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 Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2010 5:10 pm
She took the bottle from his hands. Nerveless fingers dropped it. The young woman made a soft sound of disgust, moving quicker than she had intended to grab it and hissing in pain as her hair rubbed against the red, raw flesh of her back. She looked at the young man and frowned. "Thank you for staying with me."
Shaking hands managed to get the top of the bottle off, and she lifted it to her lips slowly. "You look like s**t, Dylan." good job on being subtle there. "I hope that isn't all my fault." instinct had her reaching up towards his face with the hand that wasn't holding the bottle to her lips, wiping at the soot with her gloved fingers.
She'd fix his hair too, if she thought that she could; Jada was a stickler for appearances. She was trying very hard not to think about her own.
Ugh. The water was cheap, and it was possibly the most delicious drink of water she'd ever had. Her cells were screaming for fluid. She drank too much and choked, coughing. Put the cap back on the bottle. "Mirrors. That's a nifty skill to have. I get to run everywhere."
She sat back down on the couch, stiffly. "How bad is my back?" she asked, finally. "I can move, but I can't feel anything." Just a dull, throbbing pain. Her back looked bad. It was impressive she was moving at all, much less talking... lucid. "And how long have we been here? Or I, rather." she was sure he hadn't stayed if she was unconscious for too long.
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Posted: Thu Mar 25, 2010 12:37 am
"About four hours," came Dylan's answer. "It's pretty late, but I'm going to have to get you to the hospital as soon as you can walk." He pulled his iPod out of his pocket and turned on the bright light again, which illuminated his face. Together with his studious expression he looked a bit like a movie scientist studying a computer screen. Judging by everything so far, though, the lab results probably weren't anything more momentous than Death Cab for Cutie.
Satisfied, he pocketed the mp3 player again. "Yeah, it's late," he said, and abruptly got to his feet, landing lightly on the green room floor; he didn't look like someone with a lot of heft to him, and he wasn't, apparently.
And in lieu of answering her question about her back he pushed his fingers into the glass surface of the floor-length mirror, like Morpheus from The Matrix: but unlike the mirror in The Matrix, the mirror didn't go liquid -- just let his fingers pass through like it was made of fog, not glass.
"It won't let me through like this," said Dylan, looking momentarily interested. "I'd have to transform. But there are gaps. Do you not have a comparable ability?"
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Posted: Thu Mar 25, 2010 8:54 am
Four hours. It was an increment of time that didn't connect in her brain. Four hours was four hours. It didn't register to her just how late it was in the evening, or the fact that she was past curfew, not anymore than the words dropping past his lips. She blinked, wincing as the iPod lit up, the LCD brightness making her eyes hurt.
She watched his fingers press into the glass and tilted her head. "If I reached out to touch it while you were, would my hand go through the glass?" it was an inquiring question. "Would I get stuck trying to come out? Have you ever had anyone get stuck in the mirror?"
His question confused her, and she gave a small shrug. "As far as I'm aware, no, I don't have an ability that is anything like that. It would be useful." she sounded wistful. "Are we going to go through the mirror to get me out of here?" wistful to hopeful in .5 seconds.
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Posted: Tue Mar 30, 2010 2:19 pm
"You're definitely not walking," was Dylan's response with an incredulous laugh. The laugh sounded as tired as he looked. "You're on the one-way train to infection right now, Jada. Choo choo. All aboard. Not that I'm implying you don't know the state of your own body," he waved his hand, "I'm just trying to head off any attempts at noble stoicism that might be coming to mind right now. It's just a precaution."
He swung one leg over another and stood up, a little creakily, and stretched his arms and cracked a few joints. "But I appreciate your curiosity about the physical properties of mirrorwalking," he said. "In fact, I never knew anyone other than me wondered about that kind of thing. I've done some experiments. I think that once I transmute the mirror to a permeable surface, it remains that way until anyone I've brought through has gone all the way through, and then it becomes solid. It won't become solid until everyone is on one side or the other, but it won't stay liquid or gaseous if there's no one going through." This line of discussion appeared to cheer him up than anything previous. "My dream is to get a mirrored ceiling and floor."
He walked around the couch she was on and retrieved a large tube of Neosporin from some table behind her, after which he walked back around to stand in front of her. "Well, my other dream. Saving the world and making a real adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness aside." Dylan unscrewed the cap. "Hold still a moment."
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Posted: Wed Mar 31, 2010 12:31 am
Dylan had a nice laugh, she decided. Her eyes were starting to go slowly as glassy as those mirrors he was talking about, but she managed to keep up. "Don't worry about stoicism. I will need to power down to go to the hospital won't I?" She would. She frowned. "But my clothing is not going to match the burns on my back, will they?" black brows furrowed at the thought.
Her eyes were on her companion as he rose from his seat. "That sounds interesting." she admitted at last. "What if someone who wasn't with you tried to chase you through the mirror though? And if you got a mirror on both your ceiling and your floor, could you fall forever? Because you'd fall to the floor and slip through the mirror, and maybe come out on the ceiling..." her voice trailed off. That would be something for her to ponder at some point. "I know, it sounds like something a three year old would think about, but it is something to consider."
She watched him move, closing her eyes and allowing herself to power down. Thank god she hadn't been wearing a tight top when she worked the library; the brush of satin against her lower back made her hiss through her teeth. Her upper back, however, was open to the air, red and welted flesh sore at the rush of the air. "You're incredibly well-read." she said finally, as she pulled back her black curls into a tight bun. "And I'm starting to think you might be incredibly eccentric as well. Not that that is a bad thing." She declined the tube of Neosporin with a definitive shake of her head. "If you're taking me to the hospital you can save the sticky stuff. They'll have something better."
Like morphine. She was starting to shake again, violently. "Saving the world seems like one hell of a goal. You'll have to sit down with me sometime and continue this discussion, but I'd really like a ride to the hospital before I pass out." her eyes were a little unfocused. "You told me not to move." she admitted. She'd done it anyway. "You look so tired. I'm sorry." she held out her hands to him.
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Posted: Wed Mar 31, 2010 1:49 am
"All right, that's it. Hospital time." The world was starting to blur, but he didn't pick her up -- instead, he reached into his back pocket for something and, oddly, she felt pressure on her shoulder, on an unwounded area of the skin. "You should read Lovecraft. I recommend 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth.'" What was he doing? She probably wasn't going to find out today -- things were starting to spin, too, and a few soft pieces of something fluttered onto her skin. His transformation, probably. While she set to wondering a bit more dizzily he scooped her up under her legs and shoulders again and, in an ungainly fashion and with shaking arms, slung one of her arms over his shoulders and slid one of his arms under her knees. "You don't look long for the waking world," Dylan commented not too far from her ear: her head was lolled against his shoulder now. "Try not to die. You're not quite rid of me yet." When they went through the mirror, she was hardly in a state to perceive what it was like: save that there was no sensation at all. It was as if he had merely stepped through a doorway with a high threshold, a silver doorway. But she passed out before she knew where that doorway led. **** She woke up, at some point, in the hospital -- and for a while the only notable thing was a nurse who kept on talking to her, and saying her name, and saying a lot of other things, but the only thing that stood out was: "Do you have any idea about the number?" The number? "Do you know anything about the number?" What number? "The number," said the nurse through the haze of morphine, "there's a phone number written in pen on your back, Miss Chamberlyn. Do you know anything about that?" You're not quite rid of me yet.Apparently not.
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