snowblindrpg | [log] In the creaking darkness [closed?]

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[log] In the creaking darkness [closed?]

Characters: Ecks and Wilson
Location Building 124 (split tunnels entrance)
Date: Day 136
Summary: A meeting of the House Toleraters Club
Warnings: People with bad taste in friends

124: This house, covered in snow, is dark and cold, but better than outside. The snow presses in on the windows and makes the roof creak and groan whenever it shifts, but it seems to be holding up alright. It's a standard, single-story house with a living room, single bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and dining room. The house is sparsely furnished, unfortunately with mostly metal There's a back door leading off into darkness, but it isn't locked.

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Doctor House is dead, and Ecks is not completely, entirely sure she is not dying herself. She should be healing, but in the last day her head has gotten worse. She has spent a day in the house inside the entrance to the tunnel, unable or unwilling to go on, and she does not know what she will do. She does not know whether this means she is bleeding into her head. Doctor House is not here to tell her now…but he is also not here to cut her head open if she is bleeding inside, which might be the one silver lining in all of this. She's pretty sure that having her head cut open is always the worse option.

These are the things she thinks about as she sits alone in the dark, now and then turning on her tablet with its brightness cranked down as far as it will go without the screen turning black. She will get better and then she will explore -- or she will not. Doctor House will come back to life yet again, or -- or --

Or he will not.

A sound at the door to Kesara's snow tunnel brings her to alert, and she grasps for the ash shovel hooked to her pack. "Who is there?" she calls in her monotone.

The voice startles Wilson and he freezes in the doorway, unable to see anything past the light of his own tablet screen. God, everything in Norfinbury is so dark. He's had a constant headache from the eye strain since he woke up here. How do people get used to this?

He has House's map open on one side of the screen and Kesara's network post on the other. If he's going to be trapped in this place, he may as well make himself useful. According to House's map, this should be the entrance to Hsiaoke Pass.

And yet, for some reason, he wasn't expecting to find anyone in here. The voice doesn't exactly sound friendly, but he probably wouldn't either. Aren't there monsters around here?

"Um, hello there," he calls back tentatively. "Sorry if I spooked you. I'm not a threat. My name is James Wilson, and I'm here to help with the exploration, if that's all right. I'm a doctor."

The shovel scrapes noisily across the floor, less a threat than clumsiness as she gets it unhooked and draws it close to her. She doesn't know this voice. She doesn't know this name. That is...good? That is probably good. She can just make out the contour of his face in the dim light of his tablet, and he looks human.

"I am Ecks," she says after a moment of thought. "The ruins are on the other side of the other door."

The scrape of metal against the floor isn't terribly reassuring, but House didn't warn him about anyone named Ecks. If she wanted to attack him, she likely would've done so by now, especially given her advantage of being able to see him. He tilts his tablet in the direction of her voice, hoping to put them on a more even playing field in that regard. He tries not to blind her, but he'd like to see who he's talking to.

"Nice to meet you, Ecks. Is anyone else here with you? I saw Miss Hsiaoke's post on the network from a few days back."

She, too, might look human in dim light, though raised scars cast shadows across her face. She is still seated with her things arrayed around her, though most of the food has long since been tucked away in cabinets. Her clothes are dark, meant to melt into shadows, but she's not trying to hide.

"No," she says after another moment's pause. Lying might be better, but she cannot back up a lie that someone else is with her. "Hsiaoke and Zach are in the ruins. No one else has come yet."

"I see." Wilson closes the door behind him and stands awkwardly in front of it, not sure what to do with himself. Ecks is the first person he's met in the flesh here. While she doesn't seem to be openly threatening, she's not all that welcoming either. He supposes a bit of suspicion is warranted given their situation, though. What's the etiquette for this? Does he make himself at home or excuse himself to another room or just find another building entirely? He'd hate to be rude.

"Are you here to help with the exploration too, then?"

"I am supposed to explore," she confirms with a brief nod. "But there was no food and I had to go get food and now I am tired and my head hurts so I am not exploring yet. Hsiaoke and Zach are exploring."

It occurs to her once she's said it that she should not reveal weakness to a stranger, even a stranger who says that he is a doctor. Doctor Stitches is a doctor, after all. "My head hurts but I have a weapon and I can still hit you if you are dangerous," she specifies. "But I do not want to hit you."

Wilson holds his hands up, trying to appear as nonthreatening as possible. He offers her a kind smile. "I'm not here to hurt you or anyone else. I don't even have any weapons. Perhaps you saw me on the network a day or two ago? I just woke up here."

He sighs, and ventures a step in her direction. "If you don't mind my asking, do you know why your head hurts? Were you injured?"

Either he is a liar or he does not have the sense to lie. Who tells a stranger that he does not have any weapons? Ecks doesn't put the shovel down, but she doesn't do anything else with it in response to his small advance, either.

"My head hurts because I was punched in the face and I got a concussion. That is a brain injury."

"Oh, you must've been hit quite hard, then. I'm sorry to hear that."

He waits for her to make a move, and when she doesn't, he shuffles in a bit further. It occurs to him that he's stuck here for the night. Both of them are. He'll have to sleep in here at some point.

"Um. Do you mind if I sit?"

"Very hard," agrees Ecks. "I do not mind if you sit."

If he sits, maybe he'll stop moving toward her and she won't feel so strong an urge to stand up and be ready if he gets within reach to do...something. She doesn't even know what she's afraid he might do.

"Are you the kind of doctor that heals people?" she asks. Maybe that is it. Doctor Clayton had asked questions because he was that kind of doctor.

Wilson nods and settles down in the opposite corner of the room to respect her space. He feels a little strange keeping so much distance between them, especially in a place this dark, but she doesn't seem the type to appreciate closer company. He takes a moment to shrug off his coat and to make as comfortable an area for himself as possible.

Her question catches him off guard, though. "Yes, I am... Is there another type of doctor you're familiar with?"

This is good. This first meeting is going very well, she thinks.

"I am more familiar with the kind that experiments," she replies, unfazed. Strange that only one of the doctors she's met in this place has been that kind; she'd thought the healers were the odd ones out. "But I like your kind of doctor more, mostly."

"Oh." He sounds vaguely surprised. "Experiments" is a rather ominous term... He guesses she doesn't mean typical research.

"What do you mean 'mostly'?"

"There are good things about the other kind of doctor," she says as though it's self evident. "I think your kind is only mostly better."

Well, isn't this a strange conversation. It's interesting, though. Interesting is good.

"Can you tell me more about the other kind? I don't think I'm familiar."

Ecks tilts her head at him, an eery, off-kilter sort of motion. "What kinds of things about the other kind? The other kind of doctor experiments. They are doctors because they learn things about bodies and magic."

Now there's magic in the mix? Magic came up a couple of times in his chats with the welcome wagon on the network, but hearing it out loud in person like this feels twice as insane. Wilson watches her for a moment, trying to figure out if she's just messing with him. She probably knows he's new here, or if she didn't know already then she's probably figured it out by now. He's an easy mark. Despite her strange way of speaking, though, she doesn't sound like she's lying. Hmm.

"What sort of experiments do they do? We don't, um, we don't have magic where I'm from." He shrugs. "Our doctors rely on science."

"I have heard about science," allows Ecks. She's heard rather a lot about science, really. She still thinks it is very strange that there are doctors that do not use magic at all, but it is good that there because they are useful here.

She fidgets with her shovel, debating how much to tell him. Nothing about her personal involvement, she decides. "Sometimes they cut people apart and put them back together differently," she says. "Or try different kinds of magic on them to see what happens."

Wilson has a sneaking suspicion that Ecks has more firsthand experience with this experimentation than she's letting on. That would certainly explain her appearance, anyway. But Wilson has social grace and will not ask about it. That would be rude. If she wants to tell him, she will.

"Interesting," he says instead, and it's a genuine reaction. It is interesting, if horribly unethical and at least a little frightening. "That's definitely not how we do things where I'm from, but..." Though he suspects Ecks has personal ties to this subject, he can't get a read on her emotions regarding it. She sounds rather indifferent, really. "Do they learn a lot from those methods, at least?"

"Yes. They learn many things. Many things are possible because of experiments." Things like creating people out of corpses, for instance. That's not really something to bring up, though.

"But I think it is mostly better to heal people," she adds. "Mostly people do not want to be experimented upon."

"Well, that's a reasonable thing to want," Wilson says, a little more sarcastically than he intended. It's just too absurd. What kind of place must she be from if she needs to assure him that people don't appreciate experimentation? "Aren't there laws against it, then, if it hurts people?"

On second thought, there probably are. Laws just don't do much to stop some people. Some people.

"Laws are for cows," says Ecks almost automatically, the phrase springing naturally to mind the moment he brings up the idea of there being laws against the things the gnomes of the Fleshworks do. "The other kind of doctor does not obey cow-laws because the cow is not their god."

"Oh," he says, and then he says it again when she finishes speaking. He thought she was being sarcastic, but apparently cows really do factor into the equation here. "I don't think we have those kinds of gods where I'm from. Typically, we keep our doctoring separate from our religious affiliations."

They what.

"How?" asks Ecks, perturbed. She knows, on some level, that Doctor House is a godless healer, but Doctor House is strange in many ways, and she's sort of assumed he's not the norm. "Everything we did was what our god wanted."

Wilson makes a face, taken aback by her statement. It's clear at this point that they come from two very different worlds, but that's not really what catches his attention. "I'm sorry, did you say 'we'?" He asks not as if to judge her, but as if he's genuinely curious. Which, he is.

Ohshit.

Ecks freezes up, silent. She did just say 'we' and she understands the implications. She hears that curiosity. She also hears judgment that is not there.

"No," she says after much too long a pause. At least her voice is still steady and flat, if too fast now. "I did not say we. I do not have any involvement."

Wilson picks up on Ecks' apprehension, her backtracking. His heart sinks. He shouldn't have said anything. "It's okay," he says with as comforting a tone as possible (which is pretty comforting; he's James Wilson, after all). "I'm in no position to judge. I don't know how things work where you're from."

He pauses. Was that the right thing to say? He's not sure. He's not sure about anything lately.

"We don't have to talk about it if you're uncomfortable."

It is not really okay, though. She knows that it is not okay to murder people and perform medical experiments on them, because she knows she would not want those things done to her.

She is uncomfortable, though. Best not reveal anything else.

"I am tired," she lies. She has done nothing but rest. "I would prefer to sleep now."

"Oh. Okay." Her sudden disengagement catches him by surprise. He hopes it's not because of anything he said, but he can't shake the feeling that it is.

"All right. Goodnight, Ecks."

He settles in to browse his tablet for awhile before turning in himself.

It is not so much the things he's said as the things she has said. Ecks does not know how to navigate this conversation without telling him things she does not want anyone to know, let alone a stranger -- and so she will simply not.

"Goodnight," she says, glad for the darkness. It will be easier to pretend that she is asleep this way.

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[log] In the creaking darkness [closed?]

Evening 136

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