Welcome to Gaia! ::

"I don't think so," he said, his breathing regularizing. "If I get the main door open, odds are good that there are alarms that will call them back in. Plus, Fin is in there without backup, and I'm worried."

He cut off all further argument. "I'm going in there. When you follow, try to stay low and move fast. Don't let anyone see you. And Adela..." He stood straight and looked down into her face. Their faces were only six inches apart, and she noticed he wasn't shivering anymore. Then she noticed that their bodies were still touching.

Exciting.

"Please don't get hurt," he whispered. He smiled softly before gently pushing away and trotting towards the compound. He didn't look back even once.

Upon arriving at the fence, he paused. This was the test: he had to 'port inside, without being able to see what was on the other side. That was tough. He had no idea what threat was on the other side. But still, they needed him to get in so that they could be safe. Adela needed him to get in.

So he took a deep breath. He visualized the door, then going beyond it. It was difficult, never having seen the other side, but he could do it. He took a deep breath. He was going to blink and -

Pain.

Every cell in his body. Every one. He could feel them. He was screaming - screaming wasn't even enough. His mouth was open as far as was physically possible for the human body, a noise of pure anguish tearing from his throat until it bled.

Each cell was white-hot, absolute zero, the sun, the Arctic. Every cell, atom, chemical, tissue, organ, muscle, bone, hair - all was pain. His entire existence was pain. There was no past, no future; just the pain. The universe was gone. Time was gone. He could feel the intensity of the Big Bang, and the power that would end the universe. His mind went blank, but the pain persisted. There was nothing but pain. Schraeder hadn't even understood existence until it was gone from him; there was only the agony that he was in.

Then came the absolute smallest microcosm of relief. Schraeder didn't even feel it; it was lost among the endless sea of pain. He could feel forever in that pain. All of everything was pain, except that single instant, despite the fact that he couldn't feel it.

What had happened? Schraeder had gathered his power and awakened his Sigil, blinking inside the confines of the door. He had, however, misjudged the angle that he stood at, and appeared with his arm, from an inch below the elbow down, inside of an electrical control box. This physical impossibility, his cells suddenly displacing already existing cells, had backlashed in the form of infinite suffering within Schraeder's mind. What to him was literally forever was half a second to the perception of everyone else. The tiny relief came in the form of a reflexive blink that moved him half a millimeter away from the box, such that the pain ceased - and his arm disconnected.

His power was completely exhausted. Schraeder fell to the floor, twitching in the spasms of a seizure as his mouth foamed and his eyes rolled back in his head. His arm wasn't bleeding; the stump had been cauterized by the electricity within the box. His arm, clear up to the side of face, was badly burned. He choked on his tongue, couldn't breathe. Everything to him was that horrible pain, nothing would ever live for him again.

He passed providentially into the blackness of unconsciousness. Needless to say, he had disrupted the power - in the entire facility. By entering the circuit the way he had, he had essentially removed a portion of it from existence, and everywhere within the base, power went out.

The alarms went off for half a second before they powered off as well. Every door opened and the lights turned off. Adela, Xu, and Fin were free to approach.

His body would periodically go into violent twitching fits, and from his mouth emerged a combination of unconscious moans, choking as he tried to breathe, and sobs as his lungs convulsed wildly.

His fingers, those on his remaining arm (the right) clutched randomly, tightening into a deathgrip on Adela's own hand before relaxing into the slack of death, only to ease her worry by nearly crushing her hand again. The shock of losing his arm due to the physical impossibility had sent his body into the worst levels of shock, and the wounds on his body weren't going to be easy to treat.

Schreader was still unconscious. Adela's worry grew by the second as his twitches grew less frequent and less powerful.

Eventually, after a few tortuous minutes of mind-numbing drain on Adela - to her credit, she didn't ever think about quitting - Schraeder's spams quit entirely and his breathing slowed to normal. Still scared that he would die, Adela kept putting power into him until his eyes fluttered open.

The blood vessels had burst, causing Schraeder's corneas to be blood-red. He couldn't open them further than a crack, but he was awake. He was exhausted, and his body remembered its pain too well: it was stiff, still hurt worse than anything he could remember, and didn't seem to want him around anymore.

He felt the tightness in the side of his face - it was burned. He followed the feeling down his shoulder, his arm. Suddenly, it stopped. Curious. He managed to turn his head, half-centimeters at a time, to look.

His arm was gone. With that realization, he remembered sharply and suddenly the pain that had gone with it, and Adela found herself cradling the always-unbreakable Schraeder in her arms as he wept uncontrollably, shivering spasmodically and sobbing in bursts with the intensity of a child.

Schraeder childishly buried his face against her stomach, now bawling openly. The amount of pain he had been in was apparently more than Adela could comprehend, if it caused this kind of reaction.

Schraeder was coherent enough to feel her shaking as she tried to heal him. He weakly raised an arm, grabbed her hand, and moved it away from his wounds. She realized that he was stopping her from expending any more energy, despite the fact that he was still in the extreme grips of pain.

By now, he had curled into a tiny shivering ball against Adela, with his face still pressed into her stomach. His sobs were slowing, though, and he wasn't choking or spasming anymore.

Xu felt no presences other than theirs within a good distance. He was momentarily relieved, but then he remembered something.

The Hosts were in there, likely wrecking havoc (the only information Xu had about the Hosts was propaganda from the Host-Agents), and he and the other Eves needed to get in there and stop them. It might be uncomfortable, but he needed to remind Adela of that fact.

Schraeder, on the other hand, seemed like he was going to be removed from the rest of the mission. He'd be extremely lucky if he ever even went back out into the world after what happened.

"I'm fine," he said. His voice, as hard as it was for Adela to hear (because he spoke below a whisper), was absolutely unrecognizable. It was a mix between a croak and a rustle, as if someone had forced Schraeder to swallow sandpaper before gargling gasoline.

He took her hand again, this time holding it to keep it away from his body. His eyes slipped back shut. "You...have a...mission. Go." Xu was relieved that he didn't have to be the one to say it.

Schraeder squeezed Adela's hand softly. "Please...go. I'm...fine." He released her slowly.

He could hear the fighting in the distance. He wished, wished so hard, that he could be there to help them. He wanted so dearly to be the Big Damn Hero and show up to save them, to turn the battle and gain everyone's respect - to gain Adela's admiration, if nothing else. Schraeder wanted to be the hero that everyone knew. That's all he had ever wanted.

And now, instead of being in that fight and using all of his myriad skills to make sure his allies adored him and his opponents feared him, he was broken down in the abandoned hallway, barely clinging to life, let alone consciousness, as things moved forward without him. He wouldn't be the hero here; he'd be forced to be the victim.

He'd lost his arm. His consciousness had faded for the first time in his life, and in the pain-induced hysteria that had gripped him, Schraeder had broken down in the arms of the woman that he now was sure he wanted to impress - and wept. This was not at all how things were supposed to go. Damn it! Damn it all! Schraeder was a failure here.

A single shudder ran through his body. He had managed to prop himself against a wall, though he was sliding down it slowly. He didn't have the strength left to prop himself back up if he slid all the way down. His glassy eyes stared blankly at the wall across from him as he shivered and sobbed softly to himself.

Then, a strange thing happened. He became aware of something strange, through all of his haze, confusion, and exhaustion. In fact, this something seemed to cut right through it, oddly unaffected by the environment of Schraeder's mind. Though it cost him the last of his energy, Schraeder managed to actually lift his head an inch and a half to look out and see something.

Standing there, though Schraeder had heard or sensed no approach, was something like an old man. Aged but healthy, he wore a straight-cut black suit and stood with a soft smile, regarding Schraeder. Weird - he almost made Schraeder feel comfortable, the way that he looked. Maybe Schraeder was just hallucinating. That would probably be it.

The man knelt next to Schraeder, still oddly clear in the hazy world of Schraeder's eyes, and laid a hand on his shoulder. Through all of his exhaustion, Schraeder couldn't even feel it. Immediately after, he passed into blissful darkness. A soft snore escaped his lips as he slid down the last bit of wall and rolled over.