The Croche Method

2

As I read the words, all the polite words, a lot of things dawn on me; firstly, my mother is alive - "alive and well", Inos had said - secondly, I have to go and find out the secrets of the experimental facility, when all I want to do is see my mum. And third, I actually want to know why they released the Luckwoss into the world. And, maybe this is what makes me decide; I am going to find out what happened.

Cauley comes over and sits down next to me, pulling the letter from my hands. Once she's finished reading, she blinks, processing the information. "Mum's alive?"

I nod, the words not properly forming in my mouth.

"Are we going to do it?"

"Well, if it's going to get Mum back, yes."

We sneak out of the apartment and quietly tiptoe down to the facility. As we enter, the smell hits us. It's not particularly strong, but it's still not nice to smell the decaying bodies. I avert my eyes as we pass the dead, avoiding the broken glass, and navigating our way through the dark halls.

Cauley, who always uses shortcuts to get what she wants, lights her hand up, and a bright white glow emits from it, casting brightness onto the walls and corners of the halls. I'm not sure whether the Luckwoss would be happy that we are disturbing all the darkness.

We reach the door at the end of the hall and open it. The smell is a bit stronger here, the scent of death and decay overwhelming me as we go through the room, searching for anything of relevance. To be fair, we have searched here before, but we haven't found anything. But, just to be sure, we search anyway, trawling the drawers and cabinets for anything, anything at all. But there's nothing

We move on to the next room, which is smaller than the previous one and looks like an office. There's a desk, in the centre of the room, with a chair behind it, and labelled paper piles stacked on it. One was labelled RESULTS, another was TRIALS, and another; EFFECTS ON HUMAN BEINGS. On this pile, there is only one single sheet of paper. And it says this:

Entry: 18th June, 2017:

Through multiple tests and trials, we have found significant results when releasing the Luckwoss with a human being. We studied the human's cognitive behaviour and brain activity, while it was kept in a separate room, with only a white wall between the two organisms, so that they can't see each other. This is the CONTROL GROUP. Then, we looked at the behaviour and activity while they were in separate rooms, but there was only clear glass separating them. This was TEST GROUP 1. Then, we put the Luckwoss into the room where the human was in and studied their brain activity and cognitive behaviour in this case, called TEST GROUP 2. The results were outstanding. In the CONTROL GROUP, there was little to no indication of fear, or the amount of brain activity typically associated with someone who is being confronted by their fear. There were more increased indications, however, that someone who was being confronted by their fear in TEST GROUP 1, but was lessened because the test subject knew the Luckwoss couldn't reach him in his room. In TEST GROUP 2, there was the extreme indication that someone was confronting their fear, and when attacked, there was complete extremity to fear indications, and then, the test subject had died. This shows that the Luckwoss is extremely capable of killing anyone just with their own fear, making it extremely effective at killing humans. It was decidedly more effective on human test subjects than on magic people, but the test subjects were still put in a coma, and never survived. This is why we are going to release these creatures into this world, to kill all the humans, so that the magic people may live on, without these unevolved parasites of humans.