[Sayori does not awaken elegantly to this situation. She tries to sit up too fast and bonks her head right on the metal top of her cage, she fidgets out of control trying and trying to stretch her sore limbs but simply not having enough room, she pokes and rattles every imaginable part of the cage wondering if there might be a weak point anywhere. She eats quickly when they awaken with food (usually.)

Even following some trips to the operating room — both her own and others' — Sayori tends to be a restless captive while she's not drugged. She has a hard time sleeping at all after the brain surgery, struggling to find a way to rest her head that doesn't agitate it, so she just stops trying and allows herself to drift off whenever sleep might take her in whatever position she happens to be in.]

A. [She spends a lot of time fussing over the others. Giving them reassuring smiles when she can, when it's appropriate. Catching their gaze with genuine concern when it's not the right time for a smile. And often asking softly:] How are you feeling?

[Never are you okay, because she's not that stupid. None of this is okay.]

B. [Maybe someone looks like they desperately need a distraction for whatever reason. Boredom, or anxiety, or sadness. Not in the direct aftermath of anything too gruesome, but— regardless of her own state, Sayori is on the case with a gentle offer.] Hey. Do you want to play a game with me?

C. [There's also this funny thing she does when not absorbed in conversation with the other captives. Occasionally, with her eyebrows furrowed in deep thought, she traces her finger along the bottom of the cage in short movements, as if she's writing. Those in adjacent cages can probably tell that she's tracing the shapes of letters, but of course there's no reading what she's "written" in this imaginary ink.]

[When she finally comes to after her first experiment, it's a sensation she's never felt before. It's even worse than her worst days, her body achey and heavy and simply hard to control in a way she has no point of reference for. It doesn't just feel like fog in her brain; it feels like everything is behind frosted glass, painfully inaccessible while she tries to wake up. The sounds of her surroundings are muffled, as if they're behind the glass too.

She eventually sits up, rubbing her eyes to try to clear the sleep from them. (It's not sleep, not really, but it makes her feel better to go through the same motions.) Her stomach feels a bit unsettled, so she spends a few moments just breathing deeply and hoping that will help.]

A. [The first thing to catch her attention is a sound — maybe someone speaking. Maybe someone speaking to her. It sounds fuzzy, and she can't make it out. She blinks, turning her head towards the source of the sound with an owlish look.] What?

[And that's when she notices, as she turns her head, that the sleepy muffled feeling changes direction. It follows to her right. She turns her head this way and that to test it, expression becoming puzzled, and lifts a hand to her right ear after a moment. Running her fingers over the shell of her ear, nothing feels out of the ordinary. So she cautiously inserts her pinky into her ear — maybe it's clogged? — and laughs with a nervous edge as she addresses who'd spoken.] Sorry, I didn't hear you! I guess my head's a little stuffy...?

B. [It's a little later, after a lot of uncomfortable fidgeting with her damaged ear, that she begins to wince as she rubs her earlobe between her index finger and thumb. But it's not from irritation on the outside; over the course of a mere few seconds, a fast-creeping ringing sound in her right ear goes from quiet to annoying to piercing.

She squeezes her eyes shut as it grows louder, hoping that might block it out, but it just seems to make it worse. Then she moves on to covering her ears with her hands, pressing her palms to them until she feels them go airtight. But the shrill sound overwhelms, resonating in her skull almost to the point of pain.

She stays like that for a full minute, bowed over her own knees with her hands pressed tightly to her ears and her eyes closed, face held in a tight expression of discomfort. She doesn't respond to any prompting. Only once the intense tinnitus subsides does she blearily open her eyes and look to anyone addressing her, clearly a little disoriented.] S— sorry, I just— did you hear that?

[Of course they didn't. But she's never had sounds in her head like that before. There's still a phantom tickling feeling in her ears as if vibrations from the nonexistent sound still linger.]

[It takes Sayori a lot longer to wake up from her second alteration. Her head is heavily bandaged when she's brought back, to the point that most of her hair is hidden beneath it, but there don't seem to be any visible changes beyond that. And for a while she just sleeps it off.]

A. [When she finally does wake, it's with a groan, and she doesn't start moving right away. Her head is— god, her head is killing her. Even after the first surgery, it didn't hurt like this, like she can feel every throb of her beating heart vibrating the cavities of her skull. She reflexively reaches up to touch her aching head as she rolls onto her side, but as she presses her fingers into the center of the bandaging at the front, a jolt of pain cuts straight through her skull from the tips of her fingers and her sharp yelp cuts the stale air of the room.

A full-body flinch accompanies the sound of pain; however, the sudden movement of Sayori curling in on herself like a pillbug jars her equilibrium in such a way that it sends the whole room spinning and makes her stomach turn. A cold sweat breaks out along the edges of her pale face and she closes her eyes to block out the swimmy quality of her vision.

She doesn't dare open her mouth until the heavy wave of nausea subsides. Even once it does, she doesn't sit up. She just clumsily brushes her fingertips along the edges of the bandaging, sluggish and nearly delirious as she asks of no one in particular:] What happened to me...?

B. [They went into her head.

I pop off my scalp like the lid of a cookie jar. That's exactly what they did. It was a metaphor when she wrote it. Wrote of her own hands scraping the inside of her head raw for every last drop of happiness that she could bottle up and give away. But no, here, they've actually— is that what they've done? Opened up her head and excised the happiness from it to be bottled for later use? They couldn't have, right?

It feels like it. But she can't know for sure. Not unless she takes off the bandages and rips her head right back open, and she'd probably get drugged again before she made it that far.

It would be normal to cry in this situation. She feels on some level like she wants to. But the realization brings her far away from her own body in the same way that the epiphany of Club President did; the horror is simply too vast, too personal to process at a normal emotional level. Her mind forces a disconnect upon her because it's the only way it knows how to cope with the situation: shut down and embrace the foggy oblivion of numbness, just as she does on the days that she can't bear to rise from her bed.

She spends a good amount of time simply staring into space, idly fidgeting with her bandages. When someone finally catches her attention, she fixes them with a distant, haunted stare — and then smiles, gently, sadly.] I'm okay. My head just hurts a little.

[As disoriented and exhausted and sick as Sayori feels, she doesn't notice right away that there's something different about her cage when she wakes up. She discovers it when she reflexively moves to stretch her limbs — and instead of knocking uselessly into the bars this time, her feet push the front of the cage open.

One second. Two seconds. Three seconds. It takes at least that long to absorb what she's looking at. And then she's scrambling out of her cage, heedless of the persistent headache and general fatigue of her battered body; this is the most awake she's looked since they were all taken.

She's quick to offer a word of encouragement to those who may not realize, or who look fearful of leaving. Perhaps they're physically struggling to leave for whatever reason; she's happy to offer a hand there, as well. All the while, she speaks in a soothing voice, lively with an edge of hope.] Hey— hey, it'll be okay, we can leave now!

[Some of the captives are surely like her, though, leaving their cages as soon as they're able. Once Sayori has done all she can do for the others, she begins to explore the lab, as driven to find answers as she is afraid of finding them.

For better or worse, the operating room is her first trip. It's closest, so that's where she ends up first, and— God. What a nightmare. Nausea overcomes Sayori as soon as she steps in and sees the table. Doubtlessly the very table where they were all cut open.

There are probably useful things to find in here. She manages to grab a scalpel, which she doesn't want to use, but her conversation with Sans about the dangers of this place weighs on her heavily and it's the most weaponlike thing she sees. However, her exploration of this room is cut short, because when she looks in the sink — when she finds the discarded viscera — she can't. She can't. She can't bear to look but she can't look away either, and there are fleshy bits and gore she doesn't recognize, and— and something gray and pulpy rots at the bottom of the sink, and what part of the body is gray—?

Her free hand flies to her head. Either from the resulting pain or the smell or the realization, she can't stop herself from emptying the paltry contents of her stomach into the sink.

She's gone from the operating theater quickly after that. Until rescuers begin to arrive, she pilfers as many first aid supplies as she can fit in the pockets of the pajamas she was snatched up in. She holds the scalpel tightly in one white-knuckled hand as if she'd ever actually have the wherewithal to use it, but even when she's finally discovered and startles at the presence of someone else in the room, she doesn't move to wield it properly. Her face is still pale, her skin a little clammy.] Ah— who's there?

[ If you'd like something different with Sayori, either in captivity or during the escape, feel free to hit me up on plurk at ceesawaseesaw or at my plotting post! ]