Supernatural: Book 3: Yin-Yang's Story

Chapter 22 - Tests

(Yang)

    "What was it like to have powers or magic?" I ask Two. Cizen has been doing some examinations with these things attached to my head. He said that they were supposed to measure the focal points of magic, and determine how I could learn to use my powers best.
    "It was pretty cool. Jumping around tall buildings, making sure the city was safe. Being on the news was pretty nice, I liked the attention." She replied.
    "What did they say about you? And me?" I ask. Since she was more comfortable talking to me about what happened before the incident, I wanted to know everything. It was like she was telling me a story that I played a part in, and never realized. In fact, it is kind of like that.
    "They said nice things, but loved to exaggerate every other thing that happened. They did sometimes want to make us seem like a bad person, but they were good. Once, they said..." She trails off.
    "Said what?"
    "I... don't remember. It was pretty funny though." She says, and pauses. She feels the long scar on her face while she still lays on the bed. "I wish that Cizen did better fixing up my face, however he did. I hate how it feels."
    "If you don't like it, then don't touch it, silly!" I joked with her.
    She chucked. "I just have to, like petting a cat."
    "Cat?" I asked. I didn't know what she was talking about.
    She looks at me, while I look at her. She exhales, and stares back up at the ceiling. "A cat is an animal. Like something living like us, but in a different shape. They can't talk, or pick up things, but they can walk, interact, and they care about you. It's hard to explain, let me draw a cat for you." She said, and got up. She walked towards me and picked up another sheet of paper.
    Two proceeds to draw something I don't think I have ever seen before. It's an animal, as she calls it, walking on four legs. It has a tail, as she explained, and two ears on top of it's head. On it's face, it had these lines on it's cheeks called whiskers. "It's not the best drawing ever, but that's mostly what a cat looks like."
    "Did you have a cat?" I ask.
    She slightly jumps, and hesitates answering. "Yes. I did. Her, I meant his name is Dusk."
    "Dusk is a pretty name, why did you name him that?"
    "It's because of his fur, which is hair covering his whole body, which was... uh... Black? Orange? I don't remember."
    That doesn't seem like a thing that you would forget. I wouldn't forget Two's hair color. Maybe she didn't see Dusk that often. I didn't want to ask her any more about Dusk the cat, because she seems stressed. She gets like this from time to time. When she's stressed, she tenses up and her eyes dart across the room. I don't want her to feel stressed, so I let her calm down.
    She starts rubbing her face again where the scar is at. "Two..." I say.
    "I know, I know, I should stop touching it. Cizen said that's the only way to get better. I... wait." She narrows her eyes and looks at me.
    "What?" I asked nervously.
    "Why are your eyes changing color?" She says.
    "Wait, I thought they were supposed to do that?" I asked. Ever since I can remember, her eyes changed color, from all colors of the rainbow. It's usually how I could determine her mood when she was looking at me.
    "You seriously thought that irises change color constantly?" She asks me, and covers her face. "Do mine change too?" She asks as she uncovers her face.
    "Yeah..." I said cautiously. "They're mostly black."
    "Why are yours a yellow-ish green then?"
    "I don't know. Maybe you should ask Cizen."
    She pauses again. "I guess so. I don't want to though."
    "It's not like he will hurt you, you can trust him."
    "Trusting him would be the bane of my existence."
    "Uh... okay." I concluded. I didn't know what she meant, and I didn't want to stress her out any further.
    A couple moments later, Cizen arrived at our room. "One, follow me." He says, and shuts off the lasers. I do as he says, and he leads me to the room across from our room.
    "Complete the quiz." He says, and hands me a sheet of paper, and a pencil. I looked at the questions, they were the same as the one I had the other day. They revolved around working with x and y.
    "Didn't I do these a while ago?" I ask.
    "Yes, and I wasn't satisfied with the results."
    "Can you help me then? Please?"
    Cizen pauses. "Fine, if it's the only way you will learn." He says, stands up, and walks over. "So the first one..."
    He explains the stuff to me, and once I can solve it, he moves on. If I get something wrong, he becomes a little agitated, but calms down. Two says that he is a villian, an evil person, but just because you did bad things, doesn't mean you can do good things too. Maybe Two was exaggerating, slightly.
    Once Two is done with her session with Cizen, she comes back, we both eat, and Two takes her pill. The lights turn off, and we both lay in bed.
    "I talked to Cizen today, about the eye thing." Two tells me.
    "What did he say?"
    "He said that it was another side-effect. He also said that he saw it coming."
    "I guess you have your ex-"
    "But it's always a side effect! My condition! How I feel mentally and physically! My head exploding! Now our damn eye color! What's going to be next, the same freckles?"
    "Two, stop! Not everything happened because of Cizen doing bad things to you! Look on the bright side for once, please. At least he feeds us!" I tried to calm her down. I didn't know what to do, and I didn't want her to turn black again.
    "Feeds us? He only does that so we can survive! If we didn't need to eat, he would probably be glad that he can care less about us. Cizen has only done bad things to us, even this nightmare called my life was created by..."
    She stops, and looks at her hands. "That night, he called both of us his daughters. That means that..." She stops again, and covers her mouth. She starts shaking, and before I can do anything, she glows black again.
    "It's going to be okay, I promise! One day we can get out of here, I know it!" I say. I don't want to lie to her, and I didn't, because I just knew that I had to be right.
    "It's just... just..." She said, I hugged her, and both of us said nothing for the rest of the night. She eventually calmed down, and returned to normal.
    The next day, before lunch, Cizen instructed me to take another laser session. I don't like them, they hurt my head until the next morning. Two haven't had a single laser session after it malfunctioned.
    I climbed up on the chair. "Why does Two never get to do these?"
    "She isn't able to yet, she still needs to heal." Cizen says.
    "I didn't expect her to take this long, she seems fine now." I reply.
    "She is more fragile than you, she will need more time, and I still need to adjust the output for her."
    "Fragile?"
    "It means that she will die easier than you."
    "Oh." I conclude. I didn't want to think about losing her. He straps me in, and I don't say a word. I don't want to.
    Cizen pressed some buttons, and the light on the needle, the laser, turns on slowly. It's difficult to look into it, but Cizen instructs me to do it anyways. He scolded me for blinking too much last time.
    I passed out, as expected. It happens every time I do a laser session. Approximately a few hours later, I woke up. Cizen was sitting on a chair next to me, sipping his coffee.
    "How are you feeling?" He asks.
    "Dizzy, I guess? My head hurts." I reply.
    "Anything else of note?"
    "Not really."
    "Then you should be fine. Get up." He says, I do as he demands, and he leads me to me and Two's room. Two is currently in bed, resting. She sits up once she hears the lasers shut off.
    "Two, follow me." Cizen says. She stretches, and slowly gets up. She tries to be as slow as possible, and Cizen notices. He starts to tap his foot. "Come on, I don't have all day."
    "I know."
    "I don't have time for your shenanigans." Cizen says, and uses his telekinesis to pick her up, as he calls it. He carries Two away, and goes right, towards the machines. Cizen might have listened to me, and she's now going to have another laser session, the first one in weeks. I hope she's going to be alright, unlike last time.
    I don't see her, or Cizen, until it's bedtime. I worried throughout the day. I hoped that I hadn't hurt her, and that I didn't cause laser sessions for her. I did though, I wanted her to be okay, but I didn't want her to get hurt by my actions.
    I was so excited when she had arrived, with not a single bandage on her face. I hugged her when she entered. Cizen fed us once both of them came back. It was later than normal, but I wasn't that hungry until they came back.
    Once the lights were shut off for the night, I told her the same thing again. "I'm so glad that you're alright."
    "I know that already. I'm glad that I am too."
    "I am just so happy that it didn't turn out like last time. I didn't want to wait all of those lonely days just to see you once more."
    "I wouldn't do that to you. Cizen would've, but I understand how you feel."
    "Cizen wouldn't have wanted me to be lonely! He waited for me until I woke up today, and I'm sure that he did that for you too."
    "I dunno, it seems like he would just make sure that we are alive. If he cared for us, he wouldn't have blown my head off."
    "He probably didn't mean to, if he waits for us to make sure if we are alive, then he would want you to survive. He does put us through bad things, but he wants us to live."
    "Or to suffer until we break, and do whatever he asks."
    "Well... we won't break. We can't break by suffering."
    "That's a metaphor."
    "What's a metaphor?"
    "I don't really remember, and I'm tired, maybe we can talk about it tomorrow."
    "Oh come on, please?"
    "Hmm... no, I don't like explaining educational things. I know one thing I can explain to you though."
    "What?"
    "Something that we have been able to do for years, and I just want to see if we can still do it."
    "But what is it? I wanna know!"
    "Both of us can glow in the dark." She explains.
    "Really?" I say. That's something I didn't know about, and it is enticing. "How?"
    "It's really easy if you know how. So all we need to do is hold hands, like this:" She holds her hand so her palm is facing me. "Now you lift your hand like that, and both of our hands have to touch."
    She grabs my right hand with her left hand so it matched what her right hand looked like. Then, I brung them together. Our fingertips and palms only touched, they were not intertwined within one another. She holds up her left hand like she did with her right hand. I did the same thing, and now both of our hands were touching.
    "Is it supposed to happen now?" I ask.
    "No, one last thing. We both are supposed to... I don't know how to explain it but we both have to focus on our hands. Not just look at them, but concentrate on how they feel. You also have to close your eyes while you focus."
"That's a strange description." I comment.
    "It's the best one I got." She replies.
        I start to "focus" on my hands, and close my eyes. Then, I started to feel them tingle. I waited, and waited.
    "Look." She said, and I did. I opened my eyes, and she was right. Both of our arms were glowing, as were our faces, legs, and feet. Our clothing hid the rest of the glowing. The color of the glowing was difficult to see, but it looked like a bunch of rainbow-like colors. It was beautiful.
    "Wow." I said.
    "It's pretty cool. It seems brighter than the last time we had done it. That was months ago though, so I can't tell. We should stop, Cizen might not like it." She says.
    "Why not?"
    "I dunno. Maybe because it's strange. I'm still tired though, goodnight."
    "Goodnight." I said, she tucked herself in the blanket that we had, and I did the same. I wonder if we could do anything else like that, something else that she knows of. She knows so much that I want to know about, but I know it's probably not possible to tell me everything.
    I fell asleep relatively quickly that night. I also had a dream, a strange one. It wasn't scary, it wasn't joyful, but it left me partially confused.
    I heard muffled giggling, and everything was extremely blurry, like squinting your eyes. Then, it became more focused. Things were moving around, and scenery started to take form. There were lines of blue rectangles, and moving blobs that were different colors and sizes.
    I could eventually make out what was around me. Lights were on the ceiling, but most of the light came from the transparent laser-like things. I couldn't see out of them easily. There were other people, holding items. Some had bags on their backs. Some of them were getting stuff from each individual blue rectangle. People were in groups, facing each other, talking to each other. There were multiple halls that I could see, that had more of the blue rectangles, and sometimes led into a room.
    Most importantly, there were two other people in front of me, facing me, laughing. One of them had glasses and brown hair, with it pulled back. The other had orange hair, and was a bit taller than me. I moved around as if I were laughing too.
    The sounds were still muffled though, as if I was underwater. Everything was also moving in slow-motion. I felt distant from where I was at. It felt like I didn't exist there, or I wasn't supposed to. I wasn't able to move, or say anything, I just had to watch. I hear something else, and I turn around, not by my own, but the person who was controlling me.
    It was Two, and she looked a little different. Her eyes looked more gentle, and she seemed younger. She started talking to me, I couldn't understand what she was saying, but she was smiling. Something that I only get to see once in a long while with her now.
    Then, it all fades away into darkness. I hear silence ringing in my ears. I saw something else appear in front of me quickly, but I can't remember what it was.
    I woke up, mostly because Two was up and was attempting to get out of bed, and the lights were turned on. "Sorry." She said.
    "It's okay." I replied.
    Cizen arrived some time later with our first meal of the day. We ate, and after we were done, he came back.
    "One, follow." He said.
    As he said, I followed him, and we went straight ahead into the room next door. I wonder if we are doing a quiz today. I know that I have fixed my mistakes after last time, I just need to show that I can do it.
    "Today, we will be using this to evaluate your memory." He explains, and places a small, cylindrical object on the table. It has four buttons that are red, yellow, green, and blue. The rest of it is black.
    "You press one of the colors to start it." He says, and presses the yellow button, it lights up, and makes a small sound. Then all of the buttons light up, and then they turn off. Finally, the blue one lights up and makes the same small sound. "You have to press the buttons in the order they light up in. If you get it wrong, or you take too long..."
    The thing makes a longer, harsher sound, and blinks on the blue one. It shuts off, and it starts back up again, now lighting up the yellow button. He scoots it over to me. I pressed the yellow button.
It was fun to play, and I got up to six colors. It was very difficult, but it was fun to play. He told me that I would use this memory game instead of tests. I obliged, I had no other option, and this was more fun than doing quizzes.
    Many hours later, it was bedtime. I had another laser session today. Cizen has now asked me multiple times how I feel, which he never asked before. I'm glad that he is more caring about how I feel.
    "You must have seen so many amazing things back in Minneapolis." I said.
    "I did."
"Do you miss anything?"
        "Of course I do. I miss our parents, our cat, our house."
    "Yeah, I know all of that stuff. Anything else?"
    She doesn't respond for a few moments. "Yeah. I miss the dark, clear sky. And the warm sunshine."
    "What do you mean?" I ask.
    "The sky, like the barrier around Earth from space. At nighttime, it gets black outside. Usually clouds cover up the sky, but when they don't, there are many little stars in the sky."
    "Stars?"
    "Ehh... stars are difficult to explain. Usually we see them as little white dots. They cover the sky at night, and they are beautiful to look at. I loved to take pictures of them when we were younger. Too bad that Minneapolis has such a large amount of light pollution. Our sun is a star, though. For around half of the day, it creates daytime, so we can see clearly. Like a big lightbulb. It also warms the Earth."
    "Earth?" I ask. There were a lot of things I wanted to question her about, but I had to ask them slowly. She gets stressed if I ask them all at once.
    "Ummm.... Look, I can't teach you all about space or stars, whatever the name for it is. Maybe I can one day, but..." she yawns, "Not right now. I'm tired."
    "Okay then, goodnight."
    "Goodnight."
    The next day, Two was called to leave our room first. I didn't care too much, and I started to draw the memory game I had played with yesterday. Once they came back, Cizen asked me to follow him.
He usually waits for both of us, but regardless, I did, and today, we went into the room with the lasers. I'm guessing we are doing another laser session today.
    Before I sit down, I see something sitting in the chair. It's Two. Even though she was back in our room, she was here. I started to run towards her, as Cizen was still in front of me. Then the laser activates, but as soon as it starts up, both of them disappear.
    "What are you doing?" Cizen asks, I look at him, and he's narrowing his eyes at me. Should I tell him?"
    "I... am just hurrying up. Getting in... in the chair."
    "Are you now?" He questions me. He is suspicious. I nod my head in response. "Then why do you look so anxious?"
    "I... uh... I don't know."
    "You're a bad liar. You saw Two, didn't you?" His tone changes from calm to upset.
    "Yes." I gave in. How did he know?
    He sighs. "Let's just get this over with, and later I will have to rearrange my schedule."
    I didn't say a word after that. We didn't talk about what I said when I woke up. Two asked why I was quieter than usual when we both went to bed.
    "I saw you, in that chair with the big laser thing."
    "Really? When?" She seemed surprised.
    "Today."
    "Phew. I'm glad that-" She stops, and leans closer to me, and whispers into my ear. "I'm not the only one that's been seeing things."
"Why did you have to say that so quietly?" I asked, lowering my voice level.
    "Cizen probably wants us to see these things. That's what I think the laser tests are for. If he knows he is successful, then he will probably do other things to us. Mine only happen in the morning." She whispers. We go to sleep shortly after that.
    The next day, I don't know what I did. It's all blurry, as I was constantly waking up and falling unconscious. I don't remember why I was hurt, how I was hurt, I just remember the pain.. I just remember Cizen putting me back in our room, Two running over to me, and the conversation.
    "What happened?"
    "H-heal me." I begged.
    "What? How?"
    "I did it... so you can."
    "I... Oh jeez..." She panics. She lifts my head, and I black out.

    When I wake up, I'm in a bed, and Cizen is beside me, sitting down. He explains that I should tell him if I am seeing anything and if either of us are experiencing abnormal. Despite Two and I whispering, Cizen must have heard us.
    Two don't want to talk to me, at least that's what I think. She has been ignoring me all day. I don't know what really happened, and I don't think I should ask.

-

    Two is magic-locked, and could not muster any of her power in any situation I put her in. A couple of days ago, Two had said that she was able to predict. One, as I knew, was capable, but I was unsure about Two. If she is able to predict, that means that she is able to use her powers.
    I seem to be wrong. Putting her under immense stress, she couldn't save One. All she had to do was heal, and she failed miserably. It's nearly amusing. I don't know if I should examine further to see if Two is capable, or if that will be a waste.
    Every day, I seem to grow weaker and weaker. It's becoming more difficult to stand, or do normal activities. I do not want to show weakness to both of the subjects, as Two would attempt to take advantage of it.
    I have also noticed that I have started to... revert... back to normal. As my magic decays, I am losing the ability to sustain the use of my powers. I am shrinking slowly, my hair is becoming shorter, my facial features are starting to change. I have to make sure I use as little of my powers as I can, until both of them are ready.
    I have been more self-conscious of the scar left by my stress. I have started wearing eye-patches to cover it up, as the infection only grows larger. My hair gets in the way most of the time when wearing them, though. Two called me a pirate once, so I don't think that I will wear them any longer.
    Speaking of Two, she had another episode when she was trying to heal One. There was no one to calm her, and it could have done damage, so I had to come and intervene. She started cursing at me when I came over, but I didn't care to listen.
    I don't feel I have much time left though, less than two months. I should have started over. I don't think I will make it.