RE: Grand Battle S3G1! (Round Four: City of the Dead)
05-29-2014, 05:19 AM
(This post was last modified: 05-29-2014, 05:22 AM by Elpie.)
”Does that hurt?”
The patient screamed in affirmation. Doctor Vong tossed the cleaver aside and picked up the stubby finger, offering it to one of the interns. “It’s still twitching,” he said. “Are both the parts alive, or only the part that houses the consciousness?”
“I think neither of them are alive now,” offered another intern. “Life is defined by homeostasis, and if he’s—“ she flipped through a dusty medical dictionary “—‘Bleeding to death,’ he’s not homeostatic. Because of the deficit of blood.”
“Hmm. That’s a temporary fix at best, yes? Eventually the volume of blood inside and outside the body will reach an equilibrium and stasis will be restored.” Vong plopped the finger back onto the stump. “Someone, er, sew that back on. I admit I’m completely out of my element.” The floating surgical mask that the interns typically took to represent the doctor’s center of consciousness sagged sadly and began to drift awkwardly out of the room before being caught between the bandaged hands of Rebekshep, the nurse who had followed the patient up from the E.R.
“No medical history on record for an ‘Ekh Selsi Orr,’” she told the impotently flapping white mask, “But if he is—was—a lich as he claims, that’s to be expected. They don’t have a lot of health problems and tend to keep their personal records expunged as a matter of course.”
“Thank you, nurse,” said Vong curtly. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have other patients to—“ The patient screamed again as an intern jabbed a needle through his truncated knuckle. Vong sighed. “The case, for all its sensationalism, does not seem to be urgent.”
“He’s afraid he’s going to catch it,” shouted another intern, across the room.
“I don’t have all the information at this time,” snapped Dr. Vong, “And have already formally recommended complete quarantine procedure. Vacuum-sealed, if that works.”
“I think he needs a continually nitrogen-replenished environment,” claimed the intern with the dictionary. “No, wait—“
“Failing quarantine procedure, I’m going to the board,” said Vong, “To refer him to a corporeologist, who will be better equipped to manage this one’s… parts.” He pulled his mask out of Rebekshep’s grasp and threw his presence down the hall, flickering the lights and rattling errant surgical tools as he passed.
Rebekshep shooed the interns out and stood over the patient. She bandaged his hastily-reattached finger with some gauze off of her forearm and applied pressure until he stopped screaming.
“Water,” he croaked after a few minutes.
Rebekshep ran off and returned with a glass of water, which she placed near his intact hand. He drank it down in a gulp. “Thank you, nurse,” he said.
“Think nothing of it.” She pulled a chair up to his bed. “Mr. Orr, may I ask you a question?”
“Of course. You asked several in the E.R.”
“A personal question.”
“Again, you’ve already—”
“A question personal to me.”
“There we go. Given that you may have saved my finger, I’d say you’re entitled.”
Rebekshep shifted nervously in her chair, face inscrutable beneath her bandages. “What’s it like?”
“Being alive?” asked the patient.
“Yes.”
“It’s—” the patient stroked his beard. “That’s a very complicated question. I think it may be different for other people but for me—there’s this feeling like I can only fit so much love inside of me, or so much suffering, like a container bound to explode under pressure. But the love and the suffering, and the happiness and the misery, just keeps building up, side by side, and all that happens is you sort of stretch out. Just keep stretching and stretching and growing and growing. And you try to let a little air out with, I don’t know… violent anger, or fleeting hope, or drugs, but at the same time you have this feeling that if you just keep growing and changing and dealing with the pressure you’ll grow into some perfect version of yourself, like some moment of ascension, but
The patient craned his neck over to look at Rebekshep and smiled, a wide and exertive smile that transformed his face into something grotesque and ineffably charismatic. Then the face began to shake like a building about to collapse, and then it opened up into a guffawing, throaty, teary-eyed, wild yet somehow powerful laughter.
“Bwa ha ha
ha ha ha haha! Okay okay okay okayokay. On your own terms, then. To be alive as opposed to merely existing is… well, there’s the heart, but you get used to that. It’s the breathing that gets me. It doesn’t stop. And it just—“ (he took a heaving gasp to demonstrate) “It rattles your whole body. Every time. I never get bored of it. Anyway, you were alive once, you would know.”
Rebekshep shrugged. “That was a long time ago. What memories I had I lost in Hurricane Lethe.”
“Ah, yes. That… debacle.”
“The going theory around the floor is that you caught alive doing some sort of sex thing. Is that true?”
“I could not say. I…” (There was a note of theatricality in the patient’s tone here that Rebekshep could not place) “…Am sexually active.”
Rebekshep glanced at the door, then back to the patient. “I’ve heard stories and—you don’t have to lie. Is this some sort of underground fetish thing?”
“I don’t—” Scofflaw looked up at the nurse leaning over his bed, bandaged hands on his arm. He glanced back up at her and raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know. Is it?”
The nurse stood up and backed away awkwardly. “There are, you know, a lot of books. That get passed around the nursing pool. The women. Sort of a bookclub. ‘Romance’ novels.” (She offered tiny, insecure air quotes at the level of her waist). “Sort of alternative stuff. I don’t think you’ll have heard of any of them. Heart’s Beating. The Living Daylights. Vital Fluids. Confessions of a Well-Spanked Vivophile.”
“They don’t ring a bell,” admitted Scofflaw, “But I’m starting to see a pattern.”
“Anyway. There are a lot of these and I guess there are a lot of people reading them, even if most of them talk about it. But it’s just fantasy. I think people are more comfortable thinking about these things knowing that there’s no opportunity to act on their desires.”
She closed the door to Scofflaw’s room. “Most people,” she added, “Wouldn’t be willing to take it all the way.”
Scofflaw eyed up and down the shape that could be a passable (albeit tightly bound) hourglass figure or a carefully-concealed rotting skeleton. He sat up on the bed, careful not to put any weight on the reattached finger. “Might I reciprocate the personal question?”
“Be my guest.”
“What’s the personal care routine of a mummy like? Do the wrappings ever, mmmm, come off?”
A shift beneath the bandages on her head that was probably a smile, either with lips or without lips. “Mmm. They do. The living culture I stem from were masters of mummification. They could preserve a body in perfect condition—from the outside—indefinitely.”
“That’s quite some process. One I’m sure they reserved for those bodies most deserving of preservation.”
The nurse shrugged. “I’ve never seen another mummy like me here before. And I still have to be careful. Once the wrappings come off, they have to be replaced within about half an hour before the decay process begins.”
“Hmm. That’s workable.”
“Time enough for a quick shower in my own personal blend of oils, fragrances and preservatives.”
“Which I’m sure is imperative after eight hours getting entrailed on by those ‘Infected’ kids in the ER.”
The mummy stumbled a little in her slow, seductive sashay towards Scofflaw’s bed. “Then I rewrap. The first, protective layer takes about ten minutes, and then I roll up some extra layers for warmth and emergency medical supplies, and make myself a pocket or two to keep some cash in. By the end of my shift, my hands and forearms are usually back down to the base layer.”
She held out her hands. Scofflaw placed his good hand over her ring finger, caressing it as he would a roll of tape, and found the seam. “May I?” he asked, looking up into where he assumed her eyes still were.
She nodded. “I’m Rebekshep, by the way.”
“You can call me Selsi.” He began to unwrap her, exposing a perfectly preserved finger sporting a nail painted the delicate violet-blue of a water lily. “You are… a marvelous piece of work, Rebekshep.”
“I know I am,” she agreed. “Plus enough of my internal organs have been scratched out that I only weigh around a hundred pounds, which makes all the other nurses jealous. But they don’t understand. I’m empty inside.”
“I can fix that,” moaned Scofflaw, bending to kiss her exposed finger. She tasted like ashes and formaldehyde. His finger fell off of his hand and dangled above the bed by a thread, like a marionette.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” cried Rebekshep, rushing to reexamine the wound. “These interns and their sewing, I swear.” She wrapped her finger back up and went to tend to the wound.
Scofflaw grunted in pain as a needle punctured his skin yet again. “You know, Rebekshep,” he said mournfully. “Breathing’s only a part of it. There are aspects to living that I don’t think—ah!—you’d like at all. The constant pain. The weight of these useless organs. And oh, I miss my phylactery. There’s a story I—och! that hurts—heard once about a creature called a phoenix. That generates life and fire inside of itself. And every time it stops living, it bursts into flame and lives again from the ashes. No matter what. It’s even said that the tears of the phoenix—maybe all of its bodily fluids, who knows, ‘tears’ sounds more romantic—could bring life to others.”
Rebekshep nodded absently. “I don’t get it,” she said. “I’m trying to put you back like you were, but you won’t fit back together.”
“It’s because of entropy,” explained Scofflaw gloomily. “A side effect of life here. Hey!” He snapped his fingers. “You know what? I had a boyfriend a while back who would periodically burst into flame. I never thought much of it at the time—it was a scene where a lot of people were doing things like that, calling it art—but who knows. That might be where I got this.”
Rebekshep didn’t respond. “Nurse?” Scofflaw asked politely.
“I’m sorry,” said the mummy. “It’s just… your hand was so beautiful but I can’t fix it.” She tore off his finger and held it up to him. “See?”
“That’s alright,” Scofflaw groaned through the pain. “But I think you’d better call in one of my doctors. I’ve had a breakthrough while you apparently weren’t listening to me.”
“Okay,” sniffed Rebekshep. She tucked the finger into her pocket and left the room. A skeleton in a white coat walked by with the arrogance she commonly associated with doctors. She tapped on his clavicle. “Doctor? The patient with the, er, L – I – F – E problem needs help that… that I can’t give him.”
The skeleton turned to her and smiled. Or he wasn’t smiling, he just looked like that all the time. “He can wait,” he rattled. “I’m on my way to the other one.”
“Other one?”
“Two more life cases,” confirmed the doctor with a peace sign. “And it looks like one of them’s going to die! What a day for medicine!”
And with a![[Image: tumblr_n5yigoYz7M1r1g8zro7_250.gif]](https://31.media.tumblr.com/4bb74b113834f1f838147506a7518277/tumblr_n5yigoYz7M1r1g8zro7_250.gif)
he ran off down the hallway and left Rebekshep alone.
The patient screamed in affirmation. Doctor Vong tossed the cleaver aside and picked up the stubby finger, offering it to one of the interns. “It’s still twitching,” he said. “Are both the parts alive, or only the part that houses the consciousness?”
“I think neither of them are alive now,” offered another intern. “Life is defined by homeostasis, and if he’s—“ she flipped through a dusty medical dictionary “—‘Bleeding to death,’ he’s not homeostatic. Because of the deficit of blood.”
“Hmm. That’s a temporary fix at best, yes? Eventually the volume of blood inside and outside the body will reach an equilibrium and stasis will be restored.” Vong plopped the finger back onto the stump. “Someone, er, sew that back on. I admit I’m completely out of my element.” The floating surgical mask that the interns typically took to represent the doctor’s center of consciousness sagged sadly and began to drift awkwardly out of the room before being caught between the bandaged hands of Rebekshep, the nurse who had followed the patient up from the E.R.
“No medical history on record for an ‘Ekh Selsi Orr,’” she told the impotently flapping white mask, “But if he is—was—a lich as he claims, that’s to be expected. They don’t have a lot of health problems and tend to keep their personal records expunged as a matter of course.”
“Thank you, nurse,” said Vong curtly. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have other patients to—“ The patient screamed again as an intern jabbed a needle through his truncated knuckle. Vong sighed. “The case, for all its sensationalism, does not seem to be urgent.”
“He’s afraid he’s going to catch it,” shouted another intern, across the room.
“I don’t have all the information at this time,” snapped Dr. Vong, “And have already formally recommended complete quarantine procedure. Vacuum-sealed, if that works.”
“I think he needs a continually nitrogen-replenished environment,” claimed the intern with the dictionary. “No, wait—“
“Failing quarantine procedure, I’m going to the board,” said Vong, “To refer him to a corporeologist, who will be better equipped to manage this one’s… parts.” He pulled his mask out of Rebekshep’s grasp and threw his presence down the hall, flickering the lights and rattling errant surgical tools as he passed.
Rebekshep shooed the interns out and stood over the patient. She bandaged his hastily-reattached finger with some gauze off of her forearm and applied pressure until he stopped screaming.
“Water,” he croaked after a few minutes.
Rebekshep ran off and returned with a glass of water, which she placed near his intact hand. He drank it down in a gulp. “Thank you, nurse,” he said.
“Think nothing of it.” She pulled a chair up to his bed. “Mr. Orr, may I ask you a question?”
“Of course. You asked several in the E.R.”
“A personal question.”
“Again, you’ve already—”
“A question personal to me.”
“There we go. Given that you may have saved my finger, I’d say you’re entitled.”
Rebekshep shifted nervously in her chair, face inscrutable beneath her bandages. “What’s it like?”
“Being alive?” asked the patient.
“Yes.”
“It’s—” the patient stroked his beard. “That’s a very complicated question. I think it may be different for other people but for me—there’s this feeling like I can only fit so much love inside of me, or so much suffering, like a container bound to explode under pressure. But the love and the suffering, and the happiness and the misery, just keeps building up, side by side, and all that happens is you sort of stretch out. Just keep stretching and stretching and growing and growing. And you try to let a little air out with, I don’t know… violent anger, or fleeting hope, or drugs, but at the same time you have this feeling that if you just keep growing and changing and dealing with the pressure you’ll grow into some perfect version of yourself, like some moment of ascension, but
The patient craned his neck over to look at Rebekshep and smiled, a wide and exertive smile that transformed his face into something grotesque and ineffably charismatic. Then the face began to shake like a building about to collapse, and then it opened up into a guffawing, throaty, teary-eyed, wild yet somehow powerful laughter.
“Bwa ha ha
ha ha ha haha! Okay okay okay okayokay. On your own terms, then. To be alive as opposed to merely existing is… well, there’s the heart, but you get used to that. It’s the breathing that gets me. It doesn’t stop. And it just—“ (he took a heaving gasp to demonstrate) “It rattles your whole body. Every time. I never get bored of it. Anyway, you were alive once, you would know.”Rebekshep shrugged. “That was a long time ago. What memories I had I lost in Hurricane Lethe.”
“Ah, yes. That… debacle.”
“The going theory around the floor is that you caught alive doing some sort of sex thing. Is that true?”
“I could not say. I…” (There was a note of theatricality in the patient’s tone here that Rebekshep could not place) “…Am sexually active.”
Rebekshep glanced at the door, then back to the patient. “I’ve heard stories and—you don’t have to lie. Is this some sort of underground fetish thing?”
“I don’t—” Scofflaw looked up at the nurse leaning over his bed, bandaged hands on his arm. He glanced back up at her and raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know. Is it?”
The nurse stood up and backed away awkwardly. “There are, you know, a lot of books. That get passed around the nursing pool. The women. Sort of a bookclub. ‘Romance’ novels.” (She offered tiny, insecure air quotes at the level of her waist). “Sort of alternative stuff. I don’t think you’ll have heard of any of them. Heart’s Beating. The Living Daylights. Vital Fluids. Confessions of a Well-Spanked Vivophile.”
“They don’t ring a bell,” admitted Scofflaw, “But I’m starting to see a pattern.”
“Anyway. There are a lot of these and I guess there are a lot of people reading them, even if most of them talk about it. But it’s just fantasy. I think people are more comfortable thinking about these things knowing that there’s no opportunity to act on their desires.”
She closed the door to Scofflaw’s room. “Most people,” she added, “Wouldn’t be willing to take it all the way.”
Scofflaw eyed up and down the shape that could be a passable (albeit tightly bound) hourglass figure or a carefully-concealed rotting skeleton. He sat up on the bed, careful not to put any weight on the reattached finger. “Might I reciprocate the personal question?”
“Be my guest.”
“What’s the personal care routine of a mummy like? Do the wrappings ever, mmmm, come off?”
A shift beneath the bandages on her head that was probably a smile, either with lips or without lips. “Mmm. They do. The living culture I stem from were masters of mummification. They could preserve a body in perfect condition—from the outside—indefinitely.”
“That’s quite some process. One I’m sure they reserved for those bodies most deserving of preservation.”
The nurse shrugged. “I’ve never seen another mummy like me here before. And I still have to be careful. Once the wrappings come off, they have to be replaced within about half an hour before the decay process begins.”
“Hmm. That’s workable.”
“Time enough for a quick shower in my own personal blend of oils, fragrances and preservatives.”
“Which I’m sure is imperative after eight hours getting entrailed on by those ‘Infected’ kids in the ER.”
The mummy stumbled a little in her slow, seductive sashay towards Scofflaw’s bed. “Then I rewrap. The first, protective layer takes about ten minutes, and then I roll up some extra layers for warmth and emergency medical supplies, and make myself a pocket or two to keep some cash in. By the end of my shift, my hands and forearms are usually back down to the base layer.”
She held out her hands. Scofflaw placed his good hand over her ring finger, caressing it as he would a roll of tape, and found the seam. “May I?” he asked, looking up into where he assumed her eyes still were.
She nodded. “I’m Rebekshep, by the way.”
“You can call me Selsi.” He began to unwrap her, exposing a perfectly preserved finger sporting a nail painted the delicate violet-blue of a water lily. “You are… a marvelous piece of work, Rebekshep.”
“I know I am,” she agreed. “Plus enough of my internal organs have been scratched out that I only weigh around a hundred pounds, which makes all the other nurses jealous. But they don’t understand. I’m empty inside.”
“I can fix that,” moaned Scofflaw, bending to kiss her exposed finger. She tasted like ashes and formaldehyde. His finger fell off of his hand and dangled above the bed by a thread, like a marionette.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” cried Rebekshep, rushing to reexamine the wound. “These interns and their sewing, I swear.” She wrapped her finger back up and went to tend to the wound.
Scofflaw grunted in pain as a needle punctured his skin yet again. “You know, Rebekshep,” he said mournfully. “Breathing’s only a part of it. There are aspects to living that I don’t think—ah!—you’d like at all. The constant pain. The weight of these useless organs. And oh, I miss my phylactery. There’s a story I—och! that hurts—heard once about a creature called a phoenix. That generates life and fire inside of itself. And every time it stops living, it bursts into flame and lives again from the ashes. No matter what. It’s even said that the tears of the phoenix—maybe all of its bodily fluids, who knows, ‘tears’ sounds more romantic—could bring life to others.”
Rebekshep nodded absently. “I don’t get it,” she said. “I’m trying to put you back like you were, but you won’t fit back together.”
“It’s because of entropy,” explained Scofflaw gloomily. “A side effect of life here. Hey!” He snapped his fingers. “You know what? I had a boyfriend a while back who would periodically burst into flame. I never thought much of it at the time—it was a scene where a lot of people were doing things like that, calling it art—but who knows. That might be where I got this.”
Rebekshep didn’t respond. “Nurse?” Scofflaw asked politely.
“I’m sorry,” said the mummy. “It’s just… your hand was so beautiful but I can’t fix it.” She tore off his finger and held it up to him. “See?”
“That’s alright,” Scofflaw groaned through the pain. “But I think you’d better call in one of my doctors. I’ve had a breakthrough while you apparently weren’t listening to me.”
“Okay,” sniffed Rebekshep. She tucked the finger into her pocket and left the room. A skeleton in a white coat walked by with the arrogance she commonly associated with doctors. She tapped on his clavicle. “Doctor? The patient with the, er, L – I – F – E problem needs help that… that I can’t give him.”
The skeleton turned to her and smiled. Or he wasn’t smiling, he just looked like that all the time. “He can wait,” he rattled. “I’m on my way to the other one.”
“Other one?”
“Two more life cases,” confirmed the doctor with a peace sign. “And it looks like one of them’s going to die! What a day for medicine!”
And with a
he ran off down the hallway and left Rebekshep alone.