Online RP Thread (Lead up to Bloody Valentine)

Dorchester moves in the direction indicate shuffling the pack to sit more comfortably, “fighting you say Ma’am, 'ow bad as it been round 'ere?”

Work is harder today. Zek’s hands hurt; his head hurts. The stretcher in the infirmary is uncomfortable to sleep on, and several times in the night he woke up to hear the others in the infirmary groaning in pain or stifling sobs.
Despite that, he is content today. As he walks back from the lighthouse, having retrieved the message he was leaving at the dropbox for Leo, he hears birds singing. It’s not an unusual sound, but it reminds him of many things - the hills outside Ireland he was traveling through with Amadeus, and the peace at the shore when he first arrived. For a moment, he thinks of those travels, waking up and hearing no cries of pain, but just birdsong and running water and the gentle breathing of Amadeus in the bed on the other side of the room.

He misses him greatly, but there is so much to do and not too much time for sentimentality. He thinks of Lewy, in the laboratory, working hard to keep his grief at bay. He stops outside the taverna and burns the message he retrieved, fumbling with the match in his hands, which are still dumb and imprecise. And then he enters, nodding to Ivy and a man he doesn’t recognise as he passes them at the door.

Dorchester returns the nod but continues walking past as he is lead to his new bunk.

Dahlia silently lay in the infirmary, able to hear most of the camp. Her father again fast asleep in his chair. She keeps hearing tired voices. Some familiar, but some unfamiliar. Occasionally she gets a visitor, but many don’t wish to come in if they can help it. These scars and all wounded are not only reminders of what happened, but also what was lost. The infirmary is quiet, but occasionally she can make out the sobs of another. Dahlia could feel her heartbreaking a little bit everytime she heard that now all too familiar sound.

Esther resumes reading after Ivy and Dorchester leave, picking up the book Orpha’s left for her with great interest, talking to Harriet as she examines the introduction.

“Your Aunty Orpha’s brilliant, sweetling. Crazy, but brilliant- I’m glad you didn’t meet her when her crazy was a less manageable level. Still, she’s the best resource I could ask for if I’m going to…” she trails off as Zek comes in and waves, then waves. She smiles and nods to the spot on the floor beside her and motions to her cup of tea then nods back to him, a questioning look on her face.

From her corner in the infirmary all Cailin can see is blood, and she can’t get the sound of screams and tears out of her head, her back hurts from the sword slash and the stitches but after the last push to help everyone three days ago the stitches have not broken again. Doctor Daniel keeps checking on her and pouring relaxant down her throat, but nothing changes the screams and tears, Cailin is broken

Walking purposefully down the hall way, a cup of steaming tea in one hand and a number of freshly bleached bandages held in the other, Doctor Ashdown turns sharply to enter the infirmary.

Setting his Union Jack mug quietly on the window ledge before returning the cotton bandages to the chest, their make shift home, he scans the room. The older woman lying on the stretcher was awake and seemed calmer than earlier, he approached testing her temperature gently with the flat of his fingers.

He smiled at her, perhaps with a look of pity in his eye, he’d seen this before, a fellow professional who had snapped under the pressure of everything happening at once. Front line medicine was a very different beast to the every day care many were used to. Hopefully he’d be able to reduce the dose of sedative over the next few days as she came to terms with what she’d been through.

Refiling the white enamel cup that lay near her hand with fresh water, he slowly spoke to her in an attempt to get through. “You must drink as much as you can Cailin, keep your fluids up, you lost a lot of blood, but everything will be just fine.” He Smiling again he turned away wondering who he was trying to convince.

Crossing the room to where the young doctor lay, her colourful hair contrasting sharply with the clean white sheets which had been recently changed by Nurse Blake. He picked his way past her doting father who lay exhausted, slumped in the chair he’d all but refused to leave since she’d been injured.

“How are you feeling Doctor Swanhilde?” He enquired, noticing the uneaten bowl of thick brown grey paste that lay next to her. Pointing at the unappetising meal with an accusatory finger “You should know better than most you need to eat to keep your strength up.” He smiled, “I find it helps if you hold your nose for the first few spoons.”

[quote=“Bryn”]Crossing the room to where the young doctor lay, her colourful hair contrasting sharply with the clean white sheets which had been recently changed by Nurse Blake. He picked his way past her doting father who lay exhausted, slumped in the chair he’d all but refused to leave since she’d been injured.

“How are you feeling Doctor Swanhilde?” He enquired, noticing the uneaten bowl of thick brown grey paste that lay next to her. Pointing at the unappetising meal with an accusatory finger “You should know better than most you need to eat to keep your strength up.” He smiled, “I find it helps if you hold your nose for the first few spoons.”[/quote]

“Perhaps I should shut my eyes too to distract me from it’s ugliness” she joked, forcing herself to take a spoonful of whatever it was they provided for “food”. “Oh and call me Dahlia, Daniel. You and I are well past those sorts of formalities now after the few days we’ve had”

Dahlia looked up at the smiling doctor. “How are the other patients doing? I’m afraid I won’t be much help with the hands on medicine for a while”. She added “despite my best efforts” as she shot a glance towards her father who sat there fast asleep.

As the young woman struggles with her food, Daniel watches patiently giving encouraging nods each time she raises the spoon to her mouth.

Once she’d had her fill of ‘food’ he indicates she should lean forward so to check over her dressings. The wide cotton strip wrapped around her torso was unstained bringing a relieved look to the Doctors face.

“Your father is right to have you rest, it’ll speed your recovery, Doc… Dahlia,” he corrects himself. Years of military training and the stiff upper lip of society making it hard to shake his habit of titles.

“The others have been discharged, they’re to report in daily until fully recovered.” Frowning, “well except poor Miss Quigg who’ll need to be supervised for the foreseeable future.”

“Ah yes” Dahlia sighs, glancing over at the only other occupied bed. “You and I have probably seen our share of events like today. I think Cailin had been lucky to avoid it until now”

After a few seconds of silence, Dahlia decides to break it. “Still”, she adds, "Even with the amount of violence and death I have seen in my short life, I am still trying to figure out how I manage to get up in the morning, let alone sleep some nights"
Her father let out a huge breath in his sleep. Smiling, she chuckled “or even how he can sleep so peacefully at a time like this”

The pain in her arm and her back now flared simultaneously. With clenched fists, she waited until the pain dropped down to a bearable threshold. ‘Great’, she couldn’t help but think, ‘now I have two sets of scars to cause me pain’.

[quote=“DapperAeronaut”]Lewy sits hunched over the engineering workbench, staring blankly at a set of blueprints laid out before him. He figets with his pencil.

“What if I…” he begins, and makes a small adjustment to the plans. “No, no,” he finishes, and erases it. “Maybe if I make the wings a bit more… no. That won’t work.”

He yawns. It’s clear he hasn’t slept recently, but that doesn’t matter to him. The plans, the work. Anything to keep himself busy. He reflexively goes to grab at something around his neck, and seems puzzled to find it’s not there. “Oh, right,” he says out loud, remembering who he’d given it to.

Quietly, his head slumps forward onto the bench, and he passes out on the blueprints for his new airship.[/quote]

As Dr Montgomery enters the workshop again, she finds Lewy’s passed out form and quietly chuckles. Leaving a glass of water and some food by him, she grabs some blueprints and limps off to retrieve the resources for her experiment dropped off that morning.

She smiles inwardly at the thought of the possible progress made, her mind swimming with new and exciting ideas. Orpha notices Daniel in the infirmary on her way past and her face suddenly turns to stone. She hurries by in order to remain unnoticed.

A frown crossed the mans face as Dahlia clenched her fists in obvious pain.

“We need to discuss a treatment for that wound on your arm.” He gently rolled her sleeve up to inspect the full extent of the injury. “You said it happened almost five years ago, and that it was caused by a demons claws?” She nodded in reply.

“And there’s been no real sign of improvement in all that time since the wound knitted together?” Again another nod.

Daniel looked troubled, “I’ve dealt with many similar injuries, usually a healthy dose of blessed water and the correct treatment sees a full recovery. Something is obviously aggravating the wound.”

“Could the fiend have been infected, perhaps a plague demon or the like? What do you remember of it and the attack?”

[quote=“Bryn”]A frown crossed the mans face as Dahlia clenched her fists in obvious pain.

“We need to discuss a treatment for that wound on your arm.” He gently rolled her sleeve up to inspect the full extent of the injury. “You said it happened almost five years ago, and that it was caused by a demons claws?” She nodded in reply.

“And there’s been no real sign of improvement in all that time since the wound knitted together?” Again another nod.

Daniel looked troubled, “I’ve dealt with many similar injuries, usually a healthy dose of blessed water and the correct treatment sees a full recovery. Something is obviously aggravating the wound.”

“Could the fiend have been infected, perhaps a plague demon or the like? What do you remember of it and the attack?”[/quote]

Dahlia managed to ignore the pain for now in order to answer. “I… don’t remember much” she replied. “It was so long ago and I was so young… and so scared”.

She tried to picture it in her head. Her mother torn apart by those things, her father screaming and carrying her out the door before being dragged back in. She kept picturing it. ‘Oh god’ she thought. She had never let her mind wander this far. She was running through the snow, tears streaming down her face and all of her covered in blood from the scratches she sustained. She kept running until she felt something grab at her ankle. Her face hit the ground hard and sent her saw flying out of her hand. Turning on her back, she saw what she now knows is a demon. It lunged at her and screaming, she closed her eyes and put her arm in front of her face as it took a swipe at her. While remembering this part, Dahlia’s arm flares up with pain. ‘No, keep going’ she thought. Blood came spurting from her arm, but she managed to grab her saw and with a desperate swing, she got the demon in the face as it came back for more. The demon let out an earsplitting growl. She took another swing with effort and it’s head came clean off. Remembering what her father had told her about these things, she grabbed her flask of what he called “magic water” and poured it all over her arm. It burned like nothing she had experienced and she lay in the snow screaming from it. After what felt like hours lying there, her arm stopped hurting as much. The pain was still very present and showed no signs of leaving. Slowly getting up, she looked at her arm. The bleeding had stopped itself. But the wound remained open and fresh, yet…clean. The surrounding area however looked infected. Dahlia looked for the creature she had just killed. It was nowhere to be seen. Ignoring her attack, she collapsed to the ground and screamed for her family. She was now all alone.

Wiping the tears from her face, Dahlia quickly snapped back to reality. “I’m sorry Daniel, I don’t know what it looked like. It just seemed to vanish after I had dealt with it”

The doctor stood there as she began to cry. Unsure how best to deal with the situation, he removed a plain cotton handkerchief and passed it to the young woman, whilst clasping her reassuringly on the shoulder.

“Try not to worry about it, if you can’t remember or you aren’t sure we’ll simply start with the most obvious options.” He paused momentarily to consider a number of options, “I read a file case on an attack in Constantinople where the demons claws exuded a black ichor that if left untreated made it’s way into the patients internal organs, corrupting them from the inside.”

Perhaps he thought that wasn’t what she needed to hear at the moment. “Chances are that’s not what happened in your case though, as it proved fatal in a matter of weeks.”

Kneeling down at the side of the bed Daniel takes a closer look at the inflamed scars. “I think the first course of action will be, with your agreement, some exploratory surgery to see what, if anything, is going on inside.”

Standing back up, “As you’re going to be out of action anyway for the next few weeks, the next few days may be as good a time as any to conduct it. A thorough investigation and make some decisions from there.”

Zek looks at it for a moment, tempted to spend some time with his friend and goddaughter, but eventually, he has to tear himself away. He gestures to the rooms behind the taverna, the infirmary and the laboratory, and makes an ‘L’ shape with his hand. After a moment’s pause, he adds a ‘W’ in the air to the right of where the ‘L’ would have been. Lewy. He looks questioningly at Esther, as though asking permission to go, and she nods.

Zek crouches down and brushes his thumb gently across the sleeping infant’s cheek, and then does the same to Esther. As he walks through towards the laboratory, he wonders whether or not he had heard Harriet crying in the forest that afternoon. Not to be helped, he thinks. They got her back safe and sound, that’s all that matters. And he learned something important from the experience, so that’s something to be happy about, too.

Lewy is still asleep, and Zek looks at him with a strange combination of relief and nervousness. He’s still alive, after all: still fighting, and designing… something that looks very impressive but that Zek will stay the hell away from, thank you very much. But that note that he left for Zek, something written under the haze of impending death. “My one regret is that you had not been so shy…” Zek’s hand goes to the cladach ring in his pocket. He wants to wake Lewy up, to say something to him, to explain how he needs to grieve, but he can’t do any of those things. Instead, he goes to the infirmary.

[quote=“Bryn”]“I think the first course of action will be, with your agreement, some exploratory surgery to see what, if anything, is going on inside.”
“As you’re going to be out of action anyway for the next few weeks, the next few days may be as good a time as any to conduct it. A thorough investigation and make some decisions from there.”[/quote]

Dahlia slowly nodded. “I think that might be best. Providing that this is kept between us. No need to cause more stress for everyone here.” she said guilt-fully, while looking towards where her father sat.

“When would you like to do this?”

[quote=“BlackDahlia”]

“When would you like to do this?”[/quote]

Zek rounds the corner into the infirmary immediately before Dahlia says this, and finds himself instantly regretting that the infirmary has nothing he can knock on to announce his presence. Instead, he just stands there, looking slightly startled, before grabbing a few bandages and making a move to leave again. Of course, Dahlia can see the curiosity in his eyes.

"[quote=“BlackDahlia”]“When would you like to do this?”[/quote]

“Hmm”, he considered the question at length. “I think we should give your back a few days for the tissue to knit together, reduce the chance of blood loss if the injury becomes aggravated.”

“I’ve asked my sister Isabella for some help in building some equipment I’ve used in the larger hospitals. Whilst we muddled through with some thick needles and rubber tubing from the laboratory, but I’m keen to have a better system for the transfusion of blood.”

“She’s offered her help, they’re simple enough devices the trick will be getting her to keep from adding too many improvements.” Smiling reassuringly, “I’ve seen sketches of a machine that can vaporise liquid morphine and funnel it through a breathing apparatus, useful for immediate pain relief, or even full on deep sleep for more involved surgery.”

“I think give it a week or so, if you think you can deal with the pain.”

Dahlia smiled a little at this. "I’ve been dealing with this for many years, I think a few more days will be fine"
Her focus then was brought to Zek, whom she noticed had entered and looked like he had regretted this decision.

“How are you doing Zek?” she asked in order to catch Daniel’s attention to the visitor in the room

[quote=“BlackDahlia”]

“How are you doing Zek?” she asked in order to catch Daniel’s attention to the visitor in the room.[/quote]

Zek shrugged, and held up the bandages. Then he fished a pencil and a scrap of paper out of his pocket, crossed something off from it and wrote something in its place. He held the paper close enough that Dahlia could see. ‘Not bad. Feels a little strange. Pain, but also absence.’

He scribbled an amendment: ‘Are you planning something?’