Sheng Guang, Lili Vogel-Zwingli, Christophe Janssens, and Ludwig Beilschmidt. A voice calls all four of your names over the intercom, and the four of you gather at a passageway near the living quarters, a team of lab techs guiding you to the awaiting facilitator standing in front of a large, very secure door, his straight expression telling you nothing of what lie ahead. Charles raises a hand casually to the screen awaiting beside the door, an ominous violet glow scanning the hand and a loud noise reverberating through the air as the door opens suspiciously silently.
Charles gestures all of you to enter the room before entering himself, closing the door behind him. He walks past all of you to four chambers, shaped oddly like a pod and full of what appears to be lukewarm water. Charles turns his head to ask all of you to undress to your undergarments with a soft, yet oddly intimidating tone.
The team of lab techs you noticed before begin to swarm all of you, taking a sample of blood before beginning to hook monitoring cables upon each of you. In the meanwhile, Charles is prepping each pod, his eyes half-hooded and the glowing light of the chambers shadowing his face in a villainous way. You cannot help but shudder.
Soon enough, the lab techs lead each of you to a separate pod, and Charles asks you to step into the water. Each of you begin to float on your backs, the water reaching uncomfortably up over your neck and just barely leaving your noses above the lukewarm surface. The pods close with one last warning from Charles to relax, for panicking in these pods could cause drowning.
You float for minutes. Hours. Years. Decades. Time floats away and images that are unfamiliar begin to flicker upon your eyelids. But your mind is blank, empty, you are numb.
And then, a shock. Pain for a brief moment.
The pods open slowly, each of you squinting from the sudden onslaught of outside light. Lab techs help each of you out of the pods and provide each one of you a towel and a robe. You stand awkwardly around one another, eyes averted to the ground as Charles approaches Christophe.
Then, with the speed that one could not expect from such a twink figure (Charles did it first, Francisco can shove it) Charles threw a quick left hook into Christophe’s side. Each one of you winced in pain, hands flying reflexively to your right side.
“With this, your connection has begun. All of you now share pain with one another, so be careful with what you do to yourself. This is only Level 1 of your future connection. You will soon share emotion, feeling, dreams, and what not.” Charles spoke lightly, shaking his left hand out with a sigh before rubbing the back of his neck. “You are lucky I did not use my right hand, you would all have passed out by now. Pain is your bond, for now, but soon enough you guys will know much too much about one another.”
He shoos all of you out of the room, opening the door for all of you and releasing you to have free reign for the rest of the day, but not without a warning:
“Seriously, do not do anything dumb that will put the others in harms way. You are now part of one another.”
And with that, your connection has now officially been initiated.
