The Lesson ended shortly after the light phenomenon that surrounded Fen, but not before Raisen sat him down to ask about everything he experienced. The old Knight couldn't bother to have Edmond with them anymore, so he sent him away. He quickly cleared a space in the Training Hall and set up all the equipment he needed to record him.
Raisen pulled out even more cameras from his secret pockets (magic), and even a damn floodlight. Thankfully, the light created by the floodlight wasn't actually flooding, and was dim enough to not cause him discomfort.
Raisen then sealed the room again, turning the window/walls into the familiar black stone filled with veins of energy, and transformed the door into stone too. For some reason, Fen had the feeling that he sealed off the room so he couldn't escape.
After giving an initial description of trying to manipulate the energy within the training ball, Fen began to talk about the heat and all the observations he made.
"I couldn't understand jack-shit from the inscriptions and I couldn't sense any energy, but I could feel heat coming from inside. I didn't think that was strange until you asked about it, but I didn't even study it that long," Fen said, scratching his head as he explained what he experienced.
"I didn't get very far with my study though." He had a bitter smile on his face.
Ever since he felt the Vitality within him circulating, he suddenly became much more energetic and lively, and his mind felt sharper. His thoughts felt cleaner than ever before.
It was as if the whole world glowed with more color than he previously thought possible, showing him the true beauty of being alive.
"I could only feel what was on the surface, so I didn't learn much. After I got the candle you gave me, I was able to tell apart the differences between the two. For one, the energy, or 'heat', inside of the training ball wasn't actually warm."
Fen described the feeling he got from the energy, and the weird sense of familiarity he felt with it. Raisen hung onto his every word and was enamored at his description of the relationship he had with the energy.
When Fen described the comfortable feeling he felt resonating from the Vitality inside the training ball, the old man madly took notes that he promised to share at the end of the retelling.
The relationship between them had changed in a very subtle way. Although Fen still thought of him as a crazy old man, he finally understood that he needed him.
After the change his body experienced, he needed someone knowledgeable with Vitality to help him understand the changes and what he would experience in the future. Because there wasn't another Vitul besides him in the entire facility, Raisen was the next best thing he had to a real teacher, even if he wasn't a particularly sane one. But given the circumstance, he didn't really have the option of choosing a teacher.
For his part, Raisen was a decent person to tell about his experiences.
Fen would tell Raisen everything abnormal he experienced while working with Vitality, and in return, he would then break down that information into terms that he could understand and then utilize for his survival.
"Eventually, I just got frustrated at the lack of any progress I was making-"
Raisen cut him off with narrowed eyes filled with scorn at the ungrateful candidate who didn't appreciate how valuable his breakthrough was, saying, "You know, I didn't make any progress with my training ball for half a year."
"I had to work my ass off to even sense anything inside of it. For a while, I thought my teacher was playing a trick on me and was just letting me mess with a metal ball."
"Well, maybe I'm just more talented?" Fen tentatively asked.
Raisen snorted, "It's more likely that I'm just a much better teacher."
"Bullshit. You're the worst instructor I've ever seen." Fen said honestly. Even if he was a decent partner, his teaching abilities were so terrible that he wouldn't even rate him a single star out of ten. Maybe a tenth of a star, if he was in a good mood.
Raisen almost looked hurt at Fen's comment, and his irritation increased when he saw that the youth was telling the truth. Thankfully, he was born with a lack of shame and took the insult in stride.
"Ahem, anyway, so what happened then?"
"I just... got angry. The stress that built up over the past few days just erupted and I stopped taking no for an answer. I pushed my hands on the ball and there was this strange and electrifying feeling; it felt amazing, but then my entire body exploded in pain. It was so bad that I couldn't even move like I was frozen inside my own body... But then it stopped, and I could feel the same energy from inside the ball inside me, but I could control it inside me."
Fen pulled his arm up from his side and directed the energy flowing inside towards it, painting the limb in a faint green light as the energy collected within. The glow wasn't as vibrant as his 'transformation', but it was still enough to reveal the veins and muscles inside his arm. His skin looked nearly transparent with the glow of energy.
"And there's more, I think." Now was the time for Fen to answer some of his questions. He gestured towards Raisen, wanting him to give him his arm, which he obliged to.
When his hand was only two inches away, he felt the same energy inside Raisen as inside him, and within the training ball. He recognized the feeling of Vitality but the amount inside the old man was much denser. The amount Fen could sense increased dramatically as his hand got closer and closer, to the point that he had to force his hand forward as the strain on his mind increased from sensing the dizzying amount of Vitality inside him.
At the same time, something in his mind clicked, and desire grew in his chest, demanding a small amount of energy resting inside him.
His original intent of testing if he could manipulate the Vitality within others transformed; now his goal expanded to taking some of Raisen's energy for himself. His hand shot forward and his fingers clasped around the old man's wrist with a terrifying amount of strength as all of Fen's Vitality enhanced his body's power.
The energy inside Raisen's limb was blinding to his senses, and only increased his desire for taking some of it.
"He won't mind if I just take a small part of it, right?" Fen mumbled under his breath as his pupils dilated from the primal urge that began to bloom inside his mind.
Underneath his tightening grip, the surging Vitality under Raisen's control slowly accumulated near Fen's hand, the limb twitching as its energy left its control to serve under Fen's will. Slowly, the energy passed from the old man into Fen, rapidly flowing through his body to be integrated and efficiently utilized.
The energy passed from his hand into Fen at a painfully slow rate, and no matter how hard he pressed his will to dominate the energy the speech didn't change. Despite all his efforts and desires, it had only been a short while since he even began to sense the Vitality in his surroundings, so naturally, his ability to manipulate this energy would be subpar at best.
Over time his body started to take on a green glow as the energy he assimilated from Raisen's body accumulated inside him. His body entered a state very similar to digestion in an attempt to dilute the massively dense Vitality he had taken from Raisen because the denser energy couldn't be used by his body yet; if his body was akin to a toaster, then the energy he assimilated from Raisen was nuclear. He needed time before his body could break his energy down to the point where he could use it.
The time in which Fen was sucking the energy out of Raisen was short and only lasted a few seconds, but to his senses, it lasted much longer from the amount of ecstasy he was in.
The experience was so pleasurable that all his caution was thrown out the window and he focused completely on ripping more energy out from Raisen's body, leaving him completely vulnerable to the old man's plan.
"Ah, looks like you're about full. Enough eating time." Just like that, the ripe energy inside the old man that seemed to barely be under Fen's control easily shattered the weak willpower controlling it and started circulating back around his body.
The connection between their energy also severed, and what he took from him remained in his body to be 'digested' and assimilated.
"You have become my pet. Now, you can live only by feeding off my energy." A nasty grin appeared on the old man's face, which became wider as he watched Fen's expression grow paler.
"You have become my Vitality thrall!" Raisen laughed like a maniac, and Fen collapsed onto the floor. The energy that he took from Raisen now felt corrupted and tainted inside him. How could he have been so careless? Thinking that there wouldn't be any consequences for taking the energy from within somebody like Raisen...
'I let myself be controlled by my emotions... Dammit! All that time planning, thinking, and struggling to find a way out of here, destroyed instantly by that one moment of carelessness. How could I have been so reckless?' Fen internally screamed at himself, disgusted at his actions and the potential consequences they had.
He got so desperate that he tried to remove Raisen's Vitality from within him, and force it outside in the air to dissipate but it was as if his cells had integrated with it already. Every pull, twist, and nudge directed at the energy caused a painful twinge in his own body until it was impossible for him to successfully differentiate the energy from his own.
Raisen smirked while he watched the turmoiling emotions in his eyes before he coughed and said, "Eh? Why are you so down? I was joking, you know. No such thing as Vitality thralls, that's the dumbest thing I've ever had the pleasure of thinking of."
Fen slammed his arms onto the ground and didn't hear Raisen's words, he was still completely engrossed at removing his energy from inside him. It was only when he repeated his words that he actually heard him, and froze in place.
"So... that was a joke?" Disbelief widened Fen's eyes, and he was emotionally stunned. What the hell was he supposed to feel? Anger? Relief? Hell-bent on conquering the world? All of the above?!
...Fen blamed his strange emotions on his current state of mind. He was slightly loopy right now, a condition that might as well be chronic; he never spent a day in the Program where he wasn't stunned beyond all belief.
That wasn't his fault though, Fen assigned the VPF with all the blame, and if he could, he would sue them for emotional damages. Preferably, after he burned the Program from the ground up.
'And with the money I gain from suing, maybe I could even hire some therapists for the crazies inside this place like Raise. Hmm,' Fen's eyes lost their focus as he actually thought about the idea. Maybe he really was tired, but for some reason, it didn't sound like too bad of an idea.
"Yep, that was a joke. As if it's that easy for anybody to enslave somebody else... Ahem, well, a vampire can actually do that kinda stuff, but lucky for you, I'm no bloodsucker." Raisen frowned at the lost opportunity. If he was a vampire he'd be able to whatever he wanted with Fen as a thrall. How enticing... He could study him all he wanted without fear of losing his best test subject.
"Crazy bastard." Fen spat out.
Raisen tactically ignored Fen's stress-induced insult.
"I gave you some of my Vitality, tell me what you felt. Was it instinctive? Addictive? Repulsive? Describe everything, and the more detail the better." He went back into his instructor role like changing clothes, and after turning around and making sure that all the equipment was properly recording, he beckoned Fen to continue.
Seeing the weird expression on Fen's face, Raisen continued speaking.
"What, you take my lifeblood and then think of it as nothing? The audacity." Raisen started rambling, trying to get the young candidate to start speaking. "That was my first time too, y'know, and you just took my energy like a beast."
Fen shivered at the innocent look on Raisen's old face before he started explaining. Thankfully, the old man dropped the act after he began talking.
"It was instinctive. When I was close to your hand my body reacted to the Vitality running through your body, as if I needed it. And when I grabbed your wrist I didn't even realize what I was doing; I was just a passenger, watching my body move on its own." He massaged his chest where the strange feeling of joy had yet to go away.
"At the same time, something was enjoying it- I felt joy but it wasn't mine."
"After I finished... absorbing," He was reluctant to use the term 'feeding', "I could feel the energy inside me. I still can, but it's much fainter than before. I think... I feel like I'm trying to split apart the Vitality. In that process though, I keep seeing, or- or feeling flashes of something."
Fen tried to find words to express what he was experiencing but failed to properly convey his intent. The flashes of perception were extremely strange, but as soon as he forgot them, they became familiar, as if the process of losing those feelings made them a part of him.
Snow. That was one of the things Fen could differentiate from the blurry images. And although extremely faint and blurry, he could make out a large dog in that snow. The pet sometimes appeared as small, or freakishly large. If you ignored the animal's monstrous size, it could almost be called cute.
Fen hesitated at whether or not he should tell Raisen about what he felt. After a brief moment of hesitation, he decided to open up. The old man would be able to confirm his theories, or perhaps label him as a crazy person. Hell, he might even get a welcome party at the Foundation with all the other crazies...
"Hey- did you have a black dog? A really big one?"
Raisen's eyes shot open and his pupils contracted as he stared at him. The most apparent emotion on his face was confusion, for obvious reasons. But that flicker of emotion proved Fen's theory.
"How do you know about Blackie?" Raisen stumbled before he could formulate his question, "Did you... see him?"
The question in the old man's eyes served as the definitive proof of Fen's theory, which gave him some relief for many reasons. Among others, the most significant of those reasons was that he was proven to not be crazy. Which was a relief.
'Wait, should I feel relieved? In general, Raisen and Archon Ellora seemed to be much happier than he was. Maybe being crazy was the secret to being happy?'
He shook his head to clear his mind. 'Okay, enough conspiracy theories. I didn't pay them attention when I was home, and I'm definitely not going to start now. Otherwise, I might really go crazy...'