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This Party Blows
REGULAR ~ Marcella and Kaatje

Seriously, of all the dumb things to be doing right now....

Unusual Circumstances
SOLO ~ Marcella and family

Science made sense. That was why Marcella enjoyed it. Everything had some sort of effect that could be predicted, and if it did not, then, well, someone somewhere was trying to figure out how to predict it anyway. There were still some mysteries, true, but she liked to think that there was always an answer for things somewhere out there. There would be work in the studying, and glory of some form, ranging from a name on an academic paper on up, to be had in the discovery.

That was why all of the goings-on in Destiny City irked her so thoroughly. Strange comas directly correlated to more time for her working at the hospital, and also extended duties since some of the other workers had also been affected. But, thus far, there was not even really a good basis to go on for explaining why so many people had slipped into comas all at the same time. And why some other people had been unaffected.

The last thing was something for which Marcella really wanted an explanation.

"Are you sure it's okay to be working there?" her mother pressed, standing beside her daughter at the refrigerator. "They're positive that you won't catch anything from all of those coma patients?"

"Mom." Marcella leaned into the fridge to get the carton of milk, then turned to face her, allowing the door to swing shut on its own. "Mom, someone has to take care of them. And because I'm already working there, I seemed like a great candidate to help." She nudged past her mother to the counter, where she reached up into the cabinets to get a cup, and continued as she poured herself a glass of milk. "Besides, comas are not usually contagious in and of themselves, and it's not like there aren't already other things floating around the hospital that I could catch, Mom. They're very careful about those sorts of things."

"Still, though," Laureen Palomo went on, knitting her fingers together as she followed Marcella across the kitchen. "The news has been full of monsters and things, and now all of this. Is it something the hospital can handle?"

The student nurse considered it for a long moment as she sipped her milk, then turned around, faint white moustache adorning her upper lip as she replied in a serious tone, "They need people to handle it, and so they need me."

She was scared, sure, since the city had gone under lockdown and soforth, but everyone was. And maybe the hospital could not do anything about monster attacks, but as long as people were getting hurt, they could, at the very least, take care of them. The comas were different, as they had all come on at the same time; Marcella was not heavily religious, but was still willing to accept any number of supernatural explanations at this point. But as long as there were peopel lying in hospital beds, regardless of how they got there, the pre-med student would do her job and take care of them.

"Besides, Mom, you've told me all along to work hard." She took another drink of milk, then grabbed a napkin to wipe her mouth. "A bunch of people have already up and left, from the hospital and from Destiny City. I'm not giving up."

The woman studied her daughter for a moment; of course she only wanted the best for her, but she also wanted Marcella to be safe. Finally, she sighed and conceded, "Alright, if you think it'll be okay. I'm proud of you, just ... please be careful. No one knows what's going on right now, just that it's dangerous."

"Of course," Marcella told her, having heard all sorts of things from her mother a thousand times before. "Besides," she laughed weakly, "We can't leave the city now, and so if whatever it is comes to get us, too, we really don't have much choice except to stand and face it.

"Like you always told me, Mom, we have to do our best with the situation. Take what we get and do our best with it." Perhaps originally more applicable to their daily life of the past, when money was tight and times were hard, but even having lived in relative luxury following their jackpot lottery win, Marcella had hardly forgotten what hard work meant.

"If only your sister felt the same way." Laureen reached out for the carton of milk to offer to put it away.

As if on cue, Julia walked into the kitchen, phone stuck to her ear as she hooked a finger in the necklaces she was wearing. She waved to her mother and elder sister without even slowing her conversation over her cell, and then flipped her designer chains over one shoulder a little before pushing the door open and walking outside.

"Don't forget they backed up the curfew an hour earlier again," Marcella shouted after her, then exchanged a look with her mother before rolling her eyes. "Don't want to see you in the hospital...."

Old habits revisited
REGULAR ~ Tony and Asclepius ... ;;

This is completely freaking ridiculous.

Curiouser and Curiouser
REGULAR ~ Vivianite and Asclepius

Who are you?

(( ** in progress ** ))

Walk in the park...?
BATTLE ~ Chaonis and Asclepius vs a youma

... He almost definitely saw my underpants. gonk

Possibility
SOLO ~ Marcella

There were times when Marcella just knew she was going to have nightmares. It never prepared her for them, though - regardless of how scary the movie she had watched was, her mind, left to its own devices, could always concoct something else unexpected from whatever it had seen.

Tonight was that all over again, but even worse because the girl knew the dead bodies had been real. She had actually been there in the darkened corridors without a screen in the way. In a lot of ways, it had felt even more real than the battles Marcella had fought, perhaps because she had been so utterly alone in the halls of Asclepius. That chill had been a breeze driven by the absolute zero of space itself, not from any weather system on Earth. It was just so remote, and so dead....

Leaving the lights on had not really worked as planned; Marcella tossed and turned but remained awake, haunted by the faces of the dead every time she shut her eyes, even knowing that there was a warm light bulb right there beside her bed. It might have made it harder for her to fall asleep, too, as she was exhausted to begin with, but found herself unable to drift off.

When she finally did, though, her dreams proved to be a bit more pleasant than she had feared.

She wandered down the stone hallways of Asclepius again, but she found no one there at all. The rooms were blessedly empty, devoid of even the dust of bones. The girl quickly exhausted the rooms she had already seen and remembered, but her subconscious made up others for her to wander: spiral staircases set in the stone; rooms with various furniture or items stored that changed when she was not looking at them; one long, narrow room lined on both sides with spears made of glass. It was all much better lit, too, and eventually became far more open, with swooping stairs crossing large rooms with vaulted ceilings.

No people at all, though, living or dead.

And that, above all, started to bother the girl. She carried something that was her senshi phone when she looked at it, and a flickering lantern when she did not, and cast the beam about in search of even a footprint in the dust on the floor that was not her own.

In her mind, Marcella meandered through all the hallways she could create, until she finally found herself upside-down and falling, the blue heels of her seifuku no longer in contact with the smooth stone floor. Or was it a floor? It was not smooth - it was rough, unhewn and unpolished, and reflected her light back in twinkles.

Starting to worry as the asteroid drifted away beneath her, Marcella flipped her phone open and fumbled with fingers that did not want to move, to try to bring herself back to Earth as she had done that evening. This was supposed to work, right? Earth was just right there! She had been able to see it through the icy glass windows she had passed by when she first teleported into the tunnels! Maybe she had to be back on the asteroid, instead of floating freely in space?

She knew she could not breathe, but somehow could anyway (maybe because she was dreaming, Marcella considered in passing). The coldness of space might be why her fingers could not work, but it seemed somehow unlikely. The designs on her phone seemed hollow and empty, cut into the plastic like the holes on a violin, except they went on forever, and Marcella could not even see stars through them. A digital image of ********* face frowned at her from the desktop - she had messed up as a senshi again.

In frustration, the girl threw the phone away. A combination of Newton's Third Law and the lack of gravity in space meant that the motion spun her around the other way. Very slowly. Agonizingly slowly. The Earth began to come into view then, but it was not green and blue. The blue was there, where it should be, but there were shrouds of grey in the way. The clouds did not look right. And there was no green on the land. There was only brown and red, and no lights on the sliver of the planet that she could see that was hidden from the sun.

Something happened after that, but Marcella had already sunk to deeply into sleep to see it, or certainly to remember. All of it would fade from her mind in the morning anyway. Perhaps that was for the best.

Set Fire to the Rain
BATTLE ~ BMC Finale

Dear lord, just what are we all up against?

Do No Harm
REGULAR ~ Ilmenite and Asclepius

A rematch...?