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The Chamber of Life

Deep within the castle is skekTek the Scientist's laboratory known as the Chamber of Life.  Here he keeps a wicker cage full of Pod People.

There is a row of metal chairs fitted against a stone wall.  Specimens are clamped into the chairs by tightening a wormscrew.  In a bracket at the front of the chair is a crystal to which a long glass tube is attached.  The tube is slightly inclined, and beneath its lower extremity the Scientist places a jeweled flask.

With the pulling of a lever, a portal swings open in the wall opposite the chairs.  Behind the portal, a vertical shaft is revealed, down the center of which a continuous beam of energy, violet in color, is visible.  At the far bottom of the shaft, deep within the planet's crust, the beam terminates in a lake of fire.

With the pull of another lever a rod swings out from the side  of the vertical shaft.  To the end of it a prism of crystal is attached.  The rod moves the prism into the beam of energy and holds it there, refracting a violet ray across the laboratory and into the specimen's face.  A crackling force field then jumps from the specimen's fingertips, at the end of their extended arm, and meets the crystal in front of the chair.  There, it condenses into thick, oily droplets, which run down the incline of the tube and drip into the flask.

Within the chamber is a cabinet, on the shelves of which are lain out the maimed and dismembered bodies of all kinds of creatures.  Some of them are still, morbidly, alive, but the Scientist is not worried that they will escape.  In none of them remain the will to do so.  Elsewhere in the laboratory, recently captured animals, still healthy until they are subjected to the Scientist's experiments, are confined to cages or tethered to the floor.

The laboratory is littered with the rotten fruits of skekTek's work since the last Great Conjunction.  From all sorts of living beings, bones and flesh, marrow, filament, leaf, and tissue have been subjected to every tortuous experiment the Scientist was able to devise.  There is a retort of Myrrhie fins he has been steeping for weeks in two acids, distilling the resultant liquor.  As soon as he drank it, he became ill.

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This is an unofficial DARK CRYSTAL website.  THE DARK CRYSTAL, characters, names and related indicia are trademarks of The Jim Henson Company.  © 2001.  Artwork by Brian Froud.  Visit the official website at www.henson.com.