The silvery table was deathly cold beneath his bare skin. If Gavin was thinking clearly he would have known that the metal should have long been warmed by his sleeping body, but with the supernatural calm gifted by Ser suddenly ripped away from him by the pain of being melded with another person and slammed back into his body he wasn't feeling especially rational.
He sucked in air with huge heaving breaths as he shot up to sitting position, hands running over unbroken and smooth skin where he knew he'd been injured before. He kicked off the thick gray tarp that had covered him completely as he scanned the sterile white room with instincts that were not his own.
No windows, one exit. I'm not sensing any supernatural effects. Null magic zone? No, just an exclusionary field. Some of these instruments are magical. His mind stuttered to a halt as his body stuttered back to himself as he tried to dismount the high table, stumbling and crashing to the floor in a pile of limbs and heavy tarpaulin.
His knee cracked off a metal drain in the floor, scraping it up and making him hiss with pain. "Fuck!" He'd been lucky none of the tables around him with various surgical instruments had been knocked over. Some of the things on there were sharp -durability and sharpness enchantments- he could easily tell. He hissed as he stood up stiffly, holding the tarp against himself to try and preserve some semblance of modesty.
Icy fear raced along his veins, freezing him as he realized where he was. "Is that a dissection table? Oh my god. Holy shit." He stumbled to the door, stiff limbs fighting him with every step as he fought an overwhelming sensorium and disorientating emotional disconnect as he vacillated between professional calm and a much more reasonable panic. His fingers scrabbled against the door handle, shaking and struggling to find purchase.
Finally forcing the door open he found himself in a locker room. Everything from nurse scrubs to yellow hazard suits hung from hooks in neat rows next to a dozen or so tall metal lockers. The tiles was cold beneath his feet as he pulled on the closest things to actual clothes he could find there, blue hospital scrubs that were close enough to fitting.
People. He needed to find people. Someone out there could help him feel more like himself. Gavin left the locker room in a rush as he pushed his way out into a hallway. The new location did little to help orient him. It was empty, lit by flashing red emergency lights that combined with the way the place shifted like a living thing, closing off paths every second with shifting hallways and directions produced the nauseating feeling of standing in an MC Escher painting.
Gavin recognized it as an advanced spatial distortion. The connected paths weren't disappearing like a casual non-magical observation would indicate, they were shifting in and out of dimensional focus, as the doors that couldn't be shifted away were shuttered or shuttering with foreboding booms of metal like a drum rhythm. "Is anyone there?" Gavin called out, "I don't know where I am. Can someone help me?"
Gavin felt outwards with his sixth sense, -again, something he didn't know how to do before- trying to identify possible exits. It was easy, familiar enough to be second nature despite being a sense he had never had before and it was as if he was a deaf man hearing for the first time and somehow was able to easily identify things by sound.
This has to be because of Ser, thought Gavin as he worked. He was getting a crash course in the oddness of the process of assimilating knowledge. If he never had to do it again he'd be happy. The knowledge he received was so tightly engrained as to be second nature, the kind of task that was so instinctive you forgot where you had ever learned it and what you would do without it. Like reading in your native tongue- you couldn't help but do it whenever you saw the letters. Not reading just didn't seem possible having learned how.
Identifying the effects of the encrypted enchantment spellform- words and meanings he had never used or heard in anything approaching reality before but fell from muttering lips easily- were rapidly identified as sharpened senses honed in on the energies suffusing the walls. He tried to reach out and probe it with his own magic without a response from the Aether pool he knew should've been there.
"-told you that it's not going to be a problem!" Gavin whirled at the voice, catching a glimpse of a hallway shifting in an out of focus just as a man stepped through. He held hand up to one of the small plastic earpieces that supposedly elite bodyguards always wore in movies. "All the sensors are reading mundane energy levels, and target of a major resurrection or not this is a total overreaction. We did not need to clear half a sub-level for this-"
The man was several inches taller than Gavin and model-pretty like some young movie star heartthrob stepping onto the red carpet made by the flashing emergency lights.
He moved with grace and a confidence that announced how comfortable he was in this place. He scanned the room rapidly with flicks of striking blue eyes, before settling onto Gavin and sticking there like glue. Idly, Gavin noted the 'totally natural' windswept messy brown hair that Gavin just knew took forever to get right in front of the mirror, and an outfit that was clearly meant to be eye-catching with khakis and a tailored vest in a light gray with black, and pale gold accents over a white button-up folded up at the elbows.
Completing the look was a crooked smile that crossed most of the way over to predatory as he approached Gavin without pausing his argument with whoever was on the other side of his connection. "I've got eyes on him now. Yes I'm fine. I can feel him from here, he's barely Void-touched, I don't even think he's awakened. He probably just stumbled too close to a ritual somewhere." Fire licked its way up his right arm as he slowly raised it from where it had been swinging by his side.
He paused then, face and voice growing serious. "Really? And you didn't think to tell me that before I got here?" Gavin took a slow step back. "Move again and die," the man snapped, the fire in his hand shaping into a dense ball of brilliant white light that cast stark shadows around the room far harsher than anything from the still flashing emergency lights. "What does management want? I'd prefer to take him alive, I don't feel like murdering someone who can't fight back."
Gavin tensed but didn't move. This guy wasn't his friend. He would've run, but he didn't want to test what that ball of compressed fire could do to his flesh. "Fine. I'll bring him in for interrogation." He tilted his head questioningly. "Are you going to come quietly?"
This whole interaction had been unnerving to say the least. His eyes had only strayed from Gavin for blink-and-you'll-miss-it moments, scanning with military efficiency and hardly blinking as he held a conversation with whoever was on the other end of their headset. Gavin started suddenly, realizing that the last sentence had been directed at him. "D-do I have a choice?"
"Oh for the love of- no, you don't." Clearly deciding it wasn't worth talking anymore, the man reached out to grab Gavin's arm, the fire extinguishing on his hand as he reached for something behind him. Unfamiliar combat instincts screamed at Gavin and he jerked away from the grab. The magic he'd been reaching for earlier didn't respond, but wisps of void energy leaked from his skin startling the other man.
"Shit," they cursed as they dodged away, ice crystallizing into a long blade as another sphere of fire spun into being far faster than the first. "Void emissions!"
"Wait, no-" Gavin tried to apologize but was attacked immediately, his opponent's façade of calmness evaporating into deadly intent as his sphere of condensed fire turned into a wave of eye-searing flame that lashed out like a whip. His other hand slid down to base of the long handle of his ice sword, extending his reach to the limit as he swung down in a blinding arc that flung a deadly line of frost towards Gavin.
Confidence born of necessity and familiarity burned away all Gavin's uncertainty and fear as his hands came up blindly, closing around a familiar weapon as his feet corrected themselves into a basic stance. The tip of the spear he held was wrought from a gleaming silver metal marked with countless tiny runes worked into a gorgeous swirling pattern that hinted of waves and hurricanes, while the haft was a similarly beautiful opaque dark green mineral banded by curls of black onyx that ran along its surface like living vines.
The vines grew thicker as they approached the tip until it transformed to a solid black inches below the join, where there was inset pure white runes that spelled the name of the weapon. It sprung into Gavin's hands eagerly, like he had wielded it for countless centuries already. "Norithand, Oath of the End."
His opponents reaction was immediate. They instantly aborted their attack, detonating their sphere and blade in an unfocused dual-element explosion that sent them flying back away from Gavin with singed and wet clothes and their composure shattered. Gavin blocked it all with a single half-spin of his spear, wielding it like a staff to deflect the assault.
His opponent's hand scrabbled against their hip and they cursed, failing to find whatever they were looking for. Changing tactics, they retreated away from Gavin down the hallway, fingers activating hidden spell elements in the walls to stretch the distance between them. "Spiritbound!" they shouted with their hand on their ear, "They're a spiritbound! Get an Executive!"
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"I'm not trying to hurt you!" Gavin was already regretting this whole situation. Interrogation sounded bad, but now it looked like getting out of this alive was becoming more and more unlikely. He wasn't going to be capable of fighting for long. Sudden combat skills or not, his current self couldn't even run up a flight of stairs without breathing hard and without magic to fortify him his options were limited.
His opponent didn't wait for him to catch his breath. They'd adapted instantly to the threat of his weapon by keeping their distance as they summoned a wave of boiling water that rushed down the hallway towards him. He thrust forward, passing the spear through his leading hand as he did like he had done a thousand times before (he hadn't). Scalding water splashed onto Gavin's arms making him hiss and nearly drop his spear.
Not-his instincts screamed at him that he should've been able to cut apart that wave (and the entire hallway behind it) with barely a thought but he'd had to step back and stop his thrust early in order to keep hold of his spear when his arm's strength failed him. Another hallway slid into focus and a squad of six suited agents dropped to their knees in front of the first man, raising guns that glowed with cyan markings.
With nowhere to dodge Gavin grimaced and lowered his spear, opening his mouth to try and explain himself. "Don't move!" One of the armed men roared. Gavin noticed another hallway open to his side as he tracked everything going on. The first guy who tried to grab him had 'casually' placed one hand behind their back, prepping a spell that faintly disturbed the surrounding Aether despite being hidden from view.
Gavin caught a faint ticking sound on the edge of his hearing. A clock? Where? Why now? His opponents on the other end of the hallway apparently heard it too, and though their weapons and spells didn't stray from the center mass or stop being readied their faces showed clear relief.
He glanced down the hallway to his right, trying not to make any sudden movements that'd earn him a bullet. He could block maybe one or two, and not the barrage that six unfamiliar weapons were probably capable of releasing. The ticking grew louder, passing into view and allowing Gavin was finally able to identify it's source. Hundreds of meters down the hallway he could see a man rapidly approaching him, blipping forward in time with each loud tick like someone was pressing the skip button over and over on a video.
Despite appearing to walk they moved with horrifying speed. They only got close enough for a moment to make out a few things. They were tall, a black man with huge pink and gray scar that ran down their face on a diagonal from his temple to his upper lip just barely missing the corner of his eye, and his left arm was wrapped in delicate gold chains that suspended a shining gold pocket watch swinging back and forth- presumably the source of the ticking.
Gavin didn't even have time to react to the fist that appeared millimeters from his jaw connected and everything went dark.
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When he awoke he was groggy and disoriented and his jaw ached something fierce, but not enough to fail to recognize the signs of an interrogation room. Ser's limited memories didn't help much, it looked enough like things he'd seen on movies and tv to make an educated guess. Rune-lined metal cuffs locked him to the similarly marked table in front of him. He looked up to see the man that had knocked him out- Gavin was going to call him Pocket watch- sitting casually in front of him. Leaning against the wall behind him was the guy who'd intercepted him and started this whole debacle.
Pocket Watch looked too comfortable on his side of the table, like the uncomfortable metal chairs were familiar. He'd been here a lot, Gavin realized. "So, what's up with you?" they asked.
"A headache, mostly." Gavin hadn't meant to say that. Something in the chair beneath him compelled a response.
"Cute." Pocket Watch flipped through a pile of paper and manila folders, wetting the tips of his fingers as he read. "Gavin Wilder. Mundane. 5'7. 20 years old. Born to the late Helena Wilder and her husband, James Wilder."
He raised his hand to his chin as he leaned forward, the Manila folder falling shut in front of him. "You were here on the east coast on a partial merit scholarship. Pretty impressive grades, it looks like school came to you easily. You were on track to graduate a semester early in just another year and a half." He paused, letting tension build in the room. "Until you were tragically pronounced dead after the EMT's spent fifteen minutes failing to restart your heart barely a hundred meters from where hunter specialist Maxwell Smith died hunting a void beast. That was 8 hours ago."
Gavin recoiled. He'd been dead. Or at least his body had been. The parts of him that still felt like himself were horrified. A much greater portion of him took it in stride.
Pocket Watch processed that reaction instantly. Gavin could practically see the information getting sorted and filed away. "So tell me Gavin- how did a nobody like you who gave no indication you even know magic existed this morning get themselves resurrected?"
"I got lucky?" A partial truth. So he could bend his way around the compulsion a little bit. Good to know. It had been random chance. He was curious why had then been his instinct to try.
"Well it's lucky for both of us that I'm good at finding out the truth, isn't it?" Pocket Watch dropped his namesake from his palm, allowing it to start to swing back and forth again. The ticking he'd heard earlier was back, a loud and stifling metronome as it reflected off the sides of the concrete box. Tick. "I think we should start with what you're sure you know. Why were you on," Tick. The manila folder shifted slightly on the desk between them without being touched, "132nd Anderson this afternoon?"
Gavin paused, trying to think of what to say. As he did so the chair underneath him warmed, the energy in it forcing him to reply before he got much of a chance to think. "I was taking the long way home and trying to relax and enjoy the nice day after failing my test- the hell is this chair."
Model Boy smirked, but it wasn't nearly as hostile as it could have been. Almost friendly. Was this some good cop/bad cop routine? "We call it the hotseat, for obvious reasons. A gift from the lovely folks in R & D. People with resistance to charm magic and mental compulsions can fight it off, but you don't appear to have that luxury."
"Thank you for that, Adrian," Pocket Watch said dryly. The newly named Adrian didn't bother with a verbal response, tossing up a peace sign before returning to leaning against the wall silently. Gavin was shocked they'd gotten away with that- Pocket Watch didn't seem like the type to let that happen. "Explain, as completely as you can, the events of the fight as you remember them."
Gavin hadn't really tried to fight the compulsion yet, though he did take note of the fact chair didn't need an actual question to compel an answer. It just needed something that expected an answer. He prodded the spell effect a little bit with his sixth sense. Without inactive Aether, there wasn't much he could think of to do about it.
The competency granted by Ser's slowly assimilating memories didn't extend to non-magical counter-compulsion measures. From the impressions he was getting from fragments of memories and skills, Ser had long forgotten what it was like to not have Aether coursing through their body, if they hadn't been born with it flowing through them in the first place.
Pocket Watch tapped his chin thoughtfully as Gavin trailed off, having just managed to leave out his stint in The Gap Between. The manila folder stuttered once again and the man leaned forward, steepling their fingers together as they dissected Gavin with a knifelike gaze. "I think we both know that isn't everything. Don't we?"
The magic forced Gavin to speak. "Yes."
"Then spit it out. What happened in those eight hours you were dead?"
Gavin couldn't do any magic at the moment, but that didn't mean he was helpless. Ser's memories guided him to use the sliver of void energy in his soul, flexing his mental muscles to move it to edge of his soul. That was a weird feeling. Like moving a third arm that you just had to trust was there.
He brushed the destructive force up against the spell, wielding it like a scalpel to damage the Spellform that compelled him to speak. He didn't damage the actual spell in the chair, betting it would have anti-tampering measures that would give away what he was doing and bring more suspicion, but he could use it on the magic flowing into him. It wasn't much, but a little bit of wiggle room could mean everything.
"My soul was banished into The Gap Between. I drifted there for some amount of time before my soul returned to my body and I woke up in that dissection room. You can tell me what happened from there." There. That wasn't bad. Gavin didn't give too much away.
The next tick of the pocket watch heralded the explosive crack of a gun shot as a bullet hole appeared in between his feet and the source, a smoking white and silver gun, was held half an inch from his forehead. Gavin lost control of his soul for an instant as he jerked back in shock, injuring his wrists slightly. "Is that the entire truth, containing all relevant information to this interrogation yes or no?"
Gavin fought hard to lie, but with his focus disrupted and the chair beneath him heating to an uncomfortable degree the magical compulsion flowing into him forced him to speak before he could manage any way to break it. "No."
Pocket watch flickered back into his chair like nothing had happened the next instant, smirking as Gavin tried to regain his composure. "Most mundane compulsion resistance involves self-hypnosis or intense concentration. Takes a special kind of person to maintain that when you've got a smoking gun pointed at your head." They slid forward in their seat, leaning on their elbows. "Don't feel bad. We are very good at our jobs, Gavin Wilder, and we have procedures for verifying information, removing unreliability-"
Adrian rolled his eyes in the background. "What Fourteen is trying to say is that we've been lovely hosts so far, and if you cooperate you'll get to keep your fingernails. Though getting those pulled isn't really that bad on the scale of what we can do to you legally, let alone illegally if we deem it necessary."
At least that answered his question about whether this was a good cop/bad cop situation. "Lovely hosts? I woke up in a morgue, was attacked by you, asshole," Gavin gestured vaguely in Adrian's direction, causing him to take a small exaggerated bow. "and now I'm being interrogated under threat of torture. What part of this screams hospitality to you?"
Fourteen glanced back at Adrian with an unreadable poker face before returning his intense focus to Gavin. "Well for one, the torture is still only hypothetical. So here's how your next few hours are going to go: You will be telling us absolutely everything you know, and everything you think you know, then you're going to tell us all that again and we're going to keep doing that until we're beyond sure that we have all the information you can possibly give us. And if you somehow muster up the ability to avoid answering our questions satisfactorily, we'll do our best to get that certainty by dissecting your corpse. Understood?"
The chair forced Gavin to answer honestly once again. "...Yes."
"Good. Now, what happened to you while you were dead?"