Formaldehyde.

Antisceptic.

Raw meat left out.

Iron, or something similar - a tool? Blood?

Burnt, cauterized fat.

Bone dust, they had learned over the week, smelled of corn chips.

Green tea and black tea, wet and warm.

Faint scents. Restless, distant rattling. Mechanical whirring. This was the background against which the six shrunken patients existed. Not all of them could be said to still walk, talk, breathe, or think clearly. None could be said to sleep. At this point, the people merely existed inside the transparent confines of glass containers. Existed, and perhaps, despaired - but they did not live there. This was not life. These bodies, these procedures, these terrors - these couldn't be what life was.

They'd changed over their stay. Mutated, curled, ripped and rebuilt anew. And yet, she remained. She was the same. That immense creature who swayed and wobbled through the door; white lab coat's tails trailing behind her confident, booming steps; blonde hair in the sky drifting around thick bolts in her cranium. Her wide, glazed, yellowish eyes looked at them with the same detatched, sleepy intrigue as when they'd entered the mansion. When they were full-sized.

"Pulses still within acceptable range of 500-600 bpm. Gas exchange increasing, resize airway lumen and recalibrate humidifiers to regulate diaphragm's oxygen. Fine motor control evaluation show jitters and spasms, though outside the conditions for dysdiadochokinesia. Verify peripheral nerve connections, clear cerebrospinal fluid ventricles, prepare dexterity training. Cellular mitosis remarkably energetic and reactive to cyclins - good work, little bacteriaaaa~"

She used her left hand to hold a medical chart; and her right hand to scrawl notes in it; while her other hands tapped and brushed the jars holding her specimens, or adjusted dials as she walked by their enclosures. Stitches ran down the joints, as if some fingers or phalanges had fallen off, and been replaced. Between them, every bit of skin was clean, spotless and smooth as a porcelain doll.

Except that porcelain dolls didn't move. Porcelain didn't have sinews, veins, aortas; flexing, pumping, bulging, popping, crackling, breathing beneath thin wafers of flesh in an excited frenzy. Porcelain couldn't have that smile, that knowing smile that ripped past her lips and across her cheeks.

That was Fran Madaraki.

Anderson sobbed in a corner, holding his knees. His fluids pooled and spilled around his seat. "Kill me..."

Fran's head rotated to him. "No."

Pedro scratched at his neck, hunched over, hacking up bile. His nostrils flared. "Kill... me...! You sick... fuck...!"

The doctor's forefinger rubbed fog from his glass. "You'll live."

Tessay's garbled, minuscule voice barely left millimeters before his face. "K... kggk..." He struggled to get the smallest bit of air in his flooded, tiny lungs.

"You all agreed to my conditiooons..." From above, the unsteady colossus wrote notes with the speed of a typewriter.

In the largest enclosure, Hadi and Bello shrieked over each other with a singular, hysterical voice: "Kill us! Oh God - kill us!"

Fran's neck tilted sideways at the shivering shapes within. "Why?" She glanced with genuine confusion as they sunk into each other.

The last of the hall's five containers held Liu. Words and motion were distant memories within. If she could, she would flail out and beg as soon as Fran's majestic medical smock came into view, draping around her legs. But the subject was motionless, frozen.

In the corner, there stood a spectre - only half a head smaller than Fran and imposingly quiet. A bucket hat over her short, dark hair. A winter coat sightly covering her scarred, blood-drenched hands. Veronica Madaraki, younger sister and bodyguard of the household, loomed perfectly still, besides the occasional twitch. She'd been there the whole time; yet sunk in as a background element, part of the horrifying scenery stretching out sickening distances and curving through the glass like a hall of mirrors.

Turning back one more time, as she finished her notes, the titan-scale surgeon held one of her index fingers up. "The Hippocratic Oath. My Professor has taught me its intricacies. I'm sure you all know it, even though few physicians still swear by Apollo Healer." She closed her eyes, and clasped her fingers in nostalgia. "Hold your teacher equal to your parent. Divulge no secrets from your patients. Administer no poison. And of course, most famously... Do no harm."

Her silhouette sunk into the doorframe, Veronica swiftly trailing like a shadow against the wall. "So don't worry, any of you. I will nurture you. I will keep your secrets safely shut in this room." She made a zipping motion across her friendly, grinning scars. "And as long as you're within my care, none of you will die. That is my solemn promise. These hands exist to keep you alive and safe."

Fran's eight palms reached out to them, open and welcoming. The hopeless shrinkees' shaking, pained arms struggled against the glass, gripping desperately, as she shut the door behind her.