“Tell me, what was it like to die?” he asked me.

I spat out the blood that had pooled in my mouth, “What the hell are you talking about?”

He was taken aback, “You don’t remember?”

“You’d think I would remember dying, now take these goddamn chains off me and let’s go a few rounds.”

“I….I…I don’t understand. I actually killed you, the one thing that I had been vying for, for 18 years and you are telling me that you don’t even remember it?!”

I looked up at him slowly, blood running down my face, my hair clumped by blood and dirt stringing together in strands around my face. My wrists bloodied and bruised by the chains that held me in place. I certainly looked dead, “If you killed me like you say- “

“I did kill you!” he raged throwing his lab equipment on the floor. Broken glass now strewn across the cold concrete floor, a few pieces hit the cell bars where he had been keeping me making a few pathetic clangs.
“Are you finished?”

Taking a deep shaky breath, he turned to me “yes, I… I…”

“If you killed me like you said, why am I still alive in these chains?” I placed two fingers on my neck “Yep, I’m reading a pulse” Shaking my chains to get his attention, “If I died, like you so clearly think, then why on god’s green earth do I have a pulse and no recollection of dying or being dead?”

“I thought you weren’t religious”

Rolling my eyes, “Religion isn’t a luxury when you know as much as I do, that was just an Earth expression.”
“Luxury, God isn’t a luxury” he muttered to himself.

“Hate to burst your religious bubble but God doesn’t exist and even if in this parallel world he does after everything you’ve done, hence kidnapping me” shaking my chains “you won’t be meeting your precious God” I spat at him.

“Hmmm, you are probably right”

He started to clean up the glass fragments off the floor, the room filled itself with an awkward silence. I focused on the man, closing my eyes I concentrated on feeling and understanding everything he felt. I could feel my hands starting to shake, I needed to rein it in and control it. Going into his temporal lobe, I was overwhelmed with his current emotions, the overwhelming emotion was a sense of calm. That couldn’t be right, he should be scared and confused. I left his brain and refocused back into my host body. I allowed five minutes of this awkwardness to pass.

“So, are we just going to ignore the fact that you think I died?” I finally asked.

“I didn’t think you died, you did die.”

Holding up my arms allowing my chains to clang together “yet you have me chained up in this experimental dungeon of yours. YOU chained me up, I’ve been here for over a year and today, this very second you decide to ask me what it was like to die as if I just died. Even MY superior mind can’t process what you are trying to say.”

“If you are so superior, then why have you been my prisoner for….” He glanced at the clock on his left wrist. “… 11 months, 13 days, and 4 hours?”

For the first time in almost a year, I smiled.

“Why the hell are you smiling?”

“According to the Earth’s Merriam-Webster dictionary: a prisoner is a person deprived of liberty and kept under involuntary restraint, confinement, or custody.”
He shifted unsteadily “That describes your current condition perfectly”

Grazing the edge of my cuff by my fingertips “Almost perfectly, key word is involuntary”
As the words left my mouth, there was a flash of purple.