It wasn't until Emma had left the prison that had held her captive that she began to believe it was real.
She had been locked up there for far too long.
A year? Two years? Or maybe five? Emma didn't know. In the dim prison cell, which was less than ten square meters, her sense of time had long since faded.
Whenever she was taken out of her cell, she was first drugged, then brought to an operating table so they could draw her blood and take samples of her skin. In that state, she couldn't fight back at all. Her powers, which she had once been so proud of, were useless against the drugs and advanced technology. Every time she resisted, she was only subjected to more abuse. If not for her mutant physiology, which let her heal far better than an ordinary person, her body would have been covered in terrible scars by now.
All that time, she had prayed every day that her fellow mutants would come to rescue her. But as the days passed, hope had turned into despair. At last, she accepted reality. No one was coming to save her. She could only rely on herself.
But what could she do in that situation? Each time she was taken from her cell, anesthetic gas poured through the ventilation ducts. Her diamond form could protect her from the gas, but then the people outside might fire a rocket launcher at her from the doorway.
The cell she was held in was specially made, and strong enough to inspire despair. It could withstand thirty or forty direct hits from a rocket launcher without a scratch. In that situation, unless she dropped her diamond form, the people outside would keep firing until she was knocked unconscious or killed.