The Mask Maker

Just One Thing

Morai opened her eyes and saw nothing. She assumed she had been blindfolded. She tried to move her arms and legs but they couldn't go very far, as they had been strapped down. She grimaced. She could feel something cold running through her forearm, and she realized that she was hooked up to monitors. 

"Morai? You awake?" a familiar voice asked. 

"I don't know, maybe you could tell if I weren't blindfolded," she retorted. Her post-unconscious quips obviously weren't the best. She felt her arms and legs being freed, and she took the blindfold off herself to see Giovanni, his executives, and a couple of nurses standing around her. Morai hardly remembered what had landed her here in the first place. 

She stretched and wiggled her extremities. It felt like they had been locked in place for hours, and they had grown stiff. The trainer began to unhook herself from some of the machines, and when the nurses stepped forward to stop her, she snarled at them and gave them a red-eyed stare that made them stop in their tracks.  She looked at Giovanni with a flat expression, and he shifted his gaze to look everywhere but her eyes. 

"Heart rate's rising again," one of the nurses acknowledged. 

Morai didn't say anything herself before lunging at the man like she had before. It took three out of the four executives to hold her back, and they were still struggling. Giovanni simply stood there with an unperturbed look. Then, as if cued by Morai's outburst, another man walked in. He took one look at the situation and smiled big. 

"It really did work!" he exclaimed with excitement. 

"Not quite the way we hoped this time!" Petrel grunted while struggling to hold Morai back. The doctor didn't seem to view what was happening as a failure.

"Her heart rate's getting dangerously high again," one of the nurses said. 

"Hold her still," he commanded as he pulled out a vial filled with blue liquid from his white coat pocket. He inserted it into a syringe and approached the group, remembering to look above Morai's eyes. She got even more restless as he got closer, but he didn't hesitate before administering the dose of the mystery liquid. 

"You can let her go," he said. As soon as the executives released their hold, Morai quickly turned, grabbed the doctor's coat collar, and slammed him into the wall behind them before putting her hands on his throat. Before she could finish the move, however, her mind cleared just a little, and the adrenaline rushing through her veins seemed to slow. Morai let go and stumbled back to sit on the bed as she adjusted to the changes. 

"It's simple, at least as simple as such an ambitious scientific endeavor can be," the doctor started. "Your amateurs made a miscalculation when trying to recreate my formula."

"...That's it?" Proton asked. "She almost died because someone messed up the numbers?" 

The doctor nodded. "Not unintentionally, however. I know exactly who did it, which is why I'd like Morai to come with me."

Morai sat at the edge of the bed, staring ahead at nothing in particular. 

"So that's what changed in me," she said in almost somber tone. "That's why my memory has been foggier than usual, and why I don't remember being any other person than who I am now. I really am a science experiment." 

"Well, I wouldn't put it that way," the doctor answered. "But...you didn't know this? What did you think happened to you?"

"I don't know," Morai replied. "It wouldn't have been the first time that I just changed out of the blue."

Everyone stood silently for a couple of minutes. Morai seemed bothered by what she had learned, but as the doctor had suggested, she hadn't thought of any other cause for the sudden change in her behavior. She had been so caught up in her new life that she had forgotten to consider her old one—or that she had an old life in the first place. Every second gone past seemed like a dream of some sort, and she tried not to dwell on the past too much anyway. But hidden amidst all the fog was a life she had forgotten. Did she want to remember it?