making this cold harbor now home

[dubiouslychthonic]

Who: Sawbones Jetshard and open!
What: Several around-the-station open prompts, first week of March.
Warnings: Third prompt involves blood and routine medical testing.


A - March 2, Common room, ~1 A.M.

[It's still a little surprising to Jetshard how quiet it is in the middle of the night around here; it's not unheard of for others to be up and around at this hour, of course, but in a troll community the aftermidnight hours would be the busiest part of the day.

Anyway, it feels vaguely antisocial to spend too much time shut up in her quarters, even if her sleeping schedule doesn't seem to coincide with most others', so she's currently camped out in the common room, sitting crosslegged on one of the couches with a large, dense book open in her lap and her tablet computer balanced on one knee. Ever so often, she taps something into the tablet.]

B - March 5, East Residential Hallway, ~7 P.M.

Aw, shit, no...

[The exclamation - more disappointed than alarmed, almost resigned - is accompanied by a faint clatter from inside the open door of Apartment #1. A smallish disk-shaped robot with a largish knife taped to the top trundles out of the room and down the hall toward the kitchen - maybe a bit faster than might be expected of a troll roomba. A moment later, Jetshard follows, stocking-foot and damp haired. She looks both ways at the door before spotting the device and giving chase. Hopefully it hasn't found any ankles yet...?]

C - March 7, Medbay, ~9 P.M.

[Jetshard sits on the edge of a cot in the medical bay, a combination of her own kit and some supplies she's scrounged up in here spread out next to her. She's turned away from the door; although she hasn't bothered to pull the curtains and hide herself from view, she's also kind of sheilding what she's doing with her body as she draws a vial of jade-green blood from her arm.

There's no real reason why she needs to be in here for this, except that there's something comforting about keeping medical things to the medical bay. It feels... safer somehow. Less vulnerable.]

Comments

[dubiouslychthonic]

Does it have a technological basis, or...? [A perigee ago, that would have been a ridiculous question, and she's still not sure how to word it in a way that doesn't make her sound like a credulous child.]

[dubiouslychthonic]

[Ok well. She really can't argue against any of that. He's still way more worked up over this than seems reasonable to her. She completely unceremoniously captchalogues the roomba.]

Are you injured?

[founderinglight]

No, entirely magical. Gods-granted to our bloodline in exchange for defending the crystal and someday purifying the scourge of the star, and so on.

[Something about the way he say that is quite bitter.]

[dubiouslychthonic]

[She looks up quickly, reflexively closing her hand around the vial in her hand. Not that there's any reason to hide the color from him, but there's no real reason for her to continue to wear tinted glasses or type in grey on the network, either. Call it force of habit. She shrugs, a little sheepish over her surprise.]

Just taking a draw for a few tests.

[have_hat_will_travel]

... I can see the knife, but the rest is new to me...

[dubiouslychthonic]

You could say that.

[The initial reply is a little distant, as she finishes a paragraph; that done, she looks up.]

I think I'm near done with this course of study for the time being, though, unless Strange finds something else to throw at me.

[fantasykiller]

Nah, I'm fine. It didn't even nick me.

[He stands up out of the armchair.]

Do you have a pair of scissors or a box cutter stuffed away in your inventory by any chance? It would be best to remove the knife now while we're still thinking about it.

[dubiouslychthonic]

I think I have everything covered, unless the preliminary results are drastically different from what I'm expecting. [She peers at the vial to see how much she's drawn, decides she needs a little more, and looks up again with a crooked smile.] I appreciate the offer, but I've been doing this for myself for... near twenty sweeps now.

[dubiouslychthonic]

And the sylladex's space-folding is entirely generated by a machine, so I'd presume that the two function differently...

[founderinglight]

Indeed, seeing as - as far as we've been able to tell - the Armiger doesn't actually have anything to do with space. It's some kind of matter to light conversion, probably.

[riderofcharlemagne]

[Her hiding the contents of the vial only piques Astolfo's curiosity more; if something calls for secrecy, then he has to know. He shuffles a little, trying to find a better position to get a peek.]

What kind of tests? Is everything okay?

[bulletnews]

Our hosts have you studying something? ...although that's not too surprising on its own. I've certainly learned a few things, but just as part of adjusting to life in the station.

[dubiouslychthonic]

Well, provided study materials when I asked. Funny thing, troll medical training doesn't typically include more than a very brief overview of true mammals in the abstract, let alone primates? And given that I seem to be the only troll who has yet managed to stumble into a rift... [She shrugs.]

[bulletnews]

Ah, I see. It would be more than a little difficult to work with confidence as a doctor when you have no idea how your patients' bodies work.

Although I was under the impression that a "troll" was a kind of weird foreign youkai that tend not to be particularly bright. I suppose that's just information about the outside world being kind of inaccurate, as seems to increasingly be the case as I'm finding out.

[dubiouslychthonic]

[She sighs, and picks it up. Now that the thing's been immobilized, it's easy enough to handle without risk of injury.] It's supposed to just roam around sweeping debris off the floor. It's just that Chanry and Ammond attached a blade to it, and I think they mucked with the sensors so it seeks out people's feet instead of just dirt.

[dubiouslychthonic]

I'd be most confident if I had the chance to perform a dissection or two - or even a vivisection - but I haven't exactly got a great wealth of potential subjects for that, and book learning is much, much better than nothing.

[She shrugs.] Well, we've got our share of brutes... but given that I don't know what a youkai is, it could just be a coincidence of how this place translates everything.

[dubiouslychthonic]

It's just routine monitoring. Nothing to worry about.

[She's not trying very hard to hide it, beyond that initial reflex, although she's not exactly holding it up to show it off, either; the mostly-opaque rubber tube leading from the needle in her arm drips into a smallish glass vial. Her blood is of about the same viscosity as a human's, but deep jade green in color rather than bright red.

With a practiced motion, she pulls the needle from her vein, holding the tubing so that it doesn't drip as she smooths a bandage over the mark and holds a little pressure on it.]

[riderofcharlemagne]

You expecting anything to change?

[He wonders if her species is particularly fragile that she needs to keep a regular eye on her health. Giving her an intense look-over, he sneaks a quick peek at the colour of her blood in the vial.]

It's not red, huh?

[He doesn't sound so much confused as he does curious. It doesn't come as much of a shock, considering she's very clearly inhuman.]

[bulletnews]

It's kind of a catchall term for all sorts of supernatural beings. And I have to explain it every single time because apparently there's more nuance to it than the thingy can handle.

[Basically monsters, except pretty much guaranteed intelligent. By a very loose definition of "intelligent", if one includes fairies, but they're numerous enough that they tend to just be called that.]

Still, I think all of us can agree that it would be better not to kill each other in the name of science.

[have_hat_will_travel]

... Why would you do that?! That's ... Really petty-grade evil in a horrifying fashion!

[dubiouslychthonic]

Then there's no harm done, and I'll keep closer track of my things in the future. [Also she's already made one attempt to dismantle it and found that one of the girls had reinforced the tape with some sort of epoxy - probably to support the weight of the knife, although possibly to foil attempts to deprive Wishgore of its ability to gore people - but she's just peeved enough now to feel that she doesn't owe him that much explanation.]

[dubiouslychthonic]

I wouldn't say evil so much as immature brats. [She turns the roomba over, and frowns, noticing the streak of red on the knife's blade; brighter than most trolls' hemopigmentation would produce, but maybe not out of line for an alien...] Oh, hell, it got you didn't it? Are you alright?

[fantasykiller]

...Alright, if you say so.

[Touma decides not to push the issue. Although he would have preferred to disarm the blood-thirsty roomba, he's fine with her keeping it sealed away in the forgotten depths of her inventory since nobody got hurt this time.]

But if it ever escapes again, I'm not going to hesitate disarming that little bastard.

[dubiouslychthonic]

Well, I'm not particularly supernatural. Just a different ecosystem's kind of natural. [She's not entirely sure that she believes that Alternia and its spacegoing sapient species truly harbors anything supernatural. Paranormal, certainly, and disease processes that render the border between life and death highly questionable. And around here the supernatural is in pretty blatant evidence. But back home, magic is a fake thing, she's pretty sure.]

[bulletnews]

[It would largely depend who you ask.]

Hmmm... that's a solid viewpoint. Gensokyo doesn't have any ocean around it; it's been a very long time since I've seen anything like what's outside the station here.

So what does the ecosystem look like where you're from?