First, darkness. Next, millions of stars stretch out all around him. Then, a familiar voice.

  “Prism! You have to wake up! If you don’t they’ll die! Our friends will die!”

  A tickle of deja-vu came to Prism as he existed amidst the sea of stars. His skin felt cold, even icy, and his mind felt dull. When he tried to move his body, it felt sluggish. When he blinked his eyes, there was a subtle weight on his eyelids, as if he was wearing a veil.

  “Wha…where…”

  Prism tried to speak, but his tongue felt like a slug in his mouth. He felt like he was floating, and he was only slightly aware of his own nudeness. He couldn’t feel anything beneath the soles of his feet.

  “Please, Prism! I know that it’s hard for you, but you have to try to snap out of this!”

  The familiar voice yelled once more, but Prism couldn’t see where or whom it was coming from. He felt a nagging in his heart, a desperate plea that shouted from its depths, but Prism was too disoriented to make sense of it. A bright light began to shine in front of him, drawing his attention forward.

  “Look at what’s happening to them!“

  The radiant sphere that shined before Prism split into three smaller orbs of light. Each of them then expanded into tall shining ovals that hovered equidistant from one another.

  The surface of the ovals that faced Prism formed into smooth pearly surfaces framed by white light. Scenes of torture began to play on the surfaces. Prism’s head jerked up as he heard Leanna and Ursun scream. His droopy eyes could only catch vague glimpses of the horrors being displayed.

  “No…” Prism wanted to shout, but his malaise persisted. “Is this…hell?”

  When he went to move his arms, he noticed a that they were raised up beside him. He moved his head to the side and saw that he was strung up by pink strands of light that wrapped all around him. His legs were bound together, and he could barely even wiggle his toes.

  “Captured…” Prism managed to mumble.

  “Yes! You need to save the three of them and escape from the mountain base Gusa’s forces brought you to!”

  Prism tried will himself to break free, tried to muster one burst of strength to dispel what he believed to be magical restraints, but he remained powerless. The torment of his teammates reverberated throughout the chamber, which served as its own form of torture for Prism. He slumped in his prison of strings as he succumbed further to their sedation.

  “Wake the fuck up!”

  The familiar voice struck Prism’s hanging body with enough force to cause him to begin swinging within his hanging restraints. Some of the pink luminous bindings snapped like overwrought rubber-bands. Prism began to wiggle his toes as he began to feel less sedated.

  “I didn’t know that I could do that!” The disembodied voice shouted with glee. “Feeling any better?”

  “A bit.” Prism was able to nod. “Keep doing whatever you just did.”

  “Get up! Get out of here! Go!”

  More blasts of sound struck the front of Prism, causing more of the strands to snap off of his naked body. He looked up, and noticed that he was only being held up by only a few remaining pink strings that seemed to stretch up into eternity. Prism pulled and flexed his legs and his arms as powerfully as he could, but he still couldn’t free himself.

  “Almost there!” Prism shouted to his unknown benefactor.

  “Go save them, you alien bastard!!!”

  A final shockwave pushed Prism back with enough force to break the last of his glowing restraints. He fell to his feet and knees as he skid back along the flat, transparent ground. Ripples that spread out in all directions disturbed the ordinarily invisible surface.

  Prism stood up and turned his attention back to the screens of light that showed Leanna, Ursun, and Wadaw being tortured. Leanna and Ursun both had thick, silvery cables running from the tops of their shaved heads, connected to what looked like devices that were surgically-attached directly to their skulls. They writhed in pain within upright metal harnesses like they were being electrocuted.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Wadaw, who was in a similar metal restraint, was undergoing some sort of surgery on his face. Small automated robots connected to the harness he was tied down to made tiny slices to the skin of his upper face while Wadaw lay motionless with his eyes closed. The guerrilla fighter’s face and hair had returned to the form they had when Prism had first met him.

  “Is this real, or some sort of artificial nightmare?” Prism looked up and around the vast void. “Hello!?!?” He yelled angrily.

  Prism began to hear a sound much like the wind begin to blow around him. “I’m…too…weak…now…” Prism could barely make out a voice within the sound. “Ha…we’ve…swapped places. It was…worth…it…”

  The blowing sound and the faint voice within it ceased, along with the displays showing his allies, leaving Prism alone in what he realized was a dreamscape. He felt like he’d been there before, but the memory stayed annoyingly out of reach like a name on the tip of his tongue. He shook his head and examined the dream’s structure until he was able to wake himself up like he’d unknowingly done days earlier.

  Prism opened his eyes and found himself floating in a chamber full of luminous pink fluid. It was the same chemical that he’d been kept in for nearly a century within the Queen’s clandestine lab. His lungs had filled with the liquid, but his body was ordinarily still able to produce enough oxygen to survive in a near comatose state; a unique trait that the Queen’s researchers had discovered through years of testing the limits of Prism’s body. His new body, however, could do more than simply remain unconscious while submerged within the pink sedative.

  “Where the hell am I?” Prism thought as he blinked slowly and twisted his body in the fluid-filled pod he found himself in. Despite being submerged in a chemical that normally kept him in a deep, dreamless sleep, Prism was pleasantly surprised by how alert he was. His pleasure quickly turned to panic when the danger of his predicament struck him like a ton of bricks.

  “We must have been captured!” His eyes grew wide as they filled with terror. “The food! They drugged the food!”

  Prism’s eyes glowed red as lightning shot out of his body, sending the cover of the pod flying. The pink sedative, free from its container, streamed out of the pod as a glowing pink gas. The ten black-armored guards who’d been standing in the room quickly tried to put on their gas masks but were overcome by the cloud too soon. All of the armored goons fell over almost simultaneously while Prism stepped out of the pod, naked and angry.

  “Where are they…”

  Prism tried to reestablish contact with Leanna and Ursun through their semi-permanent telepathic link, but he received a painful form of magical feedback when he psychically touched their minds. It was as if the two of them were having their minds emptied by an outside force. Prism struggled to fight against the incredible amounts of pain that his two teammates were feeling, pain that threatened to permanently break their minds.

  “I’m coming!”

  Prism made a desperate attempt to communicate with them before he expanded his perception, stretching it to its limits to search each room of the massive complex before leaving the brightly-lit room he was in. Its wide, basalt brick-walled corridors were lined with thick, black pipes that transported hot steam throughout the base to keep it as warm as the jungle. The combination of basalt and steel materials combined with how many large machines Prism saw made the complex seem more like a factory than a military base.

  Prism saw that there were over a dozen Sguvan soldiers headed for his room just as an alarm began blaring along with flashing orange lights throughout the spartan facility. He ignored the running ranks and weaved in and out of the multitude of rooms with his disembodied vision, merely peeking into each one until he found Leanna, then Ursun, whose heads were wired into a bulky, blocky computer. Prism then chanced upon Wadaw, whose skinless face caused the alien to gasp. He took a moment to memorize their locations relative to his own, then took off running out of the room.

  “Shit! Shoot him!” A young military officer shouted to his more experienced soldiers.

  Bullets began whizzing past Prism as he charged forward into the fray. His irises flashed gold before he was struck harmlessly by the projectiles. He ran into the crowd of soldiers and began delivering powerful punches and keen kicks to each and every one of them. Some of the men were sent flying into the walls and some were pounded into the ground. The point-blank shots that many of the soldiers made ricocheted off of Prism’s magical barrier only to strike his enemies. One of the deflected bullets even struck a soldier in his unprotected mouth and traveled up into his brain, killing him instantly.

  “Shit, shit, shit!!!”

  The fresh officer took a few steps backwards as Prism approached him. The bodies of the other soldiers lay scattered about the corridor, some unconscious and some dead. The soldier wondered whether he should beg for his life or run away. In the end, he simply stood there wetting himself.

  “May I read your mind?” Prism stopped in front of the officer and asked him in a clear, loud, monotone voice.

  “Wha…wha…what!?” The young man shivered so much that his teeth were audibly clacking together.

  “MAY. I. READ. YOUR. MIND.”

  Prism’s voice boomed down the corridor. He knew that his request was being made under duress, but the soldier’s absolute submission would make the man’s mind far more pliable.

  “Ye…yes! Just don’t kill me, PLEASE!”

  The small man stood bawling in his matte black combat armor, decorated with the golden trim of the Royalist military academy he’d graduated from only a year earlier. Not wanting to waste anymore time, Prism leapt over to the man’s side, ripped the helmet from the officer’s head, then grabbed the man’s buzzed head in his right palm. It only took Prism a few seconds to rip through the man’s memories and knowledge to gain what he needed to save his allies.

  “Guh…”

  The officer slumped to the ground when Prism released his grip on him. The elementeitan felt only a tiny pang of guilt when he looked down at the young man twitching helplessly on the ground, his mind broken by the psychic intrusion. The young officer had never killed anyone, and hadn’t believed he could.

  “Fool.”

  Memories of the officer's proudest day, when Gusa Sela placed his graduation pin upon his uniform shirt, flitted through Prism's mind as the alien rushed through the industrial base.