He would carry Mimi to the bed he had brought in earlier. He had several of these places, but he had designed this one, not Damien. Damon smiled to himself. Other people have a voice of conscience on their heads. He pretty much has the opposite. Bran had explained to Damon that because this was so old, such tendencies existed.
Bran had told him that Damien might have been a whole different creature than him but since he felt and saw Damien's memories he and Damien were connected in some way and Bran had not been sure could that connection could break or if it should even break. If Damon should have Damien in his mind. Balance him out. Good and bad.
Bran told Damon about his own demons. Even he's got a rage so great he could shred entire villages or towns. He's got it under control, just like Damon. But sometimes, these sessions help Damon, according to Bran, because Damon is a vampire. And it's just those vampire instincts and experiences that Damon needs to be able to hurt.
And Mimi is the perfect target because Mimi always heals, can't die, is a challenge. That's not to say Damon didn't regret every single session he'd ever done with Mimi. No, no. Bran did not say that Damien was separate from him. Bran made it sound like Damien was part of him, the part that he had a hard time accepting.
Yes, he did repent, apologize, and helped make Mimi better every time. He just couldn't help himself or stop Damien. But this would be a teaching session. Just like the one where he tried and succeeded in programming Mimi not to kill demons before Mimi blew the programming away. But this would be a lesson that Mimi would know for a while.
Bran had tried to make him accept who he truly was and when he told Bran what Mimi tried to do, to make him suppress Damien, Bran had said, "Mimi is trying to tame you, to suppress part of you is never a good thing, you should lean more on your instincts than what Mimi says, from my perspective, Mimi is the extremely young creature who has no idea about how these things are going."
Damon stopped thinking about the past and focused on what he was doing now. Now Mimi was properly spiked on her legs and arms, and two belts, one on Mimi's hips and the other on her chest, would make sure Mimi didn't get anywhere. He had also stripped his wife naked already. Operating when the clothes were out of the way would be easier.
I woke up, or rather came to, and began to feel my surroundings without opening my eyes or changing anything about myself. Cold, I was naked. The last vestiges of the jelly were still in my head, but my head was clearing by the minute. Distant voices, Damon bustling in the distance because I couldn't smell him very close. I'm in spiked cuffs with some belts still attached. Well, I'm not getting out of this easily. My rage, I can't get it yet; some psychiatric drug must be blocking it.
Damon came next to me and said, in a very clinical voice but not his doctor's voice, this voice I hadn't really heard ever, he sounded just like Sark or krycheck, fully clinical seeing me as subject, nothing more, "Good morning, Baby. You're awake excellent. Let's get started. Now, this is a lesson. How do I feel about you starting a relationship with someone else? You know me. You know how possessive I am. How jealous. But now, baby, after this, you know how far I'm willing to go to teach you that you belong to me, not to others. I hope you learn something. This place is a torture institution. I designed it myself, and I wasn't planning to bring you here, but as you see, here you are. And I hope Charles learns to keep his hands off other people's property, not that he wants anything to do with you after this. I can guarantee you that, baby. "
Passionfruit again. Interesting. Damon brought some kind of device to the bedside. He locked the brakes on it and began adjusting the many stems and levers and checking the tanks on the machine.
"First, I give you my serum. I have made this quite a long time ago in different uses and this paralyzes you fully, but you will be wide awake, but fully unable to move even a finger, this paralysis will deepen day by day, keeping you nice and helpless and now I get to see how, most unique creature react my little concoction. Now, let's get started then."
His voice was calm as he drew an amount of clear liquid into a syringe and pressed it into my heart.
I could feel my body starting to shut down. He explained more after he flicked the syringe in the trash.
"This device, baby, will weaken your bones. That's right, your bones. It drills tiny, thin holes in them and fills them with a bone-soaking enzyme, which goes into your limbs during this treatment. Ribs and sternum, well, think of this as a very sophisticated cheese grater. It's going to slice your bones down to a tenth of a millimeter over and over again. It takes a while before you even feel the damage. This will plane flat bones, ribs, sternum, hip bones, even shoulder blades." he came next to me and lifted me in the air somehow.
"Watch me lift you like this on a rack, like the one I installed under you earlier. So the device can reach your back. The vertebrae in your back get the same treatment as your legs. This treatment lasts three hours and is repeated every day. We'll see how many days it takes before the damage becomes permanent. This causes quite a lot of traumas, so your healing powers will have to work hard. It's quite cool here, so you'll also have to expend your energy to keep your body temperature up. Weakening, baby. Okay, let's start with your vocal cords are down, so..."
Damon's voice was matter-of-fact and explanatory, almost instructive. Not the same kind of ranting that you usually hear in a shed. And this method. He was so clinical, so coldly designed to weaken. Not to destroy as usual, but as if Damon wanted to take away my strength, my fitness, my health, but to do it slowly, methodically.
Damon looked at me coldly, not with a meaty look, but turned on the device. It was an incredibly painful three hours. My bones hurt with enzyme burns and aches, but the planing was the worst. You could feel it. Ribs, shoulder blades, hips. Like my bones were being poured on fire. My blood smelled into the air. I was shaking from the pain. What little his serum allowed my body to function.
I was wet with sweat and shaking for another three hours when Damon came to take the machine away. He looked me over, took some readings from some kind of handheld scanner, and jotted them down on his clipboard. After a moment, he pushed the next device.
He continued to his explanations, clinically, "Next, the muscles. This injects a substance that soaks the myosin into your muscles, which is one of the building blocks of muscle. Without myosin, there is no muscle. Once again, how long can you repair before your muscles start to become a soft mass? This applies to all muscles but not internal organs. Mostly skeletal muscles, but all over the place. This takes four hours and is also repeated every day."
And he turned the machine on. He sat and watched from time to time and went off to do something he remembered. He scanned me and jotted down his notes. Tens of thousands of needles pierced my muscles again and again, always injecting something almost like acid. What burned and hurt made me sweat again and shake with pain. Four hours. I could feel my muscles beginning to recover and repair, but I had felt all the time how fast the substance was taking my muscles. One day, I wouldn't get better.
But now I tried to conserve my strength and see what Damon would do next. He brought another new machine.
"This device, Mimi. This will now treat your organs—every organ. "
Damon came and twisted my jaw apart and inserted a flat plastic tube into my mouth. Serum kept me now fully paralyzed so there was no resistance as he put me ready for the next machine. He put the clip up my nose so that I had to breathe through the tube. Then he made sure I didn't spit the tube out of my mouth by putting on me a little bit of the same kind of protection they put on intubated patients in the hospital, except this one was latex.
The tube came through the hole, and the latex surrounded the tube tightly. Damon attached the latex shield to the back of my neck tightly. It was like having a latex tube pulled over my face with a little hole for the tube so that the tube just fit through, and the whole thing glued the tube to my mouth so that I couldn't get air from anywhere but the tube. Damon brought a big container closer and took a hose from it. He put a piece on the end of the hose that allowed him to attach the hose to the tube that was in my mouth. Now, I had to breathe what was in that tank. Except I wasn't breathing.
Damon looked at me for a moment and said, "You'll be breathing soon, baby. This device will now take care of your organs. So this is going to cut a little bit out of your organs now and then. A little bit at a time, this will cut your organs. It's about one part per thousand that it will cut once a second. Well, a thousand seconds, no more organ. Again, you are consuming your healing ability, strength, and fitness. A good fifteen minutes and the organ is cut out. This machine can stay with you for 5 hours. That's a lot of organs for you to grow. Four organs an hour, 5 hours."
He was creepy, scary even.
"Twenty organs, you know how exhausting it is when the amplification enzyme comes on. Don't worry. I've stopped it. After this, there are still new toys. You will learn, Mimi, and learn well, but first. This is a muscle stimulant. It makes the muscle contract. I'm going to inject this into your diaphragm so you'll start breathing; you'll also get a bit of this into your rib cage, so your breathing will be adequate. See, I'm not going to let that machine chop up your lungs. No, you'll breathe whatever it is in these tanks, and believe me, there are plenty of tanks."
He took more measurements and spoke like damn evil scientist.
"My serum seems to keep you in rather stable condition, but we will see in time what it will do to you. I can tell you that it killed everyone that I ever tested it on, but since you can't die and your system is unique, you baby, might be the answer that I have been looking for, you see, I don't like when some of my inventions don't work, I will try to improve it, and I have now my chance."
Then Damon took one syringe and injected them into my ribs first, and I felt my ribs start to move, and whatever was in the tank started to invade my lungs. There was a valve in the tube that I could breathe out through, but the more stimulant Damon injected, the deeper and harder I breathed.
He looked at my breathing for a while, grunted, and said, "Well, that's good. Those tanks have dust, debris, medical waste, everything you can find on a hospital floor now, even some exhaust. You have quite sensitive lungs, as you know, baby. It's not so good for the lungs, but now it's your organ's turn."
Damon turned on the next machine, and I felt every organ in my body being mutilated over and over again. I couldn't help it. My lungs were burning and coughing, and the lights in my eyes were flickering. After five hours, I couldn't even shake anymore. Damon removed the device and the vinyl cover and removed the tube from my mouth. I was fully immobile, nothing in me moved at all, but I felt everything, the pain, the helplessness, the agony, the exhaustion, too.
I coughed weakly. I felt like my whole chest was on fire. The stimulant started to wear off, and my breathing was no longer so painfully forced. Damon lowered me to the bed, so the rack was under me.
He took again my vitals, or whatever, wrote these down, and then explained to me some more, "Next treatment, baby. Now, I get to experience some new surgical bots. These I'll put inside you. Fifteen of them, and I've programmed every lymph node to be destroyed and the lymphatic vessels as well. Now we're gonna put a little bit of your immune system down.
Oh, baby, I know it would be so easy to get it down with metals, but this is a lesson. This will last another five hours, and then it's on to the nervous system. And then, finally, the blood and we'll start again from the beginning for as long as you can take it. And when you're done, I promise to deliver you to Charles. He'll get you fixed up this time. And oh boy. There's a lot of fixing up to be done in you. But now the lymph nodes are out. "
Damon opened my stomach with a single incision up to my abdominal cavity and dropped 15 metal balls into it. Then he activated them, and I felt the balls go off in different directions. Again, I didn't move, not at all, I could feel myself sweating, my system was being torn apart, and I was kept in a helpless state, in agony, and all for just one friend, I had a little hidey hole in my mind and I decided there and then that this would give me right to keep long ice age to this damn bastard and there would be nothing he could say to me.
Arrows of pain struck every part of my body as surgical robots mercilessly destroyed my lymph nodes and vessels repeatedly. Finally, the balls stopped somewhere inside me. burning anguish did not stop there. I felt pain a long time after the balls had stopped.
And again, he came by, took his reading and scans, and then explained, like I was just an object called a baby. There was no emotion in his voice. "Baby, those balls are resting now before it's their time again. Now, the nervous system. This device will stimulate and overstimulate your nerves from the central nervous system or spinal cord. All these little needles know how to find a nerve and irritate it, slowly destroy it, but very slowly, and especially these know how to watch out for pain nerves well, the motor nerves are their delicacy, and since my serum keeps those motor nerves paralyzed, this device knows its target, you see my serum attaches on your motor nerves making them excellent target. So, baby, I'm not taking away your sense of pain, just your ability to move, but again slowly. You're still going to heal for a while. Well, let's get started. And my machines keep your tissues alive as long as possible. "
The pain that resulted was mind-blowing. I had no voice, but that didn't stop me from trying to scream. 6 hours of pure pain. I was paralyzed but I felt everything and I screamed in my mind, I sweated, I tried to shake but no, serum kept me unable to at all. The devil kept me on the machine for 6 hours. Then, thankfully, it stopped.
Damon now brought something that resembled dialysis or a heart-lung machine.
His voice was as cold as ever as he connected a few cannulas to me and them into the machine. "Then it's your blood turn. This machine separates platelets from your blood, then white cells, nutrients, red cells, and water. It has its own cycle. You'll always have time to replace at least some of what it takes. I'll give you something. Boosters. To make white blood cells, platelets, and red blood cells. I'm using up your resources again. You can't make infinite cells either, but I don't want this to end prematurely. No, no, you must endure."
Damon gave several injections directly into my vein before attaching tubes and cannulas to my carotid artery and jugular vein and turning on the machine. This didn't hurt; this just made me tired, out of breath, and had an arrhythmia almost on top of me. Six hours on this one, too. Damon collected the full bags. And he packed them carefully in a bag. He took again my vitals, and scanned me, as the cold scientist that he was.