Thin wires extended from the edges of the examination table and wrapped around Azotreh's prone form, specifically around her joints, stomach, and throat. With the hiss of decompressing steam, seven small spikes of cold metal pressed into her spine, not enough to pierce, but still enough to feel.
The administrator brought three palms down, holding one against her forehead, one to her chest, and one to her lower stomach. Each one pressed just hard enough to ache, not hard enough to hurt.
Azotreh felt her body forcefully relax. She couldn't even twitch their fingers. Her body was still and calm in a way it had never been in her life, still as the grave no matter what her mind screamed.
Yet another hand emerged from the dark steel form of the administrator, crimson eyes still focused on Azotreh. He reached out to a nearby shelf, covered in a glass pane. Wires emerged from the hand to carefully lift the glass front and pull free a jar containing a single crimson eye. Despite the eye floating in a blue-purple fluid, it looked shrivelled and dried, as if it had been left in the sun for weeks.
He removed the top from the jar, allowing a pungent scent of decay and ozone to fill the room. Azotreh's calm body forced her to breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth, making the scent unavoidable.
Yet another hand pulled itself free from the form of the administrator, reaching down towards Azotreh's left eye. The only eye that was truly hers, rather than something implanted by the man hovering over their prone form.
The fingers of the hand retracted into the palm, which itself reshaped into a perfect sphere. Four thin sticks of black iron emerged from equidistant points across the edge of the orb. The sticks of black iron extended, pulling back Azotreh's eyelids to dig around the soft flesh of her eye and into the bone of the socket beneath.
But before the eyelid could even be fully pulled back, Azotreh's will vanished from the eye and from the body being changed. She woke up alone, a wooden ceiling overhead and the gentle pattering of rain against the window. It was calm and quiet.
The administrator's hand paused as Azotreh's eyes shifted. The black dragon's eye took on several small spots of emerald green that seemed to dance across its surface. The other eye completely changed to the same green, with Azotreh's original indigo-violet eye now spinning lazily around the verdant center.
The eyes changed from wide and panicked to a flat coolness that almost mirrored the cold gaze of the administrator.
Azotreh's aura had also changed, the thrashing edges becoming calm as a sea without the ripples of a stone just skipped across it. It was stark and sudden, but its source was obvious to the mass of black metal and reaching hands.
"Nicholas Chambers, I presume." The administrator said, already knowing it to be true.
"Just the same." The voice that emerged from Azotreh's mouth wasn't hers. It carried an older tone and was about a half octave lower than Azotreh's.
"Why would you emerge now? If you wished to communicate with me, you could have done so many times before."
"I believe I'd be more cooperative than Azotreh. She doesn't know any better."
"Ah. Why protect her? Current projections state that you have only inhabited her body for less than two days."
"She doesn't deserve what you've done to her."
The administrator paused for a fraction of a second, barely long enough for Nicholas to even notice. His movements suddenly sped up as he continued his work.
"She may not, but war is cruel. I must be crueler."
The hand worked its way deeper into Azotreh's eye socket, finding the nerve endings in the back. A flare of green light emerged from the palm and entered Azotreh's face.
Nicholas gritted Azotreh's teeth as the pain he experienced was suddenly amplified more than a dozenfold. He could taste blood as their teeth began to crack. It was the most movement he could achieve in Azotreh's forcefully relaxed body.
"You couldn't have used anesthesia?" Nicholas grunted as pain danced through his skull. He could feel every agonizing inch of metal slowly pulling Azotreh's eye free.
"You will come to appreciate this. Pain resistance is one of the more difficult ones to advance as it progresses."
"She's eight, though I guess I'm twenty by the same metric." Nicholas's eyes moved, somehow conveying a headshake without being capable of such motion, and continued, "Is all you care about advancement?"
"I do, and you should too. It's the only way you will survive."
Finally, the wires in the back of Azotreh's eye began to rapidly heat up, burning through her skin. The nerves were cleanly burned away as the wires moved like serpents, tearing apart the thin tendrils of meat without spilling any blood.
Azotreh's body suddenly lit up with a rich orange hue, the room dyed a gorgeous red. The administrator paused, the pain only amplifying as he waited, observing the room.
Nicholas continued to glare up at the figure of dark steel until his mind was finally overwhelmed by the pain and forcefully shut down.
The administrator observed coolly as Azotreh crossed into F-Grade in her first poten. It wasn't too strange for such a thing to happen, especially to the endurance poten first. He knew that Azotreh, or the masculine entity now co-inhabiting her body, would appreciate this at some point.
He plucked the eye from its socket once the nerves were all severed. It was perfectly normal and would likely serve little purpose in any experiment. He thought that maybe one of the SL experiments would benefit from the eye.
He kept the removed eye in one hand and shaped another hand from the dark iron of his body to pluck the replacement eye from the jar. It was shrunken and shriveled, but still vibrantly red and emanating a small amount of heat.
Its shrunken state was the only thing that allowed the eye to be placed within Azotreh's skull. It had taken a lot of effort from the alchemist's guild to find a solution that would so efficiently shrink an eye without making it lose its potency. He'd have to once again thank the alchemist on staff for the solution, even if Azotreh perished like every other AZ experiment.
He lowered the eye towards the socket, shaping thinner wires from the same black iron as the hand to carefully reach into the newly empty socket and extend the severed nerves. Some basic healing spell focused so carefully on those nerves forced them to regrow without the eye they were once connected to. It was nothing difficult for the administrator's gold-rank perception and reaction potens to handle.
He then carefully began fusing the nerves of the shriveled red eye with Azotreh's original nerves, carefully observing their other eye as the process continued. He hoped that her Bulwark of the Weak ability would kick into action and protect her from the worst of what was to come.
Once the final nerve was fused, he began applying more healing to truly make the eye Azotreh's. One second, two seconds, and then both of her eyes burst in fountains of blood. It covered her face in crimson and began to drip onto the floor.
The administrator pulled a healing potion from the same cabinet he'd pulled the eye from. Aluminum-rank, so the effect would be powerful, but hopefully wouldn't kill Azotreh outright. He poured the potion into the empty eye sockets, which were only filled with blood. The crimson potion mixed with the sanguine fluid, causing more blood to be pushed out as the eyes began to regenerate, only to explode again.
He carefully turned Azotreh's head on its side to allow the blood to flow onto the floor rather than remaining inside her skull. The healing potion continued its work, forcing the eyes to regenerate over and over before bursting once again.
The administrator also began to use some of the basic healing magics to both apply boons and directly regenerate the damage. He'd tried to use resistance-enhancing buffs rather than boons, but found they had little effect in comparison. Not even fortitude and endurance miracles were as helpful as some basic regeneration effects.
Each time her eyes were forced to regenerate, they lasted a little longer before breaking. Only about half a second longer each time, but it was still rather substantial progress in comparison to other AZ experiments.
Azotreh lit up the bright red of vitality and submerged the room in the same carmine light as before, and did it again after that. Even unconscious, the rapid and serious damage was pushing her potens forward more rapidly than even he'd expected.
He cursed the collar of runes burned into her neck. If he could see her status, it would help him understand if this experiment was a lost cause or not. So until he got the experience notification for killing her, he'd have to keep healing.
More than an hour of almost constant healing later, her body finally stopped damaging itself. Her eyes still bled, but weren't bursting anymore. She was still unconscious and would remain that way for a while yet. He was hoping to observe her status with the ritual he'd taught her, but that was off the table until she woke up.
He woke up in a dark cave, purple and gold sunlight drifting in through its entrance. The room was lit by his eyes, or just one eye. The other saw the world in a slightly blue tint, without any of the lighting effects of his normal eye.
His memories were fragmentary, broken like a dropped pane of glass. He felt wrong, like his body was simply incorrect. He felt abominable, and couldn't explain why.
But this place was strange. His senses understood that this was the astral, but he existed in a physical body. Not the semi-real presence he had been on the two occasions he'd been in the astral.
Two occasions? He had only been to the astral once. Why did he remember it happening twice? He shook his huge head, frills moving strangely and horns scraping the top of the cave. No treasure here either, not like his old cave. But it still felt like his old lair in every other way.
He lifted himself from the cold stone ground and stepped outside. One moment his front claw touched soft grass, and the next he was standing in a field of it. He looked behind him, finding the cave had retreated. As if he'd moved a dozen steps in that one movement.
That also forced him to actually look at his body. He craned his long neck to see his whole back, his neck popping slightly as he did so. Half of his body was the familiar black, gleaming with a sheen of purple and gold from the domed sky above. The other half was red, a bright, fiery red too. The red of a fire-breathing red dragon.
He didn't have a mirror to look at himself, but he assumed that he probably had the same coloration on his head. Half red, half black. His breathing sped up rapidly, and he distracted himself by observing the world around him.
High above, a golden dome blocked out swirling purple energy. Following the dome to the ground wasn't possible, as fog obscured everything beyond the edge of the small clearing, ringed by three structures. His cave was one of them, another was one of the wooden houses of humanity, and a third was utterly foreign to his eyes. Smooth rock made up its side, and glass was set almost randomly around the building.
In the center of the clearing was a six-sided obelisk with a bright blue prism hovering over it. The number of sides on the blue floating object shifted constantly, yet remained the same. His mind simply couldn't comprehend it, which was a strange feeling for him.
He felt a draw towards the obelisk. His instincts were rarely wrong, so he stepped closer. Claws dug into the soft ground and grass beneath his feet, his huge form somehow not leaving footprints in the earth beneath his feet.
A wall of the obelisk opened, higher than a door and perfectly sized for his head. He stared at the wall of pure white marble cautiously for a moment, but stuck his head through anyway. In his core, if he still even had one, he knew the thing couldn't hurt him.
His head entered a hexagonal room with two humans sitting in comfortable chairs. The younger of the two looked up and fell out of her chair, lifting a sword he vaguely recognized towards him. The other stared at him with unrepressed wonder.
"A real dragon…" Nicholas murmured.
He knew the man's name, and the child's. Nicholas and Azotreh. How he knew them, he didn't know. It felt vaguely like using a skill book; the information was simply present. But it was deeper than that. He knew it to the very core of his being. Even when he didn't know his own name, he knew theirs.
"Who are you and how did you get in here?" Azotreh asked, voice shaking. The dragon simply watched in silence.
"He doesn't have a name anymore." Nicholas replied, "And he didn't get in here. He was made here."
"What does that mean?" The dragon asked.
Nicholas raised a hand to his head. "How do I get headaches when I'm not even in a body? Soul aches?" He asked himself. Azotreh just looked at him curiously.
Nicholas' voice shifted very slightly. Barely enough for the dragon to hear it. But the shift still sent shivers down his spine. He recognized that from somewhere. Once again, where was beyond him.
"When the eye was implanted, it carried some of the power and mind of its source. The reason your…" Nicholas coughed before continuing, "The reason our pain resistance jumped so much was the implantation of the second eye. They attacked one another and forced both to awaken the memories held inside, and fused the remnant pieces of ego into him."
Nicholas pointed up at the dragon, who was still looking at Nicholas with apprehension.
"How do you know all that? Your world didn't have that kind of thing, right?" Azotreh asked.
"Know what?" Nicholas replied.
"About the dragon conflict and fusing?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Now Azotreh also looked at Nicholas strangely. Both she and the dragon were startled by Nicholas seemingly no longer remembering what he had said mere moments ago.
"You described how… I don't want to just call him the dragon. But how the dragon came to exist, and how he was kind of created by this space, wherever it is."
"Oh, that. Yeah, I knew because…" Nicholas then narrowed his eyes as he drifted off.
"Because?"
"Because you know. But you didn't know a moment ago."
"You just explained it."
Nicholas shook his head and said, "I don't know how I knew. The same way our new draconic friend doesn't know his own past."
Azotreh also shook her head, accepting the explanation that Nicholas simply didn't know. The dragon wanted to ask more about it, but had nothing else to ask. Other than just repeating the questions Azotreh had already asked, he had no way to get more information from Nicholas. So he pulled his head free of the slot in the wall to curl up in the grass. He had a lot to think about, and didn't want to be distracted by the duo in the obelisk.