The girl lay on the grey bed of a dim operating room. A ring of doctors crowded around her, staring at the metallic encasement that stretched from her shoulders to her knees. Although grave haste was written on the doctors’ masked faces, they went about their work slowly. They made small movements, grabbing utensils, prodding, and making incisions with incremental speed. One of them accidentally dropped a scalpel, and it glided to the tile floor, not colliding with the ground until about thirty seconds later. This was not their doing but was the result of the Allagi in which the girl was encapsulated.

“Cut... the... power,” one of them said sluggishly as he straightened his neat lab coat.

Dad, the girl thought.

Motion returned to its normal flow, and with this change came a hectic frenzy of activity as the man and his fellow doctors worked. They dismantled the encasement around the girl, injected needles into her, fed her oxygen. And at this point, she began to feel it–that searing, churning, twisting, sharp pain. It spread from her lungs to her stomach and after these her arms and legs. It spread until it filled every part of her as she screamed in agony. The loud beeping noise of the heart monitor began to shriek a speeding thump in protest.

“Dad!” cried out the girl, scared.

“I’m trying! I’m trying!” sobbed her father in a raspy tone, his voice rife with broken uncertainty. His life’s mission, his daughter, was fading before his eyes.

Noise, tension, and movement grew, then everything went quiet.

This was the day she died.

The girl’s mind and vision are a haze that only grows, but she forces her heavy eyes open, forces herself to see. Surrounded by a pale world, there is a shadow–no, a man. Something about him looks familiar, but in her blurry vision, she cannot quite make out who it is. The person smiles, tears stream down his cheeks. Then she blinks, and he is gone, nothing but a faint memory, or perhaps a trick of the mind. A distant hole of black forms in her hazy white view, and from the shadow, a figure rushes toward her. Vision blurs to nothing, and after this, all she can recall is feeling cold. The coldness pricks her fingertips with numbness, piercing the rest of her body with an odd glacial pain as if an icy stream is flowing inside of her.

Eventually, the pain fades away in exhaustion, and she can only drift ever deeper into a dark and dreamless sleep. Days pass as if they are hours. Hours meld with minutes, drifting by as if they are a single breath. And finally, after no small span of time, her senses return, and she awakens.

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She feels a silk blanket around her, and her eyes painfully creak open. She is in a pink and white bed, but beyond that, she cannot yet see. She reaches out her hand, testing her movement. There is no resistance, there is no delay, there is no slowness whatsoever. The life before her is proceeding at a normal pace. This is unusual.

She tries to tell herself all is well, but confusion outweighs the normal optimism. She panics and tries to force herself up, but her rigid limbs can hardly move, much less hold her weight, and so she leans her back on the frame of her bed, surveying the area. She is in a little room decorated with two white shelves on either end, cluttered with piles of music CDs, and a rosewood desk in the corner. Futuristic gadgets her father made her are organized about the place, and the window is open, as she always likes it. But something is terribly wrong.

The breeze is too chilling. The world is too quiet. And, with this newfound speed, it is apparent the Allagi is missing. Her CDs and gadgets are not strewn about, as she left them, but placed in orderly sets, and everything looks and even smells too clean. It is a faint echo of the world she knew, pristine and perfect, cleared of every blemish that marked her life.

She cannot help feeling as if she is in the wrong place at the wrong time, as if she is forgetting something. She reaches deep inside her mind, and for only a moment, she begins to find it. There is a golden light, the surroundings are ablaze with a wondrous gleam, and there is a form she cannot fully see. Thus the mental picture quickly slips from her mind’s eye.

You must get up, a voice urges her.

“Who said that?!” the girl shouts.

While one end of her mind tells her she is in danger, a part of her that feels almost foreign echoes in her thoughts, You are safe. There is nothing to fear.

It is the same voice. Is this person she is hearing simply a thought, another part of herself she is just discovering? Or is it something different?

You and I are one, it reassures her. Now, go. To the door.

She sees the pine door to her left but falters, wary of obliging the unfamiliar addition to her mind. Next, she tries to move her legs. They are abnormally heavy, and so she pulls back the sheets to witness a dreadful sight.

Contrasting the comfort of her white cotton getup, she sees a layer of crude black metal strapped around her legs. The strips of metal look like manacles. Attempting to move her legs only tightens the grip of the robotic shroud. She begins to understand. She is a prisoner, and these cuffs of sable steel are her binds.

She squeals, and with all her might, she rolls to the ground. Grabbing a shelf as a crutch, she raises to her feet and inches toward the door, fighting desperately against the mechanical weight. As she reaches, the door handle is barely within her grasp. The strap manacles quickly shrink, and she struggles to turn the knob. The girl begins to lose feeling in her legs, and with it, her balance is gradually taken. Finally, her legs give way. She lunges into the door at full force and it opens.

The girl looks up to see a man before her, straightening a white lab coat and meeting her gaze with a compassionate expression. It is her father, Cain.

He laughs a little bit. “I see the setting of these Wardens was too tight. Not to worry, we can fix that. We can fix everything. I’m so glad to finally see you again, Nora.”