Hydra Dies in a Fire

Hydra
Given the urgency of their mission, the trip out to the lab probably felt longer for Sid and Grace than it actually was.  When they were about a minute away, Katie suggested they pull over and rearrange themselves in the car with the two mages ducked down in the back seat - the better to avoid notice from the security cameras in the lab's parking lot.  With only three guards left at the facility, they were bound to be on alert for anything unusual.  When they finally arrived, they parked at the far end of the lot.  Peering carefully out the windows, Sid and Grace would see what looked like a fairly nondescript red brick building.  They were on a relatively empty stretch of road, and every now and then a plane would soar past overhead on its way to or from the nearby airport.  The sign out front read "Lerna Laboratories."

Before exiting the vehicle, Katie turned to Grace and Sid to explain what she was about to do.  "I'm going to go take care of the guards.  When I get back, I'll take you to the basement cells where your friends are being kept.  We need to get them out of there as quickly as possible, so while you're doing that, I'm going to head up to the labs to activate the disinfection protocol.  Once I've done that, we'll have ten minutes to get out of the building before it locks down and burns everything inside, so it's very important that we exit as quickly as possible.  Understand?  It's very important that we destroy the lab, and any trace of the virus left inside."

------------

Meanwhile, in the basement, Lena and Sera were unaware of what was going on above.  It had not been a good week for the two of them, but they were hanging on.  Weak and sick, their days were full of waking nightmares that felt all too real.  Lena, in her concern for her Tradition-mate, had been sending out empathic projections of calm warmth and calm.  It allowed Sera a few precious moments of rest that she might not have otherwise had.

At that moment, they were both blessedly free of the trap of those waking dreams, though for how long?

Hydra
[Edit: "Understand? We have to destroy the lab, and any trace of the virus left inside."
Also: "projections of warmth and calm."  (Yeesh.)]

Lena Reilly
Since that moment when Katie appeared in her room a few days earlier, Lena has been like a caged animal.  The smart thing would have been to play it cool and act like everything was still the same, but the Ecstatic is past the point of such dissembling.  Like most of her Tradition, she is a creature who is both master and slave to the Nine Sacred Passions and with lucidity being constantly torn away from her with every waking nightmare, every bloody cough, she has lost the ability to act in her own best interests.  Lost the ability to play nice and let then just take her blood and serve her empty platitudes.

Lost her ability to give.  A.  SHIT.

She may not be terrorized by whatever hideous hallucinations this disease can combine with her mind at this moment, but let's be frank, ladies and gentlemen...there is nothing worse it can conjure than the fact that she's going to die here alone in this hell-hole, wasting away to fucking disease while her friend does the same elsewhere in this very facility.  They're Ecstatics who are about as far from Ecstasy as you can get and she has not made the life of Callum's little flunkies easy.  She's ranted and raved, yelling to the camera things like "You didn't think I would find out, you piece of shit?" and "Come in here and I'll show you what disease is all about."

That is, when she's not curled up in the corner, sobbing and scared.

At the moment she's lucid.  And at the moment, she's pacing, scratching at the sores that she's picked into her body.  (They only make her mental state worse; they're so similar in her blurry vision to the lesions that are a part of Karposi's sarcoma).  As much as her weakened body will allow; she's moving on pure Rage, pure Wrath.  It will get her through and so help her, if her friends die she will figure out a way from the other side to make those involved pay.

Sid
It is with reluctance and great trepidation that Sid listens to Katie.  She does so because she knows, she knew before she let her effect finally drift apart, fragile as a spider's web, that the woman told them the truth.  Her intentions are sincere, she has only been honest with her.  Sid still distrusts.  Katie may very well be telling the truth - as she sees it.  She may be helping her - because someone else is using her guilt to their purposes.  Because soon, very soon, all four infected Mages will be inside the facility.

Still, what choice does she have?  Her friends are inside and she and Grace will find them, they will save them, they will get them out.

While she's ducked down, tall body twisted uncomfortably so that she isn't seen, she sends a quick text.  There's no time to access Ginger and make a broadcast as wide as possible, so instead Sid sends a message.  It's a follow-up, actually, their more exact location sent to a Disciple Cultist just in case...well, just in case.

Sid is not the best at being sneaky, she's a scientist (or was, once upon a time) not a ninja.  Still, she can scan her surroundings and let them know if someone is near or coming near.  Hopefully.

Katie tells them they'll have ten minutes, and Sid frowns as she draws a small diagram on the inside of her wrist.

[Go go Gadget Life scan!]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (1, 8) ( success x 1 )

Grace
After the adrenaline shock wore off, and Grace had finished venting her anger at Katie, there wasn't much to do but plan and wait on the car ride. She calmed down somewhat, but was still quite unnerved by the woman, and spent the time staring at her waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"Oh I understand. If that shit leaks out of your lab..." she says. 'Your lab', like she's still thinking of Katie as being on the other side.

She listens to the plan, and it's not half bad. Maybe somebody in their group wasn't a complete idiot, because they did have a disinfection protocol. They thought ahead.

So she ducks down with Sid in the back, "You letting people know where we are?"

Serafi­ne
The room is white and the walls are white and the walls and concrete and there is a door; you remember the door when it opens.  It has a window that frames a view of the corridor.

The corridor is always the same.

The place has a rhythm that is internal and both unvaried but unpredictable.  There are pipes in the walls, wrapped in concrete block, framed by drywall and structural steel.  There is a hum.  The hum is not a human hum and may not be a hum at all.  It may well be the intense and immediate physical experience of soundlessness.  Except for the low, insistent beeping of the heart rate monitor when it is connected or its higher pitched objection after it has been disconnected there is a sort of ambient nothingness that feels round, pregnant and full.

Sometimes Sera remembers that she should try to leave the IV in her arm.  It is the only thing keeping her alive and she is now barely alive.  She has not eaten in two weeks.  Threw whatever they shoved through the prison-like hole in the door right back at those bastards when she was still capable of downing food, and has not been capable of eating for some time.

The lucid moments are the strangest.  Worse, somehow, than the waking nightmares where she is torn apart from within; where she tears herself apart; where she is ripped apart, scissored open, consumed and consuming.  Terrorized and terrified.

Lucid she is in a white room; alone, dying, so weak she can hardly stand.  Except, as long as she can hardly stand, as long as she has the strength to so much as crawl, Sera refuses to lay around in that bed. Sometimes she drags herself to the door, leans then, slapping her hand open and rhythmic against the metal.  Sometimes she curls up in the bathroom, between the sink and the toilet, taking some sort of comfort in the porcelain.

Its proximity.

Its familiarity.

That's where she is now; curled up in a semi-fetal position, shivering, involuntarily, from the climate-controlled cold in the room, wasted and spent.

Hydra
Katie had been quiet in the car, allowing Grace her outlet to vent.  There was no attempt made on her part to defend herself or her colleagues.  Everything about her appearance and manner suggested a woman weighted down with silent guilt.  What could she say, really?  Nothing.  So she didn't try.  Inside the lab, there were two dying women who'd spent the last week and a half in a world of sickening, claustrophobic torture.  They were there because of Hydra.  One of them from Katie's hand directly.

If Callum and the other members of Hydra (was the virus named after the group or the group named after the virus? did it matter really?) had found Lena's sudden change of heart suspicious, thankfully they hadn't seemed to pinpoint the source of it, because Katie's security access worked just as well as it always had.  She jogged across the parking lot, coughing into a tissue as she reached the door and let herself inside.
Then all was still, apart from the ubiquitous sonic echo of the planes.

Five minutes went by.  Maybe Sid and Grace would begin to expect some sort of trick.  Or perhaps Katie had been found out and captured by her own people.

Another minute.  Two.

Finally she reappeared, running quickly towards the Audi.  She gave a wave to indicate that they exit and follow her inside.  "I drugged the guards and turned off the cameras."

Assuming they were ready to follow, Katie led the way back inside the building, taking a path through a brightly lit welcoming area with an empty front desk and moving at a brisk pace down a long white hallway.  They passed a couple of closed doors on their way to the stairs, but Katie didn't stop to offer a tour.
At the end of the hall, another locked door led down into the basement.  Katie entered a code into the security system and the door unlocked, allowing them access.  Then it was down a flight of concrete steps into another long white hallway.

And there they were.  So close now that Sid, with her active life scan, would be able to feel the weak, unsteady pulses of her two friends in the locked cells.  Lena was closer, followed by Sera at the end of the hall.

Katie unlocked both doors, working quickly as she ran from one to the other, hiding her next coughing fit against the sleeve of a raised arm.

"Remember, you've got ten minutes once I activate the disinfection process, so get them to the car as soon as you've given them the injections.  I'll rejoin you as soon as I can."

This was what Sera and Lena heard as the locks on their cells clicked open.

Lena Reilly
Her attention snaps to the door when she hears that telltale click, eyes narrowed.  She's past the point of trusting anything she sees or hears now; the waking nightmares have made that basically impossible.  Even hearing Katie's words don't make her believe what she's hearing; her mind could easily be making this up in some fevered pitch of hope, or she could be the target of some new trick by Callum.

Frankly though, she doesn't much care.  As long as she's got a way out of this room, it could lead into a wall of gunmen ready to blast her into oblivion.  Callum well knows she's accept that over dying of this thing.

And so she takes slow, belabored steps, weezing as she does, toward the door.  Just in case someone might be coming who wants to keep her forced in here (she wouldn't put that kind of mind game past them), she spits a bloody mouthful that she just recently coughed up into the palm of her hand.  It may not be the most effective deterrent--she doesn't know if she'll be able to actually get it into someone's mouth or the life, and even if so they may be immunized against the Hydra virus--but people generally want to play it safe with HIV.  She leans weakly against the wall and, with her free hand, she reaches out to open the door.  Sure, her hand slips on the handle and she has to fumble a little, but she pushes it open and stumbles her way to
Freedom.  Even if it's not freedom from this place, it's a minor victory.  It's about all she's got.

Sid
When Grace asks her question Sid merely nods her head once, the movement very slight in the dark cramped back seat.  And then they are waiting.  A minute passes, two, but they might as well be hundreds, even thousands of years.  Sera and Lena are in there, they're dying and if something goes wrong they won't even know that their friends are right there, were there, are trying to get them out.

Sid is silent through the wait as she runs over again and again the contents of her bag.  What she has, what they look like, what she needs, what she hopes she doesn't need.  A sort of desperation rises all around her, radiating from her every pore as she reaches out and finds each living creature within a radius of them.  When Katie returns Sid does not relax.  Her shoulders remain tight, every muscle taut with tension as she makes her way out of the car.

She follows the woman through the maze of the building's interior, hoping Grace is taking notes on their passage because Sid is taking out a needle and poking it into a small vial.  Then she caps the needle in plastic and unwraps another, repeats the process.  They have to be ready to go, from reunion to injection to run-run-run in a matter of moments.

Down the stairs and to the keycode and Sid passes a needle to Grace outside Lena's door.  "Let her do it," she says, meaning Lena, who if she hasn't had to inject someone before has likely watched it done a hundred thousand times to herself.  They're all sick, though, with Grace a little better.  And Sid, the healthiest of them all, she beelines for the door to Sera's room, to Sera, shoving past Katie as soon as the door is open.

"Sera!" she calls, perhaps needlessly as she looks around, her heart hammering in her chest.  She knows because she can feel it what she can expect, but knowing only prepares her for the visual.  Sera, sick and curled up in the bathroom.  Sid goes to her quickly and drops to her side.

"Sera," she says, and her voice is strangled, her throat constricting at the sight of Sera, so vibrant even when she was fasting, wasting away, all for what?  Sid never asked.  This time it's different, she knows.  Sera is dying, but not for much longer, not anymore.  "It's me," she says as she fights back tears of relief and tears of pain, pulling Sera toward her as she thumbs off the protective cap of a needle.  "I'm sorry," she whispers, because she knows enough to know this, this place, it's bad to Sera and Sid's about to make it worse with one more needle's prick.

[extending that scan]
Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (4, 10) ( success x 1 )

Grace
Her friends had been imprisoned here, dying. Hallucinating their deaths over and over again. Grace was a little afraid of what she might find inside. Would they be lucid, or crazed? Would she be able to help them get out?

The doors click, and Grace takes one of them. Lena's door. "Lena? It's Grace," she says, right before the handle jags and she lets go. Her voice is scratchy from the cough still, and she does have to lean her face into her elbow and give it a good fresh blood stain. But she doesn't look that bad.

Lena does. For all that Grace has been through herself, she stares for a second at the state of the woman in front of her. And then, just holds up that syringe that Sid gave her. "Sid found a cure Lena. We're going to be okay," she says in that weak little sick voice. But there's more than sickness in that wavering. It's like she's telling herself it's going to be okay too.

Serafi­ne
The door, opening.  Or rather, first - the locks.  The low tumble of cylinders, the scrape of metal-on-metal and the quiet immediacy of Katie's voice.  The last handful of words, tossed over her shoulder to Sid and Grace.  Caution or admonishment and Sera breathes out, lifting her chin and swinging her head to watch the shadowed edge of the door against the white-washed concrete walls.  The vertigo is briefly overwhelming.
She fights the urge to retch.

There's nothing in her stomach, so the energy expenditure would be futile, anyway.

--

The wasted, skeletal creature that was Serafíne is struggling to stand as Sid pushes open that door.  Has both hands on the cold toilet set and her head bent over, her long hair lank, greasy and damp.  Dark roots clearly showing where the blonde dye ends, tangled ends falling forward over her shoulders into the bowl as, shaking, she pushes herself to try to stand.

Sid gets there first; sinks to her knees on the cold tiled floor of the small, industrial bathroom before Sera has done more than brace her hands over the toilet seat.  It is ridiculously easy for Sid to pull Sera close, to tug her away from the toilet, as there's next to no strength left in her body and her whip-lean frame has lost all fat and more than a bit of muscle in the days since she was brought here.

"Sid."  A drifting look, over her shoulder toward the open door.  "I'm not hallucinating."

Her voice is raw.  The words don't carry beyond the bathroom.  Sera's hands are covered with bruises and a smear of trail of dried blood trickles from her left nostril over the mobile mouth that so usually twists itself into some sort of edgy, knowing grin.  That spirit seems to be almost wholly eclipsed, but there's a spark of something brighter, seizing, angled but unbending at the shadow of the open door.

Sera endures the needle prick, then rises - rather heavily - with Sid's assistance, tearing out the IV for what one hopes is the last time.

They are half-way across the 'hospital' room when a sudden, geysering burst of raw something seizes Sera, and she reaches, grasps that rolling IV pole and throws it across the room.

Tries to throw it across the fucking room.

And then leaves it, god she's weak, the world spinning unpredictably all around her, working to remember how to breathe as Sid supports her on the way out of the room.

Hydra
This was the place that Sid and Lena had been living in since their disappearance: white concrete rooms (no, cells) with a hospital bed, a chair, a table and some medical equipment.  The doors used to lock them in were heavy metal things that creaked from their own weight when opened.  Inside, the rooms had once been clean and sterile, but now they reeked of disease and the coppery tang of blood and bile.  It'd been about 24 hours since the rooms had been cleaned, so likely there were dark red stains on the painted floor or the sheets on the beds.

Lena and Sera were dressed in matching white t-shirts and grey sweatpants, which they barely filled out anymore despite the small sizes.  They looked awful.  Worse even than Grace had looked toward the end.  Katie had been telling the truth when she'd said that both of them were close to death.  Sid would be able to sense it instantly, the way the disease had eaten at them from the inside.  The infection itself had reached a kind of climax point - like it was hovering on the brink of a final attack.  (And jesus, what did this thing look like at the end?  Did it waste its victims away to nothing, or was there some horrible finale in store?)

Katie didn't stick around to see the reunion.  She was already halfway up the stairs by the time Lena opened the door to her cell.  Soon, she'd disappeared, leaving the other four to their own devices.  Grace with Lena and Sid helping Sera up from her collapsed position on the bathroom floor.

And then those life-saving syringes were brought out...

Had Sid really found a cure?  It almost didn't seem possible.  But look - Sid herself seemed almost healthy, and Grace, though sick, was a far cry better than either of the Cultists.  So perhaps it really was true.

Lena Reilly
She narrows her eyes when she sees Grace, and she isn't sure within that spotty vision whether the woman she's seeing is really Grace, or just an overlay.  The Ecstatic is covered in those pick-marks over her skin; her eyes are red-rimmed and unfocused and she's lost more weight than a person really should.  Even in whatever amount of time it's been since she was last tended to, her clothes have been spattered with her own blood as she's coughed it out (itself even more dangerous than Hydra-tainted blood).  And there's a tense moment where Lena looks at Grace with all the rationality of a rabid animal, when it almost seems like she's about to decide fuck it and deliver the biohazardous payload in her hand anyway.

But...she doesn't.  This may not be Grace (c'mon Lena, be honest...probably isn't), but there is a sliver of chance that she might be.  And if not...maybe this will be the needle that finally kills her.  Dead or saved, she doesn't really care at this point.

So she reaches behind her into the room to flick the slimy, red-streaked phlegm in her hand into the room she just staggered out of, then shakes her head when Grace says We're going to be okay.

"Bullshit." She forces the word out through a raw throat, and takes the needle.  She looks at it a second, then rips the protective cap off of the end and feels around on her arm for a vein.  It probably takes longer than it should, but soon she pushes the sharp end in without reaction to however much it may or may not hurt, pushes the plunger down.  "Don't touch me.  Not safe."

"Where's Callum?" she asks as she drops the needle to the ground.  More hateful words have never been heard coming out of the woman's mouth.

Sid
Someone will find out what those final stages feel like.  There is at least one person infected who will not feel the pressure of a needle as Sid's cure is forced into his veins.  Sid had seen to that, because she knew things about this virus even its makers couldn't.  There is a good chance that it will still get out, who knows if someone Sleeping had somehow been infected while these four were still able to be out and about?  Who knows how it will spread out from Eric, who Sid hopes with all of her might is lying twisting writhing as his own immune system fails him and his own creation kills him from the inside out.  And Sid is fairly certain that someone is the one she senses upstairs.

Sid shouldn't take satisfaction in that, or at least most wouldn't expect it from her.  She's so quiet, seems so timid and so shy, that must mean she's a kind, soft-hearted soul, yes?  But these people, these strangers, they tried to kill her and her friends simply because of what they were and how they viewed the universe.  But when Sid looks upward at the ceiling as though she can see through the floor to the rooms above a smile twists the corners of her lips, small and satisfied.

She doesn't dwell on it, though.  No, Sid will not be completely satisified until they're sitting in Sera's kitchen again, eating cake and getting drunk or high or both, talking like there's nothing wrong.  That day will probably never come, really, things will never be the same after this.  They will never be okay again, not really.

Sid doesn't let herself think about that as she pushes the needle into Sera's arm, her veins all to easy to find now that there's so little between them and the surface of her skin.  Sid tries to sound light when she says to Sera, "I'm not a hallucination," rather than No you're not hallucinating.  She could still be for all the Sid knows.  When the needle's saving payload is delivered, Sid casts it aside and pulls one of Sera's arm around her shoulders, bracing her.  Together they head toward the door, but Sid pauses, waiting with Sera as that something courses through her, lets her get that out of her system.  Soon (hopefully, if Katie can really be trusted) this whole place will go up in flames.

"I'm sorry it took so long," she says, her heart breaking on the words even though she knows they got here only as fast as they could.  Still, there is guilt, because while they were here suffering who knows what Sid was in Luke's practice, protected.  "Katie brought us.  She said she's going to shut this place down.  We have to hurry."

Grace
Grace's clothes are spotted with large bleach stains, and the jacket she has on has a few spots of blood where she's coughed into it. She's been there. But not any more.

Lena's clearly not herself, and while Grace certainly has a lot of anger towards the man, there are more important things to do, other than trying to find Callum right now. Such as get the fuck out.

"Callum's off laying a trap for Sid. It's the only way we could get in here -- he emptied the lab trying to get to her. But Lena, we have like 10 minutes to get out of here. The hydra's going to die in fire all right? They've got a failsafe that's going to blow this place away."

Serafine
The room is going to peel itself apart from the inside out.  Something will go wrong.  Sometimes what you notice is the way the lines of the walls begin to weave themselves narrowly and of their own accord.  Sometimes it is simply the way the light shines back at you, as if it was waiting for you to notice.  The places where things go and where they go wrong are myriad and unsettling and each of these things has gone so very wrong for Sera lately. This room is distinct from every other hospital room and -

- god, in truth Sera hardly feels the prick of the needle through her skin.  It is the least of the wounds she has endured.  Sid assures Sera that she herself is not a hallucination and the only reason Sera believes her is that thus far Sid has burrowed her way through Sera's eyes to begin consuming her brain, or something just as shiveringly macabre.

So, Sera does not say anything else to Sid.  Just nods, the gesture rough and dry, leaning on Sid as they shuffle out of the room.  If Sera knew that there was someone else upstairs,

dying of this shit,

(yes, even Erich),

she might -

- oh, but she does not know.  All she knows is how to stumble forward, half-supported by her friend.

Hydra
Flames.  Sera had dreamed of flames - of fire.  Blazing and hot and humming with the deep, resonant sound of an inferno.  What she hadn't known at the time is what it meant - only that it held some connection to Katie's future.  Now she could put the pieces together.  This was it.  This was the end.

They were getting out.  They were going to destroy this place.  Burn it to the fucking ground.

Lena wanted to know where Callum was, but retribution would have to wait.  He was gone, along with most of the others.  Wherever Katie was - whatever she was doing - they had no time to wait.  She'd said she would meet them, and they'd have to trust her to do so.  It was time to leave.

Lena Reilly
She stares dully as Grace tells her that Callum's not here.  And she really doesn't pay attention to the rest of it--anything that Grace says after laying a trap for Sid.  She starts moving in that moment past Grace, toward the exit.  If he's not here, she doesn't want to be here.  And so she starts to walk, with as much speed as she can muster (but really, it's more determination than speed), with one hand against the wall to support her.

And in truth, she still doesn't really believe this.  Maybe it's the Technocracy; maybe they're Sid and Grace clones.  Maybe it's hallucinations.  Maybe she just injected herself with ebola to create the ultimate supervirus.  Either way, she's still moving forward.  There's just a point where your mind takes you to a space beyond fear.  Even for someone who lives in it the way Lena does.

Sid
They make their way out into the hallway, their progress as quick as Sera can manage but still painstakingly slow.  There are still hallways to get through and a car to reach and a Katie to (trust to) meet.  She said the car would be a tight squeeze on the way back, and it had taken some effort on Sid's part not to suggest leaving her behind.  But Sera.  Sera wanted her to have a second chance and so Sid is going to let her.  At least, she isn't going to hinder her, and to her, right now?  It's pretty much the same thing as helping her.
Out in the hall she sees Lena and that gives her strength.  Lena's alive, Lena's making her way out whether she knows it or believes it herself.  This is going to work.

All the while, Sid keeps that net cast.  She feels for the other patterns, already cataloging the ones she's found.  Three guards sleeping, one person very ill.  And those she knows.  So far, so good.

They make their way toward freedom from this toxic nightmare.

Grace
Well, so much for a happy, or even tearful reunion. Lena's ignoring her, shuffling her way along the wall. But then, it's Lena who's suffering. Who is Grace to argue with the way she's dealing with it? Instead, she tries to play along. As she walks alongside Lena, not touching as requested, she vents.

"Callum is such a god damned fuckup. Using a virus like this? He could have killed everyone in the world, we're talking human extinction here. Sid found out Hydra's figured out a way to jump hosts."

Serafi­ne
She wants out.  Out out out.  That desire to get out out out is growing stronger, gathering momentum the further they go.  There's the illusion of strength and Sid can feel Sera straightening, moving faster - which is not to say fast - but can feel the urgency of it beneath her skin.  And everything else she's holding inside her, which radiates from her in subtle tremors as they move.

Down the white hallway and toward or perhaps even up the stairs.  The threads of her vision are knitting themselves together in the back of her mind as Grace and Lena fall into a sort of step beside them, Lena holding herself up, Grace venting about Callum and the rest in ways that Sera herself can hardly comprehend right now.

"Are there other people here?"  Sera asks, as they pass other doors; other windows, other rooms.  The space has a haunting sameness to her and she cannot suppress the shudder that wracks her body as she says that, " - in the rooms.   They should have a chance."

To escape, Sera means.

To escape, too.

Hydra
They made their way up the stairs, limping and stumbling.  Sera asked after other prisoners, but there were no others.  The other cells were vacant.  Whatever the people here had been trying to accomplish, they'd started small.  Perhaps Katie had been right about this being an experiment of sorts.

Meanwhile, the lifesaving virophage began to do its work in the Cultists' bodies, swimming through their bloodstream to attach and embed itself within the Hydra virus.  It would take time for Lena and Sera to feel the effects of the cure, but Sid and Grace had reached them in time.

They would live.

At the top of the stairs, there was a (still-open) door leading to a long white hallway.  On the ground floor, the construction was cleaner - proper walls and wooden doors and a tiled floor.  The place looked just like the inside of any number of smaller science facilities.  Maybe it had been the property of the government or some research company at some point.

As the four of them began to make their way down the hallway, Sid would sense the nearness of Katie's now-familiar pattern, along with the threading, erratic pulse of another (the one she'd assumed - probably correctly - was Eric) approaching them from inside one of the rooms to the right.  A moment later the door pushed open, and Katie stumbled out into the hallway ahead of them with a man draped over her shoulder.
It was Eric.  But the way he looked now was a far-cry from the way Sid and Sera remembered him.  Not the beautiful wannabe actor with his just-perfect tan and gym-sculpted physique.  Gone was the easy confidence and the glow of health.  In the span of only one week (less time than it had taken for the others - perhaps the virus affected Sleepers differently, or perhaps, as Sid and Grace suspected, it was simply growing stronger) he'd become a pale ghost of himself, weakened and sickly and bleeding from nose and mouth and...

There was blood oozing from his ears, too.  And when he breathed, they could all hear the choking gurgle of fluid in his throat.

Katie stumbled - almost dropped him.  And when she righted them both she looked up with a panicked expression, knowing full well how the others were likely to react to the sight of the man leaning up against her in a barely-conscious daze.

"Please," she said.  "He's the only family I have left."

When she spoke, Eric lifted his head and blinked, as though noticing the others for the first time.  "What the fuck are they...!?"

Whatever he was going to say, it was drowned in a fit of coughing, and a fresh splatter of blood struck the wall.

"I'm trying to save your life!" Katie snapped.  "Leave them alone.  It's over.  This is all over."

But whatever impending argument was about to ensue... whatever reaction the others may have had to Eric's appearance, in the end it didn't matter.  It was too late.  The man gave another cough, so hard this time that it wracked his entire body.  He choked and coughed, and then he started to scream.  Katie couldn't hold him any longer, and he collapsed onto the floor, curling into a ball as some kind of spasm worked its way through his muscles.

When he screamed, it sounded like he was drowning.  And when he looked up and opened his eyes, bloody tears streaked their way down his cheeks.

"No no no no..." Katie started to cry as she crouched down beside him, pleading in desperation for some miracle that was never going to come.  "Please, just a little longer.  Eric!"

He gave one final scream, agonized and dying, and then an invisible vice clamped down on his throat and he could no longer take in breath.  What happened next would seem like another hallucination to Sera and Lena.  It so closely mimicked the nightmares they'd all been having.  Patches of red opened up on Eric's face and arms as the skin pulled open and began to melt away.

It kept going, dissolving away the epidermis and the muscle... literally eating him alive.  His eyes were huge and terrified as the spasms went through his body...

Until he literally melted away, leaving behind a bloody, skeletal corpse.

Katie didn't move.  She sat there, crouched in a pool of her brother's blood with tears rolling down her cheeks, and uttered a frail, broken sound.

Lena Reilly
She keeps walking.  Step by step.  One foot in front of the other, away from hell and toward freedom.  Of course, it was a temporary freedom at best for her because even if she did somehow make it out of here, one day she'll be back in a room just like it, looking much the same way and breathing her last.  But even a brief respite from that...it's something.

It's hard, getting up the stairs.  But she forces herself up.  She's not going to die here and even if she was being cured by this concoction that Sid--brilliant, amazing Sid--had come up with, she didn't really want to get blown up either.

And then, just like that, there's Katie and the man she'd never met before.  There's a moment's confusion in Lena's still-bleary mind before the whole scene starts to unfold.  She weaves there a moment, leaning against the wall.  She watches the whole thing unfold.

And when we say the whole thing, we mean the whole thing.  She stares dully as the disease eats Eric and rips him apart, dissolving him into nothing but a mess of blood and a skeleton.  Maybe deep down, she feels sorrow for the loss.  Maybe there's some empathy left in her for Katie, knowing what that must be like for her.

Right now, she's just too burned out to feel anything but Rage and Hate.  But it's telling (and perhaps encouraging) when she starts walking up to Katie, ducks down and struggles to slip her head under the broken girl's arm, to lift her up.

Forgiveness?  Hard to say.  But maybe, despite the fact that she does it all with the expression of a very angry zombie, the Ecstatic isn't completely gone off the deep end.

Grace
Grace hasn't watched a person die before. Not like this. There had been deaths at the theater, but she hadn't seen them really. And this, so much like one of her feverish hallucinations, really happening to someone else?
She can only make it a few steps before she starts to retch. It's not blood that comes up this time. This isn't the virus' doing. It's the terror of it all. That's what would have happened to her if not for Sid.

She would have been eaten like that.

Who does this, who makes a thing like Hydra? And then, who releases it, knowing that this is the result?
In between her spasms of nausea, she gets out the occasional "Oh God," as if she believed in a God, really. Who could, when this is a thing that exists.

Sid
When the door opened and Katie spilled out, Sid was already shifting closer toward the wall, and she was putting herself between the woman and her friend.  She would protect Sera until her dying breath if Katie turned on them, if the sick one lunged at them.

And there they are, the pretty siblings, only one of them is looking considerably worse for wear.  Sid knows she should feel bad, she should feel guilt for what she's done.  She did that to him.  She knew that the barrier that kept the Sleepers safe was breaking down.  The cold twist in her stomach comes from something else.  It comes from Katie trying to beg for her brother's life.  She must realize how that request will go with them.  Katie was spared because of Sera, and because she offered the aid they needed to get their friends out.  Eric?  Eric only tried to kill them.  Eric turned them into lab rats.  On purpose.  Willingly.  He'd said that it was nothing personal and maybe it wasn't, but probably it was.  He had some personal vendetta (his nephew maybe? what it had cost his sister?) against the Awakened.  If Katie wanted the cure for him, she could pry it from Sid's cold dead fingers.  Because that's the only way he could be helped, if they killed the Orphan to get to it.

He can't do that, though, and they watch what these people had planned for them happen to him in fast forward.  Sid watches, cold, satisfied, as Eric is torn apart by the virus.

And then her head snaps up, facing away from them.  "They're coming.  Three of them, two men and a woman," she says, and she looks at the others.  Five of them, one healthy, four in various stages of sickness, one of them not wholly on their side.  She looks at Grace.  "We need to get out of here before the fire starts."  She says it mostly to jar Katie, to remind her that their time is limited - provided she did as she said she would.  She doesn't wait for her, though, the woman can stay and die by her brother's mutilated corpse or leave with them.  Sid got what she came for, even got a little extra.

Serafi­ne
Strange how they all react up there, marooned in a bloodspattered hallway while a man is consumed from inside himself.  Sid puts herself between Sera and Katie and Sera's confused, muzzled, not entirely with it and -

- all of that, she'll remember later. Like Grace, Sera too starts to retch.  Unless Grace, what comes up from her abused body is little more than blood leached from the tissue lining her stomach, her throat, spat back into her mouth to spatter the flood with Eric's life's blood as he - dissolves, is eaten from the inside out.  It just gets worse and worse, a horror show.  Sid's attention snaps away Lena goes to help Katie rise and Sera, well, Sera disintangles herself from Sid's arms, slips in the blood and goes down to one knee, staring at Katie and crying with her bloodied tears and finding the spike in her own pain and Katie's pain, the atomized world, the net that knits them together.  Sera's tears are coming more quickly now and they are bloodied and blood tinged and the world is a whirring chaos and her heart is still beating, the pulse thready but loud in her ears.  Lena reaches to help Katie stand and Sera brushes the tears away from her cheeks with the edge of her palm leaving bloody streaks behind on her ashen skin.

Reaches out, and offers Katie a hand.

"We have to go."

[Empathy projection: Katie.  Hope  Difficulty 5  +1 [sick]  -1 practiced.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (1, 7) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Hydra
Despite everything, Lena offered Katie a shoulder to lean against, attempting to help the shocked and traumatized woman to her feet.  But Katie pulled her arm back and shook her head, sliding in the spreading pool of blood as she crouched against the wall.  She didn't speak.  She just sat there, shivering and broken.
Then Sera offered a hand.  Did more than that - reached out with her mind to offer the only form of comfort she was able to give.  But it was no use - just as her effects had bounced off of Eric's shielded mind, so too did this one reflect away from Katie.  The thing that someone had implanted into her brain - the thing that was meant to protect her - now kept her from receiving human connection.

She looked at Sera and shook her head slowly.  Finally she mustered a few words.  "I just need... a few minutes.  With him.  Go."

Some of the others were already making their way past the ruined corpse, but they were moving both toward the exit and the three people who were making their way quickly toward them.  Three against five were decent odds, but how many of them were really capable of fighting, and what sorts of weapons did their enemies have?

It didn't matter.  They were already there.

Only moments after Sid uttered her warning, three people appeared at the end of the hall, closing off the route to the exit.  Two of them were unfamiliar: a man and a woman in their twenties, the former blond and the latter brunette.  The man in the middle was Callum.  All three of them had guns raised and pointed in their direction.

"Kathrine," Callum spoke without taking his eyes off of Sid and the others.  There was a cold, venomous finality to the word.  In his off-hand he held a phone, which he started to speak into, "I found them.  We're at the..."

He stopped cold and stared at Katie, who'd pulled something round and palm-sized out of her pocket.  I tiny LED light was flashing white just above where her thumb was pressed against what looked like some kind of trigger.

"Katie.  If you let go, we'll both die."

Callum was trying to reason with a woman who'd just watched her last surviving family member get eaten alive by a disease they'd all unleashed onto the world.

Sid
Sera lets go and for a moment Sid stands there, watching her and watching over her.  She's not going anywhere unless Sera and Lena and Grace are with her, but she will at least move to stand at the front.  She will be their shield for now.

Because here they come.  A man she's only seen on video and two others.  Sid stands between them, hands clenched into white-knuckled fists at her side.  Eric is the only one who has experienced what Sid is about to do, but Eric is a half-melted skeleton in a puddle of blood on the floor.

They may have guns, but these are Awakened Mages.  The universe exists to be bent to their Will.  And right now, Sid intends to bend Fate to hers.

[Unlucky Bastard: Entropy 2: Extending however long she can to get as many suxx as possible to target all three people: coincidental, -1 (hella practiced, thanks, people who are dicks to Shoshannah!)]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (1, 5) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Lena Reilly
She gets pulled away from and for some reason, in that moment, she looks hurt.  Of course, she's not thinking clearly and there are a lot of things that could be (and are) running through her head.  But she draws away, her jaw hardening when her offer to help has been rejected.  She puts her hand against the wall and starts to walk.

But then, there is Callum.  And there is--

Oh, who the fuck cares.  THERE IS CALLUM.

She warned him.  She really did.  He chose to lie to her and to play on her good nature.  And so where her hand leans, her fingers rise and fall in a thump.

Thump-thump, thump.

A beat.  And she does it again.  And she focuses on that beat, letting the heartbeat connect them all.  Through time, through each other.  She's making herself a conduit for surface thoughts to go from one person into her and through to someone else.  Of course, one of those people is now dead.  But when you're a Time mage, that's not so impossible.  (Hey, what's a little more mental trauma in the sake of dishing some out?)
And so she shuts her eyes and opens her mind, attempting to connect past and present.  Cold life and bloody death.  Eric and Callum.  Of course, she doesn't know there are Mind shields to deal with, but ah, well.

[Mind 2, Time 2.  Diff 5+1 for sick -3 Quint to make diff 3, dumping WP in.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (5, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Serafi­ne
There's no connection.  Something hard, finite, physical, technological in the between skin and skin and mind and mind and atom and atom, dividing Katie neatly from the ineffable and the infinite and then -
- more chaos.  Someone just needs more time and other people have guns drawn and there's this strange, grim standoff in the once-sterile hallway around the corpse of the bright, animate man who thought his sister would get the joke about Sera's insane boots just a handful of weeks ago.

Sera does not remember getting back to her feet but somehow she's standing; she doesn't have the energy to say anything more to Katie than she said on one knee, blooded and sick-to-death, with an open hand and does not remember entirely how her mouth works except when the nausea overtakes her.

And now three people with guns are standing between them and the exit.  Between Sera and the exit to this place.

Sera grits her teeth and shoves all her panic, her fear, her need-to-escape, right at the male stranger.

[Mind 2: empathic projection.  Uh.  Fear, on dude she recognizes.  Dif: 5  +1 (sick)  -1 (resonance appropriate)  -1 (practiced)
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (4, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Grace
She gets a hold on herself. They don't have time. Certainly not enough time for her to fall apart. But then, Callum is there, and he's pointing a gun at them, and suddenly Grace really wishes she'd spent every weekend at Kalen's place learning how to use one.

Still, her fear doesn't stop her from engaging the man. "You... you did this," she says, and she means all of this. Lena and Sera drowning in blood and death, Eric being eaten alive. Not to mention her own tortures, or the future of a pandemic of Hydra. "How could you be so stupid?"

"You called it a masterwork. But it thinks it could do better. It's evolving, Callum. Look what your masterwork does," she says, and points to the bloody skeleton. "You'd see the whole world drown in blood before you'd be satisfied, is that it?"

Hydra
The air in the hallway grew charged with resonance as each of them in turn began to weave effects against the armed bioterrorists at the end of the hall.  Having tried so many times to breach the minds of her captors and failed, perhaps Sera half expected her projection to dissolve on contact as it had moments before with Katie.

But no.  She'd seen this man's thoughts before.  And now her will struck his mind like a thunderbolt of fear and panic, giving the guard a brief taste of what she'd been living with since she'd arrived in this horrible place.

It worked.

"We have to get out of here!" he hissed in a panicked rush, and they'd all see the flash of anger pass across Callum's eyes (he still had not torn them away from the flashing orb in Katie's hand) as the blond man beside him turned and bolted away as fast as he could, running toward the door.  He'd be out of the building in seconds.

Lena's effect was longer in the working.  The world around her dimmed as she pulled on the threads of time, looking back into the last moments of Eric's death.  Whatever had protected his mind before, it was gone, because Lena was able to sense and channel every horrible, visceral emotion surging through his mind in those final seconds.

But when she tried to channel them into Callum, she'd find the way blocked by what felt like a hard, heavy wall of iron.  She'd have to try harder if she wanted to breach it.

Sid could feel the early workings of her effect coming together, but it wasn't yet strong enough to release onto the man and woman still standing at the end of the hall.

Grace, new to her powers as she was, had no such assaults.  Nor did she have any weapons to protect herself with. But the fact that she didn't have a gun didn't stop her from confronting the man who'd done this to them all.  And Callum?  He still didn't look at her.

He was looking at that thing.  And Katie was staring right back at him.  As though everything they might need to say to each other could be said with a single look.

When Callum responded to Grace, his voice was soft and cold.  "Do you really think I would unleash something like this without knowing exactly what it was capable of?"

At that moment, Katie smiled.

"Wouldn't your dad be proud."

Then she pulled her thumb off the trigger of the device in her hand, and in the same moment, Callum shot her.  The bullet hit her in the center of her sternum, and blood began to bubble up from the wound as the thing in her hand emitted a hard sonic pulse.  The people standing in the hallway would feel more than hear it - the way it moved through their bones and rippled the air.

All at once these things happened:

Katie slumped to the ground, dead, blood seeping out of her nose and ears.

Something exploded in the guns that Callum and the woman held, and the woman dropped hers with a cry as it burned her hand.

In the room next door, there was a sound of electrical devices and computers sparking and popping and shorting out.  Anything electronic the mages were carrying with them sparked and died.

Callum's eyes rolled back into his head.  His body convulsed as he dropped to the floor, blood seeping out of his ears and nose as it had with Katie.  Something had burst inside of his head.

Then the lights in the hallway went out.

Serafine
Then it is dark; everything is chaos.  The background taste of ozone from the dead electronics is not enough to overcome the coil of bile and blood in the back of her throat but she is aware of it, and aware of the need to move.

Sera does not run.  Cannot run, but jesus fuck she comes close to it.  Charges for the door  as fast as she can, aching and bleeding and no-longer-dying and also spent, exhausted, emotionally rendered.

[Run for the door.  Dex + Ath -2]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 9, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Sid
Callum falls, the other man bolts, one remains.  Sid winces at the sound, tries to ignore the feel of her phone fizzling out in her pocket.  Then Sera is running, or charging at the door.  Good.  Good, get out, Sera.  Go and don't look back.

Because Sid is moving forward now, slowly as she twists the fates around the man who is running away.  With luck he'll find his shoes untied or the door stuck, barring his escape.  Something something, there's always something.

[extending, +1 for distraction probably, dropping her last quint to lower the diff to 4, now targeting only the guy and releasing, so whatever suxx go to increasing his difficulties]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (2, 10) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Lena Reilly
It's traumatic to experience someone's death in a very real sense.  To have your mind connected to someone else's in the moments when it winks out is to experience the emotional trauma of their passing.  And when it's as horrible as Eric's death was...well, let's just say that Lena's mind buckles under the weight of dying from disease.  But it will all be worth it if she can deliver that pain, Eric Draven-style, onto the man who she hates so very much.  More than anything on this world currently, and possibly everything in the next.

And thus, to say that she is frustrated when it doesn't happen, when she comes up against a mind shield...well, frustrated doesn't begin to describe it.  Those thoughts jam up like traffic on an unexpectedly-closed overpass, an infinite-car pile-up on the Lena Mental Expressway.  She screams, in anger and frustration and panicked fear and pure, utter rage.

It's mostly instinct that her hand keeps that Thump, thump-thump, thump beat up, albeit frenetically now, like a frenzied butterfly rhythm.  Maybe this is how someone invented dubstep.  Certainly, you would have to be this wacked in the head to come up with such a thing.

And so she finds out the next closest target that isn't her friends.  And she unleashes it on them full-bore, probably with a triple dose of her own hatred and fear and pain.

[[Extending effect.  Out of Quint, +1 diff from before for extension.]]
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (1, 4) ( fail )

Grace
Her laptop and phone nestled into the bag on her shoulder popped and sputtered. On top of everything else, like a cherry, that.

Sera brushes past her, moving as fast as a nearly dead person can. And it's a damn good idea. Grace catches up to her, lends a hand, tries to help keep her up and running as much as she can.

"Come on, I'll get you to the car, lean on me if you need it."

Lena Reilly
[[Paradox]]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 8) ( success x 2 )

Lena Reilly
[[Soak?]]
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (2, 7) ( success x 1 )

Hydra
[Lena takes 1B on top of the 4L from the disease]

Hydra
Sera had the right idea in running for the door.  Not long after she started her unsteady, shuffling run toward the exit, a disembodied and coldly mechanical voice announced over the speakers:
"Three minutes until disinfection protocol."

When the remaining woman heard this, she snapped her head up in panic.  Looking around at the carnage before her, she hesitated a moment, then turned and ran back through the front room, making her way to the door.

On her way out, she'd trip over the prone body of her colleague, who'd slipped and cracked his head hard on the front desk in his panicked (and it would seem - very unlucky) escape attempt.  He was alive, but unconscious.

In her frustration, Lena attempted to channel her effect onto the fleeing guard, but she missed her target entirely and the effect went off inside her own head, cracking down with a horrible shock of psychic pain that radiated inside of her skull.  For a brief, fleeting moment, she'd feel everything she'd intended Callum to feel.
Then it washed away, and she was left in a dim hallway with her friends urging her to leave.

They all go.  And however they make their way toward the door, they'd find their path open.  The three drugged guards in the lab were still unconscious, as was the one now sprawled on the floor.  The woman was just disappearing out the door and into the parking lot.  Wherever the rest of Hydra was, they hadn't yet made it to the lab.

Lena Reilly
When she couldn't directly pass on the dying sensation of Eric, she'd screamed.  When it bounces back like a rubber band directly into her brain and goes off like a psychic shrapnel-filled IED, she slams herself against the wall and her mouth opens, but no scream comes out.  It's like she's been shot straight through the lungs and would cry out in horror if she could, but lacks the capacity to do so.

It scatters away quickly enough though, leaving shadows behind that she'll have to sort out later.  She doesn't have anything left to throw up, but her body is certainly trying as she straightens herself, staggering blindly forward after her friends, running on pure animal survival instinct.

Serafi­ne
Sera accepts Grace's help.  Needs it, really.  Whatever it is that is keeping her together at this point - will, perhaps - has started to desert her and there's something ragged and terrible about the way her wasted body moves, Sera who is also so entirely in-her-skin, self-assured and sensual and so many other things.

The terrible, shuffling run and Grace on one side and then run into the prone body of a man while a disembodied voice, cold and metallic, chills through the speakers.  Sera breaks a bit away from Grace as they are passing the prone body of the man she tried to scare into fleeing - did scare into fleeing - almost literally trips over him and starts - shaking more, and crying, and cursing.

Shit oh shit oh shit,

she's saying, shit oh shit

barely keeping it together, shaking so powerfully and imploring Grace, "We can't leave him.  This place is going to burn."

Sera grabs one of his arms and starts trying to drag the unconscious man toward the door.

Sid
She did it.  Katie did what she said that she'd do.  In three minutes this place is going to lock itself down and burn itself apart from the inside.  Just like the virus created within its walls was designed to do.  Just like what these people wanted to do to Sid, Sera, Grace, and Lena.

Sid wants them all to die, all of them, every last one.  Every person who had a hand in this place and what it did to her friends, she wants them dead, dead, dead.  That kind of hatred should scare her, but it doesn't.  She was never the mouse people thought she was.

But she can't stop to make sure that all of these people get what they deserve.  Lena's still back, and as much as Sid would like to stay and kick in Callum's chest cavity with her booted foot, her first and only priority is getting her friends out to safety.  So she goes back, peeling out of her sweatshirt as she goes back, throws it around the Ecstatic's shoulders, giving her something to hold so she can safely urge her toward that door.

Where Sera is trying to drag a man toward the door.  Sid reaches for her arm as she guides Lena forward and past her.  "Sera you can't we have to go."  Her voice breaks on the last word, breaks for Sera not for the man, Sid could not care less about the man.  Tears well up in her dark eyes, threatening to spill over her chest but she blinks them back, no no, not yet.  She has to get Sera, her friend, who wants to save even one of these people who did this terrible thing to her, Sera who has that kind of forgiveness in her.  She has to get her and they have to run.

Grace
Grace goes wide-eyed at Sera, as she -- even at her worst of health -- starts trying to drag a full-grown man out the door.

"Sera, we can't! I'm sick, you're sick. There's no way we can move him... Aww hell! We're not going to make it as it is!"

She and Sid both try to dissuade her, but Grace decides that a bit of physical urging is needed. She tries to grab Sera's hand, tries to drag her out of the building.

Serafi­ne
It's not forgiveness, just humanity.  Grace isn't helping, just dragging her away and now Sera is pulled open, Grace tugging her from the unconscious stranger, Sera shaking, crying, struggling to pull a full grown man she wouldn't be able to drag at her healthiest and cannot begin to budge, with one hand.

"Wake up!"

Frustrated, the work is a lashing, visceral thing, an urgent push as his unconscious mind.

[Mind 2.  Dif: 5 + 1 (sic)  -1 resonance appropriate.  -1 quint.  ]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (6, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Hydra
"Two minutes until disinfection protocol."

The truth was, if they all tried, they could probably get the guy out the door before the building locked itself down.  But Lena was in no shape to help, and Sid and Grace weren't likely to want to risk their lives to save a man who'd wanted them dead.  Who'd stood by and allowed them to be effectively tortured by this disease.

It would seem that Sera was the only one among them willing to offer the unnamed man any kind of forgiveness.  Or maybe she'd just had enough of death and misery for one lifetime.

It was probable that this man did not deserve her help.  But forgiveness wasn't only about the other person.  Sometimes it was just about holding on to your humanity.

So Sera did the only thing she could think to do.  She lashed out with her mind... and woke the man up.
He sat up with a shock, gasping in breath.  There was panic and confusion in his eyes as he scrabbled to his feet, nearly slipping and falling again in the process.  It was a small mercy that he was too much in the throes of the fear that had been projected onto him to think to attack any of them.  Instead he just ran for the door.

Serafi­ne
There's almost nothing left inside Sera as the working takes effect, jolts the man from unconsciousness to scramble to his feet and run.  He takes off going past them and Sera is absolutely, utterly spent.  Would not be able to move if Grace were not pulling her along behind.  Would not, perhaps, remember how or why to move.

But Sid urges and Grace pulls and there is no longer an unconscious man between Sera and freedom, doomed to some terrible death-by-fire.  So: move she does, at last,

crying, yes.  All the way.

Grace
Sera wakes the man, and Grace supports her, tries to keep her moving. Well, now there is no dead-weight to drag out the door, but Sera's not moving without encouragement.

Grace doesn't cry. Oh maybe she will later, when the enormity of the situation and her life comes crashing down. But she doesn't cry now. Maybe she would, if Sera didn't need her to be the strong one, to be a person to lean on.

She just keeps going.

"Just a little bit more. We're almost there."

Sid
[WP to not kill a dude.  Down three from expenditures.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 9) ( success x 1 )

Lena Reilly
Man?  What man?  Lena, frankly, doesn't see any man.  There might be a time where, if she did see him, she might help.  That time might even be now, if she were cognizant and capable.  She did try to help Katie up.  But she's neither capable nor really all that cognizant of anything, and so she just keeps stumbling for the door, urged onward by Sid.

Once she's outside, she doesn't really bother to check her surroundings.  She feels fresh air and it's barely six steps outside the door before her legs are failing her.  She makes it as far as Sid can guide her--perhaps even to the car--before she's on her hands and knees on whatever surface she's on or pushed to, and then on laying on her side.  She doesn't sigh in relief, doesn't thank anything for being alive.  Doesn't cry, doesn't ask questions, doesn't talk.  She just lays there, or leans there if nudged into a sitting position against something, with a deeply distant and faraway look.

Sid
That man hurt them.  Sid doesn't know how much, she doesn't know what he may or may not have done down in the rooms below, but his connection to them is enough.  He is guilty by his association with his maniacs.  He is guilty of hurting people just to hurt them.  Of trying to kill them.  Sid knows what it's like to suffer at the hands who take joy in the pain of others.  She has the scars to prove it.

She has a quiet, simmering fury to prove it.

Sera wants that man saved so badly she would risk her own life to make sure he got out.  In the end that's all that saves him.  It's all that stops Sid from jumping on him as soon as he stands up, all that keeps her from stomping down with all her might onto his ankle, hoping to break it, hoping to hobble him and trap him in here.  Death by fire is too kind.

Instead, Sid stands behind Sera, fists clenched at her sides, her whole body shaking with the desire to snuff out that tormentor.  Her eyes track the man as he goes, and for a moment Sid is too furious to move.  He's getting away, he's going to get away and live his life as though none of this ever happened while they live with the scars, the memories, the pain and hurt.

Only when Sera and Grace and Lena are nearer the doors does Sid finally force herself to move.  She passes a hand over her face as she moves, one step, two steps, three, suddenly stiff limbs loosening with each step until she's running, hurling herself out of the building with a strangled cry of grief and rage.  She doesn't stop, doesn't turn to look back, doesn't turn to look for the two that escaped.  They may have to deal with them later, but first they have to get away from this place.

She heads for the car that brought them here, thankful that Katie left the keys behind for them.  She doesn't look at the others as she makes sure the doors are all unlocked, and they're free to go.  Unless there are very strong objections, Sid will take them all to Luke's.

Hydra
The clock was counting down.  Time running out.  But there was the door just ahead, and one by one (or two by two) they all made their way past it and out into the crisp late-October air.  Outside the sun had gone down, and the parking lot was dark and empty apart from Katie and Eric's Audi and the back of a black van that was presently peeling its way onto the road.

They were getting away.

Sometimes in life, there were no clean endings.

A minute and a half after Sid let the glass door slide shut behind her, the locks on the building clicked shut, moved by some automated protocol.  For a moment, everything was still.

Then the door and the windows shattered, exploding outwards in a bright cloud of flame.  Inside, bodies of those living and dead roasted.  Electronics melted and scorched.  Paint peeled from the walls and dissolved in the heat.  Glass vials popped.

The building burned.  The virus burned.

Turned out it was fire that killed the Hydra after all.

The Woman with the Hood

Sid Rhodes
Sid's well enough to leave Luke's practice, which she did briefly yesterday, but she returned soon after.  For one thing there was that odd happening over at Cheesman Park, and for another being out in the open like that scared her more than a little.  Eric said they lost her, which must have meant the wards were working, so she returned.

Now she's busy preparing things for her "meeting" with Callum.  She doesn't need Grace to tell her that the man is dangerous, she's known that for a while.  Like she said via Ginger, his offer of assistance seemed genuine, but he himself was suspect.  She's treating tonight's meeting in the same vein.  Luke has given her a few things that might come in handy, but really, Sid knows, what will help her most is her brain.  So she's headed over to check on Grace in one of the rooms to the back of the practice to see where she's at, as well.

Grace
The nausea was the latest symptom to go. It no longer seems futile to eat, there's no more cramps in her gut, so Grace is enjoying her dinner tonight for the first time in many days. It's yogurt and soup, with some crackers, so not exactly the most likely of dinners, but hey...

She's in her room, where she's been spending most of her time at Luke's. She doesn't mind being alone, really, as there's always her laptop to keep her company. Lately she's stopped browsing the news and has engaged in some prepwork of her own.

Hydra
Some days of the year tended to attract notable events, and given that it was the eve before Halloween, perhaps it was not entirely imagined that the air outside felt more... alive than usual.  Like it was humming with some sort of tense anticipation.  Already there had been reports of a haunting.

And now Sid and Grace were about to meet with a man who might either be an ally or an enemy.  After so very nearly escaping the claws of death, it was a bit like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.  But Lena and Sera were missing, and what other leads did they have?

Sid and Grace waited, feeling the hours to tick by as the meeting time grew closer.  The practice was closed and locked for the day, and inside the building, all was quiet.

Then a knock came at the front door.  Hard enough to have a sense of urgency.  Whoever it was hit the glass three times in slow, deliberate succession, and the sound echoed through the smallish, near-empty building.

Sid Rhodes
Grace hasn't been alone very much today.  Sid comes into her room frequently, the safeguards on their quarantine having gone down a notch or two since the Verbena doctor injected the Virtual Adept with the cure to Hydra.  Today it's where Sid's bag is with its few new belongings prepared for later, which she adds to when she thinks of something that might be useful.  Syringes in sealed packages, small unlabeled vials with different colored liquids, at least a few of which are red.

When she hears the knock she freezes, unsure for a moment if she really heard something. She looks at Grace and goes to her bag, flips up the front flap, and pulls out one of those syringes.  Thanks, Eric, for the brilliant idea, and thanks Luke for being a doctor with access to anesthetics.  Quickly, Sid fills the syringe to a dangerous level from one of her vials and caps the needle before slipping it into a pocket.  Then she goes to the table and picks up a pen.  Pulling back the sleeve covering her forearm, Sid begins to make the first quick lines of a diagram, little lines connecting to the tattoo on the inside of her wrist as she steps out into the hallway.

[Life scan I s'pose!]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (9, 10) ( success x 2 )

Grace
That shared look, that unspoken 'oh shit' -- we've all done it. "Sid. Do you think... have they found us? I thought Luke had this place... you know... firewalled. Maybe it's just some random person?"

She'd say 'warded' but no... Not today. Today she's still sick and words are slow in her taxed brain.

"Sid, be careful. Want me to go with you?" she asks, like the sick girl is going to be much help. What would she do, hit em over the head with her laptop?

Hydra
The knock happened again, more insistent this time.  It would seem that the person on the other side had no intention of giving up.  Finally she yelled something.  The muffled sound could be vaguely heard from where Sid stood in the hallway, but most of the words were unintelligible.

It sounded something like: "...quickly!"  And then "Sera..."

Sid Rhodes
Sid has nothing to say at the moment.  Could be someone's just hoping to speak to the closest doctor and is hoping someone's still around.  Why they wouldn't go to the ER isn't something Sid can begin to fathom.  As to how they found them if they are bad?  Well, could be they followed Sid after her brief escape yesterday.  They didn't keep tabs on her before, but then she hadn't disappeared off the grid then, either.

She stands just outside the door, and she breathes, feeling the pulse of the universe, that heartbeat Luke has talked to her about.  She focuses on her own heartbeat, listening to the cadence and using it to find other, similar beats.  And when she's found it she goes a little deeper, finds out a little more about the person on the other side of the door.  What she picks up doesn't make her relax.

Poking her head back in the door, she says to Grace, "It's a woman, she's infected with the virus."  Her eyes flick to the side, then back to the apprentice.  Grace is not yet one hundred percent well, but what could it hurt to have an extra person?  Her mind works quickly through the possibilities, analyzing the alternatives in a matter of seconds.  If the woman outside isn't determined she may even give up on them.

"I'm going to see who it is," she says in her quiet voice.  "Come if you're up to it."  Because she's certainly not going to push the woman.  She hears the yell and she tenses up completely, every muscle tightening.  Still, it doesn't make her run for the door.

"I only picked up one woman," she says to Grace as a warning before she heads down the darkened hallway quietly.  As she goes, she slips the syringe from her pocket, uncapping it as she gets to the door.  Keeping her hand tight against her side, Sid cautiously peers through the window.

Sid Rhodes
[percept+awareness]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 8) ( success x 2 )

Grace
Grace shifts her dinner off her lap, and lets herself to the floor. She's wearing normal clothes, but ones with bleach stains where the blood  had been washed away. Thankfully no new red today. Just white.
"I'm right behind you, Sid."

True to her words, she followed down the hall, coughing a little as she went (the little bit of exertion perhaps?) She stays behind Sid though. Sid's got the needle. Sid's a bit more healthy.

Grace
[perception + awareness too!]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

Hydra
[Nothing to see (or rather, sense) here - the woman appears to be unawake.]

Hydra
This woman, she had eyes that were difficult to forget.  Maybe Sid remembered them from a night just under a week ago, looking out from beneath the same dark hooded sweatshirt the woman was wearing now.

Sid didn't know her name, but Grace did.  (Katie.  Or at least that's what she called herself.)

When she saw someone approach on the other side of the glass, Katie looked up quickly and pushed the hood back from her head.  Her eyes were a little bloodshot, shadowed circles showing beneath them from lack of sleep.  Compared to the night Grace had met her, she was almost a different person.

"Can I come in?" she called out.  "Please.  I know where your friends are."

Grace
"Oh my God, oh my God, Sid get away from the door!"

In her still-sick voice, her panicked shout was desperate, but not loud. She just didn't have the lungs yet, or the vocal cords.

"Shit..." she said, breath coming in fast and shallow, backing up steadily. "I'm not hallucinating again, am I? Sid, that's Katie. That's the one who did this to Lena and I. They are back, and they're trying to kill us again!"

Sid Rhodes
Sid's recollection of events right at the time she dropped unconscious is a bit hazy.  What she remembers most is that she succeeded in giving Eric back a little of what he'd given to her.  She'd infected him, hah! take that, asshole.  There had been someone else, though, someone standing over him as he dropped over Sid.  Someone had left her in her truck, had even covered her with a blanket.  Was this her?

She looks back at Grace, panicking as she backs away.  A shadow forms between Sid's reddish brows.  "I don't blame you," she says quietly.  "But I think she helped me.  And...you know...strength in numbers."  Meaning the two of them versus the one of her.  With Sid healthy and Grace probably healthier at this point than the girl on the other side of the door.  And the fact that they are Awakened and she is not.  They have the advantage.

That doesn't mean Sid trusts the girl on the other side, but if she has information on where to find their friends...

Glancing down, she focuses on that shot of fear that tenses up her spine, and she shifts so that her hands are hidden on their side of the door as she retraces the lines on her arm.  Grace may be able to feel it, the swell and song and clawing desperation of Sid's resonance as she Works.  Or maybe Grace has made her escape.  Sid doesn't stop her if she goes, but the Orphan will do whatever it takes, get help from whatever quarter if it means finding Sera and Lena.

Then she unlocks the door.  If this girl is genuine, or if every word that comes out of her mouth is a lie, Sid will know.

"Where are they?" she demands, and this time her voice is not so quiet.

[Human Lie Detector [Entropy 1, Life 1, coincidental]By monitoring the target's Life Pattern and "checking" it against Fate/Probability around them, the Mage can determine if the target's statements are true or false.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (2, 7) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Hydra
When Sid opened the door, Katie's eyes tracked between her and Grace.  There was evident relief, followed closely by a moment of tense anxiety.  It was clear that Katie didn't feel any safer around them than they felt around her, but something had drawn her there regardless.

"Whatever address Callum gave you, it wasn't the right one.  They're being held in a building out near the airport.  I've spoken to both of them.  Sera told me..." Katie swallowed, pausing to remember the words exactly.  "She told me that everyone deserves a chance to be something other than what they are.  Like Leah.  I don't... know what she meant, exactly.  But I imagine you do.  Either way, there are things you need to know.  Callum and the others... they're setting a trap for you right now.  This is the only good chance we'll have to get Lena and Sera out of there."

Grace
[WP! Because Grace is facing down the woman who's performed a vivisection on her... in hallucinations]

Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

Sid Rhodes
The corner of Sid's mouth flickers, like she might smile, or frown, or something.  Instead her mouth, a curving bow of Cupid at rest, is pressed into a line.  There are so many questions she wants to ask, that she should ask.  Who are you people, why did you do this, what the fuck is wrong with you, et cetera et cetera.

The truth, though, is that she's telling the truth.  she's blocking the door with her body, but she turns her head to look at Grace.  When she looks at her, her expression softens.  "She's telling the truth."  She's spoken to them, she's spoken to Sera and Lena, she knows where they are.  The rest, well.  It doesn't take a genius to know Callum was likely going to be up to something, hence Sid's preparations.

Before she goes back to the room for her bag, though, she does have one question that needs to be answered.  "Why are you doing this?"

Grace
Sid says to be strong, and Grace finds her breath again. It's just... It's only been a few days since she'd experienced vivisection at the hands of a hallucinatory Katie.

She's staring the woman down, and she's also watching, listening for the buzz of a wasp. She advances, fists clenched, shaking in fight-or-flight.

"Sid? Is this the woman who helped you at the university?"

She looked at Katie with such pain in her eyes, this woman who introduced her to death. "Why are you helping us, when you tried to kill us before? This doesn't. make. sense."

Hydra
Katie looked at Grace like she honestly expected to get hit, and when she let out her breath, a look of guilt and acceptance came over her face.  Pained and complicated.

She knew what she'd done.  If she hadn't fully understood before, she did now.

"I wish I had time to explain everything.  Grace... I know what I did was unforgivable.  If you're trying to understand, it's not... a simple thing.  Someone like you murdered my son, because he was just... in the way.  And then I met Callum and he showed us things and... it's the same old story, really.  Why does anyone do unforgivable things?  Bitterness and desperation.  But I've regretted it since the beginning, even before I knew that you weren't who I thought you were.  And now... I just want to make things right.  Please.  I know you have no reason to but you have to believe me."

The strain of her desperation showed in Katie's voice, and she bent over suddenly to cough into her hand.  There was blood there when she lifted it away.

Sid Rhodes
"I don't know for sure," is all Sid can say when Grace asks if this woman helped her.  She doesn't know for certain, but she seems vaguely familiar.

Sid steps to the side in a way that makes way for Grace more than it invites Katie in.  If Grace is going to hit this woman, Sid is the last person who would stand in her way.  If she didn't have an effect hanging over the woman she probably would have driven her syringe into her somewhere by now.

She listens, and she says again, "She's telling the truth."  Whether Grace trusts her or not is up to her.  Sid's own expression when she looks at the woman, though, is harder than anyone she's known in this life will have seen.  Well, except for maybe Eric.  If she hated it since before this thing started...But that was then, and now is now.

She looks at Grace, leaving it up to her whether or not the woman comes inside for a moment.  She could be given help, she could be given the cure, but, well.  God knows Sid wouldn't do the same for Eric.

Grace
"So you went and played Dr. Mengele with Callum? For vengeance? And oh, yes, here's something you brilliant people never considered. You can't put life in a box. Life always finds a way out. Viruses. Mutate.

I mean, if you're going to be evil, at least don't be stupid evil. Now, we'd be facing a God-damned pandemic, maybe even the end of the human race, if Sid here hadn't figured something out."

She's shaking with rage now, shaking with the insufferable unfairness of it all. "Which means... we have to cure you. But know I'm not saying that to spare you alone. Just your future victims in case you managed to spread it around to the entirety of Denver."

Hydra
"Not for vengeance.  What use is that?  Will it bring back the dead?"  Tears were showing at the corners of Katie's eyes, threatening to spill over.  "We were trying to find a way to stop more innocent people from being hurt.  I didn't want to do it this way, I told him..."

She snapped her jaw shut and put her hand up to her face.  "I'm sorry.  You're right, I have no defense.  I didn't come here for myself.  I came because Sera will be dead by tomorrow if we don't help her.  We need to go now, before Callum figures out that something is wrong.  There's only three guards left at the lab.  I can get you in there."

Sid Rhodes
Sid stands there a little longer, listening until Grace says her name.  Her eyes widen and her brows constrict, and she jerks her head away.  Sid doesn't like to talk about herself or the things she can do because she can't explain it to anyone.  She can't tell people why it is that a college freshman who only has her GED and is getting on in years (comparatively speaking of course) can cure an unknown virus while it is killing her in less than two weeks.

Not wanting to be asked now, she turns away and heads down the hallway.  Katie isn't going to hurt Grace, and even if she tried the Mage is healthier, stronger even if she's still a little unsteady.  Even so, Sid moves quickly to get her bag and Grace's laptop and whatever else they might need (Grace's shoes, a jacket, so on, so forth).  It takes her long enough that they've stopped talking by the time she returns.

"How did you get here?" she asks Katie.  Sid has her truck, but it'll be tough to squeeze four of them in the cab.  It's too cold for someone to hang out in the bed, not in this weather.

Grace
Grace's breath comes quickly in the tension, and this causes a wheezing cough. She's still bringing up the occasional bloody mouthful. But she recovers quickly, almost like she's in the same room with a viper, and must stay alert.

"You keep mentioning Sera. What about Lena? Is she... Is she dead?"

When Sid comes with her jacket and her laptop bag, Grace immediately dons the jacket. Not like it did much before, but hey. It's like a security blanket, see? Grey and shiny, like armor. She looks like somebody tried bleach tie-dye on their outfit and failed miserably, but maybe the jacket will cover that. Laptop bag goes on next.

"We should probably use her car, less suspicious," she says with that cold logic, and then wipes the fear-sweat off of her face. "I can't believe I'm doing this. Sid, you sure she's telling the truth?"

Grace
[Ahh forgot Katie had mentioned Lena before. So, change that 'dead' to 'okay']

Hydra
"Lena's a little better than Sera, but not much.  Their hallucinations have gotten... bad.  We need to get them out of there."

Sid asked how Katie got there, and Katie glanced over her shoulder toward the clinic's parking lot.  "I have a car.  It can fit five people, though it'll be tight on the way back."

She'd asked to come in, but now that it looked as though Sid and Grace were willing to go with her, she remained at the doorway, hovering just inside the frame as she glanced between the two mages and the street outside (perhaps half-expecting someone to show up.)  She reached into the pocket of her jacket and withdrew a tissue that she used to wipe the blood from her hand and mouth.

"It's the black Audi.  Please hurry.  And bring the cure, if you have it.  The sooner we can give it to them, the better."

Sid Rhodes
Sid is so far ahead of Katie that when she returns with Grace's things she pauses to take out and unpackage a clean syringe.  This one gets stabbed into a different vial, though it'd be difficult for someone else to know.  Sid knows because she knows what she's brought and can differentiate them by their color and viscosity.  Without a word she holds out her hand for Katie's.  She's become a bit more talkative the more she's gotten comfortable with certain people, but Katie is clearly not one of those people.  And why would she be?

"I'm sure," she says to Grace.

"The cure," she says if Katie hesitates.  And, should she question her, Sid answers her with her eyes on the woman's arm, her voice low, heated, angry, "I'm not doing it for you."  Sera wants this woman to have a second chance, so she's going to get another chance.  Flicking her gaze upward, she says, "Don't make me regret it."

Looking at Grace, she nods toward the car.  "You can ask her more questions in the car, but we have to go."  There's urgency in her voice, in her mannerisms as she caps and contains the used syringe in her bag-within-her-bag, the little black nylon case that usually carries a student's idea of a portable lab.  It has real and dangerous chemicals in it now, to help and to harm.  "Give me the keys," she says to Katie of course.  Sid is the only one who is healthy, the only one in whom the virus is a decaying memory.  It'll be a while before the other two catch up to her, health-wise.

Grace
Grace nods to Sid, heads for the car. But she is not done yet. She is livid.

"You want to talk bad hallucinations," Grace says, her voice quivering with malice. "I had one once where a pretty little girl with a yellow dress and blue eyes came at me with a scalpel and peeled me apart. And then came the fucking bone saw. You were sad though. You cried when you took my sternum out. Little bloody tears, drip drip."

"Wouldn't want you to miss out on all the fun. It's a shame you'll never get to experience that, Katie."

Hydra
Katie accepted the syringe from Sid, but when she looked down at it, her expression was strangely blank.  Nothing like the wash of relief that one might expect of someone in her position who'd just been offered the life-saving treatment she needed.  But whatever she was feeling, this was no time for bleak or self-destructive thoughts.  (Sid was right - this wasn't about her.)  So Katie took the needle and injected herself with the virophage.  She didn't ask if it was safe, if there would be side effects... she didn't try to check to see if Sid was lying to her.  She just did it.  Then she wrapped the syringe in a handful of tissue and placed it inside her jacket pocket, to be discarded safely later.

Then she took out a car key and handed it to Sid, before leading them in the direction of a black Audi sedan.  She didn't put up any argument to Sid driving, and let Grace choose whether she wanted to be in front or in the back.  The car was new and freshly cleaned, with nothing inside to give any clues to the disposition of its owner (if the car was even hers.)

When everyone was settled, Katie gave Sid an address and some directions, and they left to free their friends from the claustrophobic horror of white rooms and blood-soaked fever-dreams.

Callum

Hydra
One of the worst things about sickness is the way it makes the victim feel powerless.  It robs them of any sense of control over that which is most basic and fundamental - their own body.  Maybe Grace will have been feeling a little bit of that powerlessness during the past week, feeling the virus take hold and spread through her body.  Growing weaker and more helpless every day.  And with it, feeling the hope for improvement slipping slowly and steadily away.

She was not getting better.  Maybe she never would.  Maybe this is how she was going to die, wasted and alone in a pool of her own blood.

Today she was faring no better than yesterday, but at least there were no new symptoms to contend with.  Given the way things had been progressing, who knew what the hell she had to look forward to tomorrow.  No wonder she'd grown desperate enough to burn her own flesh with a candle.  One could go mad like this... sitting and waiting for a cure that might never come.

At least Whitney had been there with her.  It was better not to be alone all the time, even if the Euthanatos couldn't do much to ease her suffering.  But Whitney was gone now, leaving Grace alone in her apartment with nothing but morbid thoughts to keep her company.

The blood in her cough had been bad today.  At times she would breath in and feel the liquid bubbling in her chest and realize that this was her own body breaking down.

Dying.

Maybe she was resting, or maybe she was doing what she could to keep herself distracted.  Whatever she was doing, at some point late on Sunday evening, she'd be interrupted by the sound of the door buzzer.

Grace Evans
Grace expects it to be Whitney, even though the girl's been gone only a little while. Maybe she forgot something? In any case, sweat-stained sheets and a laptop are tossed aside with the unremarkable strength of a sick person, and she stumbled out of bed.

She doesn't exactly run to the door. It's hard to breathe. She takes it slow, makes it to the console on the wall, and hits the intercom. "Whitney?" she asks, in wretched scraping voice.

She clears her throat, covering her mouth with a bit of tissue. She does that every time now, just in case. The bloody tissue pile has increased so much that Whitney had to go out for more, and also for some Gatorade and such. So very important to keep up the fluids. At least it might buy her some time.

Hydra
The person - the man - on the other end didn't introduce himself.  He didn't offer a name or a reason for his visit.  What he said was this:

"It's called the Hydra virus, and if you don't do something to slow it down, you'll be dead by the end of the week.  I can help keep you alive.  Will you let me in?"

Such a message was no doubt hopeful and suspicious all at once.  And here Grace was, relatively powerless to protect herself.  But then, if whoever had given her the virus had wanted to kill her quickly, no doubt they would have taken a different tactic from the get-go.

Grace Evans
Dead by the end of the week. Okay, calm down. Breathing heavy isn't going to help...

In the excitement, she had another coughing fit, and snapped that tissue up to her mouth. When she recovered, she pushed the button again. "Who are you?"

He said dead by the end of the week, not dead right now. She can stand the time to ask some questions.

Hydra
The man had an unusual voice, soft and raspy and ethereal.  It was difficult to make out his exact words over the intercom.

"My name's Callum.  Callum Grey.  You don't know me or my colleagues, but we're tracking the people who gave this thing to you."  There was a long pause before he said, "We shouldn't be having this conversation on the intercom."

Grace Evans
Well, no shit. However, she hadn't set up a hidden camera in her apartment for nothing. Something like this had been... expected.

Option one, he was bad, and about to do something terrible to her. In that case, Whitney would be back soon, and there might just be video evidence of what transpired, so... at least the others would have warning.
Option two, he was what he said, and in that case, right on.

She buzzed him in. Silently. And then, it was back off to bed, because the air on her sheened skin felt like it was going to freeze her solid.

When Callum arrives, he'll find that she lives in the smallest apartment this complex offers. It's built for one, with a tiny kitchen off to the side of the one main room, and one bedroom. It also looks less than lived in. There's nothing on the walls, no paint, no paintings, no rugs on the floor. Furniture is mismatched, and looks to have been chosen for utility rather than looks.

She'd prefer to view it as lacking distractions. But it seems more like an apartment into which someone has not yet moved in.

Hydra
When Callum arrived at the door, he knocked once, briefly, then turned the latch himself.  As he stepped inside, he scanned the space slowly with his eyes, taking in the layout of the apartment as though he half-expected something horrible to jump out and maim him.

The man's appearance fit his voice.  He was tall and willowy, with exceptionally pale, freckled skin.  His shoulder-length red hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail, and his clothes were plain and colorless: grey jeans and a white buttoned shirt.  He carried his jacket underneath one arm.

The guy looked young.  Probably early twenties, and closer to Grace's age than she might have expected.  When he saw her, he shut the door behind himself and walked over to the bed.

"Grace Evans, I assume?"

He pulled a small, unlabeled prescription bottle out of his jacket pocket and set it down beside her.  "These are immunosuppressants.  You should take one daily.  It'll slow down the cycle."

As though suddenly remembering his bedside manner, he added, a little awkwardly, "How um... how are you feeling?"

Grace Evans
She was back in bed by the time he arrived, and busy getting comfortable again. She just nods at his question of her name, not even asking how he found her, or her name. She supposes he has ways.

She takes the bottle, and puts it on the little table by her bedside, now a bit crowded with drink cup, tissues, and a plate of half-eaten food (banana and yogurt) that she has yet to work her way through. The nausea is... well...

"I'm drowning in my own blood, throwing up blood, my temperature is through the roof, and I can't keep food down. It's not going well. But then, you probably knew that."

She looks up at him with those tired (but tirelessly curious) eyes and asks, "How did you know that?"

Hydra
If Callum was any kind of doctor (med student, more likely,) he was probably one of those doctors who knew the human body inside-out but never really knew what to do with the actual human.  His reaction to Grace's declaration of her deteriorating state was little more than a nod, and he crouched down beside her bed, not to comfort her, but to look her over with a clinical and cautiously curious gaze.

Like he was more interested in the disease than her.  But he'd come to help (presumably,) so maybe a bit of social awkwardness was forgivable.

He didn't answer her question right away.  Perhaps he was weighing in his mind just how much information he wanted to give away.  "I knew the person who made the virus."

Someone actually made this thing.  Intentionally.  One had to wonder what sort of person ever could or would create something like this.

"The people who gave this thing to you.  They're... I guess the antiquated term would be witch-hunters.  They've got resources, but they're young and stupid and they don't understand what they're playing with.  This thing isn't just some virus that someone cooked up in a military lab.  It's a fucking masterwork."  After a moment he seemed to realize how horrific that probably sounded to Grace, and he ran a hand over the back of his neck, changing his tone to one slightly more sympathetic.  "You need to be in a hospital.  I've got a place... we set it up out in the mountains.  Nobody knows we're there.  You and your friends are in real danger.  Not just from the hunters.  If the technocrats find out you've been infected with this, you and everyone you've come into contact with will be neutralized.  They're not going to bother trying to cure you.  But I will."

Grace Evans
"I don't trust you. I figured the makers of this thing might try to come and make sure that their targets got what was coming... maybe after a few days, wait until we're all too weak to fight?

And now you say, you have a place in the mountains that I need..." her rapid-fire talk in rasped voice was caught in her throat, and proceeded to have another coughing fit. She grabbed the almost-empty box of tissues by the side of her bed almost like it was an instinct by now.

"That I need to go to. Can you understand why I might be a little uneasy about that?" She just kept right on going, like the coughing spell never happened.

The bloody tissue gets thrown to the waste bin, again with almost instinctual accuracy.

"Who are you, who are you with... just... how can I trust you? I want to. God I want this to be real, but you're going to have to do more than words."

[Perception + Awarepathy = Are you for real?]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 5, 8) ( success x 1 )

Grace Evans
[Ahh it should have been 7, but same result anyway]

Hydra
[Manip+Subterfuge]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

Hydra
Grace was right, of course.  She really had no way of knowing if this man was trustworthy.  Maybe he was on her side, or maybe he was part of those who'd infected her.  Maybe he was something else entirely.

When she asked for proof, Callum pursed his lips and looked at the ground.  When he looked up again, he met her gaze with an unblinking intensity.  "If I do nothing, you'll die, so if that was what I wanted, then I've already won.  So maybe you come with me and die anyway.  Or maybe you come and live another few weeks and help us find a cure for the next people that get infected with this thing.  Or maybe you come and we save your life.  Far as I can tell, those are the options."

A moment later, he sighed, releasing some of his coiled energy.  "If it helps, I don't trust you either.  You might be weak, but you still have the advantage.  You're... what you are.  And I'm human."  He his arms out to the side as though in surrender.  "My friends and I.  We're not with anyone, but we used to be.  That's over now, and that's all I'm going to say."

Hydra
As far as Grace could tell, Callum wasn't lying.  He had his suspicious behaviors, certainly.  But the words that came out of his mouth felt like the truth.  If it seemed perhaps that he was too good to be true, well, maybe that just meant that he was a man with a complicated past.  Or maybe he was what she feared him to be, and he was just a very good storyteller.  Whatever the truth, ultimately she had no way of being certain, but it certainly felt as though he meant what he'd said.

Hydra
[Edit: "he held his arms out to the side"]

Grace Evans
"I am... what I am? I didn't really have a choice in the matter, okay? It just happened to me out of the blue in July, and I'm not so advantaged compared to you. I am human, Callum. I never stopped being human just because... because..."

The hacking cough returned again, and again she covered it with a tissue.

"Because I see the world a bit differently."

She made a little movement for her phone, picked it up off that crowded side-table. "There's others who are sick you know? And another friend of mine will be up here soon. If she needs to hide from the Technocracy too, from being in contact with me, then she should come with."

Whatever Callum makes of that movement, whether he thinks that Grace is about to fry him with a heat ray or just call somebody, she doesn't really care. The others need to know. And she wants guidance.

Hydra
Callum seemed fairly unresponsive to Grace's argument for her humanity, perhaps out of skepticism, though neither did he try to argue.  Whatever his thoughts on the matter, they would remain ambiguous.  But he seemed to understand that Grace needed time to process what he'd offered.

"Look, you don't have to come now.  I'll give you my number, and you can think it over.  Call your friends if you need to.  But decide quickly, because none of you have much time left."

He pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket and grabbed the nearest pen, scribbling down a phone number and the initials "CG."

"Have a good night, Grace.  I'll show myself out."  He handed her the slip of paper and managed a thin smile, not so much disingenuous as perhaps lacking in hope.  Then he walked to the door, nodded, and left.
Leaving Grace alone with her thoughts.

Grace Evans
"Wait.. Wait!" she managed, raising that raspy voice to where she could be heard while he turned to leave.
If he stopped, she'd pull up on her elbows, like this is something important. "Is any of your people a woman who wears a hooded... a hood?"

She's not going to say anything about the bloody field, or the blood hydra... the strange visions her friends have been having. But that woman, from Whitney's description, telling her she needed to hurry...

Hydra
Callum stopped on his way out, blinking as he looked at Grace.  As though he wasn't entirely sure if her question wasn't just some fevered outburst.  But he answered all the same.  "There are women working with us.  I'm sure at least one of them has a hooded jacket.  Why?"

Grace Evans
"Nothing.... a dream," she lied. "Sorry."

With that, she returned to her cell phone.

Hydra
Grace picked up her phone, and Callum gave her an odd look, but said nothing.  By the time she looked up again, he'd be gone.

Best Friends for Life. Or Death. Whatever.

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.

Outbreak

Outbreak
The Starbucks (one of a few) on 16th Street Mall was busy enough for a Tuesday evening.  The weather outside was brisk and scented with the telltale signs of autumn (cool air and crisp leaves and the occasional whiff of apple or pumpkin spice in a passing pedestrian's beverage,) just precisely the sort of night that tended to prompt people to crave a warm drink and pleasant company.  Inside the coffee shop, a line of customers waited to place their order at the counter, while those who'd already been served had found places to sit and read or chat with friends at the various tables.  This particular Starbucks had a plush booth in front of the window, and a family of five had taken up residence there as the parents occupied themselves with making sure their children didn't spill their hot chocolate or make too big a mess of their pastries.

All in all, the mood was one of pleasant liveliness when Grace and Lena arrived.

Grace Evans
"Lena, are you addicted to Starbucks in particular, or something?" Grace asks as they seem to be dragged magnetically toward the place. "I mean, caffeine and I have a long and happy relationship, but Starbucks? By the way, that pumpkin spice stuff tastes like chicken, and that's just weird to taste in coffee."

It's been noted before that Lena has no particular dislike of this establishment -- much to Grace's dismay. The place is like the symbol of cookie-cutter mediocrity and the spreading goo of Capitalism run amok.

Lena Reilly
"Oh god, you never get the pumpkin spice."  She wrinkles her nose, amused at Grace's comment and her reticence toward Starbucks.  She gets it...she really does.  A lot of people aren't fans of the coffee chain, but let's face it; there's a reason why they're as popular as they are.  The DJ walks along at Grace's side, a jacket over her usual T-Shirt and jeans in order to compensate for cooler temperatures.  She takes no offense obviously at Grace's disdain of the coffee place, understanding fully even if she doesn't agree.

"No, I'm not addicted to Starbucks specifically, for the record."  She chuckles and shrugs.  "But they're always nearby and say what you want about them...they're consistent.  By no means are they the best coffee on the planet but I always know what I'm getting.  I love my little out of the way places when I can get to them, but there's a certain comfort in knowing there's always an Americano within a few minutes away, you know what I mean?"

She opens the door, holding it for Grace before she slips inside after.  Mediocre or not, the place always smelled of coffee and she does appreciate that...even if the music drives her batty.

Grace Evans
"No, that is not a comfort, Lena! That is scary!" says Grace, but with a smile that says she's probably mostly kidding. Even so, Grace bows to peer pressure and steps inside. Maybe they can manage not to completely screw up chai?

Today (if you really need to know) Grace is celebrating a holy day of sorts. And she's chosen to celebrate by wearing a t-shirt that reads: 'That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show.' over the picture of woman who appears to be in 1800's clothing and style. Though since it's turned chilly lately, she has her grey turtleneck jacket almost covering up the tribute tee.

She's also chosen to celebrate by promising by the end of the week to have some feat or another accomplished in the name of that woman: Ada, Countess of Lovelace.

Lena Reilly
"There's something to be said here about resistance being futile here," she says with a grin, and she moves in behind Grace.  She's comfortable enough with the Virtual Adept to be close to her, though she still doesn't ever purposely touch her.  Grace isn't alone in Lena reacting to her that way though; she's friendly and in just about every way seems like a warm, caring friend.  Except that one.  (Well, and the not really offering up anything about her past.  But we're talking about the good parts, not the bad.)

She takes a deep breath, walking up to the counter and ordering like a pro because, frankly, she pretty much is.  After all, being incredibly caffeinated is practically a part of her job.  (Not that she wouldn't be if she changed vocations.)  She smiles at the person behind the counter, orders a Venti Americano with an extra shot and whatever Grace wants.  Hey, if she's dragging Grace to the enemy, she's gonna pay for whatever the woman gets.

Outbreak
There were three people in line ahead of the pair by the time Grace and Lena stepped through the door and settled in to wait their turn (chatting as they did about the merits and flaws of cookie-cutter coffee chains.)  But the line pushed forward at an efficient pace, and it wasn't long before the pair were able to place their orders.  The kid behind the counter looked about nineteen (probably a college freshman) but he seemed competent enough.  He took their orders with a polite smile and rung them up at the register before waving them along to wait while the barista assembled their drinks.  There wasn't much that was notable about the affair.  Names were called, and soon enough one of those names was Lena.

Of course, the question of where to sit would prove a bit problematic, as it seemed that most of the tables were occupied, but a bit of searching would find one in the back corner, empty but for a discarded newspaper that the previous occupant had left behind.  Taking up residence at the neighboring tables were an older man typing diligently on his laptop, a couple of twenty-somethings on a date (which seemed to be going well,) and a pretty girl in a yellow dress who was delicately making her way through a piece of cheesecake.

The girl made eye contact for a moment and paused mid-bite.  Then she smiled a bit, the way people do when they meet the gaze of someone they don't know, and returned her attention to her food.

Grace Evans
[Perception + Awareness = Because chai is here, and its time to relax and look around]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (5, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

Outbreak
[It would appear that there is nothing immediately notable about the coffee shop or its occupants tonight.  Grace is unable to sense any hint of resonance besides that of Lena's and her own, and there does not appear to be any weaving of effects in the area.]

Lena Reilly
This is the part that she hates about Starbucks...when it's one of those pseudo-busier times and people get bunched together.  Don't get her wrong; Lena is actually better in crowds than she is with people.  One of these days one of these Awakened people will actually go see her when she spins and they'll see a Lena they've never seen before; that's because a crowd she can get lost in, especially when she hears the Lakashim strongly.  Groups of people become individuals and they feel less connected to her, more distinct.  That's harder.

She looks around with a little bit of a frown, though it brightens (at least briefly) when she meets the gaze of the girl in the yellow dress.  It's a brief look from Lena; she doesn't linger on beauty the way that some Cultists do.  And then she's looking at Grace, letting her guide the way on this one.

"Where you wanna sit?"

Grace Evans
Grace is so much like Lena. So different too. But she will never be the one to reach out her hand for an introduction, she will never ever hug anyone, she would rather talk about the future than the past.

Lena makes for a comfortable friendship. It's like she knows in that way that doesn't require words.

Also, Grace totally lets Lena pay for the chai latte. Free stuff rocks! Even if it's corporate free stuff.

"So, you been up to anything interesting lately? In the, you know, music arena?" Grace says, stirring the spiced tea, as though stirring it with a mundane coffee stirrer would have the same effect as Patience's light-wand-thingy. What was that she'd said? Destroying the deviant molecules? Yeah. Pretend to do that. Maybe the placebo effect will actually make it taste better.

Grace Evans
"Well, there is that one place in the back," Grace offered.

Lena Reilly
"Perfect," she says with a smile, though really it's not.  Perfect is just a word you say that means That will suffice and in truth, there are a few things wrong with it as far as Lena is concerned.  But then there are probably a few things wrong with it as far as Grace is concerned, such as It's In A Starbucks.  So the Ecstatic can't let beggars be choosers, and she moves to head that way and take a seat.

"I'm mostly just doing my thing, really," she says in response to the question about her music.  "Ive been experimenting a lot with some new sounds...I'm sick to death of dubstep beats but that's all anyone seems interested in.  I'm trying to blend in some trance and ambient stuff with a hip-hop sensibility at this point.  Sort of a chillwave, Lorde-meets-Portishead if Chuck Inglish or Mike Will Made It was producing it with a little Aphex Twin sensibility thrown in."

She gives a slight shrug as she sits down, pushes the newspaper off to the side.  "It's a work in progress, really.  There's a serious dearth of good samples right now that I can work with to hit that sound unless I go with the same people that everyone else does, you know?  And those are good for attention-grabbing, but if I'm gonna keep my edge I need to keep looking for my own thing until someone else finds it."

Grace Evans
Grace just kind of nods, making her way over to the back seat with Lena, as though she knows what half of those words and performers mean, which she emphatically does not.

"That's um.. It sounds impressive! I would like to see one of your shows someday, you know. Ahh, I know two musicians now, and I have yet to hear either you or Sera. I am so... wrong," Grace says, and sits down across from Lena at the table.

Outbreak
Grace and Lena settled in at their table, doing their best (as one does in these situations) to ignore the close proximity of strangers around them.  The man and the flirting couple seemed oblivious to their presence, as did most of the rest of the people in the shop, wrapped up as they were in their own lives.  Across the room, one of the kids shrieked with laughter, and her mother leaned over to quiet her to a polite volume.

The girl in the yellow dress looked up when this happened, her eyes fixed on the family with a subtly pained expression, as though the sound bothered her.

A few moments later, she looked at Grace, leaned over and said, "Sorry to interrupt, but is that an Ada Lovelace t-shirt?"

Grace Evans
Grace looked up a bit, a kind of 'omg what?' look on her face at first, having been prodded out of her determinedly-ignoring-everyone-else shell. This was followed by a massive grin. Well, somebody knew the reason for the season. "Yes! It is! It's Ada Lovelace day today, so I just thought -- of course I am wearing this today."

"Also, Hi! Nice to meet someone who knows about Ada out in the wild," Grace says to the woman in yellow, all smiles at this point. She can put on a friendly face, even though it might take a bit of initial panic.

Lena Reilly
She takes the shriek from the kid across the Starbucks with stride.  Lena is guarded but generally she's not jumpy as a rule, and she understands that kids can be unruly.

Instead her attention is focused on the young woman who leaned over and asked about Grace's Ada Lovelace shirt.  She smiles a little, watching them converse.  She doesn't have a lot to add to that conversation...which is not to say that she doesn't know who Ada Lovelace is, mind.  It's just...well.  It would be like Grace interjecting her thoughts on music into a conversation between Lena and another deejay.  At best she could offer surface information and so instead, she busies herself with her caffeine-charged drink.  Ahh, caffeine.

Outbreak
The girl, she had an ageless quality to her.  Willowy build and youthful features marked only subtly with hints of age.  But her manner and appearance were elegant and composed in the way one might expect of a young professional: her dress, hair and makeup perfectly put together.  She was, by all accounts, lovely and luminous - with one exception.  When she shifted in her chair and leaned over to get Grace's attention, her left arm came into view.  The skin there was pink and shiny and textured with grafts and scarring.  (Burn damage, from the look of it.)

She smiled at Grace's response to her question, edging her chair a little bit closer so that she wouldn't have to lean in to be heard.  "As a fellow woman in science, I would be pretty lax if I didn't take the opportunity to celebrate her achievements," the girl replied.  "Though I'm a biologist, myself.  Computer history is something I've only studied in passing."  After a pause, she reached out to offer her hand.

"I'm Katie."

Outbreak
[Edit: "reached out to offer her hand to each in turn."]

Grace Evans
Ugh. The handshaking ritual. But which one? The one holding the cup of chai would be hot and possibly sweaty, but that's the one necessary... Grace hesitates, puts down her chai, wipes her hand off on her jeans, and finally shakes hands rather awkwardly.

It's just not her thing.

"Unfortunately there's not a lot of data on Lovelace. She was kind of reclusive, you know. Plenty on Babbage, but man, we know more about Ada from his perspective than we do from hers. Still, a complete visionary, really. You know, Lena, she was the first person to surmise that computers would be able to translate data into music? Babbage just thought of all the wonderful tables full of numbers he would be able to make," Grace says... and this is much more obviously her thing.

Lena Reilly
Like Grace, handshaking is not Lena's thing.  But it's a formality she can understand, and while she doesn't always feel comfortable with it she can do it in order to make other people not feel comfortable.  "Hey, Katie," she says with a pleasant enough smile, her grip light and brief before she slips her hand away.  "I'm Lena...nice to meet you."  It's a warm pleasantry, a bit of politeness to the girl that Grace has found a common hero in.

She smiles when Grace mentions the historical woman's influence on computers and music.  "Oh yeah?"  She grins then, raises her cup to her lips.  "Well, remind me to toast one to her one of these days.  I owe her my career."  And life's work, but who's counting?

Outbreak
There was a change that occurred when Katie shook Grace and Lena's hands.  Like that moment in a movie when the action slows and the camera swings around to a new angle and suddenly it's like you're watching a completely different scene.  Katie's grip lingered in each of their grasps, and though the edges of her smile remained, the warmth of it faded.  Grace neglected to offer her name in return, but Katie didn't ask after it.  (Perhaps it didn't really matter.)  Her hand was warm and a little sweaty, and if either grace or Lena looked for it, they'd feel a tell-tale thrum of a quickened pulse.

The music changed, and in the brief interlude it seemed as though the ambient noise had quieted to a low murmur.

Then one of the kids shrieked again, and Katie winced as she dropped Lena's hand.  Her bright eyes glimmered with veiled emotion as she turned away.

"She was an amazing woman, truly."  Katie glanced down at her mostly-empty plate and pushed herself to a standing position, brushing her hands down over her skirt.  "It was nice meeting you two.  I hope you have a good evening."

There was a lingering glance and a soft nod.  "Happy Ada Lovelace day."

Then she gathered her dishes and deposited them on the tray atop the nearest trash bin before making her way outside.

Grace Evans
Grace watched the woman pack up, and... well, it was a little disappointing that. She could talk about computing history all night, and not be sad for it. Strange to just spark up a conversation about Ada Lovelace, and then leave. But hey, people are busy right?

"Happy Ada Lovelace day back, sorry we couldn't talk more!"

Grace turned to Lena, "Well, she was nice. A bit strange though." Pot. Kettle. Hah.

[Wits + Alertness = ST Demanded It]
Dice: 5 d10 TN8 (1, 1, 4, 4, 6) ( fail )

Lena Reilly
Grace watches the woman pack up and is disappointed that she can't talk more about computers and such.  Lena, for her part, pulls her hand away even quicker than the brief hold that she'd intended.  It's instinctual for her, born from a fear that's been held for quite a while now when she senses someone is fevery or their immune system is overrun.  She doesn't freak out and run, but she does lean back slightly and the smile that she offers is a bit...strained, to say the least.

"Nice to meet you, Katie."  For once, she doesn't sound quite like she means it.  She looks to Grace and the smile remains in that same form.  "Yeah, I suppose so."

[Wits+Alert]
Dice: 5 d10 TN8 (3, 3, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

Outbreak
It was only a minute or two after the girl left when Grace and Lena would both feel a sudden, sharp sting on the backs of their necks.  Grace, perhaps caught up in her thoughts, was slow to react, and in the midst of her surprise, she knocked over her chai - spilling the hot drink across the table and into her lap.  By the time her hand reached her neck, whatever had stung her was gone, leaving only a tiny red lump of irritated tissue in its wake.

Lena, though.  She was already on the alert, and when her hand shot up to her neck she felt a brittle crunch of something tiny and metal beneath her hand.  She managed to jump out of the way of the spill, and perhaps in the midst of the chaos she might not get a chance to really look at what she'd caught.  But when she did, she'd find this:

It was a bug, but not a living one.  This was some sort of tiny robotic wasp, now crushed and mangled, with a needle as its stinger.

Grace Evans
Chai goes flying everywhere, and soon there's pain not only in Grace's neck, but her lap too. Fucking Starbucks found a way to ruin her chai, didn't it? "Ah! Shit!.... The hell?"

Instead of immediately rushing to get napkins however, there is that sting.. she prodded at the back of her neck, looked up at Lena in confusion. One sting she would have passed off as an insect. But two, at the same time, in the same place?

The words 'What's going on here?' remain unspoken however, a look is all she'll manage before heading over to the counter to get enough napkins to clean up.

Lena Reilly
Maybe it's because she was already paranoid.  Maybe her uncanny sense of situational awareness happened to come into play.  Maybe it was even just luck.  Whatever the reason, she's faster and she's to her feet, out of the way of the spilled chai tea and reacting quickly when she feels that sharp piercing on her neck.

She cries out, reaches back on instinct and smashes her hand against the source of the pain...strikes paydirt.  She pulls her hand down slowly, looking in her hand and thanking the gods for not the first time in her life that she's not allergic to bees and going into anaphylactic sho--

She stars at the think in her hand, blinking a couple of times as if she doesn't honestly get it.  She does, but she is just...dumbfounded.  "Oh, Jesus Fuck."

And now she's touching.  As Grace goes to clean up, Lena grabs the Virtual Adept by the arm.  "We need to go, now."  She isn't waiting around for permission this time.  She's paled considerably from the idea that they may be under attack of some kind and she's even (GASP!) leaving her coffee behind as she pulls Grace along with her.

Outbreak
Whatever it was that Grace and Lena had been stung (injected?) with, they didn't seem to feel any immediate effects.  Perhaps through stress and paranoia they might attribute their body's boost of adrenaline (and its accompanying symptoms) to some unknown drug or poison - but if so, the correlation would be imagined.  In truth, there was no immediate physical response to the stings, aside from the pain and redness at the site of the injury - not at all unlike the reaction one might have to a vaccination.

And if Lena was worried that more of those tiny robotic creations might descend upon the unsuspecting Sleepers in the coffee shop, this fear at least would remain unfounded.  All around them, life continued as normal.  None of the other people jumped up in surprise, except for the man with his laptop, who glanced up and quickly shifted his feet out of the way of the pooling chai on the floor.  As Lena began to usher Grace out of the shop, one of the employees trotted over with a roll of paper towels and a spray-bottle of some sort of cleaning solution, smiling in reassurance.

"Oh, it's alright.  Happens all the time."  (She assumed, of course, that their agitation was due to the spill.)

Grace Evans
Lena's serious, and Grace gets the idea that yes, leaving now -- even with chai all over her jeans, making her look like she's gone and pissed herself -- is a really good plan. Quickly, quickly now, to the exit...

It's the kind of sensible plan Grace might come up with herself, and she doesn't need much pulling along, really. But she does want to know, "What is it? What do we do?" Her words are quickened with adrenaline and hushed.

She gives a strained smile to the employee with the paper towels -- oh no, nothing terrible happening here, ha ha -- all the while making her way to the exit, hyper-aware of Lena's grasp on her arm. Outside the Starbucks, away from the crowd, Grace repeats herself with a, "What's going on?" under her breath.

Lena Reilly
Lena is usually the reassuring one who offers smiles and assures that things will be okay.  She would normally be apologizing to the poor employee who has to clean up the mess that they were leaving behind or at least offering her own smile of gratitude for the woman who is working a job that not enough people have respect for.

She doesn't this time.

Instead she largely ignores the woman, rushes out of the Starbucks and starts walking down the street with her attention toward the sky.  Luckily no other assaults come, but it doesn't put the Ecstatic at ease one bit.  As she walks along at a brisk pace, she opens her hand and shows Grace the little robotic wasp with the needle stinger that rests in her cupped palm.

"I think we just got attacked by someone.  And I don't know what it is, but we need to figure it out and quickly."  There's an edge to her tone, an urgency of fear crackling under the surface of her voice.  Biological attacks strike deep at her emotional core and she's very shaken at the moment.

Grace Evans
"Holy shit... that's a..." she doesn't finish the thought. Of course it's a robot. Lena can see as much. "Do you think it was that woman? Katie?"

"Come on, we can get to my car... I'll do some diagnosis, okay?"

At least, that is Grace's plan, and she's sticking to it. Whatever happened to them, she hopes the code will show it.

When she gets to the old red Toyota, she immediately pulls out her laptop and begins to work, setting the thing up and preparing to code.

[Life 1 -- What The Heck Did That Stinger Do? -- Spending WP]
Dice: 1 d10 TN4 (8) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Grace Evans
[Extending, because... Spending WP]

Grace Evans
Dice: 1 d10 TN5 (5) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Lena Reilly
"I know what I think of when I see robot bees," she mutters under her breath, looking back over her shoulder.  The remnants of the creature is stuck into her pocket and she moves along with Grace to the other's car.  Paranoid would be a kind way to describe what the Ecstatic is feeling like right now.

Once they're to the car she slides into the backseat.  While Grace starts scanning with her laptop, Lena goes a much less technological route; she pulls her feet up, crossing her arms into lotus position and shuts her eyes.
Focus, clear your mind.  Find your heartbeat, find the Lakashim.  It will guide you to the truth.

[[Life 1, scanning self.  WP spent, Quint to lower difficulty because Lena is paranoid about her health.  Will be extending.]]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (5, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Lena Reilly
[[Extended roll, also spending Quintessence, no WP]]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (5, 10) ( success x 2 )

Grace Evans
Lena meditates, and Grace does a bit of meditation herself. It's a different kind, mind you, but the silencing of active mind, the stillness to the outside known in the jargon as 'hack mode' settles over her as the code streams across the screen of her laptop. Lena doesn't seem to be bothered by the clacking of fingers over keys, thank goodness, because that noise and the blank pauses of single-minded concentration fills the car afterward.

She starts with herself. It's easier, the baseline recordings she already has, so one needs only to run a diff. Okay, so usually this is done on text files to see the difference between them, and now she's doing it to her own body's representation in the universal code, but you know... Whatever works.

And then, eyes darting, face slack, staring into the streaming, sliding code, she shifted her attention to the other human reading in the vicinity. More difficult this, but with the gleaned data from her own pattern as a guide... yes. This could work...

Outbreak
Lena and Grace had the same idea: to find out what it was they'd just been injected with.  And though they went about their effects in very different ways, in the end the result was the same.

Their bodies were in the same condition they'd been in an hour ago - apart from the very minor trauma at the injection site.  There was no poison or chemical substance coursing through their veins; no detectable damage or alteration to their patterns.

But something was happening.  Their immune systems were in a hyper-active state, white blood cells attacking some tiny, microscopic foreign bodies in their blood-stream.  The evidence was plain enough to anyone who knew anything about basic human biology.  They'd been exposed to a disease.  A virus.  But no matter the insight their careful scanning could give them, there was no clear answer to be had regarding the exact nature of the viral cells.  Neither of them were disease pathologists, and even if they had been - this thing... it was not a virus that they would find in any case file or textbook.  Its effects were completely unknown.  Perhaps it would prove relatively innocuous, but given the manner in which they'd been infected...
The odds were not good.

And here was the really, truly alarming bit.  Those foreign cells... the ones their immune system managed to destroy - they were multiplying.  Splitting as they died to produce two new living cells.

(Like a hydra.)

Grace Evans
"Oh... my God..."  Grace mumbles into her screen when it dawns on her what is happening. Well... There are some ways to stop one's immune system. Too bad they're mostly fatal, because you'd be... uh... without an immune system.

But it's like she just wants to tell her white blood cells that they are so not helping right now.

"Lena, we're sick... The more our bodies fight it, the worse it's going to get... Whatever it does." Her voice is amazingly calm, like she's just listing a factoid. "No idea what it's going to do. I'm going to get the info up on Ginger, but... We should probably stay away from people," she sighs, some emotion finally seeping in there. Shit... what is this thing going to do?

Lena Reilly
"Take me home, Grace."

There's no panic at this moment, no wailing or raging or freaking out.  That'll come later.  She's in the calm moment of realization when you have just been hit with a crisis and you're thinking clearly.  There's a serenity there, albeit weighted with a tinge of horror, as she uncrosses her legs, leans back on the seat and looks out the window.

"Not to the chantry.  My apartment isn't far from here.  I need to go there."  Several moments pass, before she answers the question Grace asked.  "I don't know what it's going to do.  Whatever it is, it's not good."

Outbreak
Ultimately they were left with just as many questions as answers.  Grace and Lena didn't know who'd made the wasps, or why they'd been targeted.  They didn't know what this virus was going to do to them, or how likely it was to spread to and infect other people they might come into contact with.

At least one of those questions would certainly be answered, given time.  Perhaps it was better that they didn't know.  The answer would not help them sleep.

16th Street felt unusually quiet and still around them.  Back inside the Starbucks, people chatted and laughed as if it were an utterly normal fall evening.

(Funny how calm things could be at the beginning of something terrible.)

Grace Evans
Grace nods, finds her keys, realizes she still has the laptop on and in her lap, and puts it in the passenger seat for now...

Shakily, she manages to drive, though utterly distracted. Maybe it's just the mental effect of knowing what's going on underneath, but she feels the back of her neck again... and her skin crawls with the thought of those replicating cells.

Lena gets dropped off, and Grace tries to be reassuring as the other woman leaves, "Hey... ah... maybe it'll all work out." But you know, not even Grace really believes that. Whatever it is, it's not good, indeed. Then it's off to her own place, to what end though?