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His opening cut was precise, severing the charred remains of leather and ashen skin. The sound was something akin to tearing paper as he continued to cut along the line of her chest from collarbone to navel, black and gray split to reveal a rosy pink underneath. A furrow ripples across fiery brows like an elusive fish just below a placid pond surface, something wasn't quite right about this. Hooking black rubber encased fingers into the edges of the cut he'd just made, he pulls in opposite directions... again the sound of tearing echoes about the bare stone walls of the lab, but this one rang more wet than the first.
Without hesitation, he continues to tear away the thick crust of rank black surrounding the body on the table, the results the same at each place his thick fingers pluck. Underneath the burnt overlayers lay a new Baghiira, looking as raw and pink as a newborn piglet. Her hair was gone, even her eyebrows... her lips were swollen after the violent attack of new oxygen and looked bloodshot. Her limbs were achingly thin... were it not for the smoothness of this new body he might think she had been utterly skinned, and he looked now upon the cooked remains of her muscular structure.
Pieces of the old Baghiira suit crunched underfoot as he ambled about his examination table, gloves absently stroking his chin. On a thought, he yanks out the last remains of charcoal from the points where the body was bound to the table, and cinched the straps tighter. It would seem there was more than a simple dissection to do here.
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I promised you wouldn't die. So ... LIVE.
The last word was a hiss that somehow boomed and rang through every fiber of her being -- a physical being she had never known she possessed or was possessed by.
Live.
Earlier, it had been said she would grow hotter, and this was proving true as well. Just as she had earlier grown colder, like passing through a veil of ice, now she felt herself speeding through that plane of empty, warm, brightness, sucked as if through a vacuum into blindness and an almost unbearable heat. She felt heavy and constricted. Tight. Worst of all was the heat; it seemed to originate somewhere in her chest and explode outward from there, a heat that screamed along nerve endings as they were reawakened, a heat that fused the bodiless entity she thought she had always been into this heavy being of clay and blood, this thing which could not possibly be anything more than some sorry golem, brainless and thoughtless.
Live.
The last echoes of the word were fading now; she strained toward them, and the heat which fused spirit into flesh washed into her heart.
It strained, beat once and subsided into stillness again ... but that single beat had been enough to jerk her, to crackle the remaining flakes of shed skin.
Live.
Nerve endings shrieked in response to that single beat and swollen lips parted. Another whispering echo swept across the muscle and it quivered within her chest cavity, pushed into a faltering, faint beat.
Live.
She gasped in a first breath and, though no higher suggestions of consciousness made themselves apparent, she developed her first living memory: that of an echoing command and her obedience.
