Logs:Above all, maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins.
| Above all, maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins. | |
|---|---|
Discussion/Description of Gross Diseases | |
| Dramatis Personae | |
| In Absentia | 2024-06-30 "But it's -- safe to be here, right?" |
| Location
<BOM> Jenner Ruins - Leo's | |
When it was operational, this section of the facility met BSL-4 standards, and the complicated series of airlocked chambers for chemical showers and donning and doffing pressure suits and regular showers marks that fact. It is no longer operational, its BSL-4 approval years since revoked. Probably a lot of people in a lot of unpronounceably-acronym'd agencies would be extremely displeased at just how much highly pathogenic research has been going on here lately, and under how very little supervision. The only supervision in here right now, in fact, is Leo, who definitely has not been trained for any of the complicated equipment abandoned here. But then, he isn't using it, either. At the moment he's just kind of chilling in the back, in a cleanroom that does not look so very different now, really, than it did when it was functioning as a prison. Undecorated, barely furnished. He's tucked on the cot in the back corner, cross-legged in loose soft black lounge pants and a plain white tee, vaguely-sort-of-kind-of playing Baba Is You on his signal-less tablet and vaguely-sort-of-kind-of watching Pontypool on his equally signal-less laptop. It's all fairly unremarkable except for how very unwell he's looking. He's lost noticeable weight in the past week, skin sallow and pocked with blisters or their crusted angry remains. There is an unpleasant something spiderwebbing dark and feathery across his cheek; it's eaten away at some of the skin, etching irritated weeping lines into his face. His hands are intermittently shaking too badly to actually hold his tablet -- it's resting in his lap, the stylus set aside after being dropped one too many times. There's a heavily antiseptic smell to the room and a ton of cleaning products and trash bags on standby in the corner, which is probably better than the smells of bodily effluents that have been here at many other times this week. All Leo's painfully obsessive cleaning, though, can't quite mask the sickly pus smell coming off him directly, though -- and judging by the red and swollen state of his hands is not really doing him personally any favors. Still, for now, he is not scrubbing. Just slouching back against a nest of pillows, blinking blank and exhausted at the panicking characters on screen. Even without actually going through all the proper procedures and protocols it still is a bit of a process just getting through the airlocks, so Leo has a fair amount of heads-up before company arrives. B is carrying a plastic cafeteria tray -- it's got some hot ginger tea, a bowl of noodle soup in clear herby-smelling broth, a couple single-serving tubs of applesauce. She lingers hesitantly when she actually enters the room, rocking uncertainly back on her heels. Her already flat nose is reflexively pressing down flatter, nostrils closing entirely for just a moment before she has to take a breath again to speak. "Are you, um. Up to -- you haven't eaten in a bit. We didn't know if you were good for lunch or..." "...company?" Scramble completes B's offer, maybe a bit more dubiously than she had intended. She's dressed in a black A-shirt, cutoff jeans, and old scuffed up Docs, carrying a stack of boardgames. Well. It's really just "Pandemic" with a couple of expansions. "Tho I'm kinda questioning our choice of entertainment now. Boy, you look like you about to keel over." Even with his forewarning, it takes a moment for Leo to pull his eyes away from the screen to fix on -- or a little past -- his visitors. He blinks, refocuses, his head tilting slightly at B. "Thank you," is not an answer; it sounds a little vague and hazy, and only after another blink does he reorient himself to be a little more committed: "I will try. Soup." His mouth twitches -- a little thin at first, but he's looking to Pandemic with a quiet amusement. "Have you eaten? I'm not -- the best company. If it was recent." "Oh!" B does not do a good job at disguising her quick relief at being offered this escape, gills fluttering quick as she kind of half-turns toward the doors. She doesn't actually collide with Scramble, at least, checking this impulse as she looks down at the games her Sister is holding. "I -- had lunch a while ago," she admits, and slips further into the room to set the tray down on a table near Leo's bed. "Ion said you were having a rough time but I didn't -- I think he was underselling it. I thought you were -- like. Immune. To -- everything." "I had a big breakfast," Scramble allows, settling the stack of boxes on the table, as well. "If there's something else you'd like, we'll try to make it happen. I know the game is kind of polarizing." She's trying not to breathe too deeply. "If you do want to play, though, we can handle the fiddly little disease bits. Uh...the wooden ones. I assume you got the actual squishy ones. Handled." "I like Pandemic," Leo reassures the others -- his voice is kind of rattly and he stops after this to take a slow breath. This doesn't actually stave off the rattly coughs that follow, but taking a sip of the hot tea does seem to help. "-- most people seem to think that's. Weird." He hits pause on the zombies on his screen, closing his laptop and setting it aside to make more room for the games. "Getting them handled. I'm not -- immune. Not exactly immune. It's -- complicated." "But it's -- safe to be here, right?" B's forehead is scrunching as she tries to think back to Ion's recent Deadness Levels; she doesn't seem entirely at ease as she settles down cross-legged on the floor opposite Leo, but she does look less immediately ready to bolt. "Did you start liking it before or after your whole -- uh. Horseman thing." The tug of Scramble's smile at Leo's reassurance about the game is brief. Then she's leaning back away from Leo's coughing fit. "I don't think that's weird. Not even if you only started liking it after." She pulls out the base game and opens the box. "Do you have a favorite role? No matter how good you are, we get an expansion to make it challenging." Leo doesn't answer the question about when he started liking Pandemic, or about his role, but maybe this is because the first question has distracted him considerably. He's frowning, deep, and turning over his hand to study a mottled patch on the back of his arm, black and cracking and fading into an angry red splotching where the skin starts to be alive again. "... how safe," he asks, quiet and cautious, "do you think it is to be around me the rest of the time?" B goes silent, her eyes opening up wide-wide to stark black pools that take up a disproportionate majority of her face. Her mouth presses tight, her gills flattening along the sides of her neck. She, too, is looking at the necrotic skin on the back of Leo's arm, and then at the board games. She swallows, her inner eyelids shuttering, and glances -- for a second -- back to the door. Then she's exhaling hard and deliberate and reaching for On the Brink. "You don't get to be the bioterrorist," is all she says, firmly. | |
