Yikes!
“Yes. It’s like that.” I carefully didn’t sit across the table from him. Not yet. Instead, I had a security officer very carefully place the Box in front of Nemo; she and I stepped forward to insert and two keys simultaneously in its back, to reveal a small handheld trigger. I politely ignored the way the security officer beat a hasty retreat afterward. I didn’t blame her for that, after all. If I didn’t need to stay, I would have done the same thing. Instead, I waited until everyone else had left the room, carefully stepped back to the wall, and pushed the trigger that opened the Box.
What’s in the Yellow Box? According to pictures, a weird bit of Amalgamation battery tech. It looks like a ten-sided crystal trapezohedron that radiates energy that we can barely see. What it does is mess with your optic nerves, making you see things that aren’t there. Horrible things.
Yes, it’s a torture device — but not in the way you think. For normal people, the torture comes when you open the Box. For cultists, it comes when you close it. They see the same things we do, you see; they just like them.
I gave Nemo the full two minutes before the Box closed again, carefully staying well behind the lid. After it closed, I waited patiently for the rocking and attempts to scream through the gag to end before talking again. “Here’s how it goes. There’s always at least one cell of you left behind when you do one of these missions. Give us names and their location, and you get the Box again. Don’t, and you’ll spend the rest of your life without it.”