The Diary of Nick Dolce *ON HOLD*

Entry 2: New Discovery

That night, my insomnia got the best of me. It ate away at my sleep, sinking its sharp, apathetic teeth deep into my brain and refusing to let go like a wild, feral animal.

What if Reynaldo's idea ended up being a flop? What if he became injured - or even worse, died - during the cloning process tomorrow? I could never live with myself if I lost my best friend, and the only decent person I had left in my life.

I sat up in bed, rubbing my eyes with a weary sigh. Moonlight filtered through the bedroom window, spilling over the wooden floors. Some of the light snuck into the corners and crevices, catching the silver glint from some of the many weapons I kept on the north wall. A year ago, I had no need to keep swords, daggers and knives in my room. But times changed faster than I had anticipated - crime was on the rise, and I couldn't risk my safety, nor Reynaldo's. The home we currently shared together had been broken into more than ten times during the past week.

God dammit, I thought to myself. Go to sleep, Nicolas.

No matter how hard I tried to persuade my brain to let me sleep, my plan didn't seem to work. All that ran through my mind were images from earlier that day - witnessing the newborn clone die just as it was created, only living a few short seconds before its time here was done. Usually I preferred not to let these minor setbacks get to me so much, but this time it'd been different. I saw the life reflected in the clone's hazel eyes. A life form so innocent of any wrongdoing, so clueless of what the world around him held. He would never be given another chance at life, because it was gone. He was merely just another memory, destined to be forgotten about as time progressed. There hadn't even been anything left behind in his legacy; only a puddle of insides, that had miraculously disappeared.

If I could figure out why none of the tests we were conducting had been successful in the least, it would cut our time in half. As it was, both Reynaldo and myself had spent over one hundred hours or more attempting to artificially give life to an organism. I only had my observatory notes to go on, but none of them ever mentioned a complete and unstoppable breakdown of internal and external matter simultaneously. It was something I'd never encountered in the past during my time helping Reynaldo build up his research.

"Think Nick, think," I muttered to myself, well aware that I looked like an insane person talking aloud when no one else was around. "What could be causing this, and how do I stop it?"

Growing restless, I decided that I might as well utilise my free time the best that I could before the inevitable happened, and my body finally succumbed to physical exhaustion.

I swung my legs over the edge of my four poster canopy bed, stretching out my toes before me in the freezing cold room. Goosebumps rose to my skin as the soles of my feet met the icy floor, making my teeth chatter. I'd lit a candle before turning in for the night, but it'd burned out hours ago without my conscious awareness. I could see the thin wisps of grey smoke curling into the air as I glanced over toward the nightstand, eyeing the very scroll I was searching for.

I padded over to my destination, rolling off the red ribbon tied securely around the middle of the scroll. It unravelled as soon as the ribbon was gone, the bottom bouncing lightly against my thighs. Lines of neat cursive were inked into the parchment, each word thick and unreadable in the dark. The only source of illumination came from the moon in the sky outside, but even that wasn't enough to help me. I might as well have been trying to read a foreign language; my mind could barely comprehend any of the words stringed into sentences across the scroll.

I moved it across delicately into one hand, using my free one to feel along the nightstand for my steel. Once I felt my fingers close around the curved handle of the cold object, I struck it firmly against the edge of my piece of flint.