ArchivedLogs:Shreds of Sanity
| Shreds of Sanity | |
|---|---|
| Dramatis Personae | |
| In Absentia
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2013-01-30 Parley contributes to the advancement of Science. (Part of Prometheus TP.) |
| Location
<?> Project Prometheus - Residence Hall | |
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.
Here's a room. Much like all the other rooms. It's built for two, and it holds two; Parley's roommate has been moved in only yesterday. Yesterday, Parley's roommate was a tiny dark-haired boy who could not have been much into his teens; by today (afternoon? Night? Sans windows and clocks it might be hard to track) he has become an apparently identical twin to Parley. Narrow-framed, shaggy black hair, tawny fur and scarring and all. Parley-clone seems little inclined to conversation or even movement; when there is a knock on the door he does not look up, and when the door subsequently opens without waiting for answer, he still does not look up. He sits in his chair, where he's sat for many hours, and stares at the wall.
The orderly who comes into the room after the knock is dressed in scrubs, pale green. A paper face shield over (his? her? the scrubs are baggily ambiguous as to PersonShape) their face, a clipboard in hand, which they look at and then frown at the room.
It's been a quiet room, Parley sharing it not by half, but seeming by whole, presence softened and disintegrated to the point that it seems only the other still figure in the chair is the only living thing in the room. Much of the night before had been spent sitting crosslegged on the bed, eyes closed, melted out into the room to marinate in whatever emotions trail the air - if not his unforthoming roommate, then in the halls outside, traipsing other rooms. By this next day, at some point, he's gotten risen for a quick shower; he's emerging when the obscured orderly enters the room, a towel around his waist and fur spiked and ruffled from its recent scrub-dry. The intrusion doesn't surprise him - he's moving rapidly to redress.
His roommate doesn't give off much. He seems kind of emotionally faded, himself, still and as silent mentally as he is physically. The orderly looks /irritated/ at the pair of Parleys in the room, lowering the clipboard with a /huff/. "Einen." It's clipped and terse, eyes darting between the two figures in mild impatience.
Towel dropped, no personal concern for nudity evident, Parley seems not to have heard the name spoken. Clean scrubs are pulled on, tied at the bony waist, shirt climbed up into and then pulled down to cover his dappled spine. The silence in the room is resounding. Huff, indeed.
"/Einen/." This time, it's sharper. The orderly's hand is dropping to their waist, where a baton is probably not /standard/-issue medical equipment. Parley's roommate is nonresponsive. Sitting. Staring at the wall. "You're needed." It sounds kind of hurried. Kind of harried. "Now."
Parley's compression of lips forms a neat hyphen, a very deep well of possibilities stacking up in the silence that now follows. He looks over his shoulder at the silent-seated shape, the question of which room occupant might receive attention from the baton first hanging with increasing precedence. Then, without sigh, he's already stepping forward, brisk-quick with hands in fists, not seeming interested in searching, nor searching /for/ the other's face, when he murmurs coldly, "I'm coming."
There's a slight tick of relaxation in the orderly's form when one of the two steps forward. Their hand drops from the baton, and the orderly steps back to hold the door open, gesturing out into the hallway. The not!Parley gets a long narrow-eyed look, but then, once Parley is out in the hall, the door is closed. Securely locked from outside. Parley is gestured down the hall; it's a familiar enough route, by now, and the orderly walks behind with the same thin-veiled impatience. A guard in the hallway gets a curt nod, but it's the elevator bank they're destined for.
It's more reflex than intention, to reach out for the touchstone anchors of mind in conjunction with presence, to the orderly and the guard both, absent as touching a guardrail in a flight of stairs. A lack of finding is likely as familiar as the elevator bank. Parley waits beside it, hands folded behind his back, "What's happened." His eyes scan up to the ceiling.
"They sent for you downstairs." This might be deliberately unhelpful or, likely as not, the orderly really doesn't know. They seem more impatient than intentionally obfuscating. Pressing the elevator button a second time as though that will call it faster. It comes in short enough order, the ride down is short enough as well. The hall below is starker than the one above, concrete rather than tile. No paint on the walls. Parley is led to a door set thick and heavy in the concrete wall, an operating theater beyond. Though nobody's being operated on, just now. It currently holds a wide-eyed teenage boy, his fingers webbed, silvery fishy scales rippling down his arms, his lips so chapped they are bleeding and his dark hair shaved fuzzy-short. There's a myriad of electrodes stuck to his scalp, though the machine they are hooked up to is not /displaying/ anything; not here, at least. In the corner of the room there's another person; she looks older than the boy, though not by much. Bony-skinny, dark-skinned, wild-eyed. The boy in the chair is strapped down securely with leather restraints, though the girl in the corner just crouches. Shivering. In the opposite corner there's a guard, though he seems keen to stay as far away from the girl as possible; the orderly, likewise, deposits Parley into the room and then leaves in short order to lock the door again. Neither guard nor girl is talking, though the boy on the table mumbles to himself in a broken mix of Norwegian and Sami. It's not very /coherent/ mumbling. Scattered sentiments about icicles and fishsticks and getting on a plain. The girl in the corner is sullen. The guard is wary. The boy seems to be in a good deal of /pain/.
<?> Project Prometheus - Operating Room Rather different from most operating theatres in its bare concrete walls, heavy metal-barred door, this nevertheless has its similarities making its purpose clear. It carries the same chemical-sterile smell particular to hospitals, and the surgical table in the center is identifiable enough, padded segments on its adjustable-height base and thick restraints fitted into its sides. Jointed arms hang over the table, dropping down from the concrete ceiling with an array of lights and monitors and equipment hung from their length. Though the corners of the ceiling contain security cameras vigilantly watching, one large segment of wall running the length of the room is built in glass rather than concrete, mirrored and focused down at the operating station.
"Ah. Einen." It's a disconnected voice, calm and clipped, piped in from speakers up near the cameras in the room's corners. "Wonderful. We've been having some difficulties."
Einen's narrow shoulders tighten minutely at the closing of the elevator doors, his elbows pressing slightly harder against his ribs, muscles clenching into a delicate bracing. It lingers as they go down, down, and then down the hallway where he scans the door, and moves through it with reluctant steps when it's opened. Once inside, there's a different change. Like a power surge blowing out, he inhales sharply - and then comes a subtle slackening of lips, a dulling of eyes and edges, shoulders slipping looser in the heavy turmoil of the room, like some quintessential human ingredient is buoyed up and out of him by the submergence. "I see that," he breathes, sweeping a scan between the girl in the corner, the restrained boy. "What is it you're trying to do?"
The girl in the corner turns widened eyes on Parley, skipping there sharp as she cringes back into the corner further. There's a brief sort of /tugging/ at Einen's mind, pickpickpicking at it like trying to un/ravel/ mental threads, unhinge them, but it slips in against his consciousness and then passes on like forgetting he exists. "We've been trying to monitor his changes in state," the calm voice speaks up again, "though we've run into some problems with communication as he progresses." For what value of progress the gibbering teenager on the table has made. He's engaging now in what seems to be an earnest attempt to ask one of the bright lights over him to dinner. "I've a series of questions for him, if you could translate for him and deliver his answers, it would be quite helpful. Alright?" The Voice sounds alarmingly /civil/ in tone, contrastingly calm to a sudden keening whine from the boy on the table. It subsides back into mumbled stream-of-consciousness.
Parley's eyes flutter closed for a moment at the mental tugging, though the responding texture of him is as loose and disconnected as water - what's picked at comes away easy in cool-numbing ravels that soon dissolve and disperse back into the amorphous shape of his mind. "...He's in a lot of pain," Parley protests wearily, reopening his eyes and stepping silent-footed towards the boy.
"Yes, thank you," says the Voice -- even-calm, deep enough in tone to be likely male, cultured enough in tone to be likely educated, polite enough in tone he even sounds actually thankful for this information. "Please refrain from touching the subject. Shall we begin?" There's just enough of a pause after this to seem like perhaps the voice is actually concerned with Parley's response to this question, but then he continues on regardless of what answer may or may not come. "The ninth month of the year is: October, January, June, September, or May?"
Parley turns to look at - the door, the wall, whatever direction the sound of the disembodied voice is coming from, mouth open to say /something/ else in protest. His teeth slowly clip together with it unspoken and he turns back to the boy, his feet flat, his hands loose at his sides, "Please," he whispers softly, and a wealth of much deeper apology and remorse wash through his words, "Try to focus. I have to ask you some questions," << they're making me/can't stop it/it will hurt worse if I/you don't/we have to work together/I'm here. >> He repeats the question carefully, watching the boy's face. To the girl, however, there ripples up a suggested question? Confusion - directed at the situation? An amalgamate inquiry about what is happening?
The boy doesn't seem to acknowledge Parley, at least not when he speaks aloud. His expression is contorted in a pain heavily echoed in his general feeling, his thoughts as scattered and disorganized as his speech. He's quite focused on the light above him, and the question is ignored. At least until the mental nudge, at which he frowns, sounding a soft moaning cry again. "{Is it June already?}" is the sole coherent response he voices in his native Northern Sami, buried somewhere in a longer string of rambling. About lights. About burning. About snow. Past /pain/ his thoughts, in addition to disorganized, are somewhat weak, drifting in and out like holding on to consciousness is a struggle. The girl turns her face aside, shoulders hunching up tighter, jaw clenching down tighter. << I'm happening, >> is tiny. Guilty. It comes with a heavy dose of exhaustion.
Only a grimness answers this; somewhere between a nod and a simple -- touch. Nonjudgemental and light to the girl's mind. "He," Parley slips eyes just slightly towards the girl, though only for a moment before he turns and rasps over his shoulder, "-- he asks if it's June." The wash of pain radiating from the boy mellows through him, enlivens him, and the rasp isn't necessarily one of pain as it is concentration, as he offers slowly, "He can't concentrate on that many options. He's getting -- lost. Lights. Burning. Snow. It's not making sense."
"Mmm. No. It is not June," the Voice answers after a quiet moment. << don't even know his name, >> the girl is saying, soft in the corner, though with this comes a more grim-dreading acknowledgment that she probably doesn't want to. The boy is singing, a little raspy-soft, a little disjointed. It's a song about a boy trading some chickens away -- though now it changes, something about a woman and her staff, though the words don't exactly fit the melody he's trying to cram them in to. Now it's about a fox eating violins. "What," the voice asks again, evenly, "is the ninth month of the year?" Unlike the orderly who brought Parley here, he does not sound impatient. Just blandly thoughtful.
"No," Parley repeats the Voice's words, quiet-neutral, as they're imparted, "It is not June." For a moment, almost mesmerized, he repeats tonelessly the words sung by the boy; beneath his own lack of tone, the emphasis of his translation matches its appropriate place as the boy sings it, even if the English version's syntax would make it otherwise clumsy. It's the only sound in the room, even if undercurrent, for the girl, there comes a delicate suggestion of transference and identity, coupled with urging. He'll remember the name for her. Just live. "Listen to my voice," he says it louder, to the boy, trying to raise the volume of his /sentiment/ as well, pressing in to /shout/ into the fragmented pain, even if his speaking voice stays even, "What is the ninth month of the year? The ninth month."
The boy continues singing, in response to this, though eventually the tune stutters off into nothing. "{Water,} he says eventually, maybe a request, maybe just a continuation of his rambling. "{Poured it onto the keyboard --}" He trails off into nothing. No rambling. Not even much thought, past the chaotic twists of pain. The voice waits. For translation, perhaps, though there's a still longer pause even if it comes. But, just as calm, undaunted: "Which is smaller? A cat, or a horse?"
A very faint healthy flush brushes Parley's cheeks as he continues to steadily translate the singing, pain washing in without recoil, fervor washing out over words merely spoken, "--poured it onto the keyboard--." And then it trails off for him as well, breathing through parted lips. He shakes his head blankly at the next question, "It's not going to--. Hsssss." He swallows and says methodically, "Which is smaller? A cat, or a horse?" And, after this, much quieter, he whispers in a nimble-rapid knife of subtext, words too quiet to be heard. What is your name? Do you remember your name?
"Perhaps not," pipes in crisply through the speakers, in response to the aborted protest, "but please just stick to the questions." The response to this is just as disjointed. Magnets. Magnets in the snow. A game of football played in -- no, wait, brief panic, is he /missing/ the game? Someone will be angry, though he's forgotten their name. The question is ignored altogether, the boy recoiling, tugging at the restraints though seemingly more in puzzlement than in any attempt to escape. It isn't very /strong/ struggling. His mind stirs into briefly sharper clarity at the whispered questions -- namenamename -- but all he says in the end, soft and with a sharp twinge cutting through the pain -- love, /fear/ -- "I had a cat. Can you feed her?"
Magnets in the snow, football, even the panic at missing a game transfers through, Parley's unassumed existence melts through the exchange, as though it is the boy speaking directly in English and there is no middle person translating at all. It makes it jarring, when the boy's last question is left untranslated, Parley only listening to it at first, eyes closing. And then, he translates this as well. Though this is said heartlessly. Just words, "-can you feed her." Pointedly /not/ looking at the girl in the room. Quieter, though, he tries to hammer at the same snag of clarity that had tried to flourish without speaking his time -- namenamename/affirmative/namename - rememberyourname. It mixes with a sense of safe, warm envelopment, like a nest, with a empty place in its snug middle, for the boy to fill with this small requested part of him.
"Interesting," comes from the speakers, though the tone this is said in is dispassionate and does not sound particularly interested. "What can he tell us about the cat?" "{Name,}" the boy whispers, softer in voice even as his mind sinks softer, too. /Burying/ itself in this warm nest, sinking in in what /would/ be desperate attempt to flee the mental pain, if he had the strength to flee. But instead -- just sinking. He returns to song, the same as before, though he sings a snatch here, a snatch there, mixing the lyrics together from what was originally likely many songs. "Trjegul," he eventually returns to, almost /proud/ of this remembering. Though it's not /his/ name. It calls to mind instead a cat, marmalade, spotted, curled up in a window overlooking a frosted world outside. Mountains in the distance, frosted, too.
Parley's mouth parts open, as if to yawn, blank-eyed and pulling in a slow breath. This, when the boy sinks in. His pain comes too, will /have/ to come too, but across the barrier it strains down and simplifies to its nerveless analgesic compounds, and he gently settles a cool-numb bed around this small part of this broken presence. Allows it to sink deep, to share thick. His translation, in turn, grows richer, the song striking sharp in its discord, heard mush starker than the quiet voice actually speaking it. And he finally says, "It's name is Trjegul." And, wading through these fragmented images, he adds, "...He'd fading."
In the corner, the girl has buried her face against her knees. There's another brief tug at Parley's mind, as he reaches out to the boy, twining there to pull at him with the same clawing fingers that are pulling at the boy. It's a disorienting sort of feeling, finding rough edges of sanity to hook at and /twist/ into something not -- quite. She breathes in slowly, breathes out slowly, and the clawing mental fingers withdraw. "Good, good. How long did he have this cat? Where did he get it?" the voice continues, after a pause. The last of Parley's message is apparently disregarded. The boy is singing again, in fits and starts. And then he isn't singing anymore. There's just pain, pulsing even through the numb bed Parley makes for him, and then even the pain is gone. From the girl there is panic. More skittering claws, fumbling /suddenly/ towards Parely, scratch-scrape-dig. In the corner, the guard, silent before now, stiffens with a /distinct/ twinge of fear-anger-panic, apparently receiving this same treatment. "Hey. /Hey/. You focus, now."
A long, unclenching shudder passes through Parley, the boy's pain reaching its crescendo into silence and in him, and then uncurling sideways into the tear of claws from the girl instead. Whether the contact comes initially from their shared touch on the now Silent mind is obscure, unimportant. He takes the scratching and digging like a pillow would take a rough fluffing, boneless and supple, cushiony-soft and actively coaxing her to focus here on him, and off the guard. He seeks wordlessly to calm her with soft touches. "She can't," there are book clubs that discuss plot twists with more anguish than his mild clip, looking back towards the source of the Voice, even if it's only a speaker, announcing bluntly, "he's gone." He slips towards the girl, a hand out.
There is silence from the speakers. The girl recoils from the hand, curling back into the corner with her face burying further against her knees and her shoulders shaking. The mental digs get harder, sharper, twisting into the soft scape of Parley's mind to sink in with something almost /hungry/, picking away at rationality and focus and lapping at /sanity/ like a cat might lap a dish of cream. In the corner, the guard relaxes. And from the speakers there is still silence, until: "Ah. Very well. Thank you," says the Voice, "for your assistance. Please, return him to his quarters."
The force of pressure pounding on his mind seems to make Parley smaller, thinner, not in body but in some other intangible mass that fades as holes are punched through. He's begun to pant, short shallow rushes of air, his face paling and hands developing a palsy shake. He touches a gentle hand onto her head when it recoils, kneeling to try and put his arms around her, whispers-rasping into her hair, "Find me, if you - fhhhhh," he winces in, then pushes back forwards again, eyes feverish and focused, "-- if you can't control it. I'll help."
The clawing subsides, if only slightly, at the contact, the girl leaning into it for a moment. Only a moment. Then the guard is clamping a hand onto Parley's shoulder to STEER the young man out the door, pulling keys from his belt to unlock it and re-lock it again afterwards, leaving the girl in the room with what-used-to-be-a-fish-child. The sharp mental fingers recede as they draw away. It's replaced by a desperate sort of sobbing from behind the closed door.
Parley releases the younger girl when the guard takes his shoulder, cooperating with the steering without resistance. Where claws recede, so does the softening of the room, and Einen quietly raises a slightly shaky hand to brush the hair back from his brow, pressing a hand over his mouth /hard/ once he's in the hallway once again. He swallows thick, nauseas, and with arms crossed hard and head tipped down, he allows himself to be seen back to his quarters. | |
