Dorchester holds up his hand, “its okay, i crossed a line obviously, one we weren’t aware of in china, i meant no offence to you, …or the compn’y. look hows about we get a cuppa and carry on with the grand tour eh?”
Ivy starts a little as Orpha sits down next to them. Then looks down and the sleeping Harriet and back up. “Harriet is? I suppose she will, if that’s what she wants. Though between all the people that will help in raising her I doubt there will be any shortage of teachers. I mean look at this, early access to the greatest mind of our age and everything.”
Ivy looks down at the crate Orpha was lugging. “Talking of which, what’s that for?”
[quote=“sophmelc”]
Ivy looks down at the crate Orpha was lugging. “Talking of which, what’s that for?”[/quote]
Zek looks up from his spot in the corner. He has been meditating on incantations for a while now, trying to imbue the flask with some kind of spirit, but he’s not entirely sure it’s been working. He can hear quiet clattering in the back room of the taverna.
Still, the prospect of a Mystery Crate is more than enough to pique his interest. He tries to look nonchalant.
Spying Zek as she returns to the Taverna, Esther approaches his table. She points at the back room, making the shape of an L and then a W with her fingers, then indicates herself and Zek, tilting her head as though asking his understanding.
Although Zek sees Esther approaching, the Mystery Crate is sitting there, still in his field of vision. He’s tempted to continue sitting there, waiting to see what’s inside, but when Esther signs ‘LW’ to him, the realisation of what’s going on is almost immediate. He grabs his notebook and flask and clambers to his feet, casting one last envious glance at the crate before heading to the back room.
Lewy is sitting there, drowning his sorrows although it is barely one in the afternoon. He looks up, startled, as Zek enters, but Zek tries his best to look non-threatening. Something’s going on, and he’s yet to figure out what precisely it is.
Esther grabs a candle and match from the table behind the bar follows Zek behind the curtain. It takes several tries, but she lights the wick and places it on the ground so that they’ll be able to see one another, then borrows a blanket from Lily’s bed and drapes it around Lewy’s shoulders before settling into the cushion pile.
Zek and Esther arrive to find Lewy lounging on the cushions. He seems to have found a bottle of whiskey somewhere, and is nursing it carefully. He looks up as they walk in, a tortured look in his eyes. “Well,” he says, “You’re probably wondering why I’m so damn messed up. Let me start at the beginning, and please,” he pleads with them, "no interruptions. I’m not sure I’ll be able to start again if I falter.
“It all started a couple of years ago, when I got chosen to work on the Elysium Project…”
He spins a tale of love, and loss. Of cruel deeds done in the name of war. Of hope, and crushing despair. His tone seems deliberately detached, almost clinical, though emotion starts breaking through towards the end.
Lewy pauses for a moment, and takes a deep swig from the bottle.
“She gave birth last week. A boy. Called him Áedán dùil. Our little flame of hope. We didn’t have any holy water. They… they came, and…”
He takes another swig, and begins to sob bitterly. “Demons. They… both. Bitten.”
He dissolves into tears.
Now the infirmary was quieter again Daniel took the opportunity to check on Cailin again.
He hovered over her stretcher, waiting momentarily for her eyes to focus enough to acknowledge his presence. She’d been under moderate sedation since her break down on the battlefield. Her panicked attempts to help other patients had aggravated her own injuries, bursting the stitches in her own wound.
“Nurse Blake” calling over to Margaret, “Ms Quigg will need some help soon with a change of clothes and the like, is that something you’ll have time for?”
He caught the eye of his fellow doctor momentarily who’s attention had also now focussed on Cailin. “What are you thinking doctor?”
[quote=“sophmelc”]
Ivy looks down at the crate Orpha was lugging. “Talking of which, what’s that for?”[/quote]
“Oh this? It’s just the supplies for my Miniature Land Reclamation device. it should increase the speed of the growth of crops tenfold! If this works I’m wanting to give this away to other refugee camps. My team and I are still working on the device to make infertile land fertile again. Speaking of which, got to go. Far too much work to do!”
Dr Montgomery painfully makes her way back to her feet.
Cailin looked up into Dr Daniels eyes and while they were calm and everything around her was calming, she couldn’t fight the feelings of betrayal and terror that had twice now occurred within the relative safety of Skye from ravaging her mind.
as a healer she knew logically the body and mind had systems to allow it to heal but as the patient lying on the bed those systems weren’t working,
something terrible had happened that day at the bandit camp…
Cailin blinked, Dr Daniel was still standing there had it only been a moment or an hour?
Sarah prowled around the edge of the camp in the form a small wolf, reflecting on her mistakes. She’d been in a bad mood, that had been the problem. The need to harm the humans surrounding her had been pricked by the kidnapping, and her temper had been too sharp. Perhaps if she had managed to show a little more kindness to #74, the one innocent in the room, #74 wouldn’t have gone straight to the Hellsing….
Sarah crouched down in sudden remembered terror, the Hellsing coming towards her with an axe… Her fur stood on end and she realised she was whining. Stupid bodies, they had a mind of their own, she was sure. It had been human instinct that was the problem that night, sending her running towards the closest large power for protection. Now, instead of the neutrality she’d planned to maintain until a winner had become clear, she served Dagon… who had just said “well done, you have pleased me, now go back and find out more.” And then had promptly lost a battle. Again. Stupid human-body instincts
#74 probably would have gone to the Hellsing anyway. The poor thing couldn’t not obey the rules, and the monster had been wandering around all evening, talking to people. He’d even told Sarah to call him “Father Wilde”. Sarah shuddered. Hopefully the message she left with the silly forest girl had gotten through.
Sarah had seen a lot from her vantage point in the trees, (though she’d decided to be selectively deaf, blind and dumb regarding Dagon’s embarrassment on harvest day) She’d seen ridiculous hat girl return alive, she’d carefully noted Surt’s still loyal cultists and the girl who thought to command them with silver… She’d even switched places with one of the forest folk who left the campsite to relive themselves, and had learned about a human hero named Ford who dared desecrate her new boss’s shrine and then saved the lives of everyone in the camp.
She’d seen the torture of Fluffy 4, the starved and stupid slave who had missed his human mistress so badly and only wanted to play…
For that they would all suffer.
It was time to get over her mistakes. The camp had become Prince infested over the weekend anyway, so neutrality probably wouldn’t have been an option for much longer. Not to mention that the Van Hellsing had hardly been the only danger…
At the edge of her senses she felt another of her kind snuff out of existence. Her ears flattened against her skull in fear. She had no idea what was doing that and she wasn’t getting any closer to find out. It had been happening for the past few days and it made it quite urgent that she get out of this forest.
She looked down at herself and let out a sigh. Dogs were too conspicuous and people did insist on owning them, mice annoyed her by being prey, her private, embarrassing attempts at flight meant she wasn’t going to try birds in public view anytime soon, and as for her usual back-up form…
Another disappeared from her senses, closer this time… and Sarah made an abrupt decision. What were the odds of them needing two sacrifices? A few moments later a black and white cat sauntered out of the bush, already planning to trip up humans and maybe try smothering them as they slept, and, of course, everyone expected cats to bite them occasionally.
At that thought Sarah began to purr.
[quote=“hyperspacedisco”]
Dr Montgomery painfully makes her way back to her feet.[/quote]
“Here, let me help. I can take one end, none of us are in any shape to carry heavy boxes on our own. Are we taking it to the engineering lab?” Ivy stands up and wraps a scarf under Harriet and bundles her close. With her free hand she lifts up one end of the crate, wincing slightly as the weight pulls on hardly healed wounds.
“How did you move this so far? It weighs a tonne!”
[quote=“Bryn”]
He caught the eye of his fellow doctor momentarily who’s attention had also now focussed on Cailin. “What are you thinking doctor?”[/quote]
Glancing over at Cailin’s stretcher, she noticed something that she had seen before. “Oh dear” she heard herself saying.
Looking at Daniel who now turned to her, “medically speaking, she is fine and recovering. Mentally however…” She trailed off. She had seen this in the soldiers she had pulled from a fight or a ditch in her years as a freelance battle medic.
“I’m afraid she won’t be herself for a while…”
Feeling utterly awkward after his gaff to #74, Dorchester mumbles something about carrying on later and goes back to the bunk he was assigned. Once safely ensconced he drops the side bag with its grenades and his knife onto the mattress and sits down. he picks up his rifle and begins the age old ritual of cleaning and oiling the weapon, stripping it down to its main components.
[quote=“Bryn”]
He caught the eye of his fellow doctor momentarily who’s attention had also now focussed on Cailin. “What are you thinking doctor?”[/quote]
Images dance in front of Cailins eyes as memories stir memories of hands inside Leo as she desperately tries to stitch him up with Daliah. Memories of Zek and his wounds lying in the infirmary with the blood pouring out. Memories of Jack lying in the infirmary with Ivy desperate to open her own veins to give him her blood. Memories of kneeling over Daliah as she desperately tried to stitch her back up with the help of 99. Then memories of pain in her neck as the sword bit into her neck and she fell to the ground. Blood… Memories of blood and no help to be had.
Tears start to form in her eyes and Cailin reaches for her neck for the blood she is sure is still there.
“Blood”
[quote=“daena”][quote=“Bryn”]
He caught the eye of his fellow doctor momentarily who’s attention had also now focussed on Cailin. “What are you thinking doctor?”[/quote]
Images dance in front of Cailins eyes as memories stir memories of hands inside Leo as she desperately tries to stitch him up with Daliah. Memories of Zek and his wounds lying in the infirmary with the blood pouring out. Memories of Jack lying in the infirmary with Ivy desperate to open her own veins to give him her blood. Memories of kneeling over Daliah as she desperately tried to stitch her back up with the help of 99. Then memories of pain in her neck as the sword bit into her neck and she fell to the ground. Blood… Memories of blood and no help to be had.
Tears start to form in her eyes and Cailin reaches for her neck for the blood she is sure is still there.
“Blood”[/quote]
Dahlia motions over to Daniel to come closer, and in a hushed tone, regretfully gives her diagnosis.
“Cailin can’t stay in here. In fact she shouldn’t be around anything that can trigger a panic attack. Her condition is more psychological than physical. Sadly she will have physical manifestations of her current mental state”
Jane slipped in the back door of the tavern, and smiled uncertainly at the people still in the infirmary as she went past. They seemed to be very serious about something so she didn’t interrupt.
She never knew how to react with most sick people. She’d been tending to Belinda and August for a year now, and they required bullying and lots of shouting to get them to take any sort of care of themselves. She hadn’t realised until the battle that apparently the habit of becoming shouty and angry was now too deeply ingrained. This meant that when she went past infirmary she felt vaguely guilty, though people DID stupidly keep getting up reopening wounds…
Hurrying past she trotted up to the ICT. After quickly sorting the messages she carefully checked the device for tampering or sabotage, then, glancing around fugitively, she checked on the hell-side specimen of Alexia Crystalline Inferno Uncertainty Formation. For two months she had carried the thing across hell, just in case a spare was needed. It didn’t seem to be any different from those collected earth-side, no odd colouration or reactions. She carefully replaced the covering and screwed the ICT back together.
After running a bit of routine maintenance she started feeding it the outbound letters. Below her feet she felt the Zebulon IV’s humming to life as the letters began to be processed. In a way she felt a strange kin-ship to them, memoryless beings, unable to really understand the world around them, just focusing on the one task they could do and carrying on.
It was silly of course… Jane was getting new memories all the time. Eventually they would accumulate to the point where the world stopped blindsiding her with something she should have known.
It was simple logic.
A sad look crossed Daniels face, “You’re probably right, in a larger facility we’d have a ward where people suffering from her condition could be given time and space to recover under proper supervision. I’m not certain that such a space exists on Skye, maybe we could requisition one of the closer bunk rooms, but I’m not sure we have enough people currently to monitor her.”
“Let’s give it some thought, there must be a suitable place somewhere,” the Englishman sighed. "Actually there’s a quiet area out the back of the Bar that might serve. Miss North spends a lot of time back there, we can ask her if she’d be able to set up a billet and monitor Ms Quigg for the next few weeks. He nodded his head, “She was asking what she could do to help.”
[quote=“DapperAeronaut”]
He takes another swig, and begins to sob bitterly. “Demons. They… both. Bitten.”
He dissolves into tears.[/quote]
Esther stares at her hands as Lewy tells his story, absorbing the horror of the tale he recounts. Most of it’s drawn from the fact that so many elements of his story are all too familiar, but then realisation hits her and she thinks she might be sick: He’d lost his child, and she’d given him Harriet to hold. Had thought, even, that holding her healthy, beautiful, alive baby might somehow be good for him.
She takes deep breaths, calming herself.
Finally, wordlessly, she moves closer to Lewy and puts an arm around him, then places her other hand on Zek’s arm, drawing the three of them close together. At a loss for words, she looks at Zek, hoping he understands her question: What do we do?
A sad look crossed Daniels face, “You’re probably right, in a larger facility we’d have a ward where people suffering from her condition could be given time and space to recover under proper supervision. I’m not certain that such a space exists on Skye, maybe we could requisition one of the closer bunk rooms, but I’m not sure we have enough people currently to monitor her.”
“Let’s give it some thought, there must be a suitable place somewhere,” the Englishman sighed. "Actually there’s a quiet area out the back of the Bar that might serve. Miss North spends a lot of time back there, we can ask her if she’d be able to set up a billet and monitor Ms Quigg for the next few weeks. He nodded his head, “She was asking what she could do to help.”[/quote]
“I suppose that is the best we can do for now” she sighed. “I’ve seen this condition change and break men. Sometimes even taking drastic measures to make it stop…” . Trauma is a nasty thing, she thought to herself. Some manage to be okay and carry on… Others, well…
“Everyone has their breaking point”