damned_institute | Doctor's Office 2 [Dr. House]

Entry tags:

Doctor's Office 2 [Dr. House]

[From here]

Yukari surveyed the darkened room for a few moments before remembering she now had mere human senses and her night vision wasn't going to improve much more. Sighing, she summoned up a gap, ignoring the twinging pain in her left frontal lobe as she reached inside and, after a bit of rummaging, managed to pull out a flashlight.

Finding it was one of the disassembled ones, she then spent another few seconds rummaging for batteries and putting them back in.

Now adequately equipped, Yukari started looking around at the... mess.

Papers everywhere, with no discernible order to them. Yukari imagined this would be what her home would look like if a) she kept papers and b) she didn't have Ran to clean it all up. Looking about, she tucked her parasol under one arm and picked up an interesting looking... doohickey. It was just some desk ornament that apparently served no functional purpose, but nonetheless, Yukari had fun making its bits spin and whir.

"Ooh..." she said, tilting her head as she watched, mildly entranced.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Sheena had followed behind Yukari, hands poised to choke the youkai from behind when the flashlight was finally assembled and the light clicked on. Dropping her hands as if she'd not been planning the strangulation of the annoying blonde, Sheena peered about the room with interest.

It looked like an office, so this was probably where one of the doctors put their stuff. Like... papers. While Yukari played with the... spinny thing, the ninja went around to the desk and started rummaging through the drawers.

"You think they'd keep the stuff on this ranch in here or, like, locked up in a special room?" She'd never had to go looking for information in a ranch before; her and the others had just blown them up once everyone not Desian was out.

Ranch? thought Yukari to herself. The youkai didn't particularly like being compared to cattle, especially if it was any indication of where she was going to end up.

"I dunno," she said honestly, growing bored with the ornament. She moved over to a file cabinet and started picking up and looking at the medical books and instruments sitting on top of it. None of them looked particularly useful, except perhaps using the pestle as a short club, but she already had a flashlight for that. "I know there's a file room some of the others talked about where they keep files on us."

"I don't care about the files on us - Raine says their fake anyways," Sheena muttered back.

She found some pencils, sticking them into her hair, and some weird devices. Picking one up she noted the buttons and the screen. They looked a lot like Desian devices. She knew she shouldn't, but maybe if she turned it on she'd know what they worked. Hey, maybe she'd found the control that disengaged the megadevice dampening all their powers! It seemed odd to have it here, but these people were evil - they didn't have to make sense. Honestly, who would name something like that Nintendo anyways?

As Sheena flipped the switch on, it occurred to her that she might have just caused something like she had at the ranch when she'd convinced the others to help her save the people of Luin. If an alarm started blaring...

The screen lit up and there was a chiming noise before things started coming on the screen. "Woah..."

Yukari's ears immediately poked up at a, if not familiar, known electrically generated noise.

"An old gameboy? Doesn't he have anything newer?" said Yukari, dropping what she was doing and moving to Sheena's side. She watched the ninja's amazed look with an amused smirk before reaching over and hitting the A button, starting a new game of Mario. "Move the tubby little man with the arrows; hit A to jump." Or was it B? Yukari'd seen this game before, but she'd never bothered playing. The batteries from Kourindou had died before Yukari could get it away from Chen and she'd never bothered to get new ones.

That done, she started digging around in the desk drawer Sheena had pulled it out of. After a few minutes of rummaging, Yukari came up with something more to her liking.

"Ah-ha," she said triumphantly, holding the iPod aloft. A little more searching produced the signature white ear buds.

"Hey, hey! Don't touch that you might..." Start a game? Sheena blinked and tilted her head a little. She experimentally pushed the A button and the screen changed again. She pushed the buttons a few more times, switching between the arrows and the A button, amazed at the thing until the little man on the screen fell into a hole and died.

"Che. Stupid thing." The ninja set the device down on the desk and looked over at Yukari. "So... what is that thing? And this thing? And why doesn't it control anything important? It looks like it should."

Yukari giggled when Sheena gave up on it and set the gameboy down, leaving poor Mario to stand at the beginning of the level, going for a nihilist victory.

"That is a gameboy," said Yukari, waving the flashlight beam at the device before setting the light and her parasol on the desk; exploring - and explaining - would be so much easier with her hands free. "It's a recreational device for children. And adults with nothing better to do." Then she held up the iPod, fiddling with the wheel to make it turn on and light up. "And this is an iPod. It's got music inside it; a very trendy item in the Outside World."

She smirked condescendingly at the ninja's last statement.

"Oh, is your pseudo-Norse pseudo-Japanese world too primitive to use such amazing technology for such menial things?" Not that she could talk; Gensokyo was easily several centuries behind the times.

"Ooooh."

Wait a minute! Sheena narrowed eyes at the insult to Tethe'alla.

"Hey! I'll have you know that Tethe'allan technology is quite advanced," she snapped, poking Yukari in the arm. "For Undine's sake, we have rheiards and wing packs and there is the Great Tethe'allan Bridge. Just because we prefer to entertain our children with non-electronic games doesn't mean we're primitive."

Stupid youkai. "I'd like to see you try to use kedama," the ninja scoffed.

"Those are what now? I have no ideas what those are," Yukari stated flatly as she turned her attention to the iPod, scrolling through the lists. Darn, it was all American stuff. Who the hell was Aerosmith, anyway? "Though, just because I don't know what they are," she added, "doesn't mean they're more advanced."

Admittedly, if a wing pack was like a jet pack, that would be rather cool, if a bit redundant considering the flying capabilities of most (interesting) people in Gensokyo.

"Kedama?" she said, pausing in her scrolling. Her mind immediately went to the little white balls of fuzz before turning to the children's toy; she did spend quite a bit more time shooting one than the other. "Oh, I'm okay with that. I still can't get it on the handle end or the spike though. Chen can do it."

Good. Yukari couldn't get a kedama to work either.

"The rheiards are the dimensional vehicles we use to travel between the two worlds. They're like these single-person flying bikes without wheels. They go pretty fast and have good steering," Sheena explained. "A wing pack is... well, it's kind of like that hole you pulled the flashlight out of. It's about this big" she held her hands up about a foot apart, "and it can hold all sorts of things. I only have my rheiard in it as well as the EC. Oh, the EC is the cargo boat I can power using one of my pacts."

Well, okay, that was using cheaty magic technology; of course the Outside World couldn't compete with that. Youkai could do all sorts of things that mere science hadn't figured out how to.

"Well, I'll admit the humans of the Outside World haven't made anything like that yet," said Yukari, turning back to the iPod and putting on an earbud in the ear away from Sheena. The Beatles? Had she heard that name before? "They're not even sure if other dimensions exist yet and they don't believe in magic. They just do things scientifically."

She said the word in the way one might make fun of a misguided cultist's religious beliefs.

"Oh, not bad," she murmured to herself, tapping her foot a little. These "Beatles" had a kind of old sound to them, nothing like the pop-idol stuff that was on that iPod she'd gotten from Kourindou, but she kind of liked that.

"You keep calling it the Outer World," Sheena pointed out. "Is there an Inner World?"

"Sort of," said Yukari. It's been a ha~rd day's night~ "We don't call it that though. The world I live in is called Gensokyo, a timeless land of illusion and legend. It's where most youkai and other things that have been left behind by humanity live now. It's surrounded by a barrier, so everything outside of that barrier, the world where modern humans live, is called the Outside World. It's pretty rare for anyone to pass between the two though, so a lot of people in Gensokyo aren't even sure it's real. And of course, almost no one in the Outside World even knows Gensokyo exists.

"Huh."

Sheena picked up a few pieces of paper and looked them over, not making heads or tails of them. They really didn't look important, anyways.

"So how come humanity left you youkai behind? You're kinda important to the balance of things and very useful when in a good mood," the summoner said. They were also very useful in a bad mood. And very destructive.

"Are we? I suppose we can help out, but most youkai care more about what they want than the balance of things. And besides, we attack people, remember?" said Yukari dubiously. Obviously, Sheena was extrapolating on whatever "connection" she'd made earlier. "Well, humanity kept growing, and there was only so much room in the world and we just couldn't win. Science and technology lit up every darkened corner and soon there was nowhere for us creatures of the night and shadow to exist. So we retreated to a place where we could live in peace, where time would never pass and the world would never change. That is Gensokyo."

As long as the barrier existed, it would continue so. And as long as Yukari was around, she would make sure it did.

"Sounds boring," Sheena replied, rummaging through a drawer. "Change is interesting. It's different - not the same old same old."

"Oh, things change occasionally," said Yukari, scrolling down the list again. Nine-Inch Nails? What kind of band name was that? "Otherwise it really would be boring. They just don't change drastically. The Outside World moves so fast, sometimes I feel if I take a nap, I'll wake up to a new era."

Which was not an exaggeration, coming from someone who regularly hibernated and slept for months on end. There had been that one time where she had missed an entire year, after all.

"Just recently, we almost got had a nuclear crisis underground; it was quite exciting," she said lightly.

Sheena looked up and blinked. "New-clear?" The hell was that?

So they had transdimensional vehicles but no nukes? Right, Sheena was from magic-land where gameboys were sacred technology. Of course they wouldn't know how to split an atom. Wait, did she even know what an atom was?

"Do you know what an atom is?" asked the Youkai simply.

Meanwhile, the iPod started a new track.

It's the end of the world as we know it~

"... there's an Adam in Sybak that works in the Research Academy," Sheena replied. She then scowled. "What's with the answering a question with another question, anyways?"

"No, no, an a-tom" she said, enunciating. "It's, uh, well... ah, never mind." There was a much easier way to explain this, one that would make a lot more sense to a magician than any talk about chain reactions and radioactivity. "Basically, nuclear fission and fusion make up one of the strongest forces in the universe. It's what powers the sun."

Hopefully that was in simple enough terms for the ninja to understand.

"And an idiot goddess decided it'd be a good idea to give that power to some birdbrain down in the burning hells," explained Yukari with a sigh. "It could have been quite a mess."

"Ooooooh."

That Sheena understood. It didn't seem like a good idea for anyone to have that kind of power. There was a reason why no summoner, not even Mithos, had ever heard of a sun elemental spirit. In fact, the thoughts about what a Temple of the Sun would be like was enough to make the ninja lean back in the chair and flick her wrist so her cards appeared in her hand so she could fan herself with them.

"That sounded like a really... stupid idea. This is why I'm glad I don't deal with gods and goddesses on a regular basis. I've had my fill of them."

"Well, she meant well," muttered Yukari. "But that hell-raven turned around and decided total domination of the surface world was a good way to revive the Burning Hells. We managed to talk her out of that, though." And by talk, she meant "unleash the holy wrath of a disgruntled shrine maiden on her". "We had a talk with the goddess responsible after that also."

"Well, it's not the first time things like this have happened," admitted Yukari. "Heck, one time someone broke down the barrier of life and death..."

Never mind that she was that someone, but it had been at Yuyuko's behest.

Sheena's eyebrows went up. "Between life and death you say? Like... making it so anyone could use a unicorn's power of resurrection or, like, ghosts and people mingling like it was normal?" She furrowed her brow. "Or was it like people couldn't die? Or didn't stay dead or... something like that?"

"Well, it was for a pretty short period of time, so I don't know if people stopped dying," said Yukari, obviously not taking it too seriously. "But it made it a lot easier to travel between the land of the dead and the living. A ghost I know was trying to gather up the essence of spring from Gensokyo to help with her gardening. A certain shrine maiden and her friends took up dispute with that, probably because it meant spring never came to the land of the living."

And if there was no spring, you couldn't have a flower viewing party! What an incident indeed.

Sheena's eyes went wide at the description of what happened. She was used to ghosts and spirits, but the land of the dead? Bizarre.

Turning back to the drawer she was rummaging through, the ninja's lips curled up into a smirk. "You keep mentioning this shrine maiden. What, is she your girlfriend or something?" Teasing the perverted youkai was probably not a good idea, but Sheena didn't think quite that far ahead.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject