Experimenter

Susan was an experimenter before she even became a scientist, an experimenter of things, an experimenter who tried finding new solutions, someone who grappled with new ideas, that's how she felt best described what she did.

She hated calling herself a scientist, that term was too bland and plain to even describe half of what she did, experimenter felt better but there was sadly no profession like that, so she had to choose being a scientist, no matter how deep her hatred ran for that term.

Death had fascinated her, it had captured her imagination as a young child, she had always grappled with the question of afterlife or what death was, it's true nature eluded her, and the elusiveness is what made her more curious.

Curiosity led her into becoming a scientist and that's what drove her to keep studying death. From studying she moved on to a bigger goal, just studying death wasn't enough, it didn't satisfy her curiosity, she needed a bigger aim, a goal that would make experimenting more thrilling.

And she found that thrill in trying to raise the dead, to reverse the damage caused by death was a more thrilling thing to pursue rather than just be a mere seeker, why not have the power to undo reality itself!

That became her passion then, she pursued her goal with a determination she had never found before but she was also very careful to hide her experiments and her goal from her colleagues and friends, she knew they would never understand her and there was no time to waste in explaining things to them.

She first tried studying plants and their healing power, she wanted to study their impact on cells and how she could formulate them to heal injuries faster or even prevent cell death. She tried out various plants for that purpose, going as far as taking foreign trips to collect them but none of them yielded any desired results.

A pang of frustration hit her but it wasn't enough to dull her passion, she knew she had to keep going, there was no point in giving up, she had to see this through the end!

She read books on necromancy, they weren't easy to find but she had her sources, she tried to note down every ingredient that could be of use and even if she was unsure of something, she didn't reject it, even if an ingredient had a slim chance of yielding some result, it was valuable and not to be discarded.

Black market wasn't off limits for her, she searched online and offline too through every black market she could possibly visit, there were ingredients so rare, so unique, that they were extremely difficult to find and the hope of accessing them lay only in the black markets.

Determination ran in her veins and she was ready to sacrifice everything she could for finding a way to raise the dead. Working through the night, going without food or water for hours or even missing out on spending holidays with her family, seemed too little a price for the greatness she was about to achieve.

Many experiments failed or gave results that weren't satisfactory but her passion refused to die down, there was nothing stopping her, no failure could get in her way!

One night, as she took break from her experiments, she saw faint purple spots on her arm, they made her slightly worried but she dismissed it as an insignificant thing and carried on. She thought maybe the spots would go away on their own.

They didn't, they only got darker but still it wasn't enough to worry her. A bit of anxiety gripped her mind, there was a nagging feeling that wrapped around her, she couldn't shake off the idea that the spots might be dangerous.

She observed the spots a bit, for a whole week there seemed to take place no change and it relieved her a bit. She felt they had even grown lighter, adding to her relief. The part of her that felt the spots would go away on their own eventually rejoiced.

But her joy was short-lived, the spots again grew a shade darker and there was no sign that they would go away on their own. She was hesitant but eventually decided to consult a dermatologist but even the dermatologist was of little help to her, he couldn't figure out what the spots were or their cause.

He speculated maybe they were caused by the long work hours and her busy schedule, that gave her immense stress, she felt the same too and even though she hated to relax, she knew she had to and modified her schedule.

But no matter how much she relaxed, there was no change in the spots. They began to itch, it wasn't intense but still enough to bother her and disrupt her daily life. She tried several over the counter creams but they didn't help at all, everything seemed useless on these stupid spots!

Worry began to gnaw at her, she didn't know what the spots were and there was no one to help her out, every remedy seemed to fail at providing her relief. Her mind had began to feel maybe those spots were dangerous but how or what harm they intended to do was beyond her.

She began having nightmares, she saw purple monsters tearing her apart and other grotesque things, all colored in different shades of purple. Sleep had been the least of her worries before but now it felt like a precious dream that felt far off from her reach. The spots had started to itch more and she felt irritated by them, she wanted to get rid of them anyhow but there was no way out of her misery.

She read through the necromancy books again and again but none of them talked about such a thing much to her despair. The experiments, the thought of raising the dead, her passion for that goal of her's, had all taken a backseat, nothing mattered more to her than her self-preservation.

Her nails began to turn a light shade of purple, horrifying her. She rushed to consult various doctors but all tests done on her yielded no clue to her condition, she felt like she was being experimented upon as she languished in misery.

Soon the spots appeared on her whole body and caused her immense pain, they no longer itched but the pain felt as if electricity was coursing through her. As she lay there in pain, unable to understand her situation, she knew one thing for sure, it was her unrelenting passion for experimenting with unknown things that got her in this miserable situation and she regretted every moment she wasted on her stupid goal.