damned_institute | Day 27: Intercom, Evening

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Day 27: Intercom, Evening

The intercom gave its cheery jingle just before the Head Doctor's equally buoyant voice rang through the halls.

"Ah, and finally, our day is coming to a close! Rooms and roommates have been reassigned with care, though what great partnership can start without a good meal? Ah, yes, after the nurses escort all of our patients, new and old, back to their proper rooms, everyone will have the chance to enjoy a savory chicken pot pie, full of peas, carrots, potatoes, and of course, chicken. On the side, we'll have buttery corn on the cob and green beans, and to drink, you may choose from the regular slew of water, milk, or assorted juices, which your nurse will bring to you.

"I believe that's all for now! Phew, long day, huh? I know I'll be happy to get some sleep, and thank you to all our vigilant doctors and nurses, although Dr. House seems to have gone AWOL... Hmm... Well, in any case, have a good dinner, everyone!"

The intercom clicked off again as the nurses began organizing the patients for the small trek back to their rooms.

[ OOC: Remember, room threads go in response to THIS post, and please put your respective room number in the subject line of your first post. Thanks! ]

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Dairine was herded back into her room for dinner. It looked delicious - chicken pot pie, corn on the cob, green beans...and she did need to eat, seeing as her lunch had been promptly forgotten upon sighting Qui-Gon. No Jedi were around to distract her now, so she could eat.

She hadn't realized exactly how ravenous she was until she had shoveled half of the chicken and pastry into her mouth in the span of about a minute. Remembering to chew was a good thing. It had been a while since she'd been this hungry - the period immediately following her Ordeal stood out the most. With nothing to survive on but bologna sandwiches on a far-off planet in an even more distant galaxy, the return of soda and vegetables and foods other than bologna sandwiches had been more than welcome. She hadn't even been able to look at lunch meat for months afterwards.

Dairine wondered if she'd finally meet her roommate. She'd seen her before, but they'd never had the chance to talk properly - mostly since Dair had crashed immediately after the previous night's dinner.

What was with the dinners here anyway?!

Rhode pouted down at the overly healthy arrangement of foods before her, growing audibly. Nothing sweet. Not one single thing! Even the juice was sadly lacking in sugar content. Lunch hadn't been any sweeter either, though she hadn't eaten any of it, and that little fact was coming back to bite her in the butt. She didn't want to be hungry all night while waiting for breakfast.

Well, so long as the Earl didn't see that she was willingly eating her vegetables like a good little girl, she supposed it couldn't be all that bad. She stole a glance up at her roommate again as she took her first bite.

Dessert came later.

A-ha. There she was. Her dinner decimated, Dairine put the tray aside and stared at the empty plate. Well, she'd gone through that fast, hadn't she? Hunger was a great motivator. At least she wouldn't be hungry tonight, but the dinner might make her tired. Irritated, she tried to think of what she would do for the night. Oh, great. She hadn't managed to secure a group, which was bad news. Normally, she liked working solo, but she sensed that here it wasn't the best idea. Anyway, her powers were weak if not nonexistent. Best to go with a group, then.

Maybe she could ask her roommate. "Hi," she said, nudging her own tray even further to the side. "I'm Dairine. We haven't really talked yet..."

She didn't even know her roommate's name.

Talking was usually boring. She knew this well enough thanks to the mostly boring conversation she'd had with that Dr. Citan Uzuki during the last shift. At least the venting had made her feel better, but the entertainment value had lacked severely.

"You're human," Rhode said bluntly. She knew it already from the previous night. The restraint she'd had to use to keep from attacking the red-head had, at that time, been aided with the prospect of that twisted aura enough to keep any blood from spilling. Rhode wondered if anything would drag her interest away from getting her dessert this evening.

Her fingers poked at the chicken pot pie thing a few times. Of course she'd forgone the use of silverware - there was more fun in eating barehanded! Not to mention that it made her feel like she was breaking at least some rule as she couldn't very well decide not to eat her vegetables this dinner. The act helped to keep her from becoming bored enough not to care for waiting and just pounce the girl. But the nighttime intrigued her too much, and, as she well knew, it was about time for her powers to start slinking back a little.

"Judging by the way you said that, I'm guessing you're not, not where you come from," Dairine said cautiously. Her roommate hadn't offered a name, and she wasn't going to press. If she didn't want to tell, then Dairine wouldn't force her.

She noticed that the other girl was eating her dinner with her hands. Strange, yes, but who was she to judge? Different species had different eating habits - some didn't eat at all.

Dairine tried to determine what this girl really was, if she was indeed not human. Definitely not Wellakhit, and with the thought she acknowledged that she would probably not find Roshaun here, if nobody had seen him yet. But new patients - people - came to this place with startling regularity. Maybe Roshaun would come sometime, if he wasn't dead...

No. No, he wasn't dead. She couldn't believe that, even for a second.

To try and take her mind off of that grim subject, she ran through more alien species she knew. Rirhait? Doubtful. If so, she'd be trying to eat the plate and the tray and possibly even the bed.

If Rhode was being completely honest, she was a human. The only problem with admitting that biologically true fact was that her Noah side granted her a well-founded superiority complex. Noah were superior to humans - never aging, never sustaining injury for more than a few moments, being the true God's chosen - so what reason would one have to associate with his or her weaker side? There was no reason to at all! Her only admittance to being human had come while taunting Allen Walker's kind side, and that had been for entertainment purposes. Watching him struggle over having that connection of humanity with his enemy was so delicious!

Of course, Rhode wasn't going to tell this girl of her humanity either unless she also proved as genuinely kind as Allen Walker. Or if she were an exorcist. Shocking exorcists with her Noah heritage did always make for the most terified of responses.

"Humans are weak," she returned. With that, the girl could at least infer (unless she was quite unintelligent) that Rhode was not Human. Rhode began wondered if the girl would try to guess at what she was. Lord Tamaki had mentioned a slew of unbelievable possibilities that he believed were here. Listening to Dairine could turn out to be informative. And when she gave up, Rhode could just show her what she was.

Dairine shrugged. "Depends on which humans you know." She didn't consider herself weak - weakened here and now, certainly, but even when she'd been ignorant of wizardry she hadn't been weak. The short, abrupt statement hadn't gone over well with her, though. No, she mustn't be prejudiced. Her roommate's thoughts about humans aside, she needed to at least try and be friendly. She didn't have many nonwizardly friends back home - she was going to need some here.

Now which species had that sort of feeling towards humans? Some Rirhait...but most of the aliens she knew were friendly to the sentient species. Yaldiv? But Yaldiv tended to speak in third person, and they'd reformed the species, anyway. Satrachi? No...there was no smell of damp coffee grounds. Would that carry over to a human form, she wondered?

"Okay, so if you're not a human, what are you, then? Tawalf?" she asked, thinking of the giant magenta praying mantises that had attacked Neets and Sker' at the Crossings. They hadn't been too friendly. 'Course, those Tawalf had also been dupes of the Lone Power...

"Ooooh?" Rhode smirked at the first response. Throw the technicalities back in place and that was very true. Dairine was no idiot, that was for sure. Maybe it was a think with red-heads or something. That Junior Bookman had red hair as well.

But his heart was beyond unstable.

In a few minutes, she should be able to get a reading on this one as well.

Her smirk evolved into a playful grin now that the guessing game had commences. "Nope~" she answered. She pushed her half finished food away and took to staring down the other girl, swinging her feet playfully from the edge of her bed. She didn't have any idea what a Tawalf was, but that made this all the more fun. She could ask later for explanations if the girl was willing to give them.

"Yeah." The way that her roommate was swinging her feet back and forth was very childlike. If she'd been attracted to Day-Glo colors, Dairine would have had to guess Demisiv. Filif's enthusiasm for bright, shiny things had always been amusing - the arboreal being had gone so far as to wear a Yankees cap in a house full of Mets fans.

Guessing species would get her nowhere. The next question she was going to ask would probably get her equally far, but it could narrow down just what species she was.

"Okay...how much do you like chocolate?" Dairine asked. The question seemed random, but quite a few species would literally kill for good chocolate - Tawalf included.

Rhode's attention increased ten-fold at the question. "I love chocolate! And sweets! Anything sweet!" She pointed at the dinner she'd refused to finish. "Not this stuff. There's only been sweet things for breakfast."

Oh, she was venting again. This seemed to be happening a lot whenever she got pulled into conversation, but at least it was a good way of making her feel better. And the mention of chocolate had her spirits lifted. "Is there chocolate here?" Any form of candy would have been acceptable really, blood included.

Dairine grinned at her roommate's enthusiasm. Finally, she was getting somewhere. The other girl's professed love for sweets reminded her a bit of that movie she saw ages ago, Men in Black, where that one alien had been obsessed with sugar.

But then again, she reasoned, who her age didn't like sweets?

"If there is any, I haven't found it," she said, shaking her head. "Too bad. I could really go for a few Reese's cups right now." Dairine had been known to hoard her Halloween candy ever since she was young and wear away at it throughout the year. She'd never gone on a binge - well, okay, once - but instead preferred to savor it well past Easter.

"Awwwww," Rhode pouted at the negative response.

No chocolate was an unfair nightmare! The only she'd seen had been the tiny specks in the pancakes, and that had only been once! It was proof though, proof that there were sweet things here. She had to find a way to get at more sugar than she was receiving, otherwise the withdrawl would make Rhode's subsequent anger difficult to subdue.

Would asking the nurses do anything? Probably not.

The pout turned over to confusion at Dairine's latter words and made her cock her head. "What're 'reecees cups'?"

"Hey, if I had any, I'd share," Dairine said ruefully. Already she was craving things other than hospital food - while it was good, the nutritiousness got a little bit boring after a while.

Oh, right. Not being human, her roommate wouldn't know what Reese's cups were. "They're little discs of chocolate about this big," she said, making a circle with her thumb and index finger, "and they're filled with peanut butter." She paused. "Uh...do I have to explain peanut butter, or are you familiar enough with human culture to know it?" she asked.

Maybe sinking low enough to ask a nurse was all Rhode could hope to do. She would be unable to handle such long breaks between sugar intake for much longer.

Her head cocked again at "peanut butter". Just a few years more in Rhode's time period and she would have at least heard of the stuff, but she was, unfortunately, over a century behind Dairine. Things such as peanut butter and Reese's Cups had yet to be invented. Rhode only knew human culture through her forced attendance of school anyway, and it bored her. "Um...?"

"Right, guess not," Dairine said promptly upon her roommate's noise of confusion. "There's a nut that comes from South and Central America. When you get a whole bunch of them, you roast them all together and mash them up. Then you have this light brown paste. It can be pretty salty, but most people like to have at least a little bit of sugar in it. It's really good with chocolate."

Okay, so she wasn't going to get her own show on the Food Network that explained the intricacies of peanut butter, but it was a good enough rudimentary explanation. And, as much as she hated to admit it, talking about candy helped distract her from the impending night and the terrors she'd heard lurked within. If she was going to ask, she had to ask now.

"So...you have any plans for tonight?" Dairine asked, folding her arms and trying to sound casual.

"I know what peanuts are!" That Dairine had explained it to her as if she were... well... on the same mental level as Jasdero caused her anger to flare. This human was talking down to her? It was outrageous! Her, a Noah, and the first child of the Noah Family no less!

Rhode had never been the understanding type when it came to explanations, and she most definitely was not the forgiving type either. Dairine was acting like she was better than her, like she knew more than a Noah, huh? Rhode could not stand being made to feel inferior!

She hopped up from her bed and pointed her finger sternly towards her roommate, more than ready to put her in her place, but was stopped abruptly. Her eyes widened as the cold chill she had grown all too familiar with during the day returned without any prompt. The icy pins struck first at her neck and moved the feeling outwards from there, the curse of that ghost woman snaking it's vined black and blue tattoo along her skin. She grasped her neck right as the cold, suffocating pain and forced her back to sitting, and now gasping on the bed.

The fear crept right back in along with the feeling, shutting her off from the world around her. Now she really could feel her inferiority to the girl a few feet before her. No, that wasn't it. Inferiority was not the feeling, but equality. Equality with a lesser species than what she was supposed to be. That feeling of being just as weak made its return all the worse.

Whuh-oh. Her roommate's angry outburst caught Dairine off-guard. "Sorry," she confessed, "I didn't know. Most aliens are only really familiar with chocolate..."

Actually, come to think of it, was she an alien after all? Before Dairine could pursue that line of thought any further, she noticed something strange happen to her roommate. She had been all ready to give Dair what-for, when she stopped, as though ill, clutched at her neck, and sat back on the bed. Soon she was gasping.

This didn't exactly bode well. Dairine was only too glad to avoid the conflict, if only because she wanted to save her energy for whatever was going to attack her later, but her roommate's strange behavior was troublesome to say the least. "You all right?" the wizard asked cautiously, knowing that 'No!' was probably the answer she'd get.

Rhode would have hissed the expected 'No!' gladly had her throat not felt so pained. Or if she'd had the mind to actually listen to her roommate's concern. Dairine may as well have been in another world for how disconnected Rhode had just become.

Not only had the curse, as she now knew it to be, returned, but the pain of the injury inflicted by the ghost woman as well. The bruises had probably reformed beneath the bandages at her neck, though she could not very well see them. The snake tattoo had extended far away from its own center beneath the bandages, but was thankfully not growing any larger than it had the previous night. It didn't need to grow any larger for the effects to work.

She shivered from the cold and shook her head in an attempt to remove the thoughts flooding into her mind. The fear, the isolation, the child-like insecurity... everything that her Noah side should have driven out the curse was forcing in. It wouldn't stop - she nearly screamed that it would. Nearly. A bitten tongue was less painful for the moment.

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Day 27: Intercom, Evening

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