Pyromancy

Chapter 14 - Closer

[Hidden Hydra Testing Facility; Nevada, USA]
[Early 2014]

Two scientists approached the windowed side of a two-way mirror, looking into the small reinforced chamber on the other side. "Is he ready?", one asked the other, nodding his head towards the subject strapped to the operating table, prepped for some kind of procedure.

"Yes, Doctor. Both the scepter and the salvaged Extremis formula are ready to be applied to the subject at your word.", the second man replied, with a heavy foreign accent. The doctor nodded in response, before pushing a button mounted on the wall in front of them.

"You may begin. Bring the components into the chamber.", the doctor ordered, and two Hydra technicians in hazmat suits entered the chamber. One carried a canister of a glowing red-orange material, which was mounted in a large box-shaped machine off to the side of their test subject, with tubes hooked up to a few key points on his body.

"This is a highly volatile material doctor.", the lead technician warned, "the original wave of it with A.I.M....", "Had a high percentage of unstable reactions, yes. But, I have done the proper calculations to assure our success here.", the doctor affirmed.

They were both looking through the window as the second technician in the chamber produced a long  and flat case, one that had just arrived in transport from another Hydra facility, whose Baron allowed them to loan it out to this facility's experiment.

All in the name of the next big weapon to finally crush the Avengers.

The case was opened, and Loki's scepter was taken out. The tech mounted it in an energy conduit, the outputs aimed at the subject. "We've made sure to take subjects with suitable attributes to accept Extremis, and if that isn't enough to take...", the doctor continued, as the whole mechanical system in the small reinforced room hummed to life.

"...There's a more potent element to make the bond this time.", the doctor finished with a confident smirk on his face as he watched the technicians leave the room, and the machinery start powering up further.

The building noise awoke the young man strapped to the table, as he stirred, his eyes blinking awake as he weakly lifted his head and looked around.

He was scrawny and pale, looking visibly malnourished from his time he'd been held here. His light brown hair was longer now than it was when he'd been abducted, and he'd grown a patchy stubble on his lower face. His gray eyes had grown dull and resigned over the years, and he'd lost almost all the fight in him.

"Nice to see you've awoken, Subject Zero-Seven. Just in time for the procedure to begin.", the doctor's voice called to him over the room's speakers, with an eerie sort of enthusiasm to it. All the young man could do was look weakly towards the mirror he knew they were watching him from the other side of in tired confusion for what they were going to do.

The whirring and humming of the machinery got louder, and with a soft hiss of air, the section beside him began ejecting the orange fluid within, sending it through the clear tubing, and into his body.

Pain. White-hot, searing and agonizing pain, like molten metal being slowly forced through his body. That's what the young man felt as he began screaming out in distress, his body beginning to glow with heat.

Sparks and embers gently cascaded from his ignited form, getting hotter by the second, and feeling the burning pain with an increasing rate. He writhed and thrashed on the table, trying to do something, anything to lessen what he was feeling in the moment.

As he grew more and more desperate for relief, the monitors on the other side of the glass began beeping rapidly with alerts of the critical energy levels. "He's unstable, we need to stop this!", the second-in-command exclaimed, but the doctor was unmoved. "This was expected. Now for the second stage...", he replied calmly, hitting a command on the console, triggering the mount for the scepter.