For prisoners, incarceration was but a fleeting instant. Even prisoners who were still alive to some extent had all their activities halted by the containment measures.
There was no more metabolism, no more breathing, no more thought. Even the faint glimmer at the edge of the soul was frozen in a single instant, gradually becoming clear beneath the washing current of time like a creature preserved in amber. Every generation of Sorcerer Supreme had added more prisoners to this dungeon: from the stone tablets on which Agamotto had sealed demons, to the Holy Grail Merlin had stored here; from the Great Old Ones and Outer God avatars captured by the Sorcerer Supreme, to the keys the Emperor had placed here that led to the abyss of the universe.
Sometimes, the Emperor found interesting things among these prisoners—or rather, collectibles. For example, a round, four-legged land shark, and a half-flesh, half-silicon-based lifeform that had come to Earth from another world. Their confinement was relatively light. The Watchers trained the former as a hunting dog, while they hard-linked a holographic display and a specialized password input device to the latter, which Agamotto had defeated and stripped of its weapons and most of its functions, using it as a tool for production and recordkeeping.
The parchment records in the Emperor's hands had come from this source. After the alien silicon-based lifeform was subdued, its humanoid plastic-alloy arms were fixed in the posture of holding a quill, then it used compiled Watchers passwords to organize records on parchment. Yet the data soul of this half-flesh, half-silicon-based lifeform had not been completely extinguished. Sometimes, at the end of the parchment records' standard format, this data ghost would rather talkatively offer opinions that no one would ever accept.
The Watchers, who had lost both sight and