Azotreh didn't wake in the bed in her cell. Instead, she awoke within a room that she only remembered in the most distant of her memories, and the most vivid of nightmares. This room wasn't burning, and the faceless forms of her parents weren't pulling them from her bed. Sunlight filtered through the window, and the curtains danced in a quiet breeze.
The room was serene in a way Azotreh didn't remember it being. She was simply too young to remember this room in any state but blazing.
She gently shifted underneath the thick blanket, hand-woven by her mother. Also unlike the nightmares, she could move under her own power. There was no sense of disconnect, and she didn't watch through eyes that were both hers and not simultaneously.
Her fingers dug into the sheets before pushing against the warm cocoon of soft fabric. Even though some part of her wanted to retreat deeper into the blanket, take a moment to find comfort, she knew she couldn't. Whatever this was, she needed to at least know there was no newfound danger within it.
She climbed from the bed, finding some changes to the room more aligned with the facility. A black iron desk sat against one wall, her mother's axe and father's sword crossed on the wall over it. The floor was wooden, yet lit up like the tiles of the facility as their bare feet landed on it. The sigaldry was different, and the characters glowed gold instead of blue.
A bookshelf sat against the opposite wall, though it held no books. Azotreh knew instinctively that she would have to fill the shelf herself, though she had no inkling as to how.
Finally, the door out of the room had a layer of black iron visible only between wooden planks. While the wood had gaps, the black iron beneath did not, instead seemingly being a perfectly flat plane of the material.
Azotreh took a few more minutes to investigate the room, eventually pulling her father's sword from the wall. It pulsed with energy in her hand. Just for good measure, she also took her mother's axe. Despite both weapons being designed not just for high rankers, but for adults, Azotreh held them just fine. The sword's blade alone reached her shoulders if placed on the ground, and the axe's head was larger than their torso, but they didn't even feel heavy in Azotreh's grip.
She gently pushed open the door and stepped outside, her feet meeting soft grass.
She stood in a small space, only about a hundred meters across. The ground was an even layer of grass that curved up to a hill in the very center. The grass became hazy and indistinct at the edges of the realm, covered in a thick fog. Massive shapes loomed in the middle distance, yet did not move. High above, no sun shone down. Instead, behind a gilded glass dome, a seemingly infinite sky of purple mist and golden stars stretched. Shapes were also visible in the depths of the mist, mostly large things with fins and flippers.
The purple and gold light didn't make the grass any less vibrantly green. Instead, the light seemed to only make the grass greener.
She kept the weapons up, though she had little experience with them. Still, oversized blades she could wield with no effort would surely be at least a minor deterrent if something in the blurry distance decided that Azotreh would be a nice snack.
Azotreh moved toward the hill and an enormous six-sided obelisk that rested atop it. The obelisk was constructed of pure white marble, with dancing lines of the same golden sigaldry as they'd found on the floor of their room across its surface. Hovering above the obelisk, a polyhedron with an ever-shifting number of sides pulsed with cerulean light. There was something clearly incomplete about the prism, though she wasn't sure what made it so.
Azotreh pressed the sword against one of the sides of the obelisk, watching as a hole opened in the edifice like a doorway. There was no indent to imply even the mechanical doors of the facility, but a smooth surface that seemed to simply slide into the walls on either side of it.
Within was a mostly blank room. In the center sat a high table and a pair of chairs, all constructed from the same white marble. The chairs each had plush crimson cushions, and relaxing in one was a man.
The man's skin was pale as a sheet, contrasting with the black suit in a style Azotreh had never seen before. Not that Azotreh had seen many suits.
The man's hair was white despite his youth. He must have been no older than his early twenties, though with higher rank there was a chance he was much older. Yet he gave off no sense of the ancient wisdom all high rankers held in spades, leading Azotreh to assume his age was truly matched by his looks.
The man was also tall, much taller than Azotreh had seen another human not altered by the experiments. He was a little over two meters tall, with a very lanky frame.
He held his hands up as Azotreh leveled the sword at him. Though her hands were shaking, Azotreh still kept the sword as steady as she could. There was a detached curiosity to this man, similar to the feelings she'd felt from the administrator. This man at least had some sympathy in his eyes, unlike the unknowable metallic man.
"Calm down, kid." The man said, his tone holding no hostility despite the sword leveled at his face.
"Why should I? I don't know where I am, who you are, or anything else about here. What sick illusion did you cast on me?"
The man's eyebrow shot up in confusion.
"Illusion? What are you talking about?"
"My home! Why did I wake up in a home I barely know!?" Azotreh yelled.
The man shrugged his shoulders before replying, "I can't tell you that. I was hoping you could tell me why I woke up in my bed on a stormy afternoon. I thought I died."
Azotreh faltered, the sword lowering just an inch, settling onto the man's collar. She quickly returned it to being raised just beneath the man's chin, though Azotreh noticed that the blade left no mark on the man's collarbone.
The man waited for Azotreh to get her thoughts together before asking, "Where did you get these weapons? They're really overstylized."
Azotreh poked the blade closer to the man's throat, pushing it right into his Adam's apple. The man seemingly didn't care, running his fingers over the false edge and sides of the blade.
"Don't insult my parents' weapons. You don't know anything." Azotreh responded, her voice a bit harsher than she'd intended. The man's eyes softened.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to insult the dead."
Azotreh's eyes widened at the remark. How could he know that her parents were dead? Azotreh had a very faint idea of the man, like knowledge they'd never learned. One piece of such knowledge was that the man was from an entirely other world.
"How do you know my parents are dead?" Azotreh asked, a note of curiosity and worry in her voice.
"The same way you seem so sure that I shouldn't know. When I woke up here, I had a vague understanding of you. I think I got more information about you than you got of me."
Azotreh stared for a moment before slowly lowering the sword. She kept her firm grip on the weapon, ready to bring it to bear whenever. But for now, she kept it where it was.
"Why do you think that?" She asked.
"The nature of the information. I know I'm now a coinhabitant of your soul. I doubt you got much information on your own soul, since it's yours. That, and I'm kind of an addition to your existence. So I think I got more about you."
The man's voice took on an analytical tone for a moment before his piercing green eyes met Azotreh's again.
"So, what's your name?"
Azotreh was startled. If the man had gotten so much information, why didn't he get her name? That, and she had never been asked. No one in the facility was as young as they were, so they all could easily learn her name.
Thinking on that, she realized that they'd gained system access. She should have Analysis. She tried it on the man in front of them.
Nothing happened. Not even a failure notification.
The man waited patiently as she blinked and tried again. And again after that. But it didn't work. It just wouldn't activate.
The man smiled and shook his head.
"Where are my manners?" He asked himself quietly. "I'm Nicholas Chambers. Though I guess that name means a lot less to you."
The man extended a hand, which Azotreh stared at in confusion. Nicholas held his hand extended for half a minute before pulling it back.
"Leaving me hanging. Did you learn nothing about manners?" He asked jokingly.
"I did learn manners. I just don't know what that was."
Nicholas smacked a palm to his forehead and said, "Other world. Right. Not in Kansas anymore. Though I wasn't in Kansas before either…"
Before the man could sink into silence, Azotreh spoke.
"Azotreh. My name is Azotreh."
"Just Azotreh? No last name?"
Azotreh shook her head quietly. Nicholas shrugged again and kicked his feet onto the table, legs crossed.
"So, Azotreh, what's up with that prism over the obelisk? And why is your soul weirdly foggy at the edges? There's clearly a wall somewhere beyond from the way it meets the dome, but I haven't reached it."
Azotreh shrugged, having no idea.
"Okay, easier question then. What's going on with those scars?" Nicholas asked, pointing at Azotreh's throat, right at her brands
Azotreh jumped a bit as she felt pain lance through her head. A flickering blue system notification manifested in the air over the table.
[Mind and Core disconnected. Reconnect to regain full system functionality.]
Azotreh stared at the cerulean text while Nicholas stood up and tried to grab the box floating in the air. It dissolved once his fingers touched it. He cursed.
"At least this hopefully means I can do something." He murmured as he stared into empty air. Azotreh turned to him questioningly.
"Oh, if there's a system, hopefully it'll respond to commands. Like the stories in my world."
"Isn't there the system in your world?" Azotreh asked.
"Nope. Just computers." Nicholas grinned before turning back to the empty air. "System, show me the status sheet." He said.
[Error: MICR015709]
"Well, that's just great. Huge fan of that." Nicholas said, his hopes dashed in an instant.
Azotreh looked at the error message before it vanished in a sparkle of golden squares. She knew that everyone else could see their status sheet, and had never heard of an error message. Well, the other experiments couldn't see their status sheets, but that was because of the collars they wore.
In a sudden burst of inspiration, Azotreh lifted the sword to her own throat. Before Nicholas could even turn to her, the sword slashed up at her chin, severing the runic marks around her neck.
Golden blood burst from her throat in drops before dissolving into purple and gold mist. She knew in that moment that the body she inhabited wasn't real, and as such, her real self would not die from this action. She hadn't even thought about it, only knowing that her branded collar was the thing keeping them from observing their own status.
Nicholas was suddenly beside her, trying to staunch the bleeding with his own hands. It didn't do any good, as the golden blood simply dissolved around his fingers. Azotreh felt no pain as the false blood left her equally false body. She instead grinned and murmured, "Status."
One of the sides of the obelisk suddenly extended a large panel, becoming covered in blue marble and golden lines of text. Still in Scinparic to Azotreh.
Her false form burst into motes of golden light.
Azotreh awoke in her bed once more, the bed in the facility this time. But she woke not with despair at another day in this gods-awful place, but with a sense of triumph at her small success.
She tried to call forth the status sheet again, but found that she could not. It was hopefully still present within the realm Nicholas had said was her very soul. It should remain that way until she returned to the soul realm.