[Chayden]

/alternate universe, eventually mature... And now it's in the title |D

Ever so slowly, he was being driven out of his mind.

In the past, he had always known what was going on in his life. It had been up to him to keep track of things, because his brain kept everything in perfect sequence. Now... He wasn't sure if he was even awake.

He had been in love... No, he still was. Just because the universe[s] had been turned on its head didn't mean that she wasn't just as special to him. Things had simply become more difficult, though not in a normal way.

She had been kidnapped by the government, and he was expected to perform tests on her.

It wasn't her fault that she had the powers of prophecy; it wasn't something that she could control. It wasn't her fault that tensions between the lawful folk and the anarchists were high. She had only said the wrong thing to the wrong person; that was all they needed to cart her off and wipe any traces of her existence from the face of the earth.

He wished that the situation was more complicated than that; he needed a scapegoat. Without a solid, sensical cause, the blame floated about like a fog, hanging over everyone until their fur was doused with it. He wished that he could take it all on himself, if only to free others from it; he wished that he truly had been her protector, so that he would be at fault. But he had never truly been in charge; that would not change now that she had, quite literally, been taken out of the picture.

"Knoxley, run some statistics. Get me a vitals check. Goddamnit, man, do something!"

He stared blankly into the face of his so-called superior, hiding his desire to spit upon it. Knoxley was disgusted by this moral-less creature, this thing who thought it perfectly okay to lock another up in a false womb. The Bleeder was actually doing all in his power to make sure that Knoxley's lover was erasing her own life force bit by bit. Only, Knoxley was smart enough to hide their relationship from that monster.

"Yes, sir."

"Excuse me?"

"Yes, sir, Dr. Ghizas."

The Bleeder smiled horribly, iridescent venom slipping from his needle-like fangs and onto the linoleum floor. It shone oddly in the dark, illuminated solely by the glow of the machinery set up in the center of the room. Some lowly lab hand bent to wipe the venom from the tiles; Ghizas jabbed a clawed foot into the back of their neck, pressing their face into his poison. His smile grew wider as their agonized screams shook the walls of the lab, but no one seemed to care. He had trained them well, even to the point of complete apathy at the suffering of others - all except for Knoxley. It was just as well; at least their dreams were not haunted by sadism. Yes, Ghizas was not a Dreamsnare for nothing. Whatever sleep the Trikuhna managed to get was filled to the brim with nightmares. The hair on the back of his neck stood up at the thought of them.

"That's more like it." Knoxley's boss hissed, the words sickly sweet with false pleasantry. He frothed more venom onto the back of his worker's head and watched intently as it burned through their skin and down into the puddle from before. Perhaps the floors were not made of linoleum, after all; they would have to have been magically reinforced to withstand that sort of acidic force, and such meddling was taboo.

"For gossakes, somebody get over here and clean this sh/t up the right way!" the Bleeder screamed as he stalked off, mindless of the unnecessary loss of life. Such a trivial thing meant naught to him; with his tyrannical power, he could have anything he wanted, regardless of the price.

And right now, he wanted her obliterated.

[Chayden]

/listen to "Violate" by Bones Domingo. I'll try to keep this clean, but I've warned you, my mind is graphic.

She was floating... Or maybe she was swimming. She could feel something viscous in her lungs, and urged to expel it, but nothing was happening. She seemed to remember that flying was rumored to be a peaceful thing, a lifting of weight from the shoulders.

It wasn't a peaceful thing to be where she was.

It felt as if she were being pressed upon herself, compacted by the liquid that engulfed her. The stuff was thick and cold, but only cold enough that she could feel it through her fur without having to move. Her wings twitched pitifully, moved by the current that kept the stuff from going stagnant and killing her the wrong way. She was soaked to the bone, but it mattered naught. As long as she stayed still, perhaps she would not have to return to the other place...

Sadly, things were not so easy. Visits to that alternate universe came unbidden and unwanted, whenever she needed to be rid of them most. For example: when she was taken prisoner.

Her mind rushed back to that moment, exercising one of its unfortunate gifts.

//~//

The air was cleaner than normal. It was refreshing; the wind whipped the scent of the ocean about, caressing her white fur with it. She could not recall properly the last time she had been to the sea; she was only a child at that time, and her abilities had yet to surface. Now she was there with the one she held closest to her heart, the only person who had ever been able to come close to understanding what it was like to be her. Everywhere she went, she had to hold utmost control over her thoughts and her words so that no one would be able to see what she was truly like. She had the power of prophecy, to travel between one dimension and the next; it was an ability long thought extinct. The government had hunted all those like her down, killing them and removing all information concerning them from the collective memory of the world.

And, when I say "removed", that is what I mean. There was no way in hell that any snippet of fact to prove that they had ever existed could be found anywhere.

It was this that Maeri had to avoid as she walked on the soft white sands that day next to Knoxley. There were government officials everywhere, lying in wait for someone to disturb the peace. They had heard rumors that those with "the curse" were in the area - in this crowd of beachgoers, anyone could be an enemy.

The Misty Kuhna held her tongue. She tried to focus solely on her surroundings, to memorize the feel of the wide open sky. She tried counting Knoxley's even breaths. She tried gritting her teeth, digging her claws into the sand, twitching her tail tips in time with the beating of her heart...

Nothing worked.

"Knoxley..!" she cried, her voice hushed, pressing her shoulder up against his and squeezing her eyes shut. Not here, not here, not here! she chanted mentally. Oh, please not here!

...It was too late. Her mind had been sucked to a far-off place; it had deserted her body completely, leaving her helpless to the whims of those around her. Knoxley struggled to hold her upright as he was appraised by a stranger.

"Is something wrong?" the male asked, and the Trikuhna knew by the tone of his voice that he was an undercover agent.

[Chayden]

"Shitshitshit!" Knoxley cursed under his breath, forcing a smile. "Damnit, Mae, you can't leave me here like this!"
The agent kept his face singularly unchanged - plastic, fake. He managed to keep hostilities low enough that no one was alerted to the fact that he had spotted "suspicious individuals".

"Yeah, everything's fine," Knoxley assured him, bumping Maeri higher up on his shoulder. "She's just exhausted is all."
The agent wasn't buying it. "Are you sure that I can't help you at all? Should I call an ambulance?" He tapped a receptor situated on his ear; the Trikuhna had been in this sort of situation enough times to know that all of the other spies in the area were now free to listen in on their conversation. Whatever he said would be recorded and held against him, if at all possible.

Knoxley heaved a sigh and faked letting his knees buckle under the weight of the unconscious Misty Kuhna. "If you insist, though it's really alright. Don't cause yourself the trouble."
"Oh, don't you worry. It's no trouble at all..."

The way those words were said set off little warning flags in Knoxley's head. He perked his ears and scanned the crowd. Almost simultaneously, five other creatures veered toward them. He assumed that the rest of the officers (for surely there were at least a half-dozen more) had been instructed to stay where they were. This scene could be handled perfectly well by only a small, unarmed squadron.

"Aagh!" Knoxley grunted, heaving his partner up and giving her scruff a shake in an effort to revive her. He had nowhere to run; they had, quite literally, backed him into a corner. Dead ahead, the government lackeys waited to pounce. To the left was the sheer side of an outcropping of rock, and to the right was a 40 foot drop off of that rock to the beach below. His back was pressed against something metal, but it was only the stairs, and they were blocked by the sea of tourists. So much for open air...

"There's nothing wrong with them! WHY do you have to take them all away?!" he shrieked as they came upon them, tearing Maeri from his grasp. They were being pulled apart, separated by the muscular bodies of their enemies. As Knoxley screamed obscenities, it seemed as if even the commonplace tourists had turned against them. They made no move to save Maeri or himself as they were dragged so forcefully away, shoved into the back seats of separate black cars...

Curiously enough, Maeri still cannot recall exactly what she saw when she blanked out. It was something about the end of the Earth, the complete obliteration of any type of civilization... If she did not act soon, the time she had to prevent it from happening would run out.

If only she had been born normal, all of this mess could've been avoided...

[Chayden]

Knoxley leaned his face forlornly against his lover's prison, feigning trying to get a better look at her while actually fighting back tears. It wasn't just her prison, though - it was his, too. So long as she remained, he would be tethered here. Even if Ghizas' plans were to come through and she were to die, the Trikuhna would still stay, clinging uselessly to the impossible hope that he could bring her back.
The poor boy gazed at her wings, floating listlessly in the jelly that sucked at her essence. Already, he could see pieces of her being carried away. Before his eyes, they were disintegrating into nothingness. If he didn't hurry, then the same thing would happen to her. To her soul.
Just as Knoxley was about to turn away and meddle with the programming, something within the glass. He stopped still, straining his eyes in order to discern what it was.
Ever so slowly, Maeri's eyes were opening.
Knoxley rooted his paws to the spot to prevent himself from toppling backward in shock. This was simply not possible - the chemicals that had been put into the liquid had been specially fabricated to stop movement. And yet there she was: eyes focused and alert as the eyelids peeled away from them, eyelashes waving. For one terrible moment, Knoxley thought that perhaps the eyelids were being destroyed, ripped from her as the other bits had been, but that was wrong. Miraculously, Maeri was conscious. This movement was her own.
On the verge of panic, the Trikuhna glanced at her heart rate. It was still the same as it had been: dangerously low. Normally, this type of effort would have woken her from the half-coma they had induced, but it did not. Knoxley looked on in amazement as she opened her eyes for him and closed them once more in a slow-motion mimicking of her signature "meaningful blink". Perhaps she had established it on the off chance that she was captured and tested as now...
It was plausible. After all, her talent was future sight.

"Get me an analysis of her hormone levels," he commanded, stepping away to go over her previous measurements himself. Although he was the head scientist, he had been quite detached from this particular project. Ghizas, that dirty b/stard, had brushed it off as excitement about their latest breakthrough.
Knoxley couldn't even remember what that breakthrough was. He was far too busy running escape plans through his head, plotting. What he needed was a way to return her motor and ocular functions to normal so that he would not have to drag her out of the place himself. But if the methods he used to rejuvenate these things were picked up by any of the underclassmen, he was done for.
For Ghizas, despite his slightly diminutive appearance, was no idiot. He calculated infinitely, observing every little slip in his workers and cataloging them away inside his brain. One deviation from the usual effects of the jelly, and it was off with his head. They would inject him with a poison that turned his blood into fire or into ice, his heart would pump it faithfully, and he would die.This death would be ridiculously drawn out and agonizing; knowing the doctor, he would have the poison on a IV drip. He would be able to see death drawing closer, to mark its coming with the measurements on the side of the bad.
But that was only if he could sustain consciousness as he was slowly melted by the heat. And if he couldn't?
Well, Ghizas would find ways of making him. There was no way that he would be allowed to die in any way even minutely resembling "peacefully", especially not after jeopardizing such an important experiment. Knoxey would pay.