[Mirror Gardens]

The rhythmic clicking sound of a keyboard stirred Jesse from her sleep. Slowly opening bleary, blood-shot eyes she looked to her left where the sound came from. Sitting rather comfortably in her large pillow adorned chair, Niki was typing away on her laptop. Jesse groaned as the heavy scent of chemicals and other more herb based odors finally hit her. She was in the lab.
Upon hearing her groan, Niki paused and glanced up before looking back down at her computer screen. “About time you woke up. You’ve been out of it for the past eleven hours.” Pausing again, Niki reached out to the small table next to her chair and picked up her coffee mug. “How are you feeling?” After taking a sip of her coffee, Niki set the mug aside once again and resumed her previous typing. Jesse merely groaned again in response to the question. Despite the dimness of the lab, the blonde could be considerate at times, the lights only seemed to make the throbbing in her head worse. Moving to sit up, Jesse finally noticed the restraints that held her to a cold metal table.
“Sorry, we had to restrain you last night. And for now it would be best if you didn’t try to move around too much.” Niki finally set her laptop aside and made her way over to the table. “We had to pump you full of drugs just to get you to calm down.” Jesse twitched. Had she really lost that much control the other night? She just couldn’t remember. Her head felt like it had been beaten in with a sledge hammer. As she attempted to recall what happened, Niki pulled out a syringe and pressed the needle into the visible vein of Jesse’s left arm. Pulling back on the plunger, Niki withdrew some of her blood. With her sample collected, Niki cleaned away the excess blood that had began to surface from the needle entrance as she watched the small wound heal itself.
Watching the blonde scientist take her sample, Jesse still could not remember the events that lead to her current situation. She hated being restrained; even more she hated being restrained on one of Niki’s tables. While she adored the scientist and appreciated her attempts to cure her, the woman was truly frightening. Niki was not known by many, keeping her experiments strictly secret, but those who did know her knew of her obsession with perfection and attaining the results she wanted. She let nothing hinder her once she made up her mind to achieve something, and right now that meant finding a cure. While Niki cared little for what vampirism meant to everyone else, the fact that Jesse was infected made her more actively involved in finding an actual cure. Jesse was something like a younger sister to Niki. That and Jesse was in prime physical condition, despite her vampiric infection, making her the perfect candidate for experimentation. This left Jesse a bit nervous at times when left alone and restrained with the woman in her lab.
Niki left her side to take the sample to one of her many devices in the room. Jesse continued to watch, curious as to what she needed her blood for this time. Had she gotten closer to finding a cure? Jesse hoped so. While she did rather enjoy some of the benefits of having vampire blood in her, the urge for blood and the temporary black outs in which she lost control bothered her. The black outs are a relatively new occurance. Niki suspects that the infection is starting to spread again and has been keeping Jesse on a strict routine in which she gets weekly injections of her newest serum. Closing her eyes again Jesse tried to relax her muscles, her entire body ached. The sound of typing picked up once again. The rhythmic sound of key strokes lulled Jesse into a sleep once again.