Interlude: Someone Else's War

David, Jillian and Axel

You wake up with the tingling sensation in your mouths and the heavy headaches that come from the sleep gas Dr. Sundgren uses when she needs your minds for her experiments. You are strapped to dentist chairs facing each other, Dr. Sundgren's huge and incomprehensibly complex machine between you.
It's the sharp pain in your spine and limbs where dozens of needles penetrate you and attach you to the machine that brings you out of the heavy, narcotic sleep. As you look at your friends and at the new boy that Dr. Sundgren brought in when you all started growing too weak, you can tell that they're all just as worn out as you yourself feel. Eyes red, skin pale, hair going grey. Dr. Sundgren walks purposefully around the room, her muscular body dressed in shorts and a white tank-top, her white hair flowing freely and hundreds of tattoos of mathematical formulas covering her skin.
As she puts on a cap connected to the machine, she crouches down over the control panel. "This time, you will find it," she says in her honey-sweet voice. "The Hephaesteum, it has to be in this world. It just has to be." None of you know what this Hephaesteum is, except that Dr. Sundgren claims it is a lab that contains all the world's truths. And that if you don't find it, these missions she keeps sending you on will never end.

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Sixten

You wake up, and like all the other times, you’re lying on the floor of the room where you are being kept when you're not working. You’re feeling stiff, sore, and you have a strange, uncomfortable taste in you mouth that you know is from the gas the tattooed woman – Dr. Sundgren – sprays through the keyhole to put you to sleep.
You’re being used for sick, dangerous experiments. Dr. Sundgren uses your minds as vehicles to travel between worlds, into different versions of the Mälaren Islands, searching for something she calls the Hephaesteum.
These trips are burning out your body and mind, making you feel a hundred years old. Dr. Sundgren does not care about you, except that she claims that if you lose all your strength, you will never return.

You slowly return to full consciousness and as you look around, you realize that you are alone in the room. Empty soup cans litter the floor, along with old toys for much younger kids. Your sleeping bags are stacked in a corner of the room, and there is a desk, a chair, and a shelf by the back wall. The door and the wall next to it is made from acrylic glass, leading into the Clovers' control room where Dr. Sundgren has set up her machine.

David moves his eyes - the only thing he can move - just to see himself in his companions: exhausted, pathetic figures that once were healthy, exuberant kids with their heads full of dreams, and a lifetime to experience ahead.

And all because of this white-haired bitch. How many times, in the drugged haze of his slumber, has he dreamt, imagined, focused on the many gruesome ways in which he would maim, torture and kill their tormentor...

He might have lost the will to live, powerless and condemned to the agony of this endless nightmare. But you cannot stop my hatred, you filthy tattooed bitch. He wants her to sense his hatred every time she looks at him. The only thing he can do... other than dreaming of snapping that neck... cleaving those fingers one by one... carving out those eyes...

Sixten rubs wearily at his eyes and yawns. It feels weird, yawning, when you know you shouldn't even be sleepy. All the alarms are going off in his head, telling him to escape - to shout for help, but he knows there's nobody there to help him. Him or his friends. Surely, they're working now, strapped to those damn chairs. But one of them had gotten out, and so could they, right?

He stands, shaking off the loose strands of sleepiness, and looks around before approaching the door and wall, looking out into the space beyond. He pats his pockets looking for anything he might have stuck in his pocket that could help him in his current situation then scans the room. I have to do something, have to get out of here, he thinks.

Dr. Sundgren doesn't seem to notice or care about David's glare. She's still working on setting up the machine to send your minds away again.

Sixten struggles to get to his feet, his whole body feeling weak and sore. Glancing through the acrylic glass door, he finds his friends as well as the new kid Dr. Sundgren brought in, strapped and fixed to the machine again. They all look just as sick as you feel. The only thing Sixten finds in his pocket is a small hex key. Nothing that really seems like it could help in this situation.

Sixten tests the door to see if it will open.

Assuming it doesn't, he heads to the shelf and desk, looking for anything that might be helpful.

Jillian grits her teeth through the pain.

"We don’t… know what… you’re talking about!" she almost spits the words.

"How can we… find it… if…" we don’t know what you’re talking about…

The pain and misery was too much to even speak through. The girl tries to look around the room at her fellow captives…

Axel flexes against the restraints. He's not been subjected to this living hell as long as the others. If anyone could break loose it had to be him...it needed to be him. Many thoughts go through his head, as he tries to push the pain and the invasive things out. Where was Eric?

Jillian let’s loose a whimper.

"Again?" she begins to cry. Her former confident, cocky self slowly being replaced by a mental wreck.

She sniffles as she waits for the others to take it all in.

"Again?!" she says, angry and just the tiniest but defiant, but not much.

Sixten grits his teeth. She's right, he is weak. Tired and exhausted, all those things. But as he watches his friends writhe in pain before being shunted off to who-knows-where, the small boy turns, picks up the nearby chair as best he can and starts slamming it with all his strenth into the plexiglass. Futile, he knows.

"This is stupid!" Axel says. "Does this insane bitch really think we are going to find this place she's looking for?"

"I don't know..." he says, shivering from cold and fear. "all I know now, is I want to get away from those explosions. Come on..."
He starts running away from the direction of the blast - whether or not that's North...

It took all of Jillian’s resolve just to push off from the spot she stood in. She pushes her glasses up as she runs after David. She tries to remember all the other times they failed.

She wanted to get out of this place. Wanted to get away from this Doctor. Wanted to be back in her bed, in her clothes, with her family. And yet… she didn’t want to succeed. She wanted to spite her captor. Wanted to ensure they failed. But she was so tired.

"Come on, Axel. Keep up! We need to hurry!"

Did they?…

Seeing, too, that his efforts are wasted, Sixten sticks his hand back in his pocket and worries at the hex key, finding comfort in the one thing that he feels anchors him to a life outside of this hell. Except his friends, of course. He sits in the back corner, staring at the woman on the other side of the wall, anger brewing in his young mind. He tries to take his mind off of it by thinking back to the one of them that did get away: Mette. If she could do, maybe they could to. He holds onto hope that she's out there now, getting help.

"Dammit! Everyone hide." Axel whispers loudly. He heads toward the closest cover and tries to make himself as small as possible to avoid the attention of the soldiers.

"Shit..." he whispers, and follows Axel's example looking for cover and lying as flat and still as he can behind it.

Jillian scampers down and makes herself small. She grabs her hand into bunches on either side, as if flattening her hair would make all the difference over being seen.

"Shh…" she says, almost completely absent of sound. More mouthing the sound than anything else. And then she shuts her eyes tight and waits.