An Imagination of Darkness [Klein, Liltotto]

"Biographies, hm. I could give those a shot. I'm not sure whose life I'd necessarily be interested in enough to commit to a full book, but if you have any suggestions, I'm all ears. I do keep science journals around, but those are more in the work library than for fun, know what I mean?"

Klein continued to work, making sure that his sensors didn't run into any problems as they continued to gradually crawl their way through Liltotto's vascular system, branching into further tendrils whenever they met a branching path. Their work was far from over, and wouldn't be for quite some time, simply by way of how much there was to map out.

"Ecology's an interesting subject. I've done some research into it myself, but I don't really know much about the other two, especially not Anthropology. A little too abstract for me."

The other sensors, meanwhile, had less elaborate paths to follow, simply continuing on their way as they burrowed further into Liltotto. Whenever they made significant headway, a small branch split off and anchored itself in place, not only to secure the sensors in place, but to begin collecting samples. Of course, there were some particular samples that Klein was focused the most intently on, and he was slowly getting there. It would just take a little more time.

Focus was becoming difficult to maintain, feeling as if she was floating in a lukewarm pool. No movement, any form of struggle ceased, she felt properly detached from her flesh - an oddly familiar sensation, if not for the persistent distant screaming in the back of her mind: Something was wrong, something was bad, something, something... An instinct kept crying for her - run, run, run... Liltotto wasn't very certain why, she didn't feel like she was in any danger, if anything this was the most peaceful she's felt in a long time. When did she last... She couldn't recall, it was at the tip of her tongue...

Oh, she almost forgot that she had company, the voice of the arrancar reminded her quickly before she had gone off into her own head. She tried to consider some specific examples, but the names just slipped through her fingers.. Ah, she hadn't really read many biographies in a while... Maybe she should do that whenever she got home, "I understand... Specifics aren't coming to me, but you could look into figures of specific time periods... Like major conflicts within history... Or even just highly influential people within society... It may seem frivolous, but the more accurate accounts can be a rich reading experience..."

That screaming was still there, a distant cry. She wondered what that was about. Everything was fine...

"For Anthropology... you could start with looking into a specific people," Her tone lazily expressed her thoughts, half-lidded eyes vaguely scanning the ceiling as she did so, "Or even a particular religion... Even if the latter's a lot more abstract, it gives insight into beliefs and morals... Their perspectives..."

Architecture... Architecture... That one was a little harder to explain in simplistic terms with no visual examples, "It's a little bit of both an art and a science... Designing suitable occupation or living quarters... It was something I wanted to do when I was little..."

Her mind drifted a bit, dredging up those distant memories, "..Nobody would take me up as an apprentice, was 'too small' they'd say... Smithing, too small. Hunting, too small... I could keep up fine, but it was always 'too small'... But that was kind of just an excuse, wasn't it..? Was being trained up to be a soldier like all the other children... But even that was begrudging..."

Those amber eyes of her's darkened, as a slew of uncomfortable memories surfaced. Ones she often avoided thinking of.

"I see, I see. I'll keep that in mind when I'm adding to my collection."

In a way, it was good that she seemed to be so out of it, and getting even moreso by the minute. Klein understood perfectly well that part of this was going to be profoundly uncomfortable even with the pain receptors functionally nulled, simply because it wasn't really a matter of pain. At her last comments, however, he seemed to have a very slight pause, the clicking of his keyboard slowing down as he spoke in a slightly more somber tone.

"Too small, huh? I've been there. Heard it ever since I was born. Then again, I was definitely just supposed to be a weapon. Don't ever let your dreams just be a dream, you know? If you're interested in architecture, there's always time to pursue it. Especially when age is just a number for people like you and I."

He liked to be supportive of the dreams of others. After all, he'd accomplished so much in his own life. It just made sense that he should provide a little bit of a hand to people he met too, didn't it? Returning his focus to the work at hand, he allowed the current tendrils to continue on their work in a mostly automated manner, either collecting samples or still gradually spreading through his subject's cardiovascular and lymphatic systems.

With a narrowing gaze at the intensity of the work, Klein began guiding one particularly specialized sensor as it pierced the base of Liltotto's spine, and carefully worked its way upward. Others had begun to exam the upper half of Liltotto's body, but whatever sight that might have been, Klein was barely even registering it. He trusted his mechanisms to work correctly, and his own manual work right now was the most vital point of focus.

...Him too...?

That realization was the only shock that managed to pierce through the dulled valley of grey, although only for a moment before her gaze relaxed into the spacing darkness it had acquired. It just gave her thoughts somewhere new to stray, flickering lights in an empty city.

"Sometimes I wonder," Her tone was monotonous on the ears, eyes searching the ceiling for seemingly nothing, "..If I was the weapon that man wanted me to be, would everyone have survived? Most of them were awful, because I wasn't a Quincy, let alone... Anything they understood... But... They didn't deserve all of that."

Those fiery scenes were baked into her mind, no matter how many new experiences or memories made, the scent of burning bodies never left her - as if those scenes had carved a home deep in her heart, an inseparable fact of her being. Even if that was the case... She bore no scars of that time. Her mother died, her comrades fell, countless innocents who had nothing to do with it suffered. She was the only one who rose from that time without issue, allowed to live, to survive... Even now, she still asked why it had to be her to carry the burden of that time's mistakes, the wonderings of if something could have been different... Only to realize what was done, is done.

How incredibly human of her, to wonder.

"...I lost the want to do it. I just went to school for the sake of going - I didn't have any plans for... For what i'd do..." Her teeth gently grit; it felt like that strange screaming grew more intense for but a moment, the sensation of wrongness increasing, only to gently lower back down to that drowning voice who's cries lost meaning with every perceived moment. She felt bad, in a strange way, "...I don't really know what to do other than drift, really. I wanted to stay... With the Quincy... Because that was what was familiar to me... But..."

She thought for a moment, how to express this sensation, closing her eyes before letting out an exhale, "...I've made many friends, i've gotten my routine back, but... What am I to the whole of them..? Is that something I should even care about...?"

There didn't appear to be any particular answer she had for this question in mind, if anything it seemed like she just asked it out to the air.

"Well, maybe my advice isn't worth that much to you, but I think you should try and focus more on yourself, whether that means on the people you care about or just on what you want."

It was very real advice, something that Klein felt would benefit his test subject. It wasn't as if he'd made it where he was in life by thinking about other people. He certainly did have people in his life, he had people he'd invested in. But all of it was because he had made sure to remember who mattered most in his life.

"If you aren't happy, are those people in your life really your friends? If your life isn't satisfying you, isn't making you care about it inherently, then what is it really worth? People who really care about you will never make you wonder that kind of thing."

As he continued to move the sensor up Liltotto's spinal column, Klein's attention stayed on the readouts, that tendril doing much the same as the others and periodically releasing a small anchor, each one carefully attaching to the subject's brain stem and keeping track of any readings. He imagined that this, at least, would only be a moderately unusual mental experience, but as he neared closer to the brain itself...

Well, he wasn't so sure their little chat would be continuing then.

Her gaze waned just a little, hearing that advice. This talk was making her think quite a bit about her position in everything - despite feeling a million miles away, she still felt intact enough to consider things in this lonely encapsulation of thought; she remembered the faces of her friends, her colleagues, everyone she had grown to attach to after one-hundred years of living in the wastes, that land of monsters, where she thought she belonged. She had found meaning, a sense of connection with her loved ones, even her caretaker had turned out to still be alive... That wasn't where she felt displaced, not even like such a feeling was entirely external - she'd always felt that unbearable detachment from everything.

Rather, it was the whole of the Vandenreich itself. Who was she amongst it? Sure, she was dutiful, performed everything to the best of her ability. She had a comfortable apartment, lots of food, all of the necessities a person could need in exchange for work... But who was she to them? The sensation of being a faceless participant in a sea of nothing, she convinced herself it was normal for someone like her to conduct in that way. That was who she was, for hundreds of years - nobody. Just a person going about, keeping their head down, and living in sheer normalcy...

..But why didn't she feel entirely happy with that? A normal life, to be someone unimportant, unseen - that was what she wanted, right? But... Maybe she did just want, a little more than to be a forgettable figure coasting life with seldom mundane joys... More than, a tool, to be picked up, used, and then placed away until needed again...

'Tool?'

...Huh, where did that thought come from?

...That horrible screaming wasn't going to stop, was it? It just made it harder to think.

Well, it didn't seem like she had much else to say. That was fine by Klein's reckoning, really. He liked their talk, but it let him focus more intensely on this work, and now, he was at the most sensitive part of the survey. The sensor he'd been controlling had finally finished its painstaking crawl upward, and it now prepared for its greater purpose. The end of the sensor split into countless much smaller ends, filaments so thin the naked eye could barely have seen them, and simply began to worm their way through the brain itself. Studying the synapses, looking into every section of the mind and, by all measures, ingraining itself so totally that any attempt at removal during these studies would damage the brain itself.

Klein didn't really imagine she would be capable of much cognizant thought during that. Even if he was causing no lasting damage, even the process of reading such minute signals could easily interrupt them at such an intimate level of interaction.

That was probably good, though. If she couldn't really process the world correctly, she couldn't quite process it as the rest of his sensors got to work, the ones that he'd known would be thoroughly unpleasant to even really be fully aware of. Worming behind the eyes, into the stomach and the lungs, everywhere that still needed to be accessed.

"Sorry about all this, but it won't last forever."

Truth be told, Klein wasn't really sure that she would even be able to register what he'd said, or understand its meaning if she did hear it. In a way, he'd prefer if she couldn't.

Lips had parted to speak, but nothing would have had the chance to be expressed as her senses were taken by a quickly encroaching confusion digging it's roots deep into her. She hadn't even the opportunity to think of what she was experiencing before her mind was rendered nothing but splinters of consciousness, something else having pushed it's way in through the gaps of her mind and disrupting the flow of the whole to such an extent there was no 'whole' - at least for the moment.

Her eyes were wide open, a single reaction frozen in time, unblinkingly staring at nothing as there was no observer to perceive the present. A disharmonious cacophony of memory and stimuli was all that remained for the moment. Her body lied still, unreactive at first, as whatever scattered signals frantically tried to meet one another to make sense of this situation.

There was no thought; only that sheer, raw instinct that had been left to the back of her mind. That burn in her mind was free to do what it could, uninhibited by conscious thought - and what it did was scream. Her lips parted, a horrific cry that could curdle blood and shake the uninitiated reverberated with no seeming end in the space, the only moments of reprieve being in that the body was forced to draw in a new breath as the lungs had deflated and naught but low croaking could be heard. That was the only thing her body could do to express the sheer instinct to survive, her jaw flashing open and closed uncontrollably that she was genuinely lucky she hadn't bitten her tongue, eyes darting about wildly as this base yearning for all living things had taken up the emptied space of her mind.

Though those sensors would reach many corners of her with nothing in the way of resistance, there was a single place that held any form of rejection - reaching well into her upper abdomen would have proven a challenge; mere contact with that area would be met with the core of her being dissolving any attempts at direct contact, an untouchable space proven stubborn with it's mystery being investigated.

Most people should have been startled by that response. They should have been ready to pull back on this particular research when something like this happened. Klein, however, simply slammed one of the keys on the console and continued his work, reading the results of his search without any particular concern.

The button in question had practically flooded his subject with more of the suppressant drug he'd designed, utilizing all of the anchors already in place throughout her body. Frankly, he'd created such an eleborate spiderweb of these black tendrils through her body that the dispersal of the drug took profoundly few moments. He wasn't interested in letting her subconscious panic get in the way of his results, and so he would certainly inundate her with this medicine to put a stop to it. His attention was still only on the readings, and after he had ensured that the brain scans were underway, he turned his attention to a different reading he was getting.

Something was all but dissolving his creation here. That wasn't something he'd expected, per se, but he had prepared for the concept of a sensor being damaged in their search. The sensors were pulled back for now, and he tapped on the keyboard a few more times before a larger sensor wormed its way up, coated in countless layered scales in the bone white color of a hollow's mask.

He didn't care how much he had to sacrifice for this particular data. He had utilized countless gillian for this sensor, and even now, he doubted that it would survive long term. That was okay, though. Research demanded that you create a disposable method of surveying, sometimes. The white, snake-like apparatus slid upward, before crawling down the same path that previous sensors had failed. It was designed to be destroyed; but those countless ablative layers of modified masks would at least provide it some precious longer existence than mere hollow flesh. Even if it still turned to dust, Klein needed to find even the briefest piece of data on what would cause that outcome.

That desperate sensation to fight, to struggle against the jaws of captivity, had screamed without pause or recognition - all her body understood was that there was something dangerous happening and she had to get away from it. That was, until, a sensation slowly ate into this instinct, as if being overwhelmed by another force to simply cease. Her screams waned, sweat and tears running down her face from the sudden stress response until she was quiet once more, as if a hand came upon a growing fire and surely smothered it. Her eyes rested, half-lidded and partially rolled into her skull, mouth parted for a yell that would never be born.

Calmed, her breathing played shallow, as that modified tendril went where it's others had failed, that unreadable void nestled within her center; as soon as contact was made, a force indescribable was again seeking to chip away at the intruder - far less like a response to an attack, and far more as if it were this space's very nature to take of anything exposed to it, even if it's external activity were suppressed by the seal placed unto it's host.

A reading would give out far stranger a response than any of her other parts had, lacking in understandable variables one would expect; it was more like a torrent of reishi was present than a true bodily function, a swirling darkness that ate at anything that wasn't itself. Any form of results would have been beyond immediate understanding or expectation... Something between a living being, distinct yet inseparable from the greater of the flesh it was housed within, and a sizable space was present.