niteo_logs | (no subject)

Characters: Lenalee (OU) |

fallforthesky, Alex Mercer (OU) |

angryaffliction
When: Backdated to the 11th or 12th.
Where: Hospital
Rating: M for Mercer's Foul Mouth
Summary: Lenalee is curious about the hospital and piqued Mercer's interest too. What hilarious hijinks will they get up to? What ghastly ghouls lurk in the dark?

It was dawn, and Mercer watched the overcast gray sky grow gradually lighter. He could sense more rain coming and that set his teeth on edge. From his vantage point, the rest of Nesreca seemed still. No sign of movement. No sign of Libitina anywhere.

Still, he was ever watchful for any sign of the ghost girl, but she didn't appear.

So the virus sat back on his haunches, drawing his hood tighter as the first drops of rain splattered down. He was still, like some brooding hoodie gargoyle perched on top of the hospital, roof, partially obscured by some rubble.

He would give the girl, Lenalee, another hour before he went in on his own. The virus hoped he'd find some answers. Maybe what happened. Maybe why. Maybe how. Maybe information about Libitina. Maybe even a way home.

But for now, he waited.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He knows on some surface level there isn't a living person here who will know what he is. Perhaps not even believe it if they're told. But Alex still gets anxious about being watched. About being noticed.

He watches her in turn, out of his peripheral vision as he scours the mess of rubble for any kind of answer to present itself. She carries herself with an unusual grace- not like the eerie movements of Elizabeth Greene. He'd heard talk about people here with 'powers' but Lenalee didn't look like the hulking super soldiers he'd fought. But there was something strange about her. Something Alex didn't have the knowledge to place.

His eyes traveled along the floor, a broken vial by a rusting stretcher catching his eyes. Without warning, he visibly cringed, holding his head, unbidden memories flooding through him.

A vial shattering on the concrete, red liquid that held the virus spreading over the floor. Or was that his blood? It mixed, red with red, chemicals acting like a crib to his last creation as it unwittingly consumed him and replaced him...

He came back to reality, shaking off the unwanted memory like a fly, though his whole being throbbed with the pain of remembering. Still, it gave him an idea.

"I want to know what happened here." He said roughly. "If it was some kind of plague, the hospital records will tell us something."

A virus living inside a human body? That's really not much harder to believe than a cursed, mechanical soul that wears a loved one's skin. And as for super soldiers... that's close, actually. Not quite as literal as in Alex' world, but close enough.

She just barely catches his sudden fit from the corner of her eye, and in some ways it's so familiar she almost doesn't comment— but he isn't from her world, so God only knows if it's at all normal for him. Lenalee comes to a stop, heart suddenly pounding. This man is completely different than what she knows. The things he can do, the way he behaves...

"Are you all right?" she says, voice muffled by the cloth covering her mouth and nose. But then he's recovering, and all that's left to indicate that anything had happened at all is her flickering pulse and a slight hoarseness to his voice. She hesitates, then tries to gloss over her question (her own voice a little shaky now) with, "—Where do they keep hospital records?"

No, Alex. She doesn't know. Paperwork isn't exactly... neatly organized in the Order.

"Yeah..." His voice sounded strange, even to him. Lenalee may even catch the very faint whispery echo. He straights and 'fixes' his vocal chamber. Memories always left his internal structure a little... off.

"...Yeah." He repeats himself and coughs. "Fine." His voice was normal again. Gravelly and unpleasant but normal.He wasn't sure what to make of Lenalee's concern though. That, like so many things, was alien to him. He decided though that it was better not to dwell on it. He needed to focus on the task at hand. "Older records would probably get put in a basement, but we're looking for whatever was most recent. So check offices, filing cabinets, anything. We can look for quarantine rooms as well."

His brow furrows. He knows he's missing stuff but he was never that good at planning. But there's somewhere to start.

He doesn't strike her as anything close to fine, not with that sudden fit just after warning her not to breathe the air without a filter. She hesitates on coming a little closer to him and remains where she is instead, turning her head sharply to stare around the room.

"Are the quarantine rooms actually safe to go into, do you think?"

"After a hundred years? ...Probably."

If it was a disease that had caused this, it had either died off or was long gone by now. Maybe it wasn't a good idea to bring along Lenalee if it was as potent a virus as he. But it was too late to get rid of her now and she would ask inconvenient questions about his sudden change of mind in going alone. He doubt he could pass it off as chivalry.

He stepped into the dusty gloom, careful to watch his footing on the aged flooring.

"They'll have kept the secret stuff somewhere where people wouldn't wander in aimlessly. Which means our first stop is the basement." He shoved aside some rubble, and peered down an old-fashioned elevator shaft. He could make out the wreckage of the thing some fifty feet below, and then to Lenalee, a smug grin on his face. "Shortcut?"

Smart thinking, Alex. She has little patience for chivalry, either false or genuine, so it's best you just let her come along. You'll have hell to pay if something happens, though.

Click, clack, tap, go her shoes as she follows after him, toeing aside broken tile and twisted scraps of metal. All the dust in the room seems to catch on her eyelids, making her feel even more exhausted than when she first woke up.

She watches blearily as he moves towards the collapsed elevator shaft, commenting mildly, "Do you have a light?", though in the wake of the rubble being heaved aside, her voice is drowned out.

Shortcut...?

Well. Maybe.

Coming up next to him and... peering down into the darkness. There's a flare of soft, greenish light that fades very quickly into nothing as she invocates on a whim. It's comforting. She's missed it, almost. She missed less the feeling of steel painting its way up her legs, however— and there's your clue to what she meant by knowing people who were also fast. Lenalee gives Alex a look once her Boots have activated, her expression for the most part an equal mix of wariness and that sort of bland acceptance a soldier wears as they're handed their weapon. "I'll go first."

She jumps down into the shaft before he can reply.

Which was good for Lenalee because Alex didn't have a chivalrous bone in his body. He'd had a mental taste of both sexes and had found, aside from the obvious biological differences, both were psychologically similar.

When he catches the movement on her legs, he raises a brow but said nothing.

When she jumped, Alex lunged to the side to stop her, but as she landed on the bottom, his doubts were erased.

"Stand back," he warned and then jumped, forming his hand into a claw and digging it into the wall to slow his descent. It reformed it into a hand before he was visible and landed heavily, denting the tiled floor.

"Any other tricks up your sleeve?"

By the time Alex calls a warning down, Lenalee's already back-pedalled as far into the dark as she's willing to risk, the memory of the impact craters he'd left on his first broadcast resurfacing. What little light the grimy windows let into the hospital's first floor blots out, leaving her temporarily in complete darkness— she can hear a crunching sort of sound as Alex presumably follows her down the elevator shaft.

Curiosity isn't enough to make her chance a glance up, though.

Which she's especially glad for when he lands and leaves yet another dent to mark his passage through Nesreca's ruins. She stares at the cracks in the tile for a moment, eyes readjusting to the dim light, and then glances up at him. He can't see it through the cloth she has tied over her face, but she smiles a bit at his comment.

"A few."

"Good." Alex remarked brusquely, emphasizing his words with a curt nod. "We may need them."

His eyes didn't have trouble adjusting to the gloom but that may have had something to do with the whole not being human thing. He scoured the gloom, looking for a likely place to start.

Down the dark passage, something clatters, and Alex's head snaps immediately towards the sound.

"Is someone else checking this place out too?" His voice is a low growl, and he's poised almost like an animal about to strike.

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