Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
❘❙❚ ISSUE #06 ░░░░ VOL. 1 ❛ THE MOMENT EVERYTHING CHANGE❜ ┆🌹
⁘⁙💥⛠ BUY ISSUE #6 FOR $1.00 HERE ➔
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
Rosie knew the exact moment when her feelings for Ben had changed. She had pointed to a new perspective on her relationship with him and what it really meant to her to have someone who could understand —even when Ben was a rabid, selfish child— the dynamics of a life with superpowers and has grown up on a military base. Since she met him, he behaved in many ways with her, depending on the day he had a better or worse mood, and Rosie reacted skillfully to those changes so nothing bad happened. That tolerance and restrictions for years had made her hate Ben, in silence she wanted them to take him away, but when they played chess she loved him and wished to be together forever. There was no middle ground.
That day, while drawing with watercolors scenes from the fifth chapter of Mrs. Dalloway, recreating everything she could. It helped her imagine the outside world and the characters, she liked to break down the scenes into vignettes, and even added some dialogue to it. Drawing was the only thing she could do; her chess partner hadn't shown up in a month and seven days.
After the soldier carried her on his shoulder to one of the doctors' rooms, she spent an hour traumatized waiting for the arrival of Dr. Stein, who wasn't helpful that day. He asked her a couple of questions and sent her to the bedroom. The next day they divided half of the day for group I and the other half for group II. Both groups filled her with questions and exams, starting with the physicists where they experimented with the disaster she had made with her ability, made her take off a piece of skin from her hand to take it to the laboratory, as well as a piece of hair and blood –which also had to be removed because the needles did not pierce her skin and her own strength was the only thing that could hurt her quickly. They connected some wires to her head and others to the rest of her body, even putting her in a kind of giant box that analyzed her body, or something like that. It was a new technology that used x-rays, Rosie didn't quite understand what the doctors were saying in their technical language. The last tests of those days were similar to those that group I did to test if she was immune to poisons and toxins, in this case, it seemed to indicate her saliva turned into poison. The first few weeks after receiving compound N —as geneticist Frederick Voght had named it— were martyrdom for the girl. She was kept awake for hours and only left four to sleep. The only time she had to clear her mind was two hours in the living room she had used alone for a month and seven days. Where was Ben?
At first, she thought he was recovering from compound N, she assumed having received a higher dose his body needed more time to recover, however, with the transitory of the days she suspected something bad had happened. The boy's presence seemed to have faded from the base. Normally they crossed in the corridors while they were taken to take an exam, sometimes they shared exams or were of dyadic matter, and every day they had coexistence. Coexistence was necessary in the words of psychiatrists, it was driven —especially— by the lack of development Rosie presented and threatened a mental retardation due to the lack of human contact, so the constant company of nannies and another child would help to mature things as simple as walking, talking and playing. The boy's chaotic personality drove away the calmness of Rosie, who preferred to be alone, and if she was given a choice between Ben and nothingness, she chose nothingness... until nothingness became nothing and after a few days she no longer liked nothingness and preferred Ben's annoying. There were no signs of existence. The doctors didn't talk about him and when she dared to ask Dr. Lang, he said:
