Research Notes

"Are you sure this is safe?"
The words came to Cenn as if from very far away.
"Of course it's not safe. He's a pretty bad case. What it is, however, is important."
Cenn opened his eyes. He lay in a large, sterile white room divided down the middle by a transparent pane that stretched from ceiling to floor, side to side, with no visible way to pass through. As he looked around, he saw that there were no exits on his side of the glass, either; the realization that he was trapped made him sit bolt upright, and he would have stood if his legs had obeyed him. Instead he fell from the featureless cot where he'd lain and sprawled across the floor. A bad fall, but he felt no pain.
"Lack of coordination," noted a voice that came from the other side of the glass, though it wasn't muffled at all. "Is that from the Shade, or did he not have enough adjustment time before quarantine?"
How had Cenn gotten here? He remembered fear, he remembered fleeing -- someone chasing him -- and then ... total nothingness. Blinded, deafened, unable to feel his body. A body that had run on two legs, like the one he now wore -- memory sparked. He was in The Hollow.
"He was at the university years ago, so he must have been proficient at some point, and we have no data suggesting that proficiency decays. But it could be from coming out of quarantine. We don't usually take people back out, after all."
Cenn looked across the glass. On the other side, around a white table covered in tablets, stood a man in a starry cloak, a woman in military dress, a figure whose white hooded robe hid their face. The man was taking notes while the woman watched Cenn with cool, analytical eyes.
"Hello?" Cenn said, uncertain if they could hear him.
The man looked up from his notes and grimaced. The woman glanced over at him and asked, "Can he see us?"
"And hear us," provided the hooded figure. They tilted their head and looked at Cenn; he caught a glimpse of bright eyes under the hood. "How do you feel?"
"Terrible," Cenn said honestly. Though he had no bruises from his fall, his head pounded, and everything around him felt subtly distorted. A rotten taste sat on his tongue. His body felt distant and rubbery, while every inch of his skin seemed to be covered in an invisible slime.
"Can you be more specific?" the man said. He tried to smile at Cenn and didn't quite make it, a terrible knowledge in his golden eyes.
"Please let me out," Cenn said instead of answering. It was the same plea he'd made every time food and water were delivered to his cell, for years, until finally the food and water stopped coming. "Please, I'll do anything ... "
The man winced and spoke to the hooded figure. "Frip, I'm not sure this is accomplishing anything."
"Do you know what happened to you?" the woman asked.
Cenn began to shake his head, then stopped. He did know, if he just put the pieces together. "I'm in the Hollow. I don't remember connecting, and ..." He tried to disconnect. Nothing happened. "I'm dead."
The woman nodded. "You're an Echo, like us. But you're Shade-touched."
Cenn flinched. This wasn't exactly a surprise to him; he'd worked it out, over the years in that cell. But it hadn't occurred to him to consider what happened to Shade-infected souls in the Hollow. It hadn't even occurred to him that he would die and end up in the Hollow. He'd never quite given up hope that someday that door would open.
"Please let me out," Cenn said again, more urgently. He knew they wouldn't, but he defaulted back to that familiar phrase. "I won't do anything, I won't spread the Shade, just don't ... "
Quarantine. It had seemed a terrible fate when Cenn had first heard of it, during his studies at Lukra University. Do we really just cut them off from the rest of the Hollow and leave them to die? he'd asked a professor once. That can't be right. Isn't there anything we can do?
We don't leave them to die, one of his classmates had helpfully pointed out. We leave them to marinate in their own Shade until it finally consumes them ... if it ever does.
"I can't watch this," said the man, biting his lip hard as he watched Cenn's face. He stood, tucking his tablet into a pocket. "Let me know if you acquire any useful data."
With a gesture, he opened a portal and disappeared into it. Cenn tried to copy his gesture, on the off chance that it would open a portal for him. Of course, it didn't.
"There's nothing you can do," the hooded figure said, their voice almost gentle. "You can't keep the corruption from spreading. It's already trying to hook into the magic that comprises this room. There's no way we can maintain your sensory integrity, let alone any concept of freedom or contact with other souls."
Cenn ran to the glass and pressed himself against it as if he thought he could pass through it that way. Then he pounded on it. "No ... no ... let me out!"
"He's not rational," the hooded figure said to the woman.
"I noticed," the woman said, watching Cenn try to break the glass. It wasn't even actually glass, he knew distantly. Nothing here was real. Except the people. "Cenn. Listen."
Briefly calmed by the sound of his name, which he hadn't heard in another person's voice for so long, Cenn paused.
"We're not going to quarantine you and leave you," the woman explained. "We're going to study you. If there's a way to cure your infection, we'll find it."
Cenn began to cry. The tears running down his face were black and oily. He curled into a ball on the floor, tugging at his own hair. "No ... please ..."
The woman sighed. "Acrux was right. This is pointless. Put him back, Frip."
"No!" Cenn screamed, but it was too late; the world, and his body, fell away into nothing.