Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

Another Inconvenience

"-90. Oh, look that appears to be the limit, better warm you up if you want to keep your fingers and toes."

He didn't feel the cold recede. At least not for the first few minutes as the Rundi slowly began to heat the room back up. He did start to notice when his hands and feet began to throb with an incredible and unbearable pain in his hands, feet, and ears, as the blood vessels began to expand again. He gritted his teeth and screamed as his legs and hands throbbed lying on the floor.

His shivering continued only making the pain worse.

This went on for some minutes until he finally detected the change in heat. He was no longer in pain, but his body hurt.

His agony slowly began to fade as he thawed, and the heat began to climb.

"What is the highest heat you can manage I wonder."

Despite knowing what was coming next, the cold part of him wondered if this would be such a bad thing. It took him quite a while until he actually started feeling like it was warm, and even longer for him to begin sweating.

"Ah, there it is, the famous human reaction to heat. The evolutionary adaptation that allowed you to ascend to the top of the food chain, and the reason you can outrun a Rundi. I find the human ability to sweat rather fascinating. What an ingenious way to survive, cooling yourself off through biomechanical evaporation. Oh, it just does make my insides tingle to think of it. How incredible it must be. Did you know that most creatures are forced to stop in order to cool themselves? The fact that you can do it as you are moving is really quite a feat any creature should be jealous of?"

He didn't want to listen to this creature's lecture, but there wasn't much else to do as he felt the heat continue to rise.

The sweat continued, a sort of dampness at first, followed by actual beads of perspiration on his skin, like little diamonds coating his body. Soon those diamonds were broken and began trailing their way down his face and onto the floor where they joined into a small, but ever growing puddle.

He opened his mouth sticking his tongue out like a dog as he began to pant.

"100 degrees already, isn't this exciting."

He didn't have a response this time, and instead lay there just wishing for it all to be over. The heat pressed down on him like the foot of a giant come to crush the life out of him. He felt as if he was about to melt into the ground, and the amount of water he was losing was unbelievable as his body desperately tried to combat the sudden rise in temperature. All of this could not have been good for his body, but the madman was hell bent on figuring it out.

"120 130 140, 150!"

It wasn't a giant crushing him, it was an entire mountain. Every breath he took felt like the inside of his lungs were getting cooked. His face felt as if it was going to crack off and fall to the floor. Even his eyes felt as if they were going to try out. His mouth was open as he stared up at the ceiling waiting for the end.

And as suddenly as it had come, it began to recede again.

"170 seems to be your preferred temperature is it not?'

His head throbbed, and he placed a hand to it as he slowly crawled to his hands and feet."

"Please, no more."

"Oh, don't be such a spiled sport." The Rundi said with no indetectable amount of glee. We have to see this through to the end. And we aren't even halfway through our tests.

Adam groaned.

And he was right to do so as over the next hours, or days, or whatever time frame it might have been, he was subjected to every conceivable discomfort possible.