Fate opened his eyes to a familiar white room.
It held only a bed with pure white cloth, which he was currently resting on, and a single door of white metal, which he knew was locked. In the corner of the room was a ceiling-mounted camera, watching his every move. His worst fears had been realized.
The Advanced had him in their grasp once more.
He instinctively felt for his Sword Ring, feeling empty inside when it wasn't there. His Ex-Ear and mask were likewise missing, and he had been changed from his typical clothes to a white jumpsuit with the Advanced's symbol plastered above his left breast. He was tempted to tear the clothes off and rip them to shreds, but going around in the nude would only serve to enrage him even more.
He walked to the door and turned intangible, pressing his hand up against the metal. It didn't go through, meeting the firm resistance of the door. He tried again on the walls, only to meet the same result. He sighed, stopping his Manifest Power as he sat on the bed. The only thing he could do was wait.
And wait…
And wait…
Having had nothing better to do than count every excruciating second, he knew that the door opened 42,351 seconds after he started counting, a little under twelve hours. Norman walked in, flanked by two guards in bulky white armor that made them appear androgynous. The guards waved electrified, collapsible metal batons at him as Norman commanded him to stand.
"You think some zappy rods are going to scare me? You and your kind have done much worse to me. I doubt I'll even feel it."
"We'll see about that." Norman gestured to one of the guards, who whipped the baton at Fate's head. Fate caught the guard's wrist and twisted, catching the baton in his hand and jabbing it into their neck. The guard convulsed as the electricity coursed through their body, Fate joining not long later as the other guard jabbed him in the small of his back.
Fate refused to turn intangible, as that would cause him to lose his hold on the guard before him. The two of them stood there, locked in a twisted, agonizing dance for three minutes, until Fate finally lost control and collapsed on the ground, his hands snapping open as he dropped the weapon.
His victim fell next to him, and before his world went dark, he noticed the glassy, thousand-yard stare of a dead man peaking through the helmet's reflective surface.
He grinned.
"Put him on the table," Norman ordered.
The dead one having been replaced with a quick call, the two guards hoisted Fate's unconscious body up onto the vertical metal slab, strapping him in so his arms were bolted to his sides. As soon as the straps were secure, the slab hummed as translucent energy rushed out, forming a bubble around him. The guards stepped back before the bubble formed, taking their positions to either side of Norman.
Cait, who was strapped into the left of Fate with similar restraints, was the first to wake up. She opened her eyes groggily, eyes widening as they darted around the room and her situation sunk in. She focused her gaze on Norman, simmering with rage as she attempted to convey every ounce of her sheer disdain for the man in a single stare.
She didn't try to fight her restraints; experience told her that any effort to do so would not only fail but would also trigger the system within to pump her full of hundreds of volts of electricity.
The 'cage' she found herself in was quite ingenious. It was capable of suppressing her Divine Reach not with some special metal that eroded Divine Energy – which was the stuff of fairy tales, according to the PPK – but with science. The gravity a fraction of an inch above her skin was multiplied twelve thousand times over, contained in the invisible bubble that extended for ten feet in every direction.
Anything she tried to lift, even a pen, would weigh twelve thousand times more, turning said pen into a behemoth that weighed over twelve hundred pounds. That still left quite a few smaller objects well within her range, even back during her first years in the Advanced, which is where the other function came in. Divine Energy was similar to air.
Both were invisible forces that could touch and otherwise influence the things around them. While Divine Energy had much more to it than that, its basic physics were similar.
While an ordinary wind had no ability whatsoever to suck away an Embodiment's Divine Energy, a divine wind such as one produced by an Air Embodiment could. Another option, the one the Advanced took, was to create a strong vacuum that wrested control of one's Divine Energy and siphoned it off into a harmless ball of force behind the table.
Such petty tricks would have no chance of working on a Realized, and only the weakest Incarnations would have such feeble control over their Divine Energy, but for anyone at or below the Personification Level, they were effectively rendered powerless.
This, of course, took into account the access to enchantments and wildly better technology this branch of the Advanced had access to, seeing as they weren't confined to a galaxy of mortals and Prodigies. In Cait's time, they had technology only barely capable of containing her as a Prodigy, something she was praised and punished for in equal measure.
The vacuum was constantly active, pulling Cait's hair behind her head and whipping it about wildly as the Divine Energy she subconsciously fed into her aura was stolen from her. This in turn caused her Manifestation to dump more and more energy into her aura to maintain it, until she produced only a spoonful every second, just for it to be snatched away in the next.
Like this, she had no fuel left to lift things or use her Manifest Power, and even if she did, breaking the reinforced shackles around her wrists would take more force than she could produce in the increased gravity. She had no clue how far the wind vacuum extended, although presumably it only needed to be a few inches thick to work, as it would shrink her aura regardless of how large it was. The wind was so loud she could barely hear herself think.
Luckily, she had an earpiece lodged in her ear canal, which blipped as Norman tapped the side of his head. "Comfortable?" he asked, that phony smile seeming to mock her as his gaze wantonly roamed her body.