"Are you kidding me? How can you just let him in like this? He is dangerous!"

Shadow's lips formed into a straight line. "Kratos he came to warn us yesterday, but by that time it was too late. We had already been attacked."

"Says who?"

"Says everyone-Lily, Raine, Nox, Taj. The boy has nowhere to go. He's been missing for too long. He said if he goes back to his Master, he'll be accused of treason."

" Why does it matter? He's nothing to us! And who exactly is his Master anyway? We can't exactly trust him after what he did to KL and her friend Seth. How do you know he isn't just trying to get to KL?"

Shadow shuffled some wires on a metal table. "That is why I shall test him. See his strengths and abilities."

"What is that going to prove? That he has powers just like us. No offense to you Shadow, but we all know that he has powers. It's pretty obvious."

Silence lingered through the lab's atmosphere for quite a while until footsteps approached the door.

Shadow clasped his hands together. "Ah, Mister Knightly, just the man I was waiting for."

Jagger flashed a smile at Shadow. "Thank you for your hospitality Master. I appreciate you taking me in for the night."

"It's no problem. Now as I explained yesterday, I have to start tests to see what power category you fit into."

Jagger nodded in understanding and then looked over at me.

Shadow motioned to the cold, metallic lab table to which Jagger went and sat on. His green eyes looked over me, and he cracked a smile. "Hey there."

"Hi," I gritted through my teeth. I didn't exactly want to talk to him at this moment in time. As Shadow prepared the testing machine, I crossed my arms over my chest.

Jagger smiled in amusement as he swung his legs back and forth on the table. I couldn't help by roll my eyes at his foolishness. Suddenly, the pitter patter of footsteps came up from behind us, and everyone else rolled into the lab.

"What are you guys doing here?" I asked, making eye contact with Raine.

Crossing her arms over her chest in a sassy matter, she rolled her eyes. "We're obviously here to see his lab results," she replied, her head motioning towards Jagger.

"Well the test hasn't even started, so the results won't be here for some time."

"Oh hush up you old bag. You sound worse than Shadow when he's cranky."

Shadow raised an eyebrow to this, "Oh, really?"

Raine chuckled, "You know I love you, Master." Averting her attention back to me, Raine smirked. "We're just here to see the action."

"Whatever," I replied, turning away from her and the rest of the group.

Shadow smiled, "Well sure nice to see you all here this morning. As you all may or may not know, Mister Knightly here will be staying with us for the time being. He had warned us about an attack beforehand, and therefore he is a help to us." I rolled my eyes. Something about the way that Shadow seemed so trusting of him started to bother me. Shadow was more wise than this. I wasn't trying to read more into things but something else has to be going on beneath the surface.

"Okay, Mr. Knightly, please lay down on the lab table. Now we're going to strap your wrists to the table. I need you to lay down there and we're going to place suction cups on your body. The suction cups will poke a bit because they will release a light dose of sleeping gas into you. From there, they will test your vitals and after the testing is done, I will read it to see what category you fall under. Understand?"

" Yes Master Shadow," Jagger said.

From then, Shadow strapped Jagger's wrists on the table and placed suction cups on him, just like he said he would. Within ten seconds of all of the suction cups being placed on his body, he had fallen into a slumber. You could hear machines beep to life. Shadow began to watch his computer screen and the other various screens placed around.

Raine asked, " How are his vitals?"

" Well. Very well. He's actually very healthy. He also has lots of brain activity in his slumber which means that his intelligence is more than the average person, which is also good," Shadow said.

" Will he be able to wake up when the tests are done?" KL asked.

" Yeah, once the suction cups are off, he'll wake up," Raine responded.

" Hmmm....that's peculiar," Shadow said, his eyebrow raising in concern.

" What is?" I asked.

" There's high traces of rubise in his blood," Shadow said, beginning to click around on his laptop.

" Which is?" Raine asked.

" Which is not good...," Shadow said.

" Shadow, that's not what I meant. What is rubise?" She asked.

"It's a highly dangerous serum......" he clicked around on his laptop for a bit more and then looked at us. " Rubise is a highly dangerous serum used in a war about a century ago. Legend has it that it is a manipulation serum. This means that whomever it is injected into is manipulated into doing things that aren't in their free will. I've done my studies on this a bit, but I don't know too much about it. All that I know is that it was cooked up by a man about a century ago. His name was Vesuvius E. Kiryan. For the time that Vesuvius lived in, his intelligence level was outrageously high. People of back in the day adored him and his ideas, and he was one of the wealthiest, well known men around. But as I said before, Kiryan was an intelligent man, and he also had a passion for science. If you mix everything important in his life together, you could already guess the outcome. He was intelligent, wealthy, popular, and passionate. This drove him to use these things to his advantage. You see, Vesuvius knew that there were people that possessed great powers roaming about humans. How did he know? Well, because he was one himself. He was tired of being so well known and having to have to hide this whole other part to him that the public didn't know about. So one day, he decided to show the world what he could do. He snapped his fingers and a little flame floated right above them. He opened his hand and a fireball formed right inside of his palm. The crowd was astonished, terrified, and in utter confusion. They had no idea that things like this could even exist.

Vesuvius decided to throw the fireball into a tree trunk and as it flew, the tree trunk not only bursted aflame, but bursted into pieces. These pieces flew into the crowd and many people were smashed by them. As horrid as it is to even imagine, I am sure that some even got singed. From that point, police got involved. They had orders to put Vesuvius to death as soon as he was found. They were told that he was an abnormality, he was a freak of nature and that he should be killed for the good of mankind. Vesuvius never meant to kill anyone. He never even meant to cause a ruckus. All he wanted to do was expose himself to the human world, and to celebrate over the things that he could do. He never knew that this one decision would impact his life so much.

From then on, Vesuvius' intelligence had turned into madness, pure craziness. His views on the world changed when he had saw how the humans reacted. This caused him to hold a great amount of hatred in his heart. Then was when he decided that he was not going to let humans take his life into their hands. He was going to take their lives into his. Vesuvius went into hiding in his girlfriend's basement. She was the only one who had still believed in him. Later, he eventually found out that she had powers just like he did. But anyway, he started working with chemicals downstairs. He eventually cooked up a formula that caused the human hormones to heighten, and for their trust levels to become fully open. How he figured this out with such a lack of technology in his era is quite astonishing to me. From then on, he found a way to train the human brain into listening to his every command. It was like a stronger form of hypnosis. Since these were only chemicals that he was working with, Vesuvius figured that he needed something to contain them in. He tried water, vinegar, and oil, all to which didn't work. His girlfriend had all sorts of different jewelry, and was especially fond of gold necklaces with a ruby in them. For she was wealthy as well. One day, she gave him a necklace of hers that contained a giant ruby gem, and he went and found a way to melt the ruby. He then placed the chemicals in it, and as luck was on his side, the police had found him that day. He had already put the rubified serum in a medical syringe. He injected it into the policemen's bloodstreams. Though the policemen did get time to attack, once the rubise was in their system they stopped with Vesuvius' command.

Vesuvius later decided to call this serum rubise, mainly because liquefied ruby was the main ingredient for this manipulation serum . He later noted that a side effect to the serum was that the irises of the people's eyes turned to a crimson red color. This serum has been passed down through the Kiryan bloodline for decades, but this is the first I've seen of it in my time of living. It's crazy to think that something this old could just pop out of thin air like this."

" Wow.....," KL said.

" That's totally crazy," Raine said.

" So what war was it used in Shadow?" I asked.

" Well from the creation of that, Vesuvius ran off with his girlfriend. They were to be wed. From there, they had children, and then those children had children, but no one knew of their whereabouts. The Kiryan's went into hiding.

Some decent time from then Vesuvius' grandson, Viktor Kiryan was found. Being from Kiryan decent, everyone wanted him dead. From there, he staged an uprising against the humans, but the thing is that other people who had not shown their powers sided with the humans trying to blend in. They didn't want their bloodline to end in the same way that the Kiryan's began. They didn't want shame brought to their name. So Viktor went around desperately searching for people with powers like his. He was around his late twenties about the time that this happened.He ended up finding no one to help him, so the war was literally Kiryans against the world. Viktor's family, including Vesuvius who was still alive at the time helped Viktor fight. The Kiryan family was actually quite large. There were many brothers and sisters that fought in this war. The humans began to sharpen their swords and light their torches; there were literally towns after towns lined up to try to kill them. In the end, the Kiryan's had won and it was all because of their secret weapon, the rubise. As humans made close contact with them they pierced skin with syringe after syringe, making the humans turn on their own kind. In the end, there were many who had traces of rubise in them, and they all had taken lives of their own townspeople. The Kiryan bloodline had then restored their honor and also made a name for themselves as the most feared family of their time. Since Vesuvius' time, their family had been corrupt with a deep darkness in their hearts towards humankind. This darkness grew into hunger for power, and it eventually consumed them all."

" I've heard of this before. It was the Kiryan War of 1910, right?" Raine asked.

" Correct. The war happened about a century ago which means that the rubise is even older than that," Shadow said.

" So in other words, you believe that Jagger was being controlled?" I asked, cutting off Shadow's train of thought.

" Yes," he responded.

" Well, I mean it would make sense since his eyes were red," KL said.

" But it doesn't explain why his eyes are green now. Or how all of a sudden now we start to piece together the puzzle. You know that I've mentioned these red-eyed guys before and you knowing so much about this, I would've figured that you would've told us something. You just now figured out that it could be rubise? Unless there's something else out there that can make your eye irises turn red, I'm pretty sure that that was an obvious fact." I said.

" Yes, but Kratos how could we be sure it wasn't some other factor contributing to it? I wasn't sure why or how their eyes could even turn red. Now that I have some hardcore data, I know what we're working with," Shadow responded.

I didn't want to argue with him, but I'm pretty sure that taking a blood sample from someone who was red-eyed would've been sufficient enough to figure out if someone was contaminated with rubise. It was injected into the bloodstream for crying out loud. Usually, Shadow made sense in everything that he said and did, but this time he didn't. Or maybe I was just overreacting, but it's not like Shadow to wait long to take care of something that could've been taken care of a while ago.All of my life, since I was a kid, I have known Shadow to be a man of sophistication and order, not a man of procrastination. It just wasn't adding up to me. If Shadow had known that something like this existed out there, he should've tried to figure it out as soon as he realized that something was going on.

"Alright," was all I said, dropping the subject.

" So how would this get in his system?" KL spoke up.

" I'm not sure. I would assume that either it was somehow passed down to him through genes or someone injected it in him. I'm not even sure if this is genetic."

" So then that leaves us with the factor that someone injected him with it. Which would be who?" Raine asked.

" We'd have to ask him to see if he knows. I need to ask him some questions and things to see if he can provide any answers for me. Hopefully, it will lead me to the person who put this in his system."

" Well he's not the only red-eyed guy that's been chasing us. There have been multiple red-eyed people chasing us, and they all work together from what I've observed," I said.

" Which means that someone's either collecting people who have this in their system, or someone is collecting people and injecting them with this rubise thing," KL said.

" Exactly," Shadow said. " But the one thing that I don't understand is how are Jagger's eyes green if he has this in him?"

" He's not being controlled either," I said. " As much as I hate to admit it, he seems as though he's functioning from his own will. At least for now anyway. Before when he had red eyes, he was constantly attacking us, but now that his eyes are green, he isn't."

" Which means that something switched within him to turn off the effects of the rubise. But it looks like it's still somewhat active in his system," Shadow said.

" Well maybe something's blocking it from working," Raine said. " Maybe his free will took over. Or maybe....." she said looking at KL, an angry glint in her eye. " Maybe he was Broken."

Shadow then looked over at her. " Well.....if she is a Breaker, then it is a possibility. I'm not saying that it's certain that that is why Jagger seems immune to this rubise, but it could be a factor in it." He began typing into his laptop.

" The results are in," Shadow said.

" What are they?" Raine asked

" He falls under Jitsu and Proctor."

" How can he be a Proctor if he was trying to kill us?" I asked.

" That's where the factor of the rubise comes in," Shadow replied.

" What is a Proctor again?" KL asked softly.

I spoke up. " A Proctor is one whose abilities are made around self defense and protection. They usually know how to protect others as well as themselves and use things like force fields to keep themselves and their colleagues safe."

" Oh, okay. Well I understand the Jitsu part, but I've never really seen Proctor in him," she said.

" Nor has anyone else," I replied.

" His Proctor levels look different than from others that I've seen before.....," Shadow said.

" What do you mean?" I asked.

" It reads differently. His levels of power are stronger in places that a normal Proctor wouldn't be in and weaker in others that normal Proctors wouldn't be as weak."

" So what does that mean?" KL asked.

" I'm not exactly sure myself. I'll have to further examine his results, but they're definitely different than many others that I've seen." Shadow then stood up and took the suction cups off of Jagger's body. It wasn't much longer afterwards that Jagger sat up on the table. He shot Shadow a big, toothy grin. " So Master, what are my results?"

" Your results were actually...quite unique." I noticed Jagger's expression change to a concerned one.

" What does that mean? Is it something I have to worry about?"

" Depending on how you take it. But I would like to go over these results with you once the room clears out."

Jagger nodded toward Shadow, but I could tell that his mind was running a million miles a minute.

Raine smiled, and Lily laughed.

"I'm taking that as our sign to clear out Master?" Asked Lily.

Shadow smiled, "It may be best if you do."

"Alright, gotcha," replied Lily. The crowd began to clear out, and I followed. I could hear KL's footsteps from behind me, but it was best if I just left things alone. I couldn't stand to make a fool of myself once more.

© Lightning_Stryker 2016