He woke up to the sound of a loud bang. He jolted up, but found his movements constricted by his bound wrists. His wrists were sore. His hands turned blue and were very cold. He must have been hanging by that rope for some time. He tried to adjust his arms in a way that provided some slack on his bindings and he felt the blood rushing into his hands again. It was soothingly warm but also unnerving at the same time, because it felt like ants were crawling all over his palms. Oh, I hate this.
He looked around to see where the sound that woke him up came from. In the little sunlight that crawled through the slits under the ceiling into the Slaughterhouse he saw that the room was still empty. The only difference being that whatever dark liquid he was standing in now dried up. He turned to the door behind him where a carcass laid on the floor. It was a pig. The door swung open and the overwhelming amount of light flowing in blinded him for a moment. The door closed with a loud bang and he could finally see the silhouettes of two men.
“Good morning, Sunshine!” one said.
image [https://i.imgur.com/eUUYVCm.png]
It was Baron Bonatelli, who took off his sunglasses and put them away in the inside of a light brown, sleeveless doublet decorated with gems in the place of where the buttons should be. The white sleeves from a woolen tunic underneath the doublet ended inside black leather gloves. The Baron wore black trousers similar to the other man, but they seemed more fitting and of a higher quality. The other man wore red garments like the servants, however his garments had long sleeves ending in brown leather gloves. He was covered in a leather apron from the waist down. The servant donned a featureless black mask over his face and proceeded to carry the dead pig into the middle of the room. He had an uneasy feeling about this.
“What do you want from me?” he asked the Baron.
The Baron shook his head. “Where I’m from people return a greeting. But I guess it’s straight to business with you.”
The servant proceeded to hang the pig by its front legs right so that the head hung right in front of him. Shouldn’t he hang it the other way around?
“Well my little piggy, I just want to find out the truth,” the Baron said, “And since your Paladin friend in the… let’s say ‘Player Ethics Comittee’ has a problem with Players being harmed, we’ll experiment a bit.”
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Experiment? What does he mean?
Baron Bonatelli produced a cleaver from under his doublet and handed it over to the servant.
“You see, Timmy over here wanted to prepare something special for the twins’ upcoming birthday tomorrow.”
The servant reluctantly accepted the knife, although under the mask he couldn’t tell if the servant hesitated because he was afraid of the Baron, or because he revered him.
“The pig has already been bled out for the most part in the actual slaughterhouse for my livestock. You’ll have realized that the hygiene standards in here are grotesquely low, but they should suffice for the little lords’.”
“What-,” he asked with a trembling voice, “what does that have to do with me?”
“Good thing you asked, little piggy. Normally, a pig should be slaughtered and consumed on the same day of the feast, unless you want to preserve it somehow,” the Baron explained, “but since you’re being questioned today and no one is down for a little PvP, I was thinking we’d try something out. So I moved up this pig’s slaughter to not waste another one. Isn’t that nice of me?”
Timmy turned the pig around so that its backside was exposed. Then, the servant carefully caressed the cleaver up and down the pig’s spine trying not to cut the flesh.
“Back in the real world I saw something on TV,” Baron Bonatelli said.
Real world?
A sudden touch on his back startled him. The Baron was driving something cold up and down his spine following the movement of the cleaver.
“I believe it was called the rubber hand illusion or something like that. I’m not quite sure. I watched a lot of TV as a child and it’s been a few years.”
The movements of the cleaver and the thing on his back were slowly starting to match. After a short while they became synchronized.
“It doesn’t matter,” the Baron said moreso talking to himself instead of the others in the room. “If this works, then we’ll call it the Bonatelli Piggyback Illusion.”
Event though he couldn’t see it, he knew that the Baron smiled proudly. He didn’t fully understand what was going on and he was too afraid to ask, but he had a rough idea.
“Don’t worry, I just need to find out the truth,” the Baron reassured him. “You’ll simply answer some questions and if I don’t like the answer then… Timmy!”
The servant suddenly stopped moving the cleaver along the spine. Instead, he raised it a bit and hacked it into the pig’s right shoulder. At the moment of impact he felt a sharp excruciating pain in his own right shoulder. He screamed in agony. The scream made Timmy jolt and drop the cleaver. The room was filled with the loud clank of the cleaver and his own screams. The Baron laughed maniacally as he applauded himself.
“Splendid!” Bonatelli exclaimed. “How wonderful.”
How is he enjoying this? What’s wrong with him?
“You sick bastard!” he yelled.
“Easy now,” the Baron said, “there’s no need to worry. Just take a look.”
He looked at his right shoulder and saw that the Baron had struck him with a harmless stick and there was no wound. As the shock faded, so did his pain. How?
“Timmy, pick up the cleaver!” the Baron commanded. “Let’s get this started!”