Chapter 9 Part 1 Galatea

                                    

                                          
I wake up locked onto a table, locked in a pitch black box, which thrums and pulses around me. I do not even remember falling unconscious. 
                          
I try to disintegrate my bonds, but they do not seem to be matter. I hurl my will, strength, and desperation against the black box and I cannot move, fracture, deform, or transmute. Splitting pain dances through all of my nerves. My intent narrows to one goal: escape.
                          
Thunderous thrumming invades the air around me. I try to flee into interstitial space. 
                          
I disintegrate, or rather, my body disintegrates and I am trapped in the medusan sphere and the mask, which is now just a metal skeleton laying on the table. 
                          
Oh, and there is screaming, lots of screaming. 
                          
"I am sorry." Khorus says, voice faint through the material. "But I really cannot leave you in possession of those devices. That iteration of Medusa technology is the reason we almost lost. We lost the advantage recursion gave us, and I do not know how they did it. We must be vigilant for the safety of the sphere you understand." 
                          
"Take your time Orai." Khorus continues. "I want every bit of telemetry you can gather." 
                          
There is no response to his useless scene chewing. Just hearing his voice makes me makes me insane with anger. I bet she isn't even out there.
                          
The Medusa mask fractures and disintegrates and what is left of my consciousness retreats to the sphere. I try to run, a blind unthinking animal instinct, and I move, getting a hand outside of the barrier only to be strung back by the sphere itself. The reaction snaps me back to myself. I can still think outside of the sphere. 
                          
Okay, I think. "Think, think, think! don't just react. Observe. How far from the sphere can I get. How long can I survive outside of it. I'm probably going to die either way. 
                          
Instead of flinging myself out, I will it, projecting my consciousnes out like I am trying to view something clairvoyantly, except I want to move my entire awareness elsewhere, not just my visual perspective. 
                          
I feel the disconnect as it occurs. I have a moment of absolute terror and I ignore it and through the material and into a laboratory. Orai stands at a panel, clad in most of a suit of powered armor like the soldiers I met in the bowels under Mutant Town wore. Her head is uncovered and she wears no gloves. Cables snaked into socket at the back of her neck and behind her ears, while her twenty digits blurred over the keyboard. Her face is drawn, she almost looks haggard, and she is doing something awful to me a the bidding of a now absent Khorus.
                          
"Orai!" I send desperately. "Are you alright?"
                          
A shiver runs through her body and she looks in my direction, squinting, hands still moving. "Astral Projection, well hot damn. No wonder your readings stabilized. I should have thought of that. I will make a note. Tell me, how does this feel?" 
                          
I suddenly feel like I'm being fed super-cooled liquid expresso, and I tell her so. Orai nods, her fingers continuing to dance along the keyboard. "Alright, just stay right there. Don't go back into the black box."
                          
The sensation intensifies, becomming painful. "It is starting to hurt." I say. 
                          
"Imagine if you were still in there." She says. 
                          
"I am still connected to something in there." I say. "I don't want to go back to it." 
                          
"That's the remnant of the Medusa mask and the brainbox." She says. "Give it a moment."
                          
The line to my body snaps. My mind clears and I can sense copious ambient "magic" in the air. I seize on the threads of magic and immediately begin making a new body. This would have been very dire if it happened on Kaiju World or somewhere else where basic sorcery did not function. Necromancy required a body to use, either mine or someone else's.