[Cross-Realm Dispatch Initiated. Destination: "Nameless Chamber - Tribunal Hall". Solo Protocol Engaged.]
[Patient: Chamber Sovereign, Self-Designated "Themis".]
[Profile: Renowned surgeon with exemplary ethics. Technical virtuoso hampered by interpersonal deficiencies. Nocturnal activities suggest... extracurricular applications of medical expertise.]
[Diagnosis: Jigsaw Syndrome (Early Stage).]
[Alert: Next-Gen medical infrastructure detected. Exercise extreme caution—colleagues may prove more hazardous than pathogens.]
[Commencing Diagnostic Sequence.]
——
"Fascinating. A colleague requiring psychiatric intervention," Fran murmured as ashen mist coiled around her ankles. The fog dissipated abruptly, plunging her into sensory deprivation—until a flickering bulb resurrected the world in stroboscopic glimpses.
The chamber revealed itself through epileptic illumination: windowless concrete sarcophagus, air thick with mildew and the cloying sweetness of decomposing albumin. A warped wooden counter crouched beside the vault-like door, its surface etched with suspiciously organic stains.
Fran's sutured fingers brushed the walls, collecting concrete grit. "Ah, Themis... What delightful transgressions have you etched into these stones?"
"Charging fees feels almost... uncharitable in such squalor." Fran's gaze swept the interrogation chamber before settling on the rickety counter. Its drawer surrendered a cassette player fossilized by time, alongside newspapers yellowed with faux urgency and a journal reeking of moral crusades.
The physician's suture-scarred finger hovered over the play button. Tape hiss bloomed into a voice corroded by lo-fi menace:
"Greetings, Dr. Fran Hessel. I am Themis."
Static veiled the speaker like a shroud. Fran's eyes narrowed to surgical slits as the recording continued:
"Let's play a game."
"You resurrect corpses on operating tables, yes? Wrestle souls from Thanatos' grasp with your silver scalpel. But when you graft foreign organs into screaming patients—" The voice quickened with zealot's conviction. "—do you ever ask if they crave your monstrous second chances?"
A scalpel screeched across the tape. "You're no healer—you're a scalpel-wielding demigod sculpting flesh-puppets. Your sole commandment: Survive. Never live."
Fran's lips curled in perverse delight. "Ah, Themis... You misunderstand. I don't play games—" Her thumb crushed the stop button. "—I curate outcomes."
"While you slept, I liberated both kidneys." The voice slithered from shadowed corners. "A surgeon of your caliber knows the countdown—renal failure's exquisite timetable."
Themis' recording crackled with sacramental fervor: "Sacrifice precedes enlightenment. Your missing organs... keys to ascension. Redemption lies within."
Fran's clinic-perfected smile twitched. Her fingers found the sutured incision—a masterclass in visceral heist, nerve clusters screaming in perfect symphony.
"Both kidneys? Rude." She lifted her scrub top, inspecting the theft's artistry. "House calls require reciprocity, darling."
Though lightheadedness threatened, her stride held. The absence of sepsis proved Themis' surgical pedigree—this was no back-alley butcher.
"Could've taken my heart," Fran mused, leaning against the concrete crypt's wall. "But where's the poetry in quick death?" Ammonia-tinged air burned her nostrils as the truth crystallized: this was a test of surgeon's mettle, carved in stolen flesh.
Her Quarterly Diagnostic Circuit typically granted plausible covers—field medic, coroner, trauma specialist. Today's role? A Jigsaw disciple's plaything, kidneys harvested with puppeteer's precision.
"Let's dance, Themis." Fran's scalpel gleamed in the flickering light. "But remember—" She traced the incision line. "—I charge for anatomy lessons."
"Best consult the archives—psychological disorders demand precise prescriptions." Fran spread the artifacts across the counter like a coroner arranging evidence.
The magazine seized her attention first. There she smirked from the cover—biohazard yellow headlines screaming: "Fran Hessel's Team Revolutionizes Immuno-Engineering!" and "Gene-Editing Maverick Redefines Transhumanism!"
"Who knew I moonlighted as a Nobel laureate?" She preened, tracing her printed likeness. The bylines detailing her fictional achievements received three rereads before she tucked the publication into her lab coat—a trophy of archival self-cannibalism.
The journal's gutted pages whispered darker truths. A lone entry survived:
[January 30th]
Director Julie's hostility festers. No overt sabotage yet, but her gaze carries smoldering resentment. Last Tuesday, she stared at my spine during the morbidity meeting—not with envy, but... hunger?
Fran's nail gouged the paper. "Ah, Themis... Your Rashomon-esque distortion game needs polish." The clinic's fluorescent lights flickered, casting the final sentence in prophetic smear.
The journal's surviving pages whispered darker truths:
[April 9th]
Julie's harassment escalates. Petty sabotage—contaminated cultures, mislabeled specimens. John insists it's temporary, but her eyes... Gods, her eyes gleam like a child disemboweling insects.
The next entry bore waterlogged ink and warped paper:
[May 15th]
Parents' car suffered "brake failure." Coroner's report suspiciously vague. Sole heir now—John urges wedding plans proceed. Can't sleep. Can't mourn. Can't feel.
[May 20th]
Wedding dress measurements tomorrow. John's hands tremble when discussing the inheritance. Why won't the nightmares stop? Why does Julie smile at funerals?
Fran's surgical glove creaked as she turned the final page—blankness screaming louder than words. "Half-told tragedies are worse than lies," she hissed, the diary's abrupt end violating her diagnostic rigor.
The newspaper headline completed this inkblot Rorschach:
"Dr. Julie Jane's Partial Remains Identified Through Genetic Concordance"
The newspaper's headlines screamed their tabloid truths:
September 13th
Dr. Julie Jane's Confirmed Death - Only Visceral Remains Recovered
"Angel of Mercy Butchered: Moral Decay or Cosmic Irony? Killer Still at Large."
Adjacent column blared:
"Mad Genius or Medical Messiah? Dr. Fran Hessel Faces Unethical Experimentation Charges - Trial Set for October 30th High Noon."
Fran discarded the papers like contaminated gauze. "Themis eliminated Julie. Now John's missing, and this shadow-me faces legal crucifixion." Her suture-scarred fingers tapped the steel door. "Three victims in this anatomical chess game."
The vault door loomed - triple-reinforced alloy with bank-grade locking mechanisms. Even at full strength, breaching it would challenge a siege engine. Now, nephrectomy-weakened and sans adrenal enhancements...
The vault door bore no digital keypad—only a brass keyhole glowing with retro malice. Themis' first trial whispered through rusted hinges: classic.
Fran's suture-lined finger traced her abdominal incision, pain receptors sparking a neuropathic symphony. "How thoughtful," she chuckled. "Worried I'd starve before solving your kindergarten puzzle?"
Truth crystallized the moment Themis' recording ended.
"Lose to gain. Redemption lies within—" Her scalpel kissed the line. "—could you be more obvious? Jigsaw wants his royalty checks."
The lock surrendered to basic surgical logic. Her compact kit yielded bone saws and retractors. [Sterile Aura] bathed the chamber in antiseptic glow—no sepsis would spoil this self-directed autopsy.
Fran dissected her own flesh to the rhythm of a whimsical hum. Muscle fibers parted like theater curtains, revealing the brass key nestled between her third and fourth lumbar vertebrae.
"See, Themis?" She dangled the blood-slicked prize. "I always prepay my tutors."
Jigsaw's trials thrived on chronometric predation—death's pendulum swinging closer with each tick. Solutions demanded surgical self-dissection, agony sculpted into enlightenment.
Yet Fran's hands never trembled. Pain receptors? Disabled at seventeen. Moral architecture? Inviolate. She was an atheist in the cathedral of pain, her scalpels consecrated to pragmatism alone.
——
Her fingers delved into the nephrectomy scar. Bloodied polymer sheath emerged, cradling a brass key.
Suturing commenced with laminar-flow precision—needle dancing through dermis like a metronome. Crimson droplets patterned the floor in fractal art.
"How... considerate." She admired Themis' sterilization protocols through gore-streaked lenses. The key's polymer cocoon whispered of hypersterile civilizations. Without such measures, sepsis would claim even victors—poetic irony Fran might've appreciated under different circumstances.
The lock accepted its fleshy tribute with metallic sigh.
The vault door yielded with pneumatic grace—engineered for operators in compromised states. Beyond lay a concrete cathedral of knowledge, its brutalist arches lined with sagging shelves. Dossiers, tabloids, and leather-bound journals choked every inch, their collective weight threatening to collapse the steel frames.
A toppled bookcase caught Fran's eye. Amidst the paper avalanche glinted a cassette tape, placed with ceremonial precision atop the debris like a cherry crowning a corpse cake.
The player swallowed the tape with mechanical hunger. Themis' voice emerged, laced with new frequencies of mocking triumph:
"You've claimed redemption's key—commendable. Now let us cure your... curiosity."
Three metallic clicks echoed through speakers.
"Key One: From the Informant's Tongue."
"Key Two: Through the Lover's Betrayal."
"Key Three: Within the Prodigy's Ruin."
Static crackled like burning synapses. "Reconstruct my requiem, Doctor. Only then will the diary's second act unfold."
Fran's sutured lips curled upward as the tape hissed its final syllable. She rewound the cassette with ritual precision—twice—dissecting each phoneme for hidden frequencies.
"Themis, darling, your riddles reek of grad-school desperation." Her scalpel-tipped gaze swept the archive chamber. "Three keys in a concrete shoebox? Hardly subtle."
The toppled bookshelf leaned at 37 degrees—precisely calculated to avoid crushing the formaldehyde-stained corpse beneath. Fran clawed through newsprint mountains, her olfactory nerves cataloging decomposition byproducts: cadaverine, putrescine, and... vanilla-scented embalming fluid?
Julie Jane's mummified face greeted her—jaw unhinged in perpetual scream, lips split like overripe fruit. The clinical light glinted off something metallic lodged deep in the esophagus.
"Ah, Julie—always so vocal." Fran's gloved fingers spelunked into the shriveled throat, retrieving a tarnished key from its vocal cord cradle. "Let's hear your truth."
She pocketed Key One, its teeth still flecked with petrified tissue.
"Now then—" Her boot nudged a dossier labeled John's Psychiatric Evaluations. "—betrayal and downfall should nest in these ruins."
Fran rifled through newspaper stacks with forensic efficiency. Obituaries, stock reports, celebrity gossip—digital chaff in this mildewed archive. Her remaining hours ticked away in renal countdown: uremia's frost creeping through veins, multi-organ failure's metabolic cascade looming.
Three hours? Twelve? Her body's collapse would be a chronometric roulette.
A July evening edition caught her eye—its weather report circled thrice in crimson. Too deliberate. "Simpler than I thought," she muttered, fingertips grazing the date. "First key was red herring in cadaver."
Methodically, she combed through August issues. Five minutes later—there. August 25th: MISSING PERSON NOTICE - JULIE JANE. John Howard's contact details bled through newsprint, his address smudged by anxious fingerprints.
The newspaper's weight betrayed adhesive treachery. Fran dissected the pages with surgical strike—revealing a rectangular void where classified ads once resided. The hollowed space reeked of starch glue and desperation.
"John, John..." Her scalpel probed the papier-mâché tomb. "Let's see what secrets you entombed."
Fran dissected the newsprint skin with surgical strike. There it glinted—Key Two, its teeth shaped like temporal cipher.
"Time—the Rosetta Stone." She licked bloodied lips. Themis' game crystallized: Julie's death in September, John's missing person notice in August. Cross-reference dates, harvest keys.
John's public plea for Julie's whereabouts wasn't concern—it was betrayal's autopsy report. No groom-to-be publishes spousal disappearance notices unless... complications arise.
"Lover's Betrayal indeed." Fran's eyes crescented, pallid cheeks blooming with perverse delight. Renal failure's shadow loomed, yet her pulse quickened—not from fear, but thrill.
The final riddle whispered through mildewed archives:
"Prodigy's Ruin." Her scalpel hovered over October's headlines—the month her doppelgänger faced trial. "Ah, Themis... You presume I fear myself?"