Callisto (rageinmyheart) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2017-03-29 14:55:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, callisto |
Who: Callisto and NPC!Hydra/Cerberus scientist
What: Callisto's been captured, and experiments begin
When: Last week after the Reapers were defeated
Where: Undisclosed location
Warnings: Medium to high, though nothing explicit. But it's Hyderbus, so it's not that pretty
“She’s starting to regain consciousness.”
“Another dose, put her under.”
A bright light suddenly shone on Callisto’s face. Straps were holding her down by the arms, legs, stomach and head. A woman’s voice, her accent French, was a little too loud. “Wakey wakey, mon pet. There is so much for us to do.”
A needle priced at Callisto’s shoulder, and what was injected likely burned. “Relax. We are going to make you a god again.” Her voice grew cold. “Or perhaps the devil.”
Callisto flinched, face scrunching when the bright light shone on it. Her head was fuzzy, and she wasn’t entirely certain what was happening. It took some moments for the woman’s words to register in her brain. But before she could say anything, she felt the prick of a needle, followed by a burning sensation running down her arm and through her body.
“What the fuck are you doing?” She cursed, pulling at the restraints a bit. The restraints around her arms, legs and stomach weren’t so bad, but the one around her head got to her a bit. It reminded her of the chair she’d been strapped in when she’d been in prison in her dreams.
“Relax,” the woman said again. She stepped into the light. Dark haired and pale skinned, with inquisitive brown eyes and a long scar running across the center of her face, from eye to nose to cheek. “Do not fight it, petite. Can you feel it. Close your eyes, let the visions come. I should warn you. They will hurt.”
Visions of darkness and death, flashes of red eyes and the screams of the damned.
“Fuck you,” Callisto cursed. Though she could feel it, and she tried to fight it, clenching her fists. If she’d still been a god, she would’ve been out of this place already and everyone here would be dead. But as it was, she couldn’t free herself.
And then the visions came. The screams of the damned were nothing new to her. She’d been in Hell in her dream life, been a demon, and she knew that kind of pain and torment. She knew it better than this bitch did. But it didn’t stop her from screaming at the pain that came with the visions. It was a piercing kind of scream that reverberated through the place. And unless there was soundproofing in place, the sound probably carried quite a ways inside whatever compound she was in.
“Seventy-five percent of subjects are dead by now,” The woman noted, marking something on a sheet. “She’s showing remarkable resistence, and even more potential. Top percentile. Put her in sensedep. I want injections on the hour for the next ten hours.”
She leaned over Callisto. “In a few minutes, you’ll be alone with the demons. We don’t know where they came from, and we are still learning their power. Combined with the X samples we recovered, you’ll be a better person soon.” Her eyes flashed red. “And you’ll be one of us.”
The visions were intense, and Callisto took them as best as she could. Perhaps it was her dream experiences in her afterlives that had given her the strength to withstand this assault. Whatever it was, Callisto suddenly wasn’t certain she wanted to survive the experience. Besides, Jane was gone, most likely dead, so she wouldn’t be coming. Xena might come, if she even noticed she was gone in a bad way. Xena could just think she needed time to herself after Jane being gone and not bother to look for her.
She glared up at the woman, not even flinching when the woman’s eyes turned red. “You really don’t know what you’re doing. And I’m going to really enjoy killing you when I get out of here.” Because clearly she’d have to save herself.
“I know exactly what I’m doing.” She winked at Callisto. “When you leave, chaton. You’ll leave of your own free will.” But when they needed her to act, they would flip the switch. The woman walked around the table, trailing her hand along the edge. “It will take some time for the serum to start working. My name is Marguerite. Who I work for is unimportant. Names change. Uniforms change. They still fight their little battles over who is in charge while I continue to do my work. And you are my work. You will be my masterpiece. Shadow and darkness, heal from any injury. If I have my way you’ll even get those lovely claws. It’s amazing how easily people leave their DNA behind.”
“Oh good, a name to go with a face. Peachy.” Callisto responded. At least she knew who she was killing when she got to that part. She may be sane now, but she still had that killer instinct, that cold-blooded killer that was still within her. “You should really know it’s pretty impossible to get me to play by anyone’s rules but my own.” Callisto could change allegiances as easily as a chameleon changed its colors. She was all about serving herself and what she wanted, and she tended to align herself with whatever side was closest to that goal.
“You believe that now. But you will believe, what I want you to believe.” Marguerite booped her on the nose, then stepped out of visual range. Her voice seemed to float around the room. “I’m not going to torture you. It’s obvious that physical pain will not work on you. Non, for you, your mind will be my canvas. And if you need a little incentive...."
A picture appeared on a screen in Callisto's vision. It was a young blonde woman, maybe a few years younger than Callisto. But she shared Callisto's nose and eyes, and her chin. There was a scar on her cheek, as though she'd had facial reconstruction from, say, burns. "It's amazing the damage a human can survive, no? And how easy it is, for one to get lost in the system."
Callisto rolled her eyes. Though Marguerite was correct, physical pain wouldn’t break her. Callisto didn’t care what happened to her body, and she didn’t exactly care what happened to her mind. Without Jane, it hardly seemed worth staying alive. Xena could get by without her.
But then she saw that picture, and at first she didn’t pay it much heed. Until she looked closer, and looked harder at it. Then she realized just who she was looking at. Or who it seemed she was looking at. Her eyes narrowed, refusing to believe it. “Clever, using photoshop like that. But it’s not going to work.” If it was true, the implications were...devastating. And her sister would probably hate her for not coming to her much earlier, for leaving her, so to speak.
“Cassandra. Nineteen. Brought to hospital after a fire ravaged her home, killing her parents. Older sister missing. Cassandra died twice on the operating table, and suffered moderate memory loss due to loss of oxygen to the brain.” Other pictures flipped through, showing Cassandra’s life. Many appeared to have been taken from Facebook and other sources.
“You have the wrong girl. My sister is dead.” Callisto was going to internalize any emotions. She refused to show this woman anything. And if Callisto was good at one thing, it was keeping the “softer” and “weaker” emotions like loss and grief to herself. She didn’t cry, and she wasn’t going to let this woman break her in any way, shape or form.
“Then you won’t mind if we kill her,” Marguerite said, as though she were discussing the weather. “Regardless. We know more about you than you think we do. If not her, this Xena. Your gang. Your motorcycle. We could destroy them all with the snap of a finger.”
Now, Callisto was a strange kind of person. There were a very few finite things that she actually cared about. Jane was already gone, so they couldn’t hurt her with that. Xena and her bike, however, tended to be a different story. But her sister, that could be someone she’d cared about, but she’d believed her to be dead for over a decade at this point. Plus she already knew her sister wouldn’t like her anymore. She definitely wasn’t the person she used to be. And if her sister was actually alive and had memory loss? It was probably better Callisto didn’t darken her life.
“So let me guess, this is where you’re going to break me emotionally and mentally,” she countered. “You do know you’re talking to a psychopath, right?”
“You think you can’t be affected, don’t you?” The woman laughed darkly, moving behind Callisto. “The thing about breaking someone, is that it is only a matter of time. No one will come for you, so we have all the time in the world. And even if someone did, they would die. Our soldiers do need someone to practice fighting, after all.”
And who among those really powerful people even knew or cared that Callisto existed?
“I’m already broken and crazy and without friends or family. I don’t give a fuck if I live or die. So yeah, I don’t think you can do worse than what I’ve already been through.” And considering she’d died more than once, been to two different versions of the Underworld and everything else? Callisto didn’t think this woman could affect her any worse than she already had been.
Something else was injected into Callisto. Darkness swallowed her up until the only visible thing were a pair demonic red eyes. Marguerite’s voice whispered in her ear. “You are nothing. You feel nothing. See nothing. And you only hear, what I want you to hear. Embrace us, mon chere.”
These injections were going to get really old if they kept coming at this rate. Callisto wasn’t afraid of needles, but being poked with needles very frequently tended to make someone upset about it. When the red eyes loomed in the darkness, Callisto may have been a little unnerved, but it dissipated quickly. She’d seen worse than that. Though it did hit home just how alone she was currently. And that was something she didn’t like. “So you can make me your weapon?”
While Callisto liked power, and she probably wouldn’t actually mind getting whatever powers this woman was going to give her, she didn’t like being at someone else’s beck-and-call. Callisto served herself, no one else. That was what she was going to fight the hardest. Maybe she could try to find a way to gain the powers without letting Marguerite get control over her in the end.
“So we can make you great again,” Marguerite whispered. “Return you to the glory that has been stolen from you.”
A hand, cold and yet warm, touched Callisto’s face. “The best weapons are the ones that we point and let loose. Does that sound appealing?”
Okay so the similarity between that response and one that the fat orange lump in the White House used made her roll her eyes a bit. It was intensely cheesy and somewhat stupid. Though Callisto liked the prospect of having power again. Sometimes she did miss throwing fireballs around.
“Having power, yes. Being a weapon for anyone but myself, no.”
“One does not go without the other, petite. Are you willing to sell your soul for the power? Or would you rather embrace oblivion?” Callisto was actually managing to frustrate Marguerite. All her usual tricks weren’t getting very far. Maybe she would have to resort to old fashioned torture to break her. How boring.
“You’re assuming I even have a soul,” Callisto said. She wasn’t trying to be belligerent on that, it was a statement of fact. Did she even still have a soul after everything she’d been through? Callisto was hardly the spiritual type, but she did question the whole soul thing. And really, Callisto was not the usual kind of person. Normal tactics to break someone wouldn’t necessarily work. Though Callisto did have her pressure points, they just tended to not be conventional ones.
“If you don’t have a soul, then this is much easier,” Marguerite replied. There was laughter in her voice. “We’ll simply replace you with someone else in your body. Maybe if you’re lucky, you won’t even know you’re gone.”
Callisto supposed that whatever happened here would answer the question of whether or not she had a soul. If she did, then this would probably turn out even worse for her, If she didn’t, it would probably still be really bad. Besides, Callisto wasn’t exactly the lucky type. “So you’re basically like the bodysnatchers.” Yes she was referencing that old science fiction movie.
“I suppose that is one way to describe it. Most people don’t survive the process. And those that do do not always last all that long. Perhaps you’ll be different.”
Someone started to roll the table through dark hallways. Callisto was quickly thrown into a tiny cell, just long enough to lay down in but not tall enough to sit up in unless she sat on the floor. It was about four feet from front to back.
And it was dark. It was very, very dark.
It was disorienting being rolled through the dark hallways. She had no idea where they were taking her or what would even happen to her. At this point, she didn’t really care. If she survived, then she’d gladly kill Marguerite if she had the chance. If she died, well, at least it was an end and she wouldn’t have to suffer any longer.
However, when she thrown into the cell, it didn’t take long for her to discover just how small it was. “No! No no no let me out!!” Callisto screeched as she kicked at the door. There were plenty of expletives uttered, but her words eventually just became the high pitched, primal screams that she was noted for. She was alone, and kept in a cage like an animal. And perhaps that was all she really was.