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Partay-Partay

Party Thread:
http://www.gaiaonline.com/guilds/viewtopic.php?t=6331653&page=30

Recap:

• Bia comes a bookworm
  
• Aaand makes a beeline for the drinks table, running into Thom- and Emelyn
  
• Feels badly still, but doesn't apologize to Thom- he eventually leaves and she's left talking with- who else?- Emelyn
  
• The chatty woman made her uncomfortable, and she slunk away with her strawberry liquor.
  
• Got very tipsy and headed off 'home'- before Sabin's Halloween Trail was ever illuminated.
  

http://www.gaiaonline.com/guilds/viewtopic.php?t=1140526&page=311

To be Transcribed: Freddie+Bia

Birds of a Feather

Rp to be Transcribed:

http://www.gaiaonline.com/guilds/viewtopic.php?t=1179784&page=19

When I was in college, there was a study that was brought to our attention... a controversial thing that was picked up by all those commercial mags like People and Time Life, but ignored- even shunned- by real publications of medication and medical journals. It focused on a small cadre of people who had received organ transplants, and now, a year- or two- after their transplants, they've come forth to say that something has changed. More than just the lung receiver being able to breath easier, or the woman with a borrowed heart not needing to clutch her chest in panic every time she spotted a flight of stairs. They presented with something more, something... far less medically tangible. A woman from Cleveland who had been on dialysis waiting for a new liver... now found that she had an insatiable desire for dark chocolate, when before, the bitter concoction had always soured her tongue. And the young man from Washington whose heart had been destroyed in a freak car accident, now, post-transplant, has been hiking since the recovery date- an affectation he'd never had, previously. Others, as well, came forward with similar stories.

These minute little changes to their lifestyles and tastes hadn't, for the most part, puzzled these few- having chalked up the differences to their new lease on life, having the ability to live again and, essentially, being 'reborn' to all new possibilities. However, when the time had elapsed that they might inquire of the person whose organs they now carried came- and they spoke to the families of the generous dead... they'd discovered astounding things. The fifty-year old woman whose liver had gone to the Cleveland ad executive... had been a devout lover of chocolate. The darker, the better, her family said. And the stand-up comedian from Washington whose heart had been pulverized by the force of his ribcage against the steering wheel one dark October night... had received the replacement from a 19 year old girl who had died earlier that day from an equally freak accident... of being hit by an off-road vehicle while hiking. A pasttime that practically ate up her world.

So why, our teachers asked, was this story so fascinating to the world at large... but struck a certain chord of absurdity in the medical community? It was just a case study for one period of class, but the answer- or at least the one that the professor gave- stuck with me. The idea that our genetic information can carry more than just our hair color and our physical aptitudes and whether or not we'll be tall or short... that's an intriguing thought to most. In fact, it's more than intriguing- it's... immortalizing. We know nothing of the world beyond, and so, to hear that there even here on this world, there is the possibility that everything we are can be gradually transposed onto someone else- whether through donation or by having genetic offspring... it means that even those small parts of us that give us a craving in the morning... can live on. There was no proof to be had that this was true- scientists could think of a dozen or so viable reasons why the genetic material in the transplant patients' new organs had nothing to do with their changes... but even so, it revitalized a sort of hope that people didn't know they'd buried- a genetical birthright that was only beginning to emerge as being real and alive. The dead had lived on, by setting in place those tiny puzzle pieces of themselves in the living.

It frightened the medical community- so much that they had shunned it, called it absurd and given it no more thought than to procure those dozen or so flaws in the theory and throw it aside as not only implausible, but certainly impossible. I understood why, then- I was, after all, a burgeoning doctor, a member of this illustrious crew that loved chemistry and science and found the infintesimle combinations of the building blocks of life a beautiful puzzle that just needs to be solved. Everything is tantamount to combination, to logic and to painstaking precision. Science is beautiful- chemistry in particular- and I didn't want to have anything to do with something that I couldn't understand or prove. To have these people claim that there was something more than genetics that they had received... that a part of the dead was with them, alive and persisting when there was no reason for it to be there... that's intangible. It's invisible, it's... grey. And I don't like anything to be grey. It's a cloudy color, a dank, improvable thing between black and white. There's no science in the grey. Only faith. And I don't understand faith.

Now though... I'm no chemist. I'm not a doctor, and never will be again- not if this island stays the way it promises, a paradise of a cage for Moreau's zoo of guinea pigs. And now I see more than what I did back then, when I dismissed the possibility of genetic immortality- when I shunned the faith. I see that all we had to do to see the truth... was to open our eyes. Then we would have looked beyond our microscopes and elemental tables and seen the world around us. We would have remembered the little quirks we had- how our facial expressions mirror that of aunts and uncles we've barely met... or how a hatred for tomatoes can pass through generations, giving a great grandmother and her great grandson something eerily in common. Then, when that milestone of understanding had passed (for truly, even such a small step would be a milestone for we logical 'masters of the universe')... we would have seen the animals. We would have seen how baby birds are born with the knowledge of how to build nests and how to fly. Hippos are born into the water, and even yet, know how to swim- and that they will need to go to the surface to breathe. Primates know that there is foraging to be done, and who to cling to for comfort... and wolves innately know that there is a heirarchy to answer to, a place that they hold within their family. Instinct, scientists say. And even so... but there's so much more. Animals have one thing on their minds: survival. The need for socialization, for a society and to be understood by others of their species- it's visible only in trace amounts in the wild, because there are more important things there, such as the need to live. And so, more than instincts, animals are given as part of their birthright a cache of ancestral memories. They know where in the forest to go to find food, and they know how to make the homes that will give them shelter not because it is the only way to do it... but because that is what the memories that were the memories of their fathers fathers fathers... have always done it. I think- humans must have had these memories once. But now, they have been forgotten. We have evolved ourself free of them... for what I can see as only one real reason.

We are born as little soft things- soft bones, soft skin, and soft memories that give us only a very few answers: we are to turn and suckle when our mothers stroke our cheeks, and we are to cry whenever anything else is needed. That's it- and only after a time do other instincts come to us, and are we taught to do everything else that we need to do. We've developed in a way that we can leave almost everything up to socialization... we evolved to forget our ancestral memories because we want to depend on one another. There's a cold precision to instinct, a robotic, unemotional side to survival that didn't appeal to the growing hearts and minds that wanted to have more of a reason to reach out and touch their fellow man. We wanted to connect with each other, and, in doing so... destroyed the common barrier of the memories we all shared. Ever since, we've been grasping at each other, trying to touch something that we have in common, drawing lines of family and love and understanding and hoping that those lines can connect outward to everyone else. In our togetherness, we were alone- and now, alone... we strive to be together.

It's beautiful. It's ugly. And I don't understand it.

But even now, as I change, and those memories of my people... no. Not my people. My species. A bird- one that knows that molting is still a ways off, and to keep a lookout for hollow trees, for they're an ideal place to raise my chicks in. I think on them as if I've already had them, said goodbye to them, and gone about my life looking for the next meal and the next mate... I can see it ... almost feel it, but the memories are grey. They're not mine. They're not even of my species. They're not human. But then again, neither am I, anymore.

I've been awake since the headache sliced me away from my dreams. The pressure was so vicious, I dreamed I was giving birth to a full-grown god- I was some dark, female version of Zeus, somehow giving birth to the tall, curly haired white Athena- via my splitting head. When I woke up, the room was dark, and I tried to stand, to push the curtains apart and see the beautiful night sky... but the pain in my bones and the pressure practically pouring out of the calcified mass that ate my nose last transformation... they told me what was happening. My beak... or is it a bill? It grew outwards, stretching, twisting itself into existance by whatever horrible miracle is in those serums. Even I don't know- I produced bolster reproductions, I calculated the mass of different chemical combinations and their results on different forms of tissue... I made chemical analysis of some of the byproduct that is produced once the essence of the serum is extracted from a compound- but I never knew what exactly made up that compound. I knew what was in the 'leftovers'- that byproduct that was analyzed and then bottled, labled, and gone by the next day, taken away to places and purposes unknown- but the actual serum, the essence of the compound- that was a secret, even to me, who would have no one to tell the secrets to. I doubt I wasn't told because I was a threat, but because... I wasn't anyone to tell. It didn't matter that I would keep the secret- only that I wasn't important enough to have it in the first place.

Oh god, the pain is... indescribable. I know the names of what are twisting, grinding, spinning their way into existance- I could even name those teeth that are standing strong while the bill around it forms and pushes outward. ...Mandible. Maxilla. Wisdom teeth. Molars. Bicuspids. I wouldn't be able to name them on a test, though- not when the ache in my head reaches a tantamount of... I can't remember the words. Not now. But it hurts, and a bulge is swelling against my skin, and my tortured mind tells me it's a fleshy blood boil of a tumor. My body isn't handling the serum, the bolsters aren't compensating- or perhaps they're overcompensating, and they're creating these cancerous lumps that will overrun my body. The labs will have to take me and try and strip free this injection while there are still 25% cells in my body that they can bolster. I try to get to the intercom, to dial the labs, to tell them that my serum is defective and that they'll need to retrieve me as soon as possible. What is the code for immediate retrieval? Oh, god, what's the code...

I don't let myself think that of course the operator will know, and as soon as I tell them what's wrong they'll order a code. In my mind, I'm wavering on some indescribable brink, and if I don't order the retrieval, I'll lay here dying until it's too late, and they realize what's happened. I wonder what the look on Dr. Lockheart's face will be when she reads the incident report. I wonder if they remember my name. The lump has been growing larger, and there's something pricking at my neck, radiating outwards and stinging... then half-tickling as more patches erupt. It's feathers. More feathers are coming in- I can see them down my arms, and pricking out on my stomach- stripes, and now the pricking is pain as the quills of the pinfeathers break the surface. I've had many shots- more than the injections of the labs- but that doesn't prepare you for the stab of a needle from the inside out. It's a cavalcade of pressure, mounting each time in a vicious p***k that erupts and then unfurls as a dark feather.

I've headed for the intercom... but the mirror stops me. The bulge above my bill has gotten even larger, the skin around it warped and thinned to provide the necessary growth of tiny pinions. They're feathers as well, growing around the mass... as if they don't realize that this is what will kill me. No one in my family has ever died of cancer. I've never even known anyone to die of it. I guess I'll be the first. This isn't the escape I wanted when I left the labs. Or isn't it? My mind... I don't know anything, now. Pain shrinks your world,and nothing makes sense anymore.

But then the skin splits, and I know that this is it. I stop forcing my legs to move- I see in the mirror that my time is up- the tumor has burst, and now I'll not only watch as the bolsters overtake me, but I'll bleed out. Maybe the guards at the observation deck will be monitoring their cameras closely, and maybe they'll see. Maybe. I can't look away from the mirror, anyway, and I wait to see the mass of blood pooling onto my face from the spongy pink mass of the tumorous growth inside.

But what the aching tear of dark skin reveals isn't the familiar sight of a malignant growth... no abnormal cells bloated and pinkened, peppered with misled bloodvessels and white, fleshy nodes. Instead, what reveals itself beneath the tear is a yellow and orange calcified lump, colored the same as my bill. ...My bill. It's mine. The memories are back- they nod, they agree, and they suggest- what all can be done with this. My bill. Not now, I've just realized I'm not dying. I don't know how I feel about it, yet. The pain hasn't ended.

Oh my god, my neck. If I hadn't thought I was dying before, and been proven wrong... oh, would that I thought that now, when it feels so much more apparent. Someone, some vengeful god I don't believe in, has reached down from an ugly heaven and taken hold of my head, and pulled upon it, tried to take it back with them to the clouds. In reality, beyond all this talk of gods and grey faith, in the back of my mind, in a spot where the bird cannot dwell... the words come forth, pulled from a medical file that I'd thought to banish forever. The vertebral foramina. Those small, delicate members of the cervical vertebrae- I don't know which ones. Maybe C3 and 4. Maybe lower, maybe all the way to C7- they were stretching, swelling, oh god, whatever was happening, please let it stop.

I don't pay mind to my hands and feet- they seem to be the last bits on the periphery to find themselves at the mercy of the serum, stretching, my fingers losing even more of their human shape. Good, say the memories. The wings are coming. You need your wings. ...My wings. The skin melds together, and some of them are lost. Good. My wings.

I have been sitting on the bed, now, since the changes have finished. Some of the feathers grew longer, in that time before I could compell myself to sit- and the skin on my feet became leathery, even scale-like... and grey.

I'm alive. I'm Bia, I'm not dying of a serum-induced cancer... and I am a bird, a bird of some tropical, beautiful area, hungry for meat and fruit alike... I have enjoyed these before, a memory I have never before had tells me. I am Bia. I am a Bird.

I am... grey.

Rp To-Be Transcribed:

http://www.gaiaonline.com/guilds/viewtopic.php?t=7188629

Meeting Victor at the Riverside