Age: 28
Gender: Male
Appearance with Personality Smatterings: Pale skinned. Dark brown straight hair that falls to his shoulders. He stands at about 6'2" in height. Samuel carries himself with a lot of pride and good posture and is a very hard worker. Though he works at a morgue and does autopsies for the police he loves his job no matter how grim it might be at times. He has a dry sense of humor and sometimes it is hard to get him to react to the unusual in some cases since he often tends to keep his emotions inside and tries to smother them.
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It was a mostly normal day for Samuel - he'd gotten a new cadaver that he needed to look over and it seemed as if the poor individual had been eviscerated or so he had been told by the preliminary examiner for they could not find a heart within the corpse no matter how hard they tried. There was speculation that it had been a murder that was tied to a unholy ritual of some sort. Samuel pulled on his gloves and got his tools ready as and placed in the ear buds to his MP3 players so he could vocalize his thoughts for the recorder without having the music interrupt anything. It was a way for the man to work and focus on the task at hand though many marveled as to how since for them it would be a distraction more than a help.
He'd taken up a scalpel and then started to get to work from there. For the most part it was a pretty routine but other than the heart nothing else was missing. Samuel began to take out the organs so he could study them in depth and perhaps give more insight to the cause of death.
As he worked music streamed from his MP3 from the ear buds that had fallen out of his ears. He'd not bothered to replace them plus he could hear them just fine still so it wasn't a distraction at all. One of his favorite songs started playing as he began to delve within the chest. Samuel couldn't help it as he sang around in snatches to the song.
"Wake up the dead now. Make 'em roll in their graves now. Shakey, shake up the dead now! Risin' up from the ground. Wake 'em up, shake 'em down..." Samuel sang as he reached into the chest staring downward before he suddenly noticed a blinking glow from within the chest and it forced him to move his hands toward it simply out of curiosity and soon it was met with a rough surface and amazingly hot. Hot enough to make Samuel recoil with a soft hiss and shaking his rubber glove covered hands. Samuel furrowed his brow as he moved to pry the chest a bit more open so he could see what it was but could just barely see it but he didn't want to touch the object again in case it would burn him once more. He reached over and grabbed a set of tongs and then grasped the object and gently pulled it out.
He couldn't believe it. This was where the heart should be but why was it there? How did it get there?! It wasn't there when he initially investigated the cadaver or so he thought. Samuel reached to touch the somewhat bloody object with a fingertip and discovered it didn't burn anymore. The man furrowed his pale brow and moved to hold the egg with a hand and set down the tongs. He felt a strange sensation a swimming in his head he almost felt quite feverish and suddenly he felt his legs give out from under him and he met the floor. Everything turned black while the egg happened to find a nice resting spot upon its chosen master's chest...
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As he slept, Samuel would have a very, very strange dream. The song he'd been listening to when he found the egg-thing, would start playing in the background... and the dreamworld would be something odd and frightening. Skeletal grins, dancing bones... Darkness and slashes of red and gray. Red-in-black eyes for a moment, then gone. INTENSE pain. Faded completely.
The silhouette of a creepy hand, making a beckoning motion. The hand flashed out of the darkness to slash across the fabric of the dream, bloody rivulets sliding down to pool at the 'bottom', before just splattering all over the place. Violent, insane laughter. Screaming, screaming, screaming... Dead silence - save for the song still on repeat in Sam's mind.
A deafening mixture of a scream and a roar, cutting off the song mid-note, and waking Sam up in the same instant.
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When the man woke up, he would initially feel fine... until he looked down at himself. The fingers of his left hand were black. Completely black .And, when they were touched, completely numb. But fully functional. If he bothered to look in a mirror after the initial discovery, he'd find that his hair now had white streaks all the way through it. And he'd have an odd craving... to see something bleed.
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He'd woken up and felt woozy still, he held himself up with his left hand for now not registering that he did not seem to have feeling in that hand for now he was busy feeling around on his scalp for something that would suggest that he got wounded or something and his hand came away clean and his head, for now, lacked bumps.
Around this time Samuel noticed his left hand wasn't registering feeling within it though his weight was on that hand there was no feeling there and he felt a sudden heavy feeling on his lap. He looked down and saw the strange object he'd recovered and almost instinctively held it in his right hand and moved to stand up onto his own too feet and now that he wasn't supporting himself with his left hand he took a moment to stare down at it in disbelief and noted it's blackness. He moved the hand to touch other things but felt nothing and even tried to get the fingertips to touch themselves and felt nothing.
There was a an odd stirring within him a desire he'd never honestly encountered and for now he pushed it away and tried to ignore it with all the willpower he had as he moved to the employee restroom while carrying the suddenly weighty egg. As he entered the restroom and flicked on the light he looked across and stared at the mirror. His hair had gotten sudden white streaks.
"What the ********..." Samuel muttered to himself as he reached up with the left hand to brush it through his hair but feeling no sensation from it. What happened to him!?
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It would be a couple more days until anything else happened. Until he dreamed at ALL. But once he fell asleep on the fifth day that he'd had the egg near him, that same music started up again in his head, and continued... on and on and on... But somehow distorted. Alternately too fast and too slow. Notes skewed out of key, giving the song a creepy, almost sinister quality. Also, the way the notes moved seemed to suggest an odd sort of... half sadness, half anger. A feeling that Sam would notice pervaded throughout the dream.
That silhouette was back, fingers still beckoning, but now the darkness was running with blood. Those eyes from before stared across at.. no, OVER... the scenery, and locked right into Sam's mind. Visions of blood. Claws. Random swirling darkness. Gray and stormy skies. Lightning colored red, more pain.. so much more pain than the last time. But it was mental pain, not physical pain. That pain, again, faded.
Now, throughout the song, he would hear a soft, rapid, failing heartbeat. Thudding away inside his mind. Sounding like a cardiologist's worst nightmare, and rising and falling randomly. More images of blood. More images of the darkness. Then one, single, brightness - a white light that quickly faded. And that terrible mixture of a scream and a roar. This time, it was CLEAR that the sound was in response to pain.
The music faded out to the stench of burned flesh, and a soft sobbing.
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When Sam woke up this time, that left hand of his would be burning in pain. Upon inspection, the fingernails and tips of his fingers would have simply gone. Decayed into nothingness during the space of one dream. The pain continued, and only stopped when that hand was near the egg.
Somehow, when he awakened, he'd also have the knowledge - even if he'd never dabbled in magic in his LIFE - of a spell to see the last thing a dead person saw. Possibly invaluable in solving crimes...
Except for the urge that went with it. The desire so intense it HURT. Blood. Something had to bleed. SOMEONE had to bleed. Even if it was Sam himself.
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Over the days he got used to the hair but not so much to the hand. He tried all sorts of different medications went to other doctors but nothing seemed to come up with an answer that was satisfactory and on a compulsion he kept the egg near him at all times and was loathe to leave it on it's own though he couldn't quite describe the reasoning behind it.
The dream was disturbing when he had it - he tried to wake up but he couldn't wake up he was trapped and felt the pain all too clearly like he had felt the pain before and when he was finally managed to wake up he was sweating all over and still felt pain and out of sorts and his heart was hammering within the cage of his chest as he panted softly and stared into space. He looked himself over again and held up his left hand to stare at it with a bit of dismay. He felt his gut clench hard as he noted that...the tips seemed to be gone as if they had rotted.
"OhGodOhGod..." He reached over and picked up the hand with his left hand and felt less pain and more ease and...
This was a really strange egg...He stared down at it, "What...are you?"
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The egg gave no answer at all to the question. And it remained quiet for another couple of days... The pain in his fingers faded, however, before that. When he finally did dream again, the dream was even more vivid and colorful. Even if that color was only red. Black and red. No gray this time.
The song was still there. Still present, and echoing. Playing over and over again. But this time there were no instruments. Just the voice. ONE voice. Sounded like the lead singer. But Sam would be able to SEE the singer this time. See the red-in-black eyes, and see the mouth of the one singing. A young face. Young eyes. But somehow odd and twisted at the same time. Nothing else but the mouth and those odd eyes could be seen at all. And even those... were running with blood.
When the chorus came, blackness swept over the dream, along with some very startling images. MANY, MANY dead bodies, slashed through with claws. Staring, dead eyes. Handcuffs chaining him to the wall, no matter how much he struggled. The crack of bright white lightning, turning blood red... walking quickly, being shoved....
Then fire. Fire. Flames. Heat. Burning. Melting. Scorching, Charring.... Then nothing but a long, loud roaring scream that he would hear the echoes of even after waking up.
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When he awoke from THIS one, his heart would be racing, even if he hadn't just been scared stiff. And his skin would feel hot. Very hot. Hot enough that he'd probably need a cold shower to cool down. Not to mention the fact that the rest of his upper two finger joints on his left hand were now solid bone, the rest of the flesh going the way of the rest of it.
The white streaks in his hair had been joined by black ones. If his hair was already black, it would look red in those areas, in a certain light.
The urge for blood would have faded now... replaced with a longing... a powerful urge for people. Other people. It physically hurt to be alone. He MUST be around people. And the craving would also include the NEED to hear or feel a heartbeat.
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Samuel reached up and grasped at his chest with his right hand pulling at the shirt before he finally just threw it off and started to strip down so he could just rush himself to the shower and for now the egg remained on his bed not really forgotten but not quite remembered not especially after he turned on the light and made the newest discovery that seemed to be occurring with his left hand and the newest discovery of his hair as well. His eyes widened and he stumbled back a bit bumping into the doorframe of his bathroom as he just slid down it for a moment.
There was a new feeling that he wanted to be around people...Yes maybe being around people would fix it...
Shakily he stood again and took his cold shower though it seemed to do little for his unease and his fears and then he went to get dressed and put on hoodie and hid his hand before he took up the egg in his right hand and wandered out just to be in a crowd, if someone interacted with him that would be alright but for now he needed to be somewhere and pretend that he wasn't going absolutely insane.
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He wasn't going insane. But the dreams were getting worse. This last dream came exactly two weeks after he'd found the egg. And it was the calmest of all of them. The least chaotic, and the creepiest by far.
Instead of blackness, the setting was a graveyard, resplendent with blood and mist. Out of one of the graves came a child-size skeleton, crumbling into dust at a single word spoken from the same lips that had been singing in the previous dream. And those lips belonged, of course, to a body.
Stepping out of the shadows, a young man came into view, red-on-black eyes leveling on the dreamer - on Sam. Fire burned the graveyard in the background, flames rising higher and higher and illuminating the strange individual.
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The dream ended and... didn't end. Because that egg that had sat near Sam the entire time had vanished into flames and a faint smell of sulfur. All that was left of IT was ashes... whereas the being that came out of it... was more than real. He looked like a small red hologram, but the voice Samuel heard in his head, was anything but fake.
"The name's Tando. You're apparently my asi'kai. We'll see if that's still true soon enough..."
