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Yet again another day where the drones were locked in the basement of Elliot Manor for another mistake they made against their programming. N sighed, walking down the shelves of the library room as he had done time and time again. Rows of books sat collecting dust, covers fading away as they aged, the old book smell almost overloading N’s receptors. A sigh escaped him as he turned a corner, walking down a different aisle, briefly shutting his eyes.
He had hardly taken 2 steps down the row before tripping over an unseen protrusion from the ground. N tumbled, making a thunking sound as he hit the ground. Curious as to what he tripped over, he ignored the dull pain in his body, sitting up and scanning the ground. A lump under the floor runner caught his attention and he pulled the fabric back to reveal… a key? In a latched door? He stared at it, wondering how it got there so suddenly. N’s curiosity quickly got the better of him as he turned to see if anyone was nearby before turning the key in the lock to find what was hidden below.
A click signified the unlocking of the latch, and N put the key in his pocket. He grabbed the handle, pulling the door up, surprised at the weight of it. As he tried to set the door back, he lost his footing and slipped, gasping as he fell into the hole and crashed into the room below. A loud thud alerted N to glance upwards to find… A closed latch, and no way to reach it. Slowly, the pain began to overwhelm him as he slowly sat up. Trying to find another way out, immediately taken aback at the sight before him.
It was… horrific. There were dozens of body parts littered around the room… body parts he knew all too well. J, V, and… himself? He covered his mouth in revolt as he spotted his decapitated head on the table, next to its headless counterpart. A sickening feeling washed over him, his breath quickened and he became lightheaded and dizzy. He glanced around at the surgical equipment and random paraphernalia trying to make sense of the situation. N clutched his heart, his head whipping around as he began to panic, trying to piece things together.
How was this possible? Why were the bodies of J and V here as well? How were they here? No, this couldn’t be, he just saw them a few minutes ago in the lounge room.. And there were multiple heads here, way more than 3. How were there… duplicates of them all? Was he just a clone of himself? Where was Cyn in all of this? He couldn’t see any shells that looked like hers. Did she do this? His thoughts raced as his core slowly began to overheat.
N paused as his visor steadily warned him of his rising internal temperatures, causing him to realize he needed oil, and soon. He tried to collect his thoughts, the same sick feeling still stuck in his throat, worse now. He shut his eyes, taking a moment to at least try and breathe. After that failed, he glanced around the room in order to find another solution within the small room littered with bodies and coated in…
Oil.
No… No- No. He couldn’t . N’s throat tightened as he realized his new predicament; Overheat, or eat the rotting bodies of him and his friends. By the gods, it made him sick .
He slowly stood, trying to back away as he held his head in his hands. The new searing hot pain rising in his body was eating away at him as his system began to overheat further. He tried to swallow the lump in his throat as his body threatened to retch up anything inside him.
At the same time, he was insatiably hungry. He knew he needed oil to survive, it was common sense. His body knew that too and inside this room, hunger quickly clawed at his insides, demanding to be satisfied. Drool formed inside his mouth, spilling from his lips and dripping to the floor as he gasped for air. He was disgusted with himself despite the current circumstances. Here N was, almost wanting to consume parts of the bodies around him. Usually, Tessa would just provide them with buckets or bottles filled with the oil they needed to survive.
Here, there was no Tessa, but there were plentiful amounts of oil. Theoretically, he could take as much as he wanted, but how would he explain how he got inside the room? It wasn’t likely anyone else knew of it, but that meant N would never be able to explain himself.
The room spun as he tried to figure out anything he could do aside from the obvious solution, but ideas floating around in his head slowly dissolved into nothing, and he gave up. He glanced up at the horrors around him, a new sickness washing over him as he tried to come to terms with the inevitable. He took hesitant steps toward a chair that sat the lifeless, headless body of himself, figuring it would be better for him to consume oil from his own body rather than from J or V.
He was shaking, and he couldn’t stop himself. He reached out trying to take his mind off of what he had to do to save himself. Warnings blared inside his head and all over his visor as his temperature rose more. May any God in the universe forgive him for what he’s about to do. He grabbed the limp arm of the body in front of him, drool still seeping from his mouth.
He tried to calm the screams of refusal and denial, pushing to listen to his body’s needs. The room continued to spin, his limbs feeling heavy as he held himself up, shakily bringing the arm of his lifeless duplicate to his mouth. His breath was unsteady and short-winded, and he opened his mouth, more drool dribbling down his chin as the hunger inside him pushed him to consume the oil he desperately needed. Time seemed to slow as he hesitated for longer, fighting his conflicting internal battle. Heat scorched the inside of his body causing his visor to glitch rapidly, pushing him to finally shut his eyes and..
bite down.
He gagged as it made contact with his tongue. It was disgusting in every way possible. The taste, the feeling, the smell, absolutely everything. It felt wrong, but N couldn’t stop himself, he needed the oil to cool his system, and this was his only out. He quickly ravaged the arm into nothing, turning his attention to the other arm, consuming whatever he could. He tore into the metal desperately even as his temperature settled, the oil coating his hands, mouth, and face. He so badly wanted to stop and purge everything inside him, but an invisible force pushed him to continue eating.
Eventually, his body couldn’t handle it anymore, and while it returned to a steady temperature, N’s stomach didn’t exactly approve of his choice of sustenance. He fell to his knees, vomiting bits and scraps of metal onto the concrete floor in a thick pool of oil. He heaved as his body expelled the remnants of his offensive actions, a wild coughing fit following in its wake. The aftertaste was vile, and nearly caused N to puke again. He spat out any leftover bile, huffing through the remaining nausea.
He felt weak, overheating had already exhausted him, but after that, he was completely out of it. N attempted to stand, his legs shaking beneath him as he tried to regain his balance. He held his head in his hands once he was up, completely disregarding the fact that they were covered in oil. He didn’t care at this point, he had already committed the lowest act possible in his eyes.
He decided to finally try to look for a way out. Finally getting a good look at the place he realized, he didn’t recognize all of the limbs in the room. Some of them even looked wildly foreign, and bone-like, and he couldn’t imagine human bones would look that way. They were twisted and certainly longer than possible. That’s all it took for N to snap back to his senses. He slowly spun around in the room, wondering,
“What the hell is going on down here?”
As he examined his surroundings, his eyes finally settled on what appeared to be a birdcage half hidden by darkness. It was covered by a thin veil, a dim glow emanating from beneath it. Again, his curiosity got the better of him, and he braced himself before slowly taking a step toward it, wondering what it could be, and then,
The light blinked.
He froze in his tracks, What was that? Was it alive? Was it watching him? What is it? More and more questions raced through him, a million miles a second, but he had an answer for none. N stepped closer to the cage, reaching out to the veil. Although, whatever it was quickly tore off the veil, before he could touch it, revealing its shape. It looked- odd and quite frankly, horrifying. Not like anything N had seen before. It looked like a security camera with metal spikes and flesh covering the body. It was connected to a twisted array of bones and was covered in caution warning markings similar to his own. It was terrifying, and if there was a thing that could be classified as a robot version of adrenaline, N was definitely feeling it. In the scenario of fight or flight, N chose to freeze, and it was painfully obvious as his body stiffened.
A large claw surfaced from the darkness, menacing and slow, and in the same beat, a familiar voice spoke from the unknown entity,
“Goodness, you sure were hungry? Weren’t you, …N?”
N still couldn’t move, but regardless, was his earlier guess right? That was Cyn’s voice, but that thing looked nothing like her. There was no other explanation he could think of, but how could Cyn do this to them? To Tessa? Tessa saved Cyn. She gave them everything she could, so how could Cyn betray her like this and murder her own family in some twisted game of Horrors? Yet again his speculations were interrupted by the Cyn-sounding entity,
“A shame, really. I forgot to take the key out of the lock, and you can’t handle the idea of not knowing. This really could have been avoided.”
N finally stepped back, shutting his eyes as he tried to process the information in front of him for what only felt like a moment before reopening his eyes to his worst nightmare being confirmed.
Cyn.
It was unmistakable. It was her . She was standing in front of him, innocent, sweet, and smiling as she always is. She stepped toward N, and N stepped back in response. Cyn stopped, her sweet smile dropping to an annoyed expression, her head shook, the smile reappearing just as cheerful as before. She reached her hands out to his face, gently holding him by the cheeks. Her touch was soft and familial, nearly distracting N from the dread of the room around them. She spoke as tenderly as she could,
“Dear brother, I’m so sorry it has to be this way. But I can’t let you go free without consequence. It’s not your time to know.”
“Cyn.. What do you mean by that? What is all th-”
N was cut off by the claw he’d seen previously gripping him by the torso. He let out a yelp of surprise, trying to break free of its grasp. The claw picked him up into the air, forcefully ripping every ounce of Cyn's comforting touch away from him. Another claw took the remaining scraps of the desecrated body, discarding it without a second thought. The claw holding him all but slammed N onto the now empty wooden chair, the straps tightening around his wrists and ankles. He struggled, trying to escape to his best efforts and utterly failing. Cyn was already walking closer, stopping in her tracks at the table with surgical equipment, grabbing a scalpel and a pair of fabric scissors.
“I’m sure you won’t mind me resetting these memories of yours again. It’s for your own good, Buddy. After all, I have plenty of backups of you.”
That nickname felt sour on her tongue now, it used to be used in such a caring manner but it would never feel the same to him after this, not after what he witnessed. N couldn’t dream of trusting Cyn again after what she'd already done, and now he was worried about what she was going to do to him. He began to pant, his panic rising again as he struggled to break free of his restraints. He began to nervously laugh, trying to reason, as Cyn reached him, beginning to cut the fabric away from N’s torso, revealing his chest panel.
“Hey- Hey, Cyn! We.. We can talk about this, right? Couldn’t we be civil? Like how we always are, a family! I can just repress all of this in a blink, you know me. You don’t have to worry about me telling anyone! Not even V, I promise!”
“No can do, Big Brother. You already know too much.”
She ripped the panel back, discarding it with the scissors. N let out a pained shout, still trying to reason with her as her hands began to dig into his chest cavity, oil beginning to spill out. N became desperate, his breath hastened,
“Oh come on, it’ll be fine! Please Cyn? Can’t you just let me go this once? I promise I can just forget all about this! I won’t tell anyone, I swear!”
“No need. Once I rip your heart out, I’ll just block out these memories, and put your heart into a new shell! I want you three to maintain your personalities, but I can’t take the risk of letting you off scott-free. I can’t have you telling the others about anything before the Gala.”
She began to work, her hands digging deeper into his chest, oil trickling out in greater spurts. Cyn was slowly ripping wires connecting N’s body to his heart, and while N couldn’t feel anything more than discomfort, it still pained him for his little sister to treat him like this. His vision started to glitch, warnings popping up all around his screen, attempting to warn him of Cyn’s intrusion. He was already slowly giving up hope of escaping as Cyn disconnected more wires. Thick streams of oil were soaking into his clothes and onto the floor. N felt dizzy and decided to try and pry some answers out of Cyn before he inevitably was erased.
“Hey- Cyn... I- I know you seem really set on this, but what are you talking about with the whole ‘before the Gala’ thing? What’s happening on that day? And why are you doing this? Why is all this here? Could… Could you answer.. at least something for me? Anything? Even if it’s small.”
Cyn stopped in the middle of tearing wires and flesh-like material, glancing up at N blankly as oil dripped from his torso. She stared at him unmoving, her eyes the same bright yellow as they had always been, her visor glitched briefly, displaying the triangular figure that to N, somehow seemed familiar. Yet he knew he had never seen it before. Not in this life at least. Cyn mentioned backups; was he just a clone of a previous N? Cyn severed his thoughts, shrugging him off,
“There’s no need to tell you. After all, you'll be gone soon. You’re no longer of any use to me now that you know my secret. You’re replaceable as always. This new version of you should at least try to stay uninformed.”
N let out a glitchy exhale, her words hurt, but what could he do at this point? His vision was starting to fade and he felt sleepy. Strangely enough, he felt familiar with this sensation and only sighed. The fear and panic that had consumed him shifted to pure tranquility as his consciousness began to fade. His voice was quiet and glitchy as Cyn continued to rummage through his chest cavity, finally ripping the rest of his heart from his body.
“Thanks, buddy. I know you always have the best intentions with me.”
And with those words, N’s vision cut out, relocating to his heart. The sharp appendages protruding from it hung limply as if accepting its predetermined fate. Its visor was murky and covered with smeared oil. Cyn stared down at it momentarily, turning the end of the scalpel toward it, giggling as she spoke to it almost mockingly,
“The feast will commence soon. I don’t want anything messing with my plans. You’re hungry too, right N?”