Salem - Induction I

Alone he had been and alone he had remained.

Even as he tinkered with those last few compounds he had been given for the virus's creation, he had remained so very alone. Surrounded by people, yet so very alone. His name not important, he spoke rarely and ever so delicately. Inside he was a burning heap of rage and despair, but for now he spoke in that delicate voice of his and followed orders, all the while plotting, knowing his day would come soon, knowing the man he would soon become.

Salem - he had decided his name in this new life, as a recruited force of the Illuminate, would be - had found himself whispering menacing things to his cooperative little test subjects. Things so very menacing he nearly startled himself until he remembered what his own voice sounded like and just how lovely it would be the day this all came together. The idea was simple, really. He was assigned to modify and rework a base of sorts for a virus that would cause mutations to the entire world's population. A fitting way to rid this planet of the filth he had so loathed hearing and seeing and breathing and loving each and every day of his pathetic waste of a life. He knew this was opportunity. He knew he may even die. His priorities, however, were straight.

Death, he had decided, is a debt to nature due. If this be the result of his own exposure to this virus, so be it. He had accepted it into his life. He had decided death would no longer dangle above him as an anvil on a tight, thin string. No, no, he gave up on that idea. He had decided that he would stand right beneath the anvil with his head to the skies and his arms open wide, embracing the anvil, loving the anvil. His demise could be imminent.

Perhaps that result would have been for the better, for the state he would soon fall into would be worse than death itself- had he known he weren't dead, had he known just what he had become. For he woke up as someone else, just as he had hoped. He woke up in a new life, the old one so far behind him he had but one memory. He woke up with the word 'Salem' carved in his chest.