Aftermath Again

Just a few days after I extol sunlight, the weather goes and does this.

Sigh.

It's as if the sky has suddenly realised just how much water it has lying around up there and decided to do some spring cleaning Edwardian fashion. The storm drains have burst, popping up manhole covers and flooding the entire CBD. The wind's been getting in on the act too, being strong enough to cause a significant course deviation to anyone trying to walk in a straight line. The rain acts like it's trying to be hail; it might actually have been hail at some points, and I swear I've seen a few snowflakes. I'm drenched.

The great thing about university is that nobody cares when you miss lectures for a month. I did get a few sideways looks about the eyepatch, but the place always has a few eccentrics who wear these when they don't need them, so they weren't too searching. My fingers aren't putting up with holding a pen for any length of time, but take typing easier, so I'm blogging while in the middle of a lecture right now as a matter of fact. My absence may have gone relatively unnoticed, but I missed a lab and the homework's piled up, so I'll be studying double time. If you don't hear from me for a while, it's because an entire shelf of reference books has fallen on me and crushed me. Send help.

Onto more slenderly related matters, I went to check on Black to see if he was still unconcious or if I needed to get a syringe. Well, he was awake, sitting on the bed and staring at the wall. I locked the door behind me.

"Black." No reaction. "Hey, you!" Nothing. I snapped my fingers in his face. That did something. He turned and looked up at me. His eyes were... well, not dead, exactly. Unfocused. Burnt out. Like smoked glass, was the first thought that popped into my head. I swallowed. Well, it was clear this interrogation wasn't going to go anywhere near like expected. No, I don't think he was faking. It's not really the sort of thing you can.

Bing! went my curiosity, right on cue. I poked him. Nope. Harder. Noooope. I wondered if I'd inflicted permanent brain damage. I shook him by the shoulder a little. "Hey. Heeeey. Anyone home?" He turned to look at me again, then when he started to turn back to the wall I grabbed his head so he couldn't. Not a blink. "Oi. Black. Say something." He just kept staring at me patiently, until I let go. I was at a loss. He was exhibiting signs, reminiscent of the Hallowed, that he hadn't before. I think I'm shelving my 'catch and release' program right now. I need to find out exactly what the MRI did to him.

Still, he at least responds to some stimuli.I'd shaken my head and had my hand on the doorknob to leave when he said, still staring at the wall, "Where am I?"

What could I say? "My house."

"Oh."

I waited, but there was nothing more. Then I got out of there, locked the door and put on the kettle.

...

Also, I'm in the news. By which I mean I'm in a couple of paragraphs buried on the thirteenth page of one of those free papers that everyone throws away. I only found out by chance when making the fire.
You'd think someone appearing from nowhere in the middle of a hospital /or the katana, or the blood/azoth mix all over the place...) would get a bit more attention than that but I'm both glad and worried I haven't. With this and the lenient hospital security, I'm starting to suspect someone somewhere is pulling strings. The article was written anonymously, so I don't have a name to go on, but maybe I could ask around at the printing press. Student surveys, always a potent weapon.

Also also on the list of things to do, I went down to the PO Box and picked up the azoth samples and Strider's pills. I can now start getting to work on them, which is great. I love lab work. That wasn't sarcastic, by the way. There's something very zen about distilling, adding reagents, recrystallisation, chromatography, spectroscopy... It's the write ups I groan at.

What else... I've put in an order for another iPhone and seen about getting another taser. Starting to get a little out of pocket.

Final tally:

Me: Loss of an eye, numerous cuts and scratches including gash from sword strike, mild hypothermia, mild starvation, mild dehydration, gain of now defunct alternate timeline memories, slight loss of sanity, several layers of skin missing from palms.

'Black': Cracked patella, numerous scratches, severe bruising, internal and external bleeding, blood loss, other side effects...?

'Grey': Cracked skull, injury to motor cortex of brain, blood loss.

Med out.

Getting Out Part 2

Instead of immediately splatting on the concrete below my flailing hands managed to grab the banister one floor down, although doing so almost dislocated my shoulders and freezer burnt my hands. For a few seconds I just hung there, seeing little black and white dots. Then there was the noise of quick footsteps from above. There was no way I was going to be able to pull myself up with my arms doing jelly impressions, so I swung back and forth until I could land on the stairs below my feet. This time, I managed to stick the landing, and took off at a sprint.

Things went on in a similar manner. They were better navigators, but I was faster and managed to build up a head start. The chase came to its end when I kicked open a door that said MRI Scan Room, having previously hidden my necklace, the laptop and its charger in the room next door and flung the axe, the torch and anything else metallic on me out of a nearby window; even when not switched on, an MRI is still magnetic and when on this beast of a machine is capable of accelerating paperclips to 60kph… and larger objects even faster, counterintuitively. It’s a good thing the place was mostly empty, because otherwise there’d be no way I’d have been allowed to get my hands on the operator’s table. I sticky taped paper over the ELECTRONIC STOP and QUENCH buttons in the scanning room (thank you, secretary’s desk!) and wrote on them “Out of order, do not perform scan” in vivid. Then I stuck my head around the door, looking for the rapidly approaching Black. When I was sure he’d spotted me, I hit the button to start scanning, ran out of the scanning room, shut its door, ran into the operations room and crossed my fingers.

Crossed fingers evidently are lucky, because he came straight into the operations room rather than see what I’d been up to in the scanning room. The sleepily stirring machine wrenched the sword out of his hands in a ‘give me that’ manner, and it stuck fast onto the humming casing. In the moment of confusion this caused I kicked at his knee with every ounce of strength I could muster. There was a satisfying ‘crack’. He gave a shout of anger and pain and made a grab for me, but with all his weight on one leg now I had a greater chance of succeeding in tackling him, whereas previously that chance had been near zero. Instead of trying to dodge his swing I rammed all my weight into him, sending him crashing backwards onto the operating table.

We kicked and struggled, me doing my best to pin him down with the world swimming in and out of clarity, and him doing his best to get me off of him despite his injured knee. Neither of us played fair, and at first I was sure he was going to win since he had the physical advantage. The MRI began making loud knocking noises, and for every second that passed his struggles grew more and more frantic. Then he started screaming and thrashing, no longer with any kind of obvious goal.

I shoved his head into the center of the MRI, straight into the heart of the 3 Tesla magnetic field, 60000 times background level. The room now sounded as though a jet plane was taking off in the middle of it, and one of my eardrums burst, sending a trickle of blood down my neck. Even outside of the eye of the storm, holding Black in it, my entire body prickled with pins and needles and my limbs would twitch involuntarily. Bits of me started to heat up like someone had embedded heating coils at random points in my flesh. Red blood and black azoth began to coat the insides of the tunnel.

Things got even weirder then. I backed away from the still twitching, frothing, struggling Black and the machine, and instead moved to the right. I panicked, tried to turn towards the door, and instead moved up, then left, and then I slammed into a wall. If there’s ever been a video game glitch where the movement keys suddenly up and decided that they’d be whichever direction they happened to want to be at whim, then it was like that. It was also like being a person who’d lived on a previously flat sheet of paper experiencing it being screwed up into a little ball while they were still on it. My inner ear was going haywire, telling me gravity was all over the place, and sometimes operating in two or more directions at once. Prioproreception was having similar problems with the question of exactly where my limbs were. And I had to shut my eye when things started distorting like an Escher painting. I threw up on the MRI machine. Classy, Med.

The operating room’s ELECTRONIC STOP button was my only hope to stop the madness. Never has a journey of a few steps taken so long and been so harrowing, in my opinion. I managed to hit it with my arm. There was the ‘cikh’ of suddenly disabled electronics, and the whole world went quiet. I threw up again, to the consternation of the people in the room.

Yes, there were people in the room. I opened my eye to find a whole lot of guys in white coats looking at me like I’d just appeared from nowhere, which I suppose I technically had.

To cut a long story slightly less long, while everyone was frozen I grabbed the unconscious but surprisingly still alive Black by an arm, hoisted him onto the nearest thing with wheels and was out of there like the worst rescue ever, pausing only to swipe the laptop bag from the room where I stashed it and it thankfully somehow still was. The stairs were a bit tricky, I was shedding layers of now useless blankets on the way and I swear I heard someone shout “WHAT THE HELL!?” as I raced past them. My thoughts exactly, strange guy who I will never know.

Sadly what would have been an awesome end to this entire debacle was cut short by security. I was confined to the hospital while I was questioned and searched. I gave my best ‘I have no idea what happened either, sir’ and while they were still suspicious the search came up clean. Then they went out of the room for a bit, came in and… let me go. I’m not sure exactly why, still. If I were a security officer at a hospital, I for one would have loved to know how a katana ended up stuck to the MRI machine.

My wounds were sterilized and stitched and I am currently scheduled for a repair to my left eardrum

(They’re going to replace the old busted one with some skin taken from behind my ear, apparently.) in a week, but I’m no longer inside the hospital.  I told those who similarly treated him and whoever else asked that Black was my brother, and while he’s still dead to the world he doesn’t need life support so I was allowed to take him home after signing a veritable mountain of papers and a knee brace was put on him. He’s currently locked in the spare room, handcuffed to the bed, so if B does take up my offer it appears I’m going to be a couch sleeper for the forseeable future.

…I need a new iPhone.

Getting Out Part 1

(Holy hell this is long. I'm splitting it into two to make it easier to read.)

It occurs to me I haven’t been posting music! Let’s fix that. And maybe a picture too.

That out of the way, I am now out of the hospital. God, I’ll never take sunlight for granted again. I’m going to stay in this sunbeam for the rest of my life, sunburn be damned. It’s so warm. And wind! Something other than still, dead air! And trees! Aren’t trees amazing? I’d kiss them, if I wasn’t sure they were working for the enemy.

As you can maybe tell, I was getting severely outside world deprived at the end there. To the point where when people other than Jack appeared, I went and hugged them from behind a corner at high speed.

Well, this would probably have been a bad idea even if they hadn’t turned out to be Proxies. There’s probably something about a blood covered madwoman lunging towards you with a fire axe that makes you immediately not think of hugs.

There were two of them, one wearing a grey hoodie, the other a black one. We’ll call them Black and Grey for lack of anything else. It’s at times like this I wish I had a camera since Black was completely floored by my hugging him. I’m not sure what reception he was expecting, but it wasn’t that. His expression was priceless. He gave Grey a help what sort of look, and Grey rolled her eyes, drew a knife and stabbed me in the arm. Down to the bone, it felt like. I yelled and let go and reflexively swung the axe.

There is no ‘blunt end’ to a fire axe. It has a pick on one end and well, an axe blade on the other. The inexpertly swung pick managed to smack into Grey’s head with a nasty sound, and she dropped. All this happened in the space of a few seconds. I stood there for a few more, holding the dripping axe. My hands started shaking.

Black growled and drew was that a sword!? I pushed the axe between him and me to get enough time to turn around and started running off down the hallway, doing my best to put the MRI room out of mind and distance between myself and the pissed off Proxy. I turned several corners, went up a flight of stairs and opened a door to immediately find myself, younger, scared looking and with both eyes intact and was immediately assaulted by a wave of déjà vu.

I did not have time for this. I could do everything I’d seen myself do, keeping the time loop intact, or I could mix things up a little and cause a paradox, by saying something like “Jack is an ass.” Or “Don’t go to the roof, it’s not fun at all.” Or even “Don’t give a mentally unstable woman torture tips you fucking idiot.”

So I did. I rushed it all out in one breath. Bad idea.

Both of us were immediately struck by a huge headache. I think I was the worst off, but you know how memory fades with time. It was more sensation than actual physical event, a whole world sound, something trying to be interpreted by the senses that really couldn’t be. New memories: ones where I didn’t go to the roof, ones where I did, ones where I took the Risperidone, ones where I didn’t, ones where I didn’t post that comment, ones where I did, ones where I went in the basement oh god, ones where I didn’t, in… doing the math now… roughly 14 combinations. That’s not counting the ones further out into a more indistinct and fuzzy sea of probability, where completely different events occurred and I gave correspondingly different warnings. The universe flickered and twisted in various transition states, the equilibrium swinging wildly, until suddenly it snapped into the lowest energy state and stayed there. I opened my eye and my past self was staring at me with a what happened to you expression. As the ghost memories began to fade, the ‘real’ timeline came into greater focus. The only thing I’d managed to change was going to the roof. I could have kicked something right then.

Then there was a yell from behind me, and a thunk, and I looked to my right to see a knife embedded in the plaster worryingly close to my head. As my past self craned her neck to try and see what it was, I slammed the door in her face and turned in the direction the knife had come from.

It was Grey. She’d come down the corridor in front of me, and was clutching her head, which looked like a blood explosion had detonated on it, and her expression was both murderous and quite terrifying. She walked towards me slowly, fumbling for another knife and dragging her right leg, which didn’t seem to be working properly. Oh, that’s right, I thought. The left side of the brain controls the right side of the body. Then I smartly turned around and continued running, trying doors as I went. They were all locked. The only direction to go was back to the staircase, where Black was waiting for me.

He swiped at me with the sword, I tried to block with the axe, misjudged the distance, and got a red line across my shoulder for my trouble. I swung the axe in front of me as fast as I could, not really looking to hit him, although that would have been a nice bonus, but more to keep that sword away from me while I backed away up the stairs. Surprisingly, he let me. I found out why after I’d advanced a story only to find him there ahead of me. He’d mazed the stairs, and his grin said it all.

With Grey approaching, there was only one thing to do. I jumped down the stairwell and hoped for the best.

The air's shifted. Something's changed.

Someone's here. I'm going to go look.

Jack

A man in a long coat wearing fingerless gloves.

I drew him up a plastic seat on one side of a metal operating table, the best I could do under these circumstances. Honestly, I was not expecting to see him here, exactly, and said so.

Meeting him was an... experience. He can be infuriating like no one else, and has a particular fondness for half answers. After a while I became sure he was simply needling at my curiosity for the fun of it, so I kept on calling him 'fairy boy'.

After the exchange of pleasantries we got down to business, negotiating and haggling back and forth. Anything I could give was theoretically on the table, up to, and including, my life. I'm not sure how long this went on: it could have been hours but it felt like days, and scraps of balled up paper began to surround the table. Eventually I carefully went through the written contract for the last time, methodically locating and excising any remaining ambiguities of language I could find; I'm aware the bargain needn't have taken this form but I was determined to do this properly.

"Let's do this one last time," I said, picking it up. "If the terms of this contract are breached by one of its signing individuals, full and permanent ownership of all items of collateral is to be transferred to the nonbreaching signing individual."

"Yes." The grin hadn't left his face this entire time.

"If the first recipient dies or rejects the bought protection either verbally or in writing, that protection is removed from them. If the second recipient voluntarily disbands by majority vote or there are no longer any living members, that protection is removed from them. If both recipients meet one or more of their respective conditions written above, the contract is then considered inactive and the items of collateral will be returned to their rightful owners. If I, the buyer, should die, then protection is removed from both recipients regardless of their condition and the items of collateral transfer into your full and permanent ownership, with the exception of if my death is a direct or indirect result of any attempts or plans on your part to bring about my death while this contract is active. These attempts or plans will then be considered a breach of contract, with the aforementioned results."

"Yes." If anything, it had gotten wider.

There were other clauses. Precise definitions of the terms used, closing of loopholes, certain specialised confidentiality agreements. Finally, we both signed on the dotted lines. I gave him the original and kept the carbon copy. He was more amused by it then anything else. We shook hands.

"Thank you for your time," he said cheerfully. "I haven't had this much fun in years."

And then he left, and I wondered if perhaps I'd made the wrong decision.

In other news, I no longer have an eye.

Getting Better

Well, as you may have noticed from my comments on other blogs, I am marginally lucid at the very least. I went a little mad there for a while, and thanks for your support in helping me get out of it. Except for that prick who bet money on me. Is that you, Smugface? You can go die in a fire.

So, I've mostly managed to stitch myself together, metaphorically speaking. Managing to ignore the voices pretty well. Things are still a little fragile in here, but this is not the time or place for a navel gazing mental reconstruction project so I'll leave it at that. As a side effect of my little rampage, everything even resembling a speaker has been thoroughly axed, and I now know why my future self had tattered ears; I'd done my best to rip them off. Good thing I mostly failed. Oddly enough, the roof did give better reception!

The basement was... odd. It was dark, and not the 'lights have gone out' dark present everywhere else in the hospital. The torchlight refused to pierce it, almost like it was something solid, but I could put my hand straight through and touch the walls on the other side. I backed away and shut the door. Going in will have to wait until I can find some form of rope.

I'm currently in the ER room. Unsmashed vending machines are starting to get scarce, and I've been eating a lot of food to keep warm. The taps are frozen, so I can't get water that way; I've been drinking energy drinks pretty much non stop, and those are running out too. Before you ask, already got all the stuff in the cafeteria. So I'm stocking up on unmedicated intravenous bags. They don't taste of much; sugary, salty water; but they are just a little bit in case my food and water supplies run out for good. They take longer to freeze than ordinary water, so I don't have to heat them up as much to use them.

Speaking of dwindling supplies and heat, I have been scouring the place for burnable objects. I am having a great deal of difficulty finding any I haven't already burnt. On the other hand I am pretty sure I'm starting to reach Blanket Critical Mass. Still don't want to have to burn those if I can help it.

shutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutup
Everything just stop talking I can't i can't think...

arrogant overconfident prideful hateful vindictive possessive false feral useless a joke a liar uncaring dangerous weak shortsighted unthinking manipulative vicious stupid theif murderer promise breaker helpless unliked alone