Welcome to Gaia! ::

Reprieve

With each sentence Jack says, Chel seemed to shrink further and further into herself. She can only nod to each and every one of Jack's words.

Chel flinched at Jack's final word, but said nothing. Her hands gently returned to her sides, falling off the glass and laying limply. "I'm sorry," she says again.

She means that to all of them. Perhaps unconsciously, she took a step away from the glass, as though her mere presence was going to bring down the wrath of Merlin on this very room. She feels very much like a caged animal, as Chris observed earlier, but rather than being caged in she feels as though she is keeping something else out.

Reprieve

He rubs his temples, continues to avoid looking at Jack. He feels sick, anxious. The idea of something, anything, being that powerful seems impossible, but they're so insistent.

He holds out a hand, trying to stop Chel. "It's not-" He starts, voice to loud. He stops and tries again, gentler. "It's not your fault. If this Merlin is this powerful, this corrupting, then this would have happened to someone no matter what. The fact that it was you is not your fault."

He gives Jack a stern look, looking at him directly for the first time. "Jab me with whatever the ******** you want, but do not lay all of this ******** blame on her shoulders."

It's easier, maybe, to continue to protect her than to accept that he could be the one in danger now.

Reprieve

It's hard. It's hard hearing Jack and Chris debate her fate and fault like she wasn't there in the room too (of course irony would strike that no, she was not in the room). It further alienated her from the conversation, rendering her silent as they talk. She agrees with Chris, but she agrees with Jack too. The instinct flares to tell Jack off for the way he's talking to her cousin, but so too does she agree with the urgency of the situation that she is quieted.

"I'm fine," she tells Jack quietly. This is entirely complicated and untrue, but it is the response one gave in this situation. "How are you feeling" echoes his question when she had woken up in the infirmary too. She knows what is coming next, so she skips pretenses. But she does like Jack without his glasses, because it lets her see his crooked nose. She likes his crooked nose. "What do you want to know." She still hovers a foot or so away from the glass, almost afraid to touch it now. She is the experiment.

Reprieve

If she wanted to skip the pleasantries, that was fine by him. "Everything of course," he replied, turning more towards Chel. If Chris stuck around, fine; maybe he'd learn something.

Jack tapped the chart with his pencil. "The techs haven't reported any other unusual phenomena, but I wanted to hear it directly from the source. Any more dreams or unusual feelings, physically or otherwise?" A day was hardly enough, he imagined, but one could never be too thorough; that seemed to be the motto of his life honestly.

Told You So

Normally Evan ignored Lifers when he overheard them talk, but the mention of pink hair and quarantine had been enough to pique his interest. There was only one person on the island he could identify by hair color alone, and only one reason that he could think of why she would have to be on lockdown.

s**t. He knew he should have kept a better eye on Chel, no matter what she had wanted. She was still one of his despite their current distance. He had hoped that taking the wait-and-see approach would give her the time and space she needed to see for herself what a bad idea making friends with the monsters was. It was like sticking your hand in a tank full of piranha and expecting them not to eat it.

Chel must have gotten bit pretty damn hard to warrant quarantine.

Evan didn't know what he had expected to see when he finally wandered into the observation room after longer than he'd ever admit to searching for it. A Fear-based infection, maybe; maybe something had latched itself onto her and followed her back from the Haunted House. It was not this skeletal figure swimming in a hospital gown several sizes too big for its emaciated frame. It wasn't this scarred and tired-looking person who was only recognizable by the dull pink of its thinning hair.

Well, Chel never had done anything by half-measures as long as Evan had known her. When she succeeded at something, she did so in a big way. When she failed..."Jesus," he whispered, horrified, putting his hand up against the glass. "What happened to you, Chel?"

Told You So

Chel's eyes flickered to the glass at the mention of her name. She'd been in the quarantine for a while, and had eventually decided to sit on the small cot they'd provided and wait for something to happen. Of course nothing had, so it was very, very boring.

Such a familiar voice scratched at her memory, like a car restarting an old engine. "Evan?" she said, visibly perking up. Chel was weak, but she was still Chel. An awkward heave got her off the cot, and she hobbled to the glass slowly, but eventually. By the time she got to the glass her breath was heavier, but she was there. She stood a foot or two away from the glass, unsure of what her limitations were.

It might have seemed strange to approach Evan so openly, but what was he going to do? Quarantine her? Ha.

He was more interesting than 99% of what had happened thus far. Chel didn't put her hands on the glass. "It's a long story ...," she admitted.

Time was all they had now; he was happy to give it.

Jack flipped the report back and made a few notes of his own, frowning in thought. That didn't make much sense. The whole point of this body swap was that she wasn't in control of where she went or what she did. The man might have been lecturing the student instead and, being in possession of her body, she got secondhand punishment for it.

He didn't move or say anything to interrupt.

Reprieve

Finally the words came back to her. "Okay I think I remember ... He touched my head, and then started saying how ... he was ... better- no more than a legacy, and that I made a deal with him ..." She paused and said, "No, no wait, the head touching came after." She put her thumbnail in her mouth, trying to remember the scenario perfectly, but for whom was a mystery. Was it for Jack to finish the study perfectly? Was it for Chris to assure him of the events correctly? Perhaps it was just to prove it to herself that she could remember all of it.

Either way, she looked up at the two boys, unsure of herself. There was a great sadness in her eyes, the kind that looked like she could cry at any moment. She was so frustrated- the same look she gave her kindergarten teacher when the letters wouldn't assemble themselves correctly on a page.

"His hands were black," she said confidently. She remembered the dark very well. "It hurt ..." Her hands went to her head subconsciously, touching the spot where his black tendrils had ripped through her skin.

"Then I was back here and ..." Another dreamy silence filled the space. "No, no wait there was more. It was white ..." She spread it her hands out in front of her like she was reaching to touch the void now. "But it filled with black ... and there were a lot of teeth-" Her hands moved to the front of her face, inches from touching her nose, just like the teeth had been. "-He said something ..." She then looked up to Chris, panicked and terrified like an animal caught by a predator. "He said Chris was it?" she mimicked. "He's- Merlin's-" She then realized that she had already said that bit and went quiet as her mind assembled the pieces again.