damned_institute | Night 43: F1-10 Hall

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Night 43: F1-10 Hall

Breaking down the bed frame after she'd eaten some of her meal had given Teresa something to do while she waited for the night time phenomena to arrive. Having not been conscious when it occurred the previous night, she was curious. She was not disappointed. The overhead words were certainly something different.

As the door opened, Teresa finished wrapping shredded bedding around the bottom portion of the six foot long metal bar that had once been a main side support of the bed's frame. It wasn't good quality metal by any means, but it was better than nothing. At least, she didn't think it'd break the first time she hit something with it given her reduced strength. As she hefted the weapon, she swung it around to get a feel and decided that it would do for now. Should she manage to find the right kind of stone or a file, she could even work a rough edge onto it.

A few more strips of cloth and the hybrid tied the makeshift weapon across her back, the 'hilt' sticking a foot and a half above her shoulders, and fashioned the cloth so she could pull on the knot by her right shoulder for a quick release. That done, Teresa took her flashlight and exited the room.

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Raine shook her head; no matter how much Sheena loved him, she would have been happy to punch him for that one. "Try to focus on the love, if you can. It's not really them, but it's a part of them," she murmured. Call her a hypocrite, but then again she wasn't sure she'd sensed much love from her supposed mother. Genis, of course, but not her mother.

She hadn't forgotten that she needed to look at Sheena's back, but that could wait.

That wasn't the right thing to say and the explosion from the ninja made that quite clear. "DON'T TELL ME IT WASN'T HIM BECAUSE IT WAS! I COULD FEEL HIM!"

As Sheena yelled, she pushed herself up to level a tear-filled glare at Raine, but she'd moved to fast for her shoulder. With a cry of pain, she dropped back down onto the bed and the explosion was gone as quickly as it had arrived, the ninja covering her face as she cried.

Raine winced only because she hadn't meant to hurt Sheena, in either sense. "Come here," she said softly, rubbing her back. She suspected the ninja hadn't had many people to really comfort her since she was very young, but no matter how withdrawn she'd gotten as a result, being hugged still felt better than any other kind of comfort. Even Raine--even Valyn--could accept it when really upset.

Sheena didn't so much go to Raine as much as she grabbed the other woman and yanked her down to her level. Trembling, she cried with the bell still held to her chest while the other hand clung to Raine. She felt so weak, so felt so pathetic... she still felt so damn alone.

Raine just hugged her close, being sure not to hurt her, and shifted so she had Sheena leaning against her to the point of nearly being in her lap. Even if she hadn't had a visitor to flash back to, she knew all too much about feeling abandoned.

She couldn't stay all night, but she hoped she could sooth Sheena to something like calmness, or better yet, into sleep.

After Sheena seemed to cry herself out again, she stammered, "Corrine... said G-Grandfather put m-me here. S-such a failure. Never getting up 'gain."

"You are not," Raine said, quietly but firmly. "Whatever's happened in this world to the people our visitors know, it's not what happened in our worlds. And a child failing at a task, that she was put up to before she was ready, is no reason to send her away. Whatever they claimed, it had nothing to do with Volt.

"Supposedly, my mother put me in here. In truth, my mother can look me in the face and still not recognize me."

"He wouldn't lie to me, Raine. He wouldn't..."

No matter what Raine said, Sheena thought of herself as a failure. Maybe the Sheena from whenever Raine had come from had gotten past all the guilt, but so soon after Palmacosta was too soon for this ninja to move on.

"Corrine wouldn't lie."

"But he would tell you things he'd been compelled to believe," Raine murmured. "That wasn't Corinne in his right mind. Remember that." She didn't want Sheena to explode again, but telling her she'd seen her friend brainwashed wasn't nearly as bad (hopefully) as telling her she hadn't seen her friend at all.

It wasn't as bad, but it made her cry again. "How could they do that to him? I thought he was dead, but then to... evil, evil ranch," Sheena replied, covering her face again.

"You aren't the only one to see a friend suspected or known dead. I'm surprised my father didn't show up..." Raine sighed. "I haven't actually spoken to many people, but I've heard a few stories. I'm informed that Lloyd was here to visit once... along with his mother." Sheena could guess how Kratos had reacted to that.

"That's different, though," Sheena replied. "You're not a summoner; you don't know how it works." Finally, she pulled herself into a sitting position. "Can't make a summoner feel a pact that's not real..."

"I don't know enough about summons or alternate worlds and timelines to speculate," Raine admitted. And as interesting as such things were to ponder, this wasn't the time. "Especially since we have no idea what's possible here."

What made her the most curious right now was Corinne's form--how had he been made into a human and yet remain enough of a summon-spirit to still have a pact with Sheena? Maybe she could get more information later...

"The basics, Raine: You can't force a pact onto either a spirit or a summoner. It has to be mutually agreed upon by both for the magic to be binding."

She fell silent, chewing her bottom lip as she rolled the bell around in her hand. "I could have summoned him right then. I don't know why I didn't." That was a complete lie. She knew she'd been in too much shock to even think about it, much less focus enough to complete a summoning. "I could have gotten us all out..." And again she teared up. Such a failure...

"I doubt his powers would have been unsealed even if your summoning ability briefly was," Raine pointed out gently. Sheena was being much too hard on herself, and Raine had no trouble guessing why she hadn't tried doing a summon.

She wanted to ask if Sheena was willing to come with her tonight, but considering Reinforce was coming to the clinic as usual... it wasn't a good idea. Before she left, she'd just try to make sure Sheena was either asleep or expecting someone.

"He was inside. I'm sure he would have been..." Sheena hung her head, tears pattering down on her hands. "I could feel him still... until I was almost at my room. Then... his presence, the pact, just vanished." She hugged herself. "He'd gone beyond the barrier."

A moment later and Sheena flopped onto her side, a small grunt of pain accompanying it, and she reached toward the covers.

Raine caught her hand. "May I look at your back first? I'm still worried about how everything's healing." She hadn't noticed any blood, but that wasn't much comfort. She had her clinic bag with her, so anything that needed to be re-bandaged could be taken care of.

"Fine." Sitting back up, Sheena carefully set the bell down on her pillow, watching to make sure it wouldn't roll away, and then pulled her shirt off.

Dropping the garment onto the bed, she turned so Raine could get a look at her injuries. The side wound only showed a flowering bruise and the area near her shoulder where the bite was located had a very large, thick bandage over it, spotted with dried blood from earlier.

"Ripped my stitches this morning," she said, taking the bell back into her hands again.

"Tell me if this hurts too much." Raine pulled carefully at the tape, wanting to get a good look and figuring the bandage probably needed to be changed anyway.

She didn't have much experience with quasi-human bites (not counting a certain incident with a toddler some years back), but this did not look normal... discoloration was one thing, rotted flesh was something else. It was minor, but gangrene setting in this quickly... she shuddered a little and checked to see if it was spreading. Thankfully, it didn't appear to be, and as far as she could tell it wasn't infected.

"How much does it hurt?"

"A lot when you poke at it. Stop that," Sheena groused. "Otherwise, it's just a throbbing ache unless I move my arm quickly or bump my shoulder against something."

She scowled. "Still sensitive from the stitches this morning, though." Of course, that was mostly because she'd talked the nurses into not injecting that numbing stuff in before they took the needle to her.

"Can you feel this?" She touched a jagged rip in Sheena's skin that looked completely dead, as lightly as she could. She was expecting the answer to be no, but she would have no idea what to think if Sheena said yes. But, any information might be useful...

She wondered if she was going to be stuck actually taking a scalpel to anyone's injuries from the night before. If so... she was sending Tamaki out of the room.

"Feel what?" The ninja craned her head around in an attempt to see what the hell Raine was doing. Unfortunately (or fortunate), she couldn't see her own wound.

"What are you doing?" She frowned and shifted a little. "The bottom's kinda itchy. Can you... Never mind."

"Just seeing if you have sensation." Raine got out the antiseptic and a strip of cloth. "Hold still; this won't be comfortable." Something of an understatement, especially since it wasn't anything they had at home...

As a courtesy, she did at least get the dried blood off Sheena's back while she was at it.

"There," she said when she had the wound bandaged up again. "Can I convince you to take it easy tonight?"

Sheena was used to having her wounds looked over, poked and prodded by Raine, but she still hadn't gotten used to the stinging liquids this damn ranch used. She hissed when the stuff was applied, her back arching away reflexively. After a moment, she got her reaction under control and stayed still for Raine to finish.

Once bandaged up, Sheena turned toward Raine and looked at her a moment before she laid back down without bothering to put her shirt back on. She wasn't going anywhere and no one was going to come see her, so why bother? She just didn't care enough. Grabbing the covers, Sheena pulled them up again.

"I'm never getting out of bed again," she told her pillow since it was right in front of her face.

Raine rubbed her back again; she knew Sheena wasn't that depressed, but she wanted to be comforting, anyway.

Oh, she'd missed a spot. She took up the strip of cloth again and tried to rub away what looked like the last of the blood on Sheena's neck, but it wouldn't budge; after a moment she realized it was a bruise. Or... was it? She leaned close to see, and discovered there were definite teeth marks.

"What happened here?" she asked, touching it lightly.

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