"There are two ways Psychics acquire their psychic powers. The first is that they are natural psychics, i.e. they were born with psychic powers which were most probably passed down to them from someone in their family tree. The second is the arising of psychic abilities through a suffering of a severe or life threatening experience that causes emotional and physical trauma. - Zack Havoc, Psychic"

The seer, before she was to be called the seer, was not much more than a struggling speck of a girl campaigning for a better world. Slavers were her prime targets, and she interrupted business on a daily basis. When they came at her with collars, or the foreign kolars, she often outmaneuvered them, or called upon local blood ties. Rumors of the leather-armored urchin girl lead to cautious slavers revamping their risk management strategies.

What one called liberation, others called theft.

Time elapsed, though did not reek havoc on her fairness. Perhaps her eyes grew softer without the facade of adolescent fury. Perhaps her hair grew long and more unruly. Perhaps she was more cautious in her steps. Was it a decade since she had fought the futile battle?

The Slavers Bane gladly welcomes ye !!!!

First of all, we would like to thank ye for being apart of this new and growing brotherhood.
It is our goal, for ye to have a place to call home, as well as a brotherhood vowed to stop slavers, and free slaves.

Old slogans haunted her still, as did old enemies.

Half past the lost decade, the seer, before she was the seer, made an attempt at a new trade. Rather than collect flesh like her aging adversaries, she would collect stories. A library was built on the ruins of a mansion, one she had inherited as the sole survivor of a once numerous family.

And to fund such an endeavor, she went to her Cousin's newest business partner, a man named Travanix.

They said he came from the stars...

Peel the skin back from the flesh.
Steal the flesh back from the starving static minds.
From nature we must stray,
To clarity we'll climb.
- AFI

Strange flashes in the dark. Eye-shaped spotlights overhead.

"You will submit."

Someone was talking.

"Serve me well, and you will live."

It might have been the walls.

Like a dying florescent bulb, she flickered at his feet. In and out. In and out. Rhythmic, in step with her breath.

The air around her hung heavier, grew hotter than the rest of the cavern.

Cavern? Her thoughts were juggled and jumbled. The Liberation Corporation: allies of her Slaver's Bane. Had she descended into their caves once more?

"Raye," she murmured, pressing her cheek to the cavern floor. It was stone-cold, but rising in temperature once she made contact.

"Raye, where are you? It's dark and sometimes its naut, and I can naut see anything... Are we to war again? Is it Brutin? We must naut hurt muh cousin.."

War, Chylde, it is before us.

"Who said that?" It was a plea to those private, voiceless near-imaginings that would later engulf her daily activities. But not yet. Not yet.

She lifted her head, and, with palms pressed to the heated ground, lifted the rest of her torso. Knotted spirals of chestnut (stained with but a few of silver-white, their numbers to increase later) fell over shoulders and breasts, a mermaid in the making, with legs linked and forced under her small weight, carefully hidden from red-red eyes.

Raise up the ghosts of the dead - I won't die like them
Push past the point of raw emotion - I will breathe
Exist with a broken spirit - I will die complete
Ignore what the angels say,
enjoy that special place where the demons speak to me.
- Atreyu

The room was cold, the table she was bound to even colder. Her head was locked in place with a band of metal across her forehead. Her arms and leg spread wide from her body. Another bar across her chest to hold her torso in place. A bright light shined down into her eyes. His footsteps could be heard in the distance around her.

Tap-tap. The captive's ears were assaulted by the echo of his feet. Tap-tap. That was all it took to usher her into Reality's cold arena, and eyes, off-blue and dilated by the intrusion of light, flickered toward the direction of sound. Heavy, quick breaths, in and out, to combat the chill and the overall terror.

"Now my dear," his voice echoed off the lab walls. "I'm just going to take a DNA sample. Well, several actually."

He suddenly appeared near her head, showing her a rather large needle attached to an even larger container. "And, this will hurt."

"Dee-Ehn-Ay?" The voice that blew past cracked lips seemed hurried and ragged, but still chimed with a childlike lilt. Thoughts of Who and Where and Why wrapped her, and weighed heavy, heavier than the fear of his approach. She saw the needle, saw it's cruel eye, and hid her own.

"This is the World Below."

"No, this is worse than the world below. Because if you were in the world below, you would be dead. And I wouldn't have anyone to torture." He suddenly plunged the needle just below her chest all the way to the container.

Her mouth stretched for the scream born of said injection, her body thrashing wildly against the bonds meant to contain her. The blood which coursed through her veins was red. Nothing unusual there, not even in the way it clotted once the syringe had had its fill. But yet, there was that glow again, lovechild of firefly and candle flame. It caused her flesh to shimmer, as if she had leapt naked into a rain shower...

"Ah...Excellent. Exactly what I wanted." Another needle was produced and plunged into her arm and began draining the life's blood from her body.

"I wanted a pre and post response of your interesting change."

"Ch-change.." The stammer was dry, and seemed a question, when rather it was an echo of his last word. The second syringe drowned in the same sort of blood, but, when touched, seemed iron-hot. In fact, so seemed the rest of her. A fever swept over, charging the chill of the table, of the room, of even him, rendering her skin too-warm to the touch, and reddening her cheeks.

He smirked. "I was prepared for this."

He picked up a syringe with a blue fluid contained there in and plunged it into her veins.. The fluid was cool as soon as it drained into her body, like liquid ice pumping into her. It followed the heat throughout her body.

There was no cry, just an arch of her back as far as it would go, just enough so that her pressed forehead was further crushed against the metal band. Her mouth was open, as were her eyes - very, very open. A sort of frozen shock had transformed her delicate features, and eventually, her core temperature plummeted. Blue lips, rival for her eyes, and a steady pallor crept across her skin.

"Delicious." He picked up a data pad and began recording the results.

"You see, as the chemical flows through your body, it grows colder in response to the heat. It is a chain reaction through your blood and chemicals. No doubt, will impact your brain as well."

"From the stars.." The beginnings of a ramble, when her jaw had unlocked and allowed her lips to move. Perhaps it made reference to nothing. Perhaps all relevance was lost as gray matter froze. She seemed a doll, a porcelain waif, cold, unmoving, uncaring, with no sense of self.

He observed her for several hours. Causing pain so intense that her body would again ignite into its furious glow. Then he would inject various amounts of the blue fluid into her veins.

Strange how the brain is thus affected by the body's agony, how it launches its own defenses to whisk spirit and psyche away in times of brutality, shock, and terror. Yet, flesh reacted as it should have as nerve endings fired rapid warnings, coaxed arms and legs to flail in a futile attempt to escape. Tears marked pathways along peaked cheekbones, steaming at times, frozen at others. Sometimes, when they were to fall, they did so diamond-hard. A plink against the table as Time marched on.

Log entry, Experiment 345.

Subject: slave number 4098231, name viki.

Preperations: Girl bound to table mark 1, fully bound; See log 319

Begin log:

Chemestry is always an enjoyable hobby. It becomes even more enjoyable when you experiment with chemicals that when mixed create a brand new horizon to explore. I've begun experimenting with local (See Rhydin entry in planetary log) as well many of the known narcotics and drugs from the galactic scale. As with all great discoveries, there are many not so great failures. I will be using the coil that was implanted into slave girl viki to test out a new chemical that I believe will have...extremly useful, as well as entertaining properties.

Phase 1: The girl was not sedated in preperation, as the mixture of chemicals would taint the experiment. Half-life of XF-255 is roughly 12 hours. The chemical has been injected into the coil. Because of direct injection, absobancy will be less than 30 seconds. Subject's flesh responds with the glow (See continuing log 291). Subject's mind begins react to XF-255.

Phase 2: As believed, subject's hormonal level has been driven to new limits. The body is responding to the lightest touch in a pure sexual manner. There is no stimulation in her e-zones, but the body is "on fire" as the subject observed. Higher thinking seems to have decreased, thinking of no food or water. Question: If stimulation were applied, how would it increase the effectiveness of the syrum?

Phase 3: 10 hours of observation are complete. The excitement the subject is feeling seems to have remained as intense as it did when the syrum was first injected into her blood. Further study reveals that continued injection through the coil would cause a permanent, if not, degraded, influance against the nervous system. Update - Life of the syrum is 12-hours to process and run its coruse in human/near-human genetics. Determination: Once this experiment concludes, and the subject rests, additional injections will be introduced at 12-hour periods.

Updated - Final analysis of subject viki after a week. The syrum has been injected into her flesh for the course of 96 hours, at the end of each 12 hour period. It has indeed had a permanent affect on her system, taking only minor stimulous at first to send her into a very long, nearly 'unclimatic'. I have allowed her to release, placing the "trigger" in her mind after several hours of heat. Personal note - Her begging has been captured on record 498211 for future endevors.

Time: 114 hours, 39 minutes