Flicker: The Game Of Chance

Chapter 8 | Just A Lab Rat

Infantile amnesia.

It may sound to you like a difficulty or disability thanks to the name, but it's actually a very common phenomenon that most people have. Infantile amnesia is the inability to recall your memories from when you were a toddler - till around 4 or 5 years old. This is something that most of the population suffer from, they can't remember their memories from when they were just a young child. I once heard somewhere that almost 99% of the population have infantile amnesia.

I was part of the 1%.

Well, if I'm being completely truthful, it's not that I did not have infantile amnesia, but it was that I had another disease, called hyperthymesia.

Hyperthymesia allows you to remember many of your childhood or latter memories in vivid detail. From this disease, I'd remembered everything in my life, from the moment I was born. The day I said my first words, the day I took my first steps, the day I got my first toy. It's all there, sharp in my memory. It seems like something straight out of fiction, but it's just how it was. Being a baby, most people have had a fairly normal childhood. They'd eat, cry a little, play, cry more and then sleep. This was, most definitely, the daily routine of most babies.

This was not the case for me.

Just a month after I was born, I woke up one day in an alleyway, inside of a trash chute. I wanted to cry, but for some reason I was unable to. I just laid inside the chute, with my eyes open, waiting, waiting for someone to find me. Preferably, that someone would've been a sane person. But, I guess, I fell into the wrong hands thanks to my awful luck. Looking back, I guess my parents abandoned me thanks to their supposed affiliations with Gloria Villa, and also thanks to learning what my future involvement with it would be.

They wanted to save me from what my grandmother planned to do with me, but in the end their plan did not work out; I was obtained by one of the 'Clan of Homicide' members. They planned to execute me there and then, but once they did a DNA test and found out my identity, I was handed over to a random lady who took care of me from then on.

Took care of me?

No, it was more like she used me for the clan's benefits. I suppose my grandmother was informed that I'd been found and captured, so she ordered the clan to raise me into a monstrous puppet for the purpose of herself and the clan's future entertainment. Once I turned 4 years old, they started to involve me in occultic activities. They made me memorize spells and chants which could bring back the dead back to life. However, it had a significant disadvantage.

Bringing back a person from the dead uses up a lot of my own sanity and blood. For the success of a ritual, I must use at least half a litre of my blood as an offering, so bringing back too many people from the dead could turn me into nothing but just as good as the person I was trying to revive. From the age of 4 to 10, I was not allowed to attend school like normal beings. I guess, in a way, I did go to school, but I had only one subject - The Occult. Every ticking second of every minute of every hour of every day, I was forced to memorize all that I could so I could excel and be a perfectionist as a reviver.

It all happened against my will.

I wanted a normal life, I wanted to go to school and have dozens of friends with a loving family who I could eat with and laugh with, but I was given none of that. I was alone for 10 years for my life, with the food being delivered to me every day to my supposed "cell" where I'd be forced to eat alone. The food had only slight variation - the same food would be given every day for a month. They'd include everything that needed to be given to me in order to stay healthy, they provided me with a balanced diet, but that's never what I wanted.

I just wanted to live normally. I wanted to feel loved by someone. Every day felt like a repetition, nothing but a copy of the previous day. I'd wake up then do my basic morning activities, then I'd do rituals, eat, do rituals, eat, do rituals then sleep.