Six eyes, three strangers. Emika felt incredibly disoriented, but luckily, she was already sitting, so she couldn’t fall over. The surroundings were bright compared to the night forest she just came from, so she needed a moment to adjust. But those eyes in the room, they were burning their gaze into her, unrelentingly, impossible to ignore.

Six light green eyes, almost beaming. Dark sclera, which made them seem inhuman. One of the gazes was afraid. Another was condescending. And the third was empty.

Emika scrunched her eyes shut, using her flesh hand to rub them, as if clearing out sleepy dust after a long nap. When she looked around her surroundings again, the gazes persisted.

She was in a brightly lit, mostly white, windowless room. It wasn’t a big one. The walls were tiled in marble, all furniture was white, too. Two bunk beds on her left side, a desk with a few chairs in front of her, white cupboards and a wardrobe next to it. Emika realised she was sitting on the tiled floor in a shadow of soot, squarely within a complex magical circle. At least, she assumed it was a magical one. It must have been how she was summoned.

To her back was the wall, and to her right was a large plane of glass. Behind that glass was a white corridor with more similar rooms, all of which were neatly filled with white furniture and featured a glass plane through which one could gaze inside.

It very much looked like how one would imagine a dystopian psychiatric hospital. An arrangement of cold rooms with no way to hide anything from the cameras gazing into them from the ceiling of the corridor.

And of course, Emika wasn’t the only person inhabiting her room.

The condescending gaze originated from a person sitting sideways on a chair in front of the desk. He had his body turned towards Emika, ankle of one leg placed onto the knee of the other, arms folded with a small sheet of paper in his hand poking upwards, so he could see it. He wore a black chequered suit, and a red tie over a white dress shirt. He didn’t look like a doctor or a lawyer; he looked like a person that had eloped from a casino. Black hair, messily combed back, frameless rectangular glasses sitting on his pale face. He seemed a few years older than Emika, but not by much.

It took her a second to realise that the look he was giving her wasn’t really condescension at all. It was a little bit of disgust, a little bit of fear. A frown, with a corner of his thin lips pulled down, as if looking at a vile and dangerous insect. Or maybe a scorpion. And that scorpion seemed to be Emika.

Her eyes flickered over to the next pair of emeralds glowering at her, edged into the face of a girl who was, in every sense of the word, terrified. She was lying up on the top of one of the bunk beds, wrapped in several blankets, only parts of her head visible, pressed against the mattress behind an opening in her fabric cocoon.

She seemed younger than Emika She seemed of Mediterranean descent; strands of brown, curly hair fell down her cheeks of an olive skin tone.

Lastly, Emika’s eyes darted back to the other side of the room. The empty gaze. Young, androgynous face and stature, the person sat on the tiled floor right next to the glass plane, legs pulled up against their chest, head resting tilted on the knees. Again, Emika had to reconsider — the gaze wasn’t as much empty as it was gloomy. Yet, it held her in its interest, unblinking.

While these seconds of disorientation passed by and as Emika slowly gained a grip on where she’d been transported to, none of these people said a word. They stared at her, almost frozen, as if awaiting something — anything — to happen.

But nothing did happen. Emika just sat there, pressing her back against the wall, pulling in her curse as much as possible to make sure she’d not touch anyone in this small room. Her breathing was strong for a while, until she consciously tried to calm down with a few, deep breaths.

Emika just jumped between gazes. She wasn’t one to talk first; especially not to strangers, not if she could help it, and somehow, the way these people looked at her made it impossible to get a word out, even if she wanted to. Eventually, she saw the fearful look on the girl relent slowly, as her terror turned to confusion. The person gently moved to unwrap herself just a little. Using her arm to push herself up the tiniest amount, she eventually gulped.

“Didn’t work, then?” she asked with a soft, squeaky voice. “Safe?”

The man sitting in front of Emika finally broke his pose, putting his leg down on the floor, and shrugged, turning his head up towards the girl. “Can’t say. Might just take a while. Or they are banking on her to get aggressive.” He looked back at Emika. “You going to hurt us?”

“Hey!” the girl snapped in annoyance at his question, finally wiggled from her blanket cocoon, wrapped what she shed off all up in a ball, and threw it. For a second, Emika thought she’d throw it at him, but actually, the blanket landed on her own face and torso. She yelped, but only took a second to understand the gesture, and then used the blanket to wrap herself in it to hide the parts of her skin that had been exposed due to most of her clothes having burned away.

“She’s clearly confused! And unhappy! Be nice!” the girl kept yelling at the man, who shrugged and held up his hands in resignation.

“Just covering the bases. She might be confused, but we all know how this will end if push comes to shove.”

“We don’t know shit!” the girl yelled. “God. You are so annoying.” Little curls fell around her head in her exasperation. She was wearing a white blouse and a black, wide skirt, now kneeling on the bed with legs spread far enough to that her bottom could sit on the mattress. Her head almost touched the ceiling, though she did seem pretty short.

The man ignored her, turned back to Emika, and held up the hand with the paper sheet. “They made me call you here,” he explained, with an oily and calm voice. “You know where you are?”

“Heaven?” Emika asked.

He nodded. “Good. I’m Blaike,” he said. “That up there,” he nodded to the girl, “Is Alisha. And that one,” he waved a hand at the androgynous looking person next to the glass plane, “Is Epse.”

“Don’t ever touch me,” Emika spilled out. She didn’t want to start her stay at Heaven by accidentally killing off three people. That would probably make for a terrible introduction.

Blaike’s lips curled into a soft smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “No worries. We know.”

They knew? Knew what? How much did they know? What a pointless thing to say. At least she wouldn’t randomly get touched, it seemed. Good enough for now, maybe. Emika made a round of their faces again, trying her very best to memorise all of these names. It would be embarrassing to not remember them, though she could probably claim excuses, like being too confused by the transport, or her new favourite one of being too dense.

As her glances landed on them, she was again captured by these eyes. These inhuman, bright green eyes. Eyes as if they could pierce Emika’s very soul. And yet, these people didn’t look alike at all beyond that. Not like relatives, not like friends. Not even like acquaintances. All they seemed to share among each other were these piercing, light green eyes.

Emika took another deep breath.

Okay, so she had been summoned not by a staffer, or a worker, or a doctor, or a nurse, or a receptionist, or whatever the people working in this place might be called. Instead, from the looks of it, she was summoned by an… inmate? A patient?

… A monster?

A research object. A guinea pig.

Yes, right. This was a research facility. These three people here were probably here to be researched. Maybe.

It seemed like a rude question to ask, so Emika just stared back at them.

“Anyway,” Blaike finally said. “Welcome, and all. They will probably introduce themselves to you at… some point. Who knows. The humans, I mean. Whatever. Anything you need? You look rough.”

“You are so freaking insensitive,” Alisha groaned, then turned her gaze to Emika. “But, yes. You need anything? Anything I can help you with? There’s… clothes in the wardrobe. Just take any that fit. Though I think maybe only Blaike’s would, and he sucks at fashion. You can try mine, but they’ll probably be too small. That okay?”

Emika barely registered what they said, and instead attempted to grasp her situation. So, big thing, first and foremost, was that at least these people were trying to be nice to her. That was a first among her recent… Well, to be honest, since her curse had hit, the only other person that had been nice to Emika was Melisande. And now… That girl, too. Emika wasn’t sure about Blaike yet, but at least he was being honest, as far as she could tell, and she could work with that.

Emika pulled in a lungful of air, holding it for a few seconds, then letting it all out. “Why the hell do I not have a room of my own?” she then asked. “Why did they put me with others? They should be well aware.”

“They are,” Blaike replied, looking like he was trying his best to control his face after biting into a lemon.

“They are? Then, why?”

“Because,” started a soft and raspy and wonderful voice, as if sung by a melancholic choir — and as Emika’s eyes darted back, she saw that it was Epse speaking for the first time, their eyes still gloomy, face sunken — “The wardens here are hoping to dispose of us.”

Oh. Okay, well, yeah. Sure.

Of course, the mages and witches running Heaven, the moment they heard about a deadly curse on an extremely strong creature, they’d use that to try and kill off their trash. Because to them, what else could a monster be worth in this world? The worst part about this was that Emika was not surprised at all, and yet still deeply upset. She felt a sudden and sharp spike of anger.

She wanted to break something.

With all the adrenaline pumping through her veins, her curse almost all spilled out. She closed her eyes for a second to compose herself, then opened them back up, staring at Blaike.

With as calm a voice as she could muster, Emika intoned a single sentence.

“Tell me their names.”