ArchivedLogs:Common Language

Common Language
Dramatis Personae Lia, Jeremy
In Absentia	7 October 2013 Lia and Jeremy are moved to a new holding cell.
Location Subject Housing – Prometheus Testing Facility – Undisclosed Location
This hall could be one of any, in some generic residential facility in some generic medical establishment. Bland tile on the floors, identical doors with numbers beside them and plastic slots to hold folders of information for the orderlies to identify the people inside. The tiny rooms beyond are identical, too; matching twinned cots with matching white sheets, matching plain wood chairs by their matching end tables, not much personality to any of them. Each comes with a bathroom, small and bare, too. Toilet. Washbasin. Tiny cube of shower with plastic floor and plastic sheet of curtain to pull across. The rooms all lack in windows to the outside, though, and the doors are suspiciously heavy, the small slat of glass set into them bulletproof-hard. One of the twin cots in this room is made neatly and empty. The other has its sheets pulled from the bed to instead cover the space beneath it like curtains. On the bed sits a doll: a pretty little girl with sweet curls of ash-brown hair, warm brown eyes, cracked porcelain skin, a yellowing replica First Communion dress. The doll sits, staring blankly with her glassy eyes, smiling placidly with her little carefully-formed mouth. There is no movement within. Being led into the room by his handler, Jeremy has a fairly blasé look on his face. It is not too uncommon for his life to be changed around him at the whims of others, and having his living quarters shifted is yet another thing outside of his control. Another facility manager comes behind with the small tray of designated possessions necessary for his general existence and interactions, markers and notepads, and a few folded up clothing items. With the tray being set beside the cot, the facility manager departs, and the young mutant is pointed to his cot and the handler departs. With no point of control in the room any more, Jeremy blinks a few times as he slowly looks around the room and notices the doll and the covers become curtains. He gives a wave to the general vicinity of the cot and doll, sitting on the floor where the tray was set, and he picks up one of the notepads and marker, if for nothing else to have something familiar in hand. The room remains perfectly still as Jeremy is delivered to it, as he is ushered inside, as the door opens and closes again to deposit his few possessions within. Footsteps echo down the quiet hall as the facility manager departs to some other corner of the building. The room also falls quiet. At Jeremy's wave, the doll's head tilts and tilts further still, to a perfect 45 degree angle to the right. Its left hand slowly raises, as if by ponderous mechanism, the arm bending precisely at the elbow and straightening again, palm forward, to wave in return. Blink. Blink. Having never seen the girl’s power used before, this is certainly a rather disturbing sight to behold, thankfully though Jeremy has never seen creepy doll horror movies before which would give him a complex. Not sure if this is a test or not though, he looks up and around towards the cameras and speakers, expecting instructions. After a minute of waiting with no direction given, he frowns beneath his muzzle, and opening up the notepad, he scrawls a hello and holds it up to be seen. The doll's head tilts again, returning to upright. Its hands settle, slowly, primly, mechanically, into its lap. The eyes blink, dark little lashes brushing against one another with each motion. Once, twice, thrice. The doll's mouth opens, dispenses the single word, “Hello,” in a soft girl's voice, and closes. It is difficult to tell if the word was read from the page or reciprocated. Remembering the girl from art day and her doll, Jeremy closes his eyes trying to remember a name to go with it. It had something to do with cops? Shaking his head, he frowns and decides to give up on remembering, and scribbles again on the page. ~I am Jeremy. You were at art day?~ He scoots closer, not sure if the doll can see very well with the size discrepancy and not wanting to waste paper writing big things over most of his limited pages. The scientists may not be testing Jeremy, though the doll clearly has been. She nods, a clean, fluid motion. Her knees bend out of their ramrod-straight positions to tuck up under her chin, her arms wrapping childlike around her legs to hold them. “Coppélia,” the doll replies. “You made a shape. It scared the keepers. I went away.” Nodding as the name is given, Jeremy winces as he is told again of what happened. He waits hesitantly looking at her, as if expecting some form of punishment to be extracted upon him. As nothing instantly happens, he scrawls again under the previous lines. ~Sorry. Didn’t mean trouble. No harm?~ The doll's head shakes. “I am here. It is like the last here. But different.” Her chin rests on her knees again. “You did not know. The keepers get scared by the shapes. They don't like for me to use my magic. Except when they say so.” Tiny fingers smooth at the ruffles of the doll's skirts, trying to set them in place. Tapping at his muzzle, Jeremy demonstrates he understands the situation. Flipping the paper over, he swaps to another color marker to avoid bleed over. ~Muzzle stops me. Helps me too. No waking up covered in frost. ~ He glances up to the cameras again, knowing that they’re being watched anyway. With another scrawl he writes out ~Hungrier though.~ with an accompanying frowny face and grabbing blue for a little sad tear. The doll's head cants to the side, more birdlike in its movement this time than mechanical. “You make cold?” Her voice becomes more distant, musing. “I used to have frost. On the window.” The little features on the doll's face scrunch up for a moment, perplexed, tiny painted-on eyebrows dipping toward one another. “Where does your food go?” ~Eat power~ Jeremy writes down, before theres a frown even visible in his eyes and the rest of his face. Tilting his neck to the side, he tugs down at his shirt tunicy thing so his shoulder is more bare. A port is more visible now that he’s made the effort to show it, then he settles back down. ~Fed from bag some. Real food less.~ He lets out a sigh, though its more reverberated from his neck and muffled. There is a little shrug again, and a slight glance from the doll to the curtains on the cot. “I don't eat.” Porcelain hands brush over a soft abdomen. “Maybe...eat magic.” Her eyes track down to the bed beneath her. “Maybe eat Lia.” Little arms wrap back around little legs. “When Lia goes away, sometimes there is food in a tube.” One finger lifts daintily to tap at the doll's minute nose. It clinks very faintly. Drawing a smiley face at the talk of eating magic, Jeremy has a slight muffled laugh. Tapping the marker against his leg a bit in thought, he raises up to place a piece of paper and a marker next to Coppelia to share. Sitting back down to be at a better level, he sighs softly. ~They angry at drawn people?~ he scribbles in query, not wishing to have his papers taken away. The doll's head shakes, little brown curls bobbing. “Pictures do not run away.” She crawls over to the edge of the bed, peering down at the offering. One hand takes the paper between its little fingers, placing it on the bed. Then both reach back to grasp the marker between them, the tiny hands pawlike in their short-fingered grip of the oversized implement. “Do I write, like you?” ~Was sharing, you can draw~ Jeremy nods at that, then proceeds to draw...poorly. It might be a platypus-bear-dog thing. Clearly, it isn’t something he’s terribly good at, but he glances back up to the doll expectantly for a moment. Writing beneath the little scribble, he asks ~Don’t know what you do. I usually sleep a lot.~ He shrugs at that then looks to the cot and his little stack of stuff. “Oh.” The doll's look at the marker is somewhat perplexed. She rests the marker between her tiny used-to-be-white shoes and uses both hands to pry off its cap. The hands reclaim the marker once more, turning its point to the paper and drawing...sort of. A purple...cat. If one squints at it right. One can tell by the large letters her hands carefully craft beneath, blocky capitals spelling 'CAT'. “Read. Dance. Lia does tests.” ~We all do tests.~ Jeremy has started a new page for writing, setting the previous paper out and to the side. It would be collected like anything else he scribbled on, probably for some other testing that was being done that he didn’t understand. ~Can teach sign language if you want. Waste less paper then.~ He gives a shrug at that, figuring the doll couldn’t Use it, but could at least see it to know what is being said. He does however draw shapes instead, better at the simple geometric shapes than anything detailed animal wise. “Sometimes the tests don't make any sense. But I get books if I do them. Sometimes the tests are bad.” The doll frowns, pursing little porcelain lips. Her head tilts again, curious and somewhat excited at the next message. “Sign? Hand-talking?” The small hands drop the marker on top of her drawing, fingers fluttering illustratively. Tiny fingers. She looks down at her hands in contemplative assessment, frowning again. ~They see if I can cancel things. Sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t.~ Jeremy makes a little frowny face drawing there, the implication that not working isn’t good. He does nod at the hand-talking comment though. ~I sign. You know what it means.~ He looks at his hands then at the paper, as if wishing there was another option, but knowing he wont get the scientist’s tablet in here. ~Don’t run out of paper if use hands.~ “Cancel?” The doll's face and tone match for confusion, though the explanation of signing earns a resolute nod. She creeps over to the pillow and lies back upon it, as if to go to sleep. Indeed, the little glass eyes close and the doll soon becomes as still as any other. It appears, for nearly a minute, as if this is all that will come from this side of the interaction. Then there is a tug of the sheet-curtain, just at the corner. Enough for a thin child's face with dark eyes to peer around it questioningly, nervous, like a small animal in the woods. Giving the appearing Lia a small wave, Jeremy looks down to the paper, and draws the explanation. He has a picture of a sun and little sunbeams coming down from it. And he draws a little spiral into a black blob and scribbles a black cloud around the spiral. ~All gone. Eaten.~ He nods and shows the page, then points up to the muzzle then back to the spiral and cloud of darkness. Lia's hand reaches up to wave, flexing each finger separately, in turn from thumb to pinkie finger. Her other hand appears, the index finger pointing at the first hand. Her eyebrows creep upward. See? Hand. She crawls out from under the bed, soldier-style, on her stomach, coming into a sitting position just in front of it. Her jade scrub-clad body mimics the doll's earlier pose, knees pulled up under chin. “Where does it go?” Shaking his head, Jeremy shrugs again. ~Mouth? Stomach? Dunno. Gone?~ Seems that he isn’t really sure, his eyes not really showing any duplicity. ~They don’t like not knowing. Lotta tests, special rooms. Breaks electrical stuff~ he seems slightly upset at the last line, and draws a dead t.v. looking thing. Re-settling into a more comfortable position, he faces Lia a little better, putting the notepad into his lap. ~Letters first. Easiest signs.~ Holding up his right hand into the ASL letter A, he poorly writes ~A~ with his left hand. Lia's eyes go wide for a moment. “There was the Nothing that ate all of the stories. It was scary.” Those wide-eyes flit from the muzzle to the drawing of the TV, finally concluding, “Probably it is better to read. That is how you make the stories come back.” Then she is distracted by this novel /gesturing/, an eager smile blooming in her wan face. She scoots closer, directly in front of Jeremy, watching and mimicking the shape of his hand with her own left hand in a manner that calls to mind a reproduction of choreography. There’s a slight sadness in Jeremy’s eyes at being called Nothing for a moment, before it washes away into a kind of emotional nothingness as he starts the work of teaching the letters. Each letter is written out with his left hand, and each letter signed with his right. He repeats back to the beginning once he is done. All the while he looks at her, looking more to her eyes than her hands to see if there is a recognition of the sign as he’s making it before he points to the letter. Lia mistakes the sadness in Jeremy's expression as relating to the tale of stories going away. Because it is a sad tale! Her attention on the lesson is rapt. She learns the motions quickly, smoothly transitioning from one letter to the next with graceful hand motions and adept little fingers. While she is near-immediately able to reproduce the progression of signs for the alphabet straight through from start to finish, Jeremy may notice that actually matching the symbol to its specific letter is taking just a shade longer. Due to the lack of things to do outside of educating, Jeremy is a patient tutor. He does however keep bouncing around now that she knows the progression normally. The bouncing around does however begin to take shape as he signs out some progressions. ~D O Y O U S E E A W O R D Y E T~ He repeats this series a few times watching to see if she does in fact get it. Even when Jeremy moves on to new sequences, Lia memorises and copies them back immediately. It takes her a moment to process that more than this is intended. “Word. Spelling. You're spelling!” she informs Jeremy as if she has caught him at something, or solved a riddle. She bounces in place, smile broadening once more. Nodding, Jeremy gives her a thumbs up. Taking the notepad though, he scribbles on it since it is the faster method for now. ~Yes, I was spelling. You can spell everything if necessary. There are signs for words, but takes longer to learn everything. There is time~ Shrugging again, he looks at her with head tilted, as if asking if she wanted to learn more or not. Lia giggles, hands thrown up happily at even the simple praise offered by Jeremy's gesture. She nods eagerly at the additional message written on the paper. “Yes, more, I want to know more words!” Her hands come together in one little clap as she continues to bounce very slightly in place. She does give a sidelong glance to the door. “I do not think we are going anywhere soon.” With her seeming eager to continue, Jeremy gives a nod at her asking to learn more, and once again when she glances to the door and pronounces their lack of departure. Shifting his legs to avoid them falling asleep, he gets to work going through the vocabulary he knows, writing them down on the page as he goes over them.