Phobia roll.
Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (1, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7) ( success x 1 )
HydraGiven Sera's lifestyle, it was possible (even probable) that she'd woken up in a few unfamiliar locations before. Maybe she'd even woken up in hospitals before. That didn't make it any less terrifying to someone who hated and feared hospitals on such a visceral, subconscious level. Though if this was a proper hospital, it was awfully bare. The walls and the floor were nothing more than painted concrete.
How long had she been out? Hours or days... she didn't know. What she did know was that she was trapped in the one place she never wanted to be. Alone.
Or was this, too, a hallucination? Or a vision? (The difference between the two could get a little thin sometimes.)
There was a faint hum coming from the ventilation system, but otherwise the building was dead silent. There was a dry, sticky bitterness in her mouth and throat that cried out for water. The door to the small bathroom at the end of the room had been removed, leaving an open passage that lead to a metal sink and a shower and toilet. The place was not especially warm or inviting, but it was clean and new. Sterile, even.
Truthfully, it felt more like a prison than a hospital room. Security cameras looked down from the ceiling, and the heavy metal door along one wall looked as though it had been built to keep people inside.
At least she was still alive. Or maybe this was what purgatory looked like?
No, she felt way too shitty to be dead.
SerafíneSera wakes up in a bed in a room with bare walls; attached to monitors, security cameras in place. The strange places in which she has awoken do not bear counting. They are beyond count: and yes, she has awoken in the hospital a time or two even within her living memory, which is shorter than most people who know and think they understand her begin to realize. The way she parties; the way she sleeps: it is inevitable. Someone tries to wake her and imagines she's unconcious rather than sleeping, overdosed instead of dreaming. It happens.
--
She wakes.
Oh, she wakes.
She inhales and arches her back and opens her eyes and looks up at the ceiling. Something's pulling in her arm and the sour taste in the back of her throat and her heart beating in her chest. Sera looks up at the ceiling and closes her eyes and opens them again. She does this three times like a spell or a charm and the ceiling is the same.
She's sober. She feels sober. It aches right now; there is a tremor of anticipation in her limbs, she's already bracing herself for whatever she's going to find as she starts to survey the room.
Her hands are shaking, tucked beside the safety rails.
She turns them into fists, blunt nails digging into her palms. This does not stop the shaking. As the pieces turn themselves over, resolve themselves into vignettes (the security door, the stainless sink and shower stall, the lack of privacy, the monitors) her breathing becomes more and more ragged. She's not crying, not yet, she just wants to scream and -
fucking
- Sera closes her eyes. Tells herself,
it'snotrealit'snotrealit'snotreal. Just aloud. Her mouth is moving. If those cameras are being monitored, if they have microphones, if they are sensitive microphones, whoever monitors them could pick it up.
- opens her eyes again.
"Fuck."
--
Sera sits up abruptly. Tears off all the leads for all the fucking monitors and tears out the goddamned IV and she doesn't care if there's pain, she needs the pain, she welcomes the pain, she allows it to lance through her like a spike. Lets it smash her open as she wrenches her body out of that bed and staggers to her feet,
or tries to, god knows how weak she is,
headed for the door. Reaching for the handle, and if it doesn't open, she's pounding, open-handed, as loud as she can. Rattling it in its frame
HydraWhen Sera yanked out the IV, a line of blood welled up from the opening in her vein and slid down her arm, dripping off the tips of her fingers to splatter tiny notes of crimson onto the pristine floor. But by now, she was probably long past caring about the sight of her own blood. Apart from the brief reprieve she'd been given following her healing attempt, the days had been full of it. Dripping and splattering and bubbling in her damaged lungs. It was probably best not to wonder what exactly the virus was doing to her to make that blood appear. (Breaking her pattern down from the inside-out. What part of her would go next? Maybe it would be something she couldn't survive.)
Speaking of which, the exertion caused by her panicked breaths and her attempts (unsuccessful - the door was indeed locked, and sturdy enough that it didn't even so much as creak in response to her attack) to exit the room caused a violent coughing fit, and speckles of red showered the smooth metal in front of her.
"Calm down, Serafine."
It was a man's voice over the intercom, soft and clinically calm. No one she recognized.
"If you panic, you'll pass out again. I'm coming into the room with some water for you. Please step back from the door."
Serafíne"Let me out."
There's no telling her to calm the fuck down and Sera does not move away from the door when the calm fucking bastard call her by her name (her full name, no call-me-Sera. Jim does that. Jim always calls her by her full name.) and tells her to step back from the door.
Please step back from the door.
They are always calm and they are always assured and they are always fucked and they are always wrong and they are -
Sera doubles over in another coughing fit. Her lungs ache. They're burning. They are disintegrating into pointillist pieces. They are -
"Who the fuck are you?
"Where the fuck am I? I want to get the fuck out."
What else is she going to say?
The room swims. Her lungs feel battered and abraded and she braces herself, she cannot beat at the door anymore but she's holding on to it.
She coughs again, hard enough that it squeezes tears from her eyes. Hard enough that she aches and throbs all fucking over. Hard enough that she sees stars behind her eyes, and the places between the stars, the source of things between the atoms.
"How do you know my name."
[Watch the Weaving: Prime 1]
Dice: 2 d10 TN7 (2, 9) ( success x 1 )
HydraIt's a sobering thought, to know that a person with her insight and abilities could be made so powerless, not by magic, but by something as ordinary as illness, four walls and a locked door.
There wasn't any magic in the room, at least as far as she could tell.
Sera demanded to be let out, and there was no response. The door remained shut. Her questions, too, were met with further silence. At least until she'd finished that horrible bout of coughing and relative silence had settled in once more.
"You're somewhere safe." (As if she would believe that.) "My name is Callum Grey. The thing you've been infected with is called the Hydra virus. Myself and the people I work with have been tracking a group of witch-hunters who stole the virus from the Technocracy. They're the ones who infected you, and they've been watching you since you were injected. And we, in turn, have been watching them.
"When I tried to make contact, you were already pretty far-gone. I found you unconscious and in critical condition, so I brought you here. It's not a proper hospital, but we have the equipment we need, and we're well-protected. I understand you're scared, but if it wasn't for us, you'd be dead right now.
"Can I come in? I need you to promise that you won't attack me."
SerafíneWP
Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (2, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )
SerafíneStrangely enough, something in her snaps and solidifies. Something liquid in her spine fuses. Maybe it is his voice; maybe it is the steadiness of the beating of her heart, insistent against the interior of her mind. Maybe it is the magick in her. The magick of her. God only fucking knows, but Sera's first instinct and second instinct and third instinct and her fucking
seventeenth instinct are to tell Callum Grey to fuck the fuck off but then she will still be in this room and in this place and - and -
- she straightens. Pushes herself upright and steps away from the door. God she feels so miserable as she does that that she cannot help but cry a little bit. Her shoulders jerk with half-voiced, mostly withheld sobs, and she wipes her nose against the back of her palm and it comes away bloody.
"You think my promise matters?" Something wry beneath the need-to-sob, as she walks away from the door. A handful of steps, her eyes on the cameras, suspicious yeah she cannot hide that, but,
there's enough solidity in her that she starts trying to calm herself, the way people sometimes do. Humming an old lullabye beneath her breath. If he has any knowledge of music he will recognize the ode to joy from the chorus of Beethoven's Ninth.
"I won't attack you. I can barely stand up."
SerafíneMind 2: Difficulty 5 +1 (distracted) -1 (specialty focus) - aura/surface thoughts.
Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (3, 4) ( success x 1 ) [WP]
Serafíne(-1 more for practiced, for the record. Final difficulty: 4, so 2 successes initially.)
Hydra"Maybe not, but that doesn't mean you aren't dangerous."
Perhaps it hadn't occurred to Serafine to wonder if her captor/supposed rescuer might not be equally afraid and distrustful of her as she was of him.
"Nonetheless, thank you."
Sera stepped back, drawing up what little reserves of strength she had. She could feel her fever prickling hot along her skin, the raw sting of her ruined throat aching in the wake of her voice. Her headache was starting to come back, brought on no doubt by the coughing and the rapid-fire beat of her pulse. It throbbed painfully behind her eyes.
There was a sound of bolt sliding open, and then the door pushed in, and a man carrying a tray with some food and a bottle of water walked inside.
Sera had probably been expecting someone older. Someone who looked... well, like a doctor. This man was closer to the age of a med-student than a physician. Maybe 23-24. He was tall and willowy, with exceptionally pale, freckled skin and red hair down to his shoulders. He was dressed in a pair of jeans and a white lab coat. Something about his appearance and demeanor suggested something otherworldly, but if he was Awake, he didn't resonate.
Callum watched Sera closely as he shut the door, keeping a safe distance (safe for her, or for him?) as he went to set the tray down on the small table next to the bed. The food on it was unappetizing hospital fare: jello, a cup of soup and some saltine crackers.
If he noticed her attempt to scan his surface thoughts, he didn't give any indication. Nonetheless, when Sera's mind reached out to him, she'd find herself confronted by a ominously familiar sensation: that of smacking headlong into an iron wall. It was the same sort of block she'd found on Eric.
"I'm sorry to keep you locked in. We weren't sure what you were going to do when you woke up. How do you feel right now?"
Serafíne"Like shit."
Sera retreats to the wall, some half-dozen feet from the door, give or take another half-dozen. The fever is bright beneath her skin, all pooling fire and it makes her woozy. Feels like coming down from something or going up on something except she's sixteen and she's managed to actually graduate from one of the fancy rehabs and get her ass lodged in some very quiet, very expensive, very hospital-like reform school where there is enough contact with the outside world that a few of the seniors manage to get their hands on shit-that-is-nothing-close-to-mind-altering but is nevertheless than the droning buzzing drudgery of a literature class that never gets past John Donne and military fucking history.
"Like fucking shit. And in the usual I-must've-had-a-badass-time last night way."
Sera's barefoot, 5'5" and maybe 120 lbs soaking wet. Maybe. And she lost weight on that fucking fast and never gained it all back and she's lost some weight over the past few days. Not as much but still; she looks starched, stretched thin, wretched, and still somehow fucking gorgeous. You can see that in her bones, the sharp cut of them through her skin.
Her arms cross over her midsection. Protective. It still has not occurred to her that he might be afraid of her.
Honestly, it never will.
"If you're sorry to keep me locked in, let me go." Her eyes flick to the hospital tray; she glances sharply away, after, her stomach turns, revolted. Body and mind, revolted too.
"Easy solution." The narrowest curl of her shoulders. "I hate these fucking places," and honest, to a remarkable fault.
"Callum. Can I call you Callum?
"You're not Awake. Why the fuck can't I read your mind?"
SerafínePerception + Awareness-as-empathy. -1 die because SIIICK.
Dice: 6 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 6, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 5 ) [WP]
HydraCallum didn't give much reaction to her agitated demeanor. He seemed to expect it, and was neither offended nor overtly sympathetic. Clinical really was the best way to describe him.
He favored Sera with a calm, analytical gaze. As though examining her symptoms from a distance and making some kind of mental notation. (He may have looked young, but he certainly acted like a doctor.) "Well, you're up, anyway. That's an improvement."
Sera wanted them to let her go. Callum crossed his arms in front of his chest. He didn't answer her right away.
"That's what you call it? Awake? Rather condescending to the rest of us, don't you think?" (The assumption there - that since he wasn't awake then he must be asleep.) There was a beat before he continued. A moment of reluctance. "It's a neural implant. Some of us were given them by the people we used to work for." (He didn't actually come out and say the Technocracy, but really, who the hell else could have made something like that?)
"If you left, you wouldn't get far on your own, and you need to be in a hospital. But you can't risk having someone call the CDC, which is what will happen once they find out what you've got. And I promise you, if that happens, you will die, probably while they're busy pumping you full of antivirals, because they won't know that that's exactly the wrong thing to do.
I promise you, Serafine. There is no-one out there who has a better chance of keeping you alive than we do. I know this virus. I'm the best hope you have for a cure, but I can't get what I need without your help. So if you leave... we're both fucked."
Hydra[Manip+Subterfuge]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 6, 6, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 1 [WP]
HydraIf there was anything to read off of this guy, Sera wasn't getting it. Maybe he was holding something back, maybe he wasn't. Maybe he was lying... maybe he wasn't. He was difficult to read.
Serafíne"It's just what we say. That we've opened our eyes. That's what it feels like, too. Waking up. You've been sleeping for so long and you're muddy with it, muzzy with it, and then somehow it's morning and there's sun through the windows with a fire like you've never known before, and you can taste the sun and hear the color three and the sing the letter blue.
"It's not condescending. It's just what if feels like."
God, the sun.
Sera closes her eyes; there's something passionate about her paean to waking up, but there is an edge of nostalgia she cannot suppress. A sort of hollowed-out sorrow that opens itself up in her marrow, in her bones. She is seized by the deep and terrible conviction that they are going to keep her here forever, that -
"Don't you think the choice should be mine? Who the fuck are we?"
Panic starts to bubble up in her like the blood in her lungs.
Shit. Shit shit shit.
Sera closes her eyes. Opens them again. Shoots a glance from him to the door, gauging distance, reaction times. Everything.
Her arms tighten over her midsection.
"I can't stay here. I can't. Jesus Christ you don't understand. And how the fuck do you know my name."
SerafíneLife/Mind scan Difficulty 4+1 = 5. -1 for practiced. She is using pain/the sensation of illness as a focus.
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (8, 10) ( success x 2 )
HydraFrom what Sera was able to tell, there were a number of other people in the building with her and Callum. About 12, by her count, spaced out at varying distances. Two of them were right outside her door. A couple of the distant life patterns were unreadable to her mind scan, as Callum was. The rest read as normal Sleepers, with nothing especially notable upon first glance.
Inside the room, Callum rather pointedly did not respond when Serafine described her experience with Waking Up. He didn't seem hostile, but... perhaps distrustful was the right word.
He remained calm in the face of her dawning panic, but he let his arms fall back to his sides, and there was a glance at the door, because it didn't take Mind magic to figure out that Sera was probably thinking about bolting.
"It's what your friends call you. I told you, you were being watched." He tried to answer her rationally, though at this point it seemed as though the effort may have been wasted. It was hard to have a rational conversation with someone who was in the throes of fight-or-flight.
"You need to understand. I don't want to lock you up like a prisoner, but you're carrying an infectious disease that could wipe out everyone you know and care about. And the people who did this to you are going to do it to others. Maybe they already have. With all due respect, if I let you make the choice to leave, and more people die because of it, then that's a choice I can't afford to give you."
The implication there was clear, even if it went unstated. Maybe he really didn't want to do this to her. Maybe he was trying to make it feel as though she had a choice because he knew that things would be easier on the both of them that way. But regardless - he was probably not going to let her go willingly.
"I can give you something for the anxiety, if you want it."
Serafíne"No. No." Her most immediate and visceral reaction is to the suggestion that he could give her something for the fucking anxiety. Sera grits her teeth firmly and shoves back on that suggestion with a vehemence that surprises even her on some level, and leaves her once more: shaking, and also: shaken. "Fucking - fucking no I don't want you making me -
"making me - " and she's struggling for words and her hands are fists now, pressed to her temples and the room has an axis and that axis is spinning around the most central of the light fixtures. " - numb."
Her hands open, she draws them sharply through her hair, dragging her fingers tightly through the tangled curls. That sourness in the back of her throat, the hallucinatory certainty of her approaching death, more -
And she can't help it, the itching need for movement beneath her skin, the way these walls feel like they are smothering her. The conviction that she'll die here, or worse, than she'll fucking live here.
Exist here.
Whereever the fuck here is.
"That's not what they call me. They fucking call me - "
Abruptly, sharply - " - your fucking guards. Do they have fucking guns?"
Hydra[Init +6]
Dice: 1 d10 TN1 (6) ( success x 1 )
SerafíneInit +6-1
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (2) ( fail )
Serafíne[Declare: Run away.]
Hydra[Callum declare: split grapple/sedate]
Hydra[Str+Brawl -2]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )
Hydra[Dex+Brawl -3]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 6, 10) ( success x 2 )
HydraCallum didn't answer Sera's question. He was too busy watching her body language - noting the slowly building arc of her anxiety (like a caged animal getting ready to gnaw its own limb off.) He reached into his pocket, and maybe that was the trigger - because Sera probably knew what he was reaching for. And she probably also knew that she had no real hope of escape.
But it didn't matter. She had to try.
So she did. But Callum lunged forward and grabbed her before she could get more than a few feet. He wasn't very strong, and on any other day she might not have been so easily overcome, but her body was barely holding itself together, and it didn't take much to overpower her. She'd feel the sharp sting of the needle sink into the muscle on her neck. A few seconds later, the world around her dimmed.
The last thing she saw before she closed her eyes was the door opening, followed by a rushing torrent of blood sweeping in to flood the room and drown her.
Serafíne[She runs. She can't help but run. She cannot do anything except try to run; and she knows deep down beneath her skin that this is going to get her nowhere, that there will be orderlies in the hall and restraints or a needle full of something and then a nice thorazine drip and a some new, experimental therapy meant to shock her back into - what -
- no, this is something else, someplace else, somewhen else, though somehow she's here and a there she half-remembers, remembers with her skin and in her throat, remembers with the mad pounding of her panicked heart.
He hits her with the tranquilizer.
She staggers, falls to her knees, makes this anguished sound, reaching forward like a supplicant at prayer. Finds herself falling inconscionably and furiously forward.
When she hits the ground, she drowns again.
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