, shaking its hood slowly as it poked at one of the strange knots just underneath the frontal lobe visible on the monitor.

"Unright... apparently that's what happens if everyone disappears? Can you fix it?" Ooctopus' eye widened a little at the first sentence, but Tangles didn't give any indication of their emotions. If they had any.

"No. It would take an example. Not just your species, but you. In the past."

"I suppose I'll have to live with it. Worked this long. Does this 'freeing' still work, even with my brain like that?"

"Yes. It was merely... strange. Such things are not often seen. Proceed." The last word was spoken toward Octopus, who started hammering onto a different keyboard, and the arm trained on my head began moving once more, finnicking around between my eyebrows, making incredibly tiny movements.

The rendering of my brain became larger, and more detail resolved itself as the arm shot a very tiny blue beam at my forehead from different positions, and the image zoomed toward my forehead, centering on the strange new lobe I apparently harbored there.

"This is very strange."

"What's strange?"

"This is unlike any human brain I have seen."

I wonder where this being got the chance to see human brains? That's a question to ask later...

The arm wavered a little, then retracted, and folded back upward, making way for a very malicious-looking one. It reminded me of the guns the bad guys would use in a cyberpunk dystopia, and folded itself toward the same spot between my eyebrows.

I went cross-eyed trying to see it, but lost its point before it touched my skin.

It was incredibly cold to the touch, and my eyebrows became numb, quickly followed by my eyes, which unfocused slightly - not enough to lose sight of the main screen, but enough so I couldn't deliberately look at the phaser rifle pointed at my forehead.

How much do I actually trust these peo-

Then, my skull felt like it split open.

The rendering turned blood red, and I released a blood-curdling scream as what felt like a white hot cleaver rent my head in two.

Quickly, structures peeled away from the rendering, the pressure on my skull increasing, and my eyes went up into my skull.

But I didn't fall unconscious. Something was holding me there. I couldn't-

Then it stopped. The cold spread with a vengeance, wiping away any remainders of the ache, and the future-gun trained on my head dimmed its glow. When had it started that?

Before me was the rendering, but it looked unlike before.

It was incredibly detailed, more than photo-realistic in nature, and of something unfamiliar.

It took some sifting through memories for me to realize that this was a model of my brain stem, specifically the area often called the "lizard brain" - the part of our brain which supposedly carries our distant ancestors' instincts. However, it looked strange, unlike the textbooks, like there was more of it than I remembered - there were structures around it, strange knots and veins and... bundles of nerves? Growing into and out of those? Why was everything glowing?

Tangles took me out of my reverie.

"This is The Illusion."

"What is it?"

"It is the restraint. No one knows where it came from. However, we do know some of what it does. And how to remove it."

"Well get to it, then."

Tangles turned back around, wordlessly sweeping along the rightermost wall, the monitors in his wake flashing a dull red as they passed.

"This will hurt beyond anything you have ever felt. You will not fall unconscious."

“Wait, let-”

It was all the warning I got. No 'brace yourself' or 'It'll be over before you know it', Tangles just jammed a button, the tool against my head glowed a dull orange, and all thought vanished.

Well, I say vanished, but what I mean is, all thought was displaced. Not by nothing, but by pain. Exquisite, maddening, excruciating pain - pain so all-encompassing that I forgot my own name, that I was a woman from Earth, that my sole friends were a strange elf and a bird. All thought, emotion, memory or structural wordage was replaced with quite exquisite pain.

It felt like I was being electrocuted from within, strapped to the electric chair and forced to live through it.

The disappearance of everyone else was painful, but I survived it. It paled in comparison to this. Maintaining the fey shield-dome may have come close, but most of my mind was distracted at the time, while now, I had nothing to focus on, nothing to focus. I was thrashing wildly on the table, limbs held in place by advanced machinery, my deafening scream muffled by the force-field surrounding me.

And an instant later, it was over.

I slumped to the table, muscles quivering, heartbeat stable at one bp5s. I blinked once. There was the smell of something burning in the air.

My thoughts were scattered, and I realized I was looking at something.

A screen.

There was something on the screen, what was it again?

Ah!

I remember!

I blinked again, and tried to focus, seeing a shape on the monitor.

I shivered involuntarily.

Some sort of blue sheen over the immediate area dissolved, and I turned my head.

There was someone here!

Who?

I felt my arm being released, and something moved upwards.

I tried to raise both hands to my face, but only one came up.

I tried to shake my left arm angrily, but nothing happened.

With monumental effort, I lifted my head, letting my gaze fall upon my right hand, still clutching something green.

I reached over, trying to brush my right hand against my left - and didn't hit anything. My head fell down with a slight 'clunk'.

I tapped my right fist to my side, searching for the arm, but there was nothing there? further up, still nothing, yet further... aha! There's something.

Feeling around, it didn't make sense - my arm wasn't that short, there was barely anything!

I looked at it once more, and the horrible truth finally registered in my mind.

My left arm was gone.

Where it had been before only a grey, porous bandage remained, lying still on the metal table.

I poked at my shoulder, and found... something?

Raising my hand, I looked down, and my knuckles were coated in something.

"Ash."

Who said that?

"Your arm. It turned to ash. I'm sorry."

The octopus-being!

Wait.

"You speak english?" I whispered in its direction.

"Hah! No. You're speaking my language. Can you sit up?" it whispered back.

"I think so, yes."

And I did.

"Amelia! Are you alright? By all the lairs of evil, what happened?"

"Erci?" I asked the new voice.

However, He didn't respond - Octopus' eye widened, and it reached out, only for Tangles to come forth, dragging Erci with them. His hands were at his ears, and he was shaking his head.

"You aren't speaking his language. Focus on the words."

"Er-" I tried again, but immediately noticed what Octopus meant - there was some sort of buzzing behind the tone, and I realized that I was speaking the same language as the reedy being had before.

I did as Octopus had said, and focused on the words themselves, managing to force them out without the strange buzzing.

"Erci, I'm... alright. Are you?"

"Amy, what in all the gods' names happened just then? You look… different. Your eyes." he whispered hoarsely.

"I don't know what the hell they did, but I think this was what Octopus meant. I don’t feel different - I’ll have to find a mirror." Also have to check on Ref, I added in thought.

“Long man must be performed also.” Interrupted Octopus, having switched back to broken english for Erci’s sake.

He shrunk back as Tangles nodded morosely.

"It'll be over in a second. Promise." I put an arm over his shoulders.

Hesitantly, he moved over to the metal table, Octopus sweeping a disturbing amount of ash and ashen bandage into a cylindrical container. I gingerly poked at the remains of my arm, but stopped when he shot me an exhasperated look.

Sitting myself on the floor besides the big monitor, I crossed my legs and got used to only having one arm to do so.

Erci calmed, his gaze turning stony, and he did not flinch when the metal needles came down to pin his limbs to the table.

I saw some tightening around his eyes when they began to glow a slight cyan (did they do that with me?), but he did not make a peep when the green emitter connected to his heart and slowed it. It conformed to his pulse, and began flashing green.

One-two-three.

One-two-three.

Slower and slower it went, his muscles relaxing, the tightness around his form slowly disappearing.

When the blue emitter descended, he tensed yet again, and upon the table tilting forward, I shot him an encouraging smile.

He smiled back without much mirth.

The rendering was... weird. It did not hold as much scarring as my own, but it still had its fair share, and the structure was completely different. None of the areas were where I thought they'd be, and when the future gun came down, Erci did not cry out as the rendering peeled away until reaching... something. I could see similarities to myself there, the same weird structures and... wires, but the area was unfamiliar.

Octopus raised the blue forcefield once more and Erci flashed me slight grin, twitching his hand in my direction.

Shrugging, Tangles threw the switch once more, and I saw Erci thrash and scream soundlessly behind the blue film of light. For an instant, his eyes and mouth let out a beam of light and I thought that he might die - I jumped up, panicked eyes darting to Tangles, but it was over a moment later. I looked at the rendering and saw the same thing as before, only without the presence of the structure Tangles called 'The Illusion' marring it.

Erci was slumped over unconscious, looking quite dead, but on closer inspection, the slight rise and fall of his chest showed that he was alive. Raven, who was sitting on my shoulder, flew over to him and pecked at his nose, but he only twitched a little.

Tangles lifted him up with several of their... tendrils while Octopus went to the door, using a device embedded into the wall next to it.

"Reya, I need you down in the lab."

"I'll be right there." came a melodic voice from the speaker.

The reedy being - Reya, I presumed - appeared shortly after, and took Erci away in a bridal carry. I had to chuckle at the image.

A loud squak made me whip around, and I saw Raven perched on the metal table.

"You won't need encouragement, then?"

And angry caw answered me, and I chuckled again.

"Right you don't."

Tangles muttered something about 'damn humans', but the both of them nonetheless began working once more.

Raven flopped down on her back, a very unnatural position for a bird to take, and was quickly skewered by the strange needles. Interestingly, she was pinned with three along her wings and none on her talons, but the procedure seemed to work nonetheless.

She lay perfectly motionless when the heart-stopper came down and slowed her heartbeat (not by much, but still a significant amount for the tiny bird), and only moved very slightly when her brain was scanned.

I turned toward the render, more interested than not, and was startled by what I saw - she was a bird, after all, and I'd long since wondered how such a sophisticated intelligence could fit her tiny skull, when I saw the image displayed.

At the center sat a normal bird's brain, but on top of it, all around, was a diffuse cloud of... something. Wisps of smoke whirled around it, filing in and out of her brain in regular intervals, but I couldn't see any sort of pattern or reason to it.

So enthralled was I that I missed the raising of the shield and the lowering of the future-gun, only looking back when the render peeled away vapor and matter alike, quickly descending down into the depths of the brain, the strange wisps being present deeper inside as well.

This was more familiar, the vague shape of a brain stem visible on the screen, and The Illusion looking almost identical to my own.

Though when I compared it to mine in detail, it was ever so slightly more complex, the number of structures definitely seemed to be larger than those in my own brain.

That thought was wiped away when Tangles, the most empathetic person around, activated everything without any sort of warning.

There was a flash on the screen, and The Illusion detached itself from her brain, vanishing instantly.

I looked back and flinched - the future-gun was a sparking mess - but the strangest thing was Raven herself. Her feathers had darkened further than I believed possible, and held a bit of an iridescent shine to them.

I wonder if I changed like that… didn’t really notice anything different about Erci, but then, he was unconscious...

"The Illusion hides your true self from others as well." nudged the cyborg-octopus from the side as Raven began cleaning her feathers with a slightly shaky beak, and the forcefield fell.

"Thank you both. For everything you've done."

"It is nothing." said Tangles, speaking for the first time since my own procedure. "We do what we must." Their voice was different, warmer, less alien and grave-like. I smiled.

Tangles scooped up Raven, who was still compulsively picking at her coat, and I followed the two of them up the stairs, while Octopus remained behind, shutting down the machinery.