Whitney
Must have taken Whitney a few days to think
to check Ginger. Grace posted on the 15th and it is not until today, the
17th, that the apprentice's phone pings with a text message:
!! im coming over
Grace
Grace
is not well, and this fact leaks over her spare apartment in little
ways. The bed is messy, and damp with sweat. A pile of bloody tissues
lies in the trash can right by her bed, and a stain on her pillowcase
reveals evidence of a nosebleed that must have started before she was
aware enough to stop it with those tissues.
Grace herself is in
bed with her laptop in her PJs in the middle of the day, wearing fuzzy
socks to complete the ensemble, and it, too is a little damp, a little
messy. She's shivering, with a blanket pulled around her, having a
chill. But the work is too important to stop and sleep.
It's in
this state that her phone pings, and she groans. It's going to take
effort to get to the dang thing, and why did she leave it in the bag all the way over there?
The laptop and blanket are shoved aside, and her shivering worsens in
their absence. But now is not the time to ignore messages. Slowly, she
walks, with aching body over to the phone to check it, and...
No, don't come over. Please. I don't know if this is contagious.
Whitney
Grace
has seen Whitney's phone and knows it is an easily-replaced little
pay-as-you-go. The technology has come a long way in the last decade.
She can knock out a text message just as fast as someone with a
high-tech smartphone can but Grace can still all but hear the pause as
the Death Mage considers her options.
never going to find out if u dont sneeze on anyone
Grace
Grace
shuffles her way back into bed where it's sufficiently warm to cancel
out some of her shivering at least. It's now cold from where she's sweat
in the sheets, leaving a Grace-shaped dark spot. Well... only one thing
to do, and that's re-warm it.
It shouldn't take long. Despite the shivering, she's actually very very warm indeed.
But when she gets settled, and checks her phone, she just blinks. With cold fingers, she types back a response:
That's not funny. This could be fatal for all I know, I don't want anyone else exposed.
Whitney
The
next two texts come rapid. Like the first is a rhetorical, or she
already knows the answer and catches herself before Grace can waste the
energy refuting her.
no friendly docs visited yet?
And then:
be me figuring what killed u if fatal. rather help now. dont be a jerk.
Grace
Grace
can text with the best of them, especially on a smartphone keyboard.
full words, no misspellings here. And Whitney gets a bunch of wordy
texts back-to-back.
Sid said she'd talk with someone she knows, but I haven't heard anything yet.
And you know, *I* think a jerk would be begging you to come and help without caring what it does to you. But that's me.
Just...
If you're going to be that adamant about it. Let's be careful okay? Can
you go to the store and pick up a few things? Like, masks and gloves
and hand sanitizer -- that kind of thing.
Whitney
too bad i left my biohazard suit @ home. be there in 30.
If
she doesn't have the decency not to joke with someone who's suffering a
blistering high fever and nosebleeds at least Whitney has the courtesy
not to commit to code sensitive information in conversation with someone
whose paranoia is not unfounded. That is the last Grace hears from her
for half an hour.
Then the doorbell sounds.
Grace
Whitney hears a groan coming from the other side of the door, followed by, "Whitney... this is so highly inadvisable..."
It
takes her a while full of shuffling steps to get to the door. Which
doesn't open right away. "You know, this could be what they're counting
on. That my friends come by, get infected--"
Grace is then interrupted by a cough. That too is worrisome. Coughing means expelling virii into to the air perhaps. Not cool.
Whitney
Coughing
means all sorts of things. Not all viruses prefer to travel via
respiration but they sure as hell take advantage of it. More than that
it can mean the structures of her lungs are inflamed or the lungs
themselves are filling with fluid. Whitney isn't a doctor. Death Mages
aren't exactly known for their propensity for saving lives.
Grace doesn't know a whole hell of a lot about Whitney's Tradition so they're both in luck.
She
doesn't open the door right away and Whitney is standing with her hand
over the peephole so she doesn't get the third degree before Grace can
even open the door.
"Well then they're, like, stupid. I don't get sick. Let me in, it's cold out here."
Grace
What
to do about this? Grace would not be able to stand herself if she got
Whitney sick. But there is the Euthanatos being all 'don't be a jerk'
and all.
Whitney hears a thump on the door as Grace leans her head against it abruptly. "Making it hard for me, Whitney."
A
few seconds later, a defeated Grace unlocks the door, and starts
shuffling back to bed. If Whitney wants to come in, she can do so on her
own. The last thing Grace wants to do is open the door, and cough in
her friend's face. Bleh.
The trek is tiring, and it's gotten her
shivering again in the relatively cooler air. Her apartment's not cold,
but Grace feels like this is the Arctic in her hands and feet -- the
Sahara in her head and chest. Her body responds with sweat and
shivering, the telltale signs of fever.
Once she's gotten a ways, if Whitney hasn't already opened the door, she'll at least say, "It's unlocked" over her shoulder.
Whitney
At
the head-bang and the clunking of the tumblers within the lock Whitney
takes a breath. Puts on her game face. The sound of rattling and
bag-crinkling comes as she lets herself into the apartment and she does
stop by the front door to don the protective gear. Rustling as she puts
on a face mask and a theatric snap as she puts on exam gloves.
Once the door is shut she locks it and says, "I can't believe there aren't any, like, Verbena in the city. Are th--"
A
beat. By now she's moved to find Grace whether she's only a few meters
from the door or whether she's retreated back to bed and Grace can see
the girl's hazel eyes widen above the white of the mask.
"Oh my
god. You look..." A sharp inhalation. A crinkling around her eyes. Sharp
incline in her tone. "... NOT that bad! You're gonna be fine. We can
fix this. Are you drinking?"
Grace
Grace makes it
back to the bed, wraps herself back up in cold sheets and the heavy
blanket she was going to use in the winter. It'll probably get thrown
off as soon as her feet warm, and her teeth stop chattering. Then, her
whole body just turns hot again, and it's time to shed all.
She looks highly relieved at Whitney's gear. "So you did bother to protect yourself, good. Thanks."
"And
yeah, I mean... I'm trying to keep up the fluid levels, cause I seem to
be losing --" another coughing fit, this one a bit worse-sounding than
before. Raspy, like this isn't just a clearing of the throat. "So much
of it."
She gestures to the big plastic cup by her bed, the thing full of half-melted ice-water.
"It's
not so bad, really... just the fever, and I feel terrible. And it's
horribly fast. And it's probably escalating exponentially," she says,
trying to put on the brave smiley face.
Whitney
Grace
thanks the Euthanatos for donning protective gear and her eyes crinkle
again. No other sign of a smile for her jaws and nose are covered. She
does not carry the entirety of her bag into the room with her so she
doesn't drag germs out on it but that means Whitney has to come into the
bedroom carrying her foci out where Grace can see them and if she's
apprehensive at the sight of Whitney approaching with a switchblade and a
Zippo and a bowl no one will blame her.
"Exponentially?" she asks
as she sits at the edge of Grace's bed. "I saw that word in my SAT book
earlier. You're not impressing anyone with your fever vocabulary."
She sets down the lighter and rests the blade across her lap, closed. The bowl beside her. It's half-filled with water.
"So
like, I want to try to identify the virus. If it is a virus. You're in
chaos and that's not bad, you know, sometimes that happens, but if it's
not supposed to happen I can see that and we can slow it down." A beat.
"I need some of your blood though."
Grace
"I am
one step ahead of you there. It's not anything you'll find in a book,
I'll tell you that. This was created. You know the old story of the
hydra? Cut off one head, and two more appear? That's what it's doing. My
immune system goes after it, and it doesn't die, it just multiplies.
I've been watching it. Morbid though that is, I know..."
Grace's
voice is going raspy like that cough, a touch on the rough side, like it
must hurt. But if it does, she's not acknowledging that. "And that's
exponential growth. Multiplicative. For your SAT vocab lesson of the
day."
She's not really paying much attention to the girl, her eyes
half-lidded, finally getting a bit warmer, so her teeth stop
chattering. It feels, comfy. Or at least, as comfy as she's going to
get. Whitney says that she needs some blood, and Grace snorts. "There's
plenty in the wastebasket. Stuff's been coming out of my nose off and
on."
Whitney
"Oh, ew."
Not to the matter of
her nose bleeding. That information showed up on Ginger earlier. The
thought of fishing into the wastebasket for old oxidized blood off of a
piece of facial tissue though. That's what solicits the grossed-out
noise.
"No, that won't work for what I'm doing. You're still alive. It needs to be fresh."
Oh
that's reassuring. She moves from the bed to the floor and sets the
bowl before her intended sitting-spot but kneels for now. Reaches for
the switchblade and holds out her gloved hand for Grace's.
"Unless you can get nosebleeds on command."
Grace
"No...
not so --" Grace gets cut off again, just as she was trying to respond.
The hand she was about to give to Whitney goes up to her mouth, just as
another strained coughing fit starts. This time, it's again, worse. And
in the center of her chest there exists this pressure. Like someone's squeezing out her lungs with that one final horrible cough.
When
it finally ends, the taste of iron is on her tongue, and she pulls her
hand back and kind of stares at it. Well... That's new.
"Will this do?" she asks and extends her hand, her voice gravelly from the cough, and her hand spattered with blood.
Whitney
"Oh, my god."
Maybe
one day they'll look back on this and laugh. Whitney isn't laughing
right now though. Her eyes above the mask are briefly horrified but she
knows Grace only let her over here in the first place because she said
she was going to help and it's not like she hasn't seen and possibly
been the cause of someone coughing up blood and for the last time before
anyway.
"It's not Ebola, is it?"
Doesn't matter. She flicks
out the knife's blade and holds it out flat-side so Grace can wipe it
onto the gleaming metal. Whitney doesn't chant or pop a pill or let her
eyes roll back into her head the way someone of a more earthen
persuasion might but some pagan influence leaks through as she picks up
her lighter and sets fire to the blade and the blood on the blade and
lets the singed fluid weep from the metal into the water.
Holds her hand over the bowl and takes on the monkish stillness of a student deep into her reading.
[i'm going to come up with a name for this rote later.
arete 2: entropy/forces/life/time, basically divining the ass out of this thing.
i think this is vulgar? -1 for unique focus, -1 for taking time. going to be an extension coming up.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (5, 6) ( success x 2 )
Whitney
[EXTENSION pt. 1, +1]
Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (8, 8) ( success x 2 )
Whitney
[fuck it let's just keep doing things]
Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (2, 4) ( fail )
Grace
"Well, it's not ebola. This was created. But
they probably got some ideas from hemorrhagic fever," Grace says, all
odd, logical coldness... for now.
She wipes her hand on Whitney's
knife, being careful not to be messy about it. She's still uncertain how
this stuff is spread. Better to be on the clean side than spatter blood
everywhere.
Whitney performs the ritual, and Grace again wonders
how that is supposed to work... But that thought is pushed away for the
moment, replaced with what will she find? It's rather tense, waiting while Whitney concentrates. She can't talk, doesn't want to distract...
Whitney
The
singed blood drips into the bowl of water and it forms a pattern but
not an intentional one. When Whitney dips the knife into the water and
stirs slow and stares at that pattern it is no more intentional than the
original. Her eyes above the mask are clear and intelligent and she
does not make a sound as she Works. In time she sets the knife beside
the bowl and puts her splayed hand back over the surface of the water.
Grace
can see when the effect takes hold and a vision comes to the younger
woman. She takes a sharp breath like something from the bowl has made
its way into her skull and her eyes do not exactly roll back to join it
but they lose their clarity and their cognizance and she sways where the
kneels. Breathes heavier but not faster.
When she comes back to
the present it is not with a jolt or a gasp. Nothing so sudden. She
blinks and takes her hand away from the bowl.
"Oh," she says. She
frowns and her throat works as she swallows. "Okay, so, like... if
someone decides burning down a lab is a good idea, you're probably gonna
die. In the fire." Whitney sits down on the floor and crosses her legs
at the ankles. "You know anybody who like, runs around wearing a hood?
Like, a woman?"
Grace
"Whitney, you're not making any sense. I'm going to die in a fire, if someone burns down a lab... somewhere else?"
She
leans her head back down on her pillow with a whumph. "I don't know
anyone who runs around wearing a hood. There was a woman at the
Starbucks, she was wearing a yellow dress, though, no hood. I think she
was responsible for the attack. Name's Katie. Or at least, that's the
name she gave."
"What did you see?"
Whitney
"If I tell you it might just make things worse."
Whatever
she saw has not driven spikes of cold dread into Whitney. Or if it has
she is making an effort to keep her voice at its normal levels of
sun-drenched Southern Californian ennui. She cannot touch her hair or
scrub her face or engage in any other fidgeting that might compromise
the integrity of her equipment.
"But I saw a woman wearing a hood
saying you had to hurry. Which is like... 'No way, you think?' And I saw
a field and a lot of blood and..." She clears her throat and looks up
from her focal point on the edge of the mattress to Grace's face.
"Whoever designed this bug designed it to kill whoever got it. We need
to find this Katie person."
Grace
Grace's hands clench into fists under the sheets, and her eyes graze the ceiling instead of Whitney. "If you tell me what?"
"Don't
do this to me, don't withhold what I need to know," Grace says, and
it's a pleading thing, raspy with her irritated throat.
"I wish I
could find her. 'Katie' is probably a pseudonym. And it's so common a
name, I don't think..." she trails off. "I've got a plan in case they
come back to the apartment to collect data on their experiment though.
Myself as bait, you see." She points to the cabinet in the corner, "Got a
camera there. If they show up, at least... there will be evidence."
Whitney
"You think they need to come back to watch you?"
It's
a rhetorical question. She's incredulous. Whitney isn't a chela and she
isn't a teacher. She's young compared to many of the other women in
this city. Sometimes she forgets just because Grace is older doesn't
mean she knows what the hell is going on.
"If whoever did this is
like, targeting Awakened people, they're probably Awakened too. Or
they're..." Her eyes flick away for a moment as she thinks. "What if
they can see what's happening to you through the virus? Like, it's a
focus for them, or something."
Grace
Grace is very
new. But still, this should have occurred to her. She knows how
surveillance via 'magic' works. Or at least, she's seen it done. She
closes her eyes, rubs them with the hand that isn't all bloody.
"If they are. If I were better at this... I could trace their spying eyes back to the source. But I'm no Gadfly. Shit."
Whitney
"You will get better at this. This so isn't going to kill you."
Anything
will sound convincing if you say it like you don't have any fucks left
to give. It has to be some sort of mathematical theorem: the less you
sound like you care what people think the more likely they are to
believe you. Or something. Whitney probably just doesn't want to see
Grace die. Friends generally don't like seeing their friends suffer
before they go.
"Does Lena know how to scry? Or Sera or Sid?" If
she sounds clairvoyant, she isn't. She's just hurling out names of
everyone she knows. "Maybe they can like, trace it back for you." She
sounds apologetic as she adds, "I never learned that sphere. This is
like, a sign."
Grace
"They can trace it back for
themselves. They're all infected," she says. "I'm worried about everyone
else too. I thought it was just Lena and I, and then Sera and Sid got
attacked. Who's next? Everybody?"
She opens her eyes again, looks Whitney in the eye, like 'you know something'...
[Perception + Awareness = You're hiding something, aren't you?]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )
Whitney
[manip + subt: psh, NO. bitch gets to reroll 10s.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 ) Re-rolls: 1
Whitney
"I don't know. Maybe they only need to attack one person to infect everybody."
Have fun trying to sleep without having nightmares tonight, kids.
The
Euthanatos girl sighs and eases herself back onto her knees now that
she's done disseminating what she saw in her divination. The knife and
the lighter go into the trash can with the sullied facial tissue and
whatever else Grace has tossed into it in the last few days and Whitney
takes up the bowl in her hands and gets to her feet.
"Do you want me to stay with you?"
Grace
It
would be nice not to have to face death alone. But there's nice, and
then there's practical, and as much as it hurts to say no to such an
offer... "Whitney, maybe you're right. Maybe what they're trying to do
is get people like you to come and get themselves infected, and spread
it around. I don't want to make it easy on them.
But of course, if
that were the case, the question remains: why robot wasps? Why make it
that obvious? Why not make a disease with a long incubation period, and
really get it to go everywhere?"
"The whys of this are really
bugging me. If I could figure out the reason for these decisions, I'd
feel better..." Though why that would be the case is a mystery to most.
Grace just plain feels better when she knows.
"Anyway... I can't tell you to leave, but I would rather you stay safe. The longer you're here, the less likely that is."
Whitney
Whitney
stands still for a moment as she considers this. With the bowl she
found in Grace's kitchen in her hands, wearing her street clothes along
with her BSI, she looks like some honey-blond nightmare hospital orderly
come to check on her.
It would be one thing if Grace insisted she
was fine and would be fine if Whitney left but she doesn't. They're
onto the next thing.
"If you're getting worse I don't want to
leave you here by yourself. Either it's super contagious and I've
already caught it anyway, or I'll be okay as long as you don't cough
blood on me."
Grace
"Well... What if it's only a
little contagious, and..." she sighs. Whitney doesn't strike her as
someone who can be reasonably talked out of things. "We just keep trying
to out-altruism each other, don't we?" She smirks. It's a thing. Grace
can't keep from making a joke, even now.
"I'm not going to throw you out of my apartment. But I will put it on the record that I think this is a really bad idea."
Whitney
"The record totally shows you think this is a really bad idea. I don't care. I want to win this altruism-off."
So
they're just going to keep joking until Grace drowns in a pool of her
own blood. Fantastic. In the meantime Whitney tries to smile at her
through the mask and it crinkles her eyes but the apprentice can't see
her teeth or the fear inside her and she won't see it until the
Euthanatos feels it safe to take off the mask.
She finds a chair
to drag into Grace's room so she can sit with her while she's still
awake. If she thinks the rest of the night she keeps her thoughts to
herself. But she won't leave the room again while Grace is awake to do
anything other than refill her water glass.
Grace
Grace
will continue to get worse. The coughing continues, more and more blood
comes. She can feel it after a while, the internal pressure of fluid on
the inside, but she doesn't tell Whitney that. Whitney probably knows
anyway.
With someone else there, its easier not to fall into
morbid thoughts (strange, when that someone else is a Euthanatos) but
still, falling asleep is hard. Grace keeps imagining the worst, and
resolutely does not sleep, until the sickly-weakness makes that little
death too difficult to resist.
At some time during the night,
perhaps when Whitney goes to refill the water, Grace will thank her. And
it will be obvious that this 'thank you' means so much more than just
refilling the glass. For everything, she means. And some day, if she
makes it, Grace will have a debt to pay.
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