Past an L-shaped corridor and a large lobby featuring fresh coffee for the day, Alois sidetracked for the current deal on a breakfast blend and scored two cups heedless of dietary regulations. It didn’t matter to him if Aleksy drank the s**t or not; Alois would have no trouble downing both in an effort to overcome his residual exhaustion. He didn’t bother to tip, either; instead, he moved on through the sloping ramp to reach the MICU/ICU segment of the hospital.
Which, he found, lacked actual definitive rooms, and conscious patients. It was a closed facility that required keycard access by a technician or nurse to gain entry, and from there onward, Alois found gurney bed after gurney bed separated by privacy curtains. The room itself was of a large hexagonal shape, and toward the back he found the Russian he’d been searching for. Alois approached without hesitation.
“You’re awake,” he remarked neutrally, as he parked one of the coffees on a nearby tray table. He pulled a chair from the corner of the room and scooted it to the side of the mobile gurney unit. “Most of the other people here aren’t. I like it.” The rhythmic beep of heart rates quickly faded to background amongst the quiet conversation.
“So, I need to know. Did they say anything about my suture work?”
Aleksy was quite awake, and actively playing a game on the 3ds in his lap with the sound turned all the way down. Some assholes (like Thorne in the next bed over) had full use of their thumbs, but Aleksy didn’t, because life sucked and was terrible and half the muscles in his upper arms had been cut through by ******** monster claws.
“It saved my life, but don’t do it again,” Aleksy summarized, not glancing up from his game. It’d taken him like, twenty minutes to get into a pose that felt comfortable, he wasn’t giving it up now when he still had like… forty trees left to cut down. (******** you, Thorne, and ******** your flower-thieving ways, you ********.) “Think they had to make more cutting, but enh. Spasibo. For it. I enjoy to live.”
He cussed, flopped backwards, and cussed again at the pain from that. Then he looked at Alois. “How you are? Doing well?”
Never one to try videogames, Alois glanced over at the screen with absent interest while he listened to Aleksy’s broken commentary. “I was hoping for something like, ‘we’re really impressed with the stitchwork here’. Or maybe ‘tell us who this person is so we can hire them to train our doctors’. Schade.”
Alois pulled the tray table toward himself to use for an elbow prop, and promptly perched his head on the heel of his hand. With the nail of his index finger, he edged forward the spare coffee cup. “Brought you a drink. They’ll probably give you s**t if they catch you with it. I always thought that makes it taste better.” Alois closed his eyes momentarily. Further away, a heart rate monitor picked up in its rhythmic beeping. He wondered, then, if someone was dreaming.
Dreams - didn’t Aleksy mention strange ones upon their first meet?
“I wasn’t injured at the job faire. I spent the three days after in a continuous drunken state, however. My liver didn’t thank me. Oh, and the ranger you were with asked for a taxidermy house call, so business hasn’t dwindled.
“By the way, they took out the fungus tree. Schatzie s**t in the hole it left. I almost took a picture.”
“You have notice the world is not the way you think,” said Aleksy, “It is normal to want to drink many days away. I have done the same thing, it is natural.” He eyeballed the coffee cup. There was very little in his life that he wanted more than that coffee, but there was also very little chance he would be able to reach it without enlisting the help of a nurse. “Were wolf tureens, whatever it is, not part of real world. The ranger is… boyfriend. Finnsha.”
He frowned, then, looked up at the ceiling and contemplated… something. “Finnsha is not for your name,” he said, sternly, “Finnsha is familiar name. You call him Finn.” Or Derouen, like Aleksy did when Finn was being a complete shithead, which was often. “I am glad they have make away with fungus tree, did not want dogs to be harm. There was no other infected? Do you know?”
”Life suddenly turned into a ******** up Twilight novel.” Alois drummed his fingers against his temple. “I tried looking through some books at Bibliophile and found mostly nothing. One of the old newspapers suggested a mass disappearance earlier but there’s been no real coverage of Other Ashdown to an appreciable extent. While that might suggest that Other Ashdown is a recent occurrence, I doubt that is so - we all knew what a werewolf was when it happened, and that concept has been part of our popular culture for ages. That had to come from somewhere, and if this place can produce werewolves somehow, then why wouldn’t it be the progenitor?” He sighed. While he vastly preferred gleaning what he needed to know from books, it looked like firsthand investigation was a necessity.
Aleksy’s insistence over ‘Finnsha’ incurred a dull stare. “Right. Finn.” He didn’t want to tack on more syllables to that than he had to. Finn wasn’t as irritating as most humans, but Alois didn’t know him well enough to form a real opinion either.
“I didn’t see any other missing trees, or extra mushrooms on any. It might’ve been the only one, but I imagine they’ll be more vigilant for any others. If not, I’ll probably get some pet owners coming through my door with Dear Old Dead Fido.” Alois seized his own coffee by the rim and took a sip.
“So do you know anything about what happened? With the werewolf.”
Aleksy gave Alois a look, or it might’ve been a look if Aleksy wasn’t so high off his a** that Animal Crossing actually seemed like a decent distraction. (That and tree-mauling. Because ******** you AND your apple trees, Thorne.) “It is old. Very old.” He blinked owlishly, shook his head minimally. “So old the stars are different…” Not that anyone could ever really see them, what with the eternal rain.
“My sister did it,” said Aleksy. “S’what Lucas say: she make me this thing. Wolf-man monster pizdaty piece of s**t…”
He took a deep breath. “You are more credulous than last I see you.”
”It’s a little hard to be incredulous without doubting my own sanity.” While others might disagree with him, Alois found himself quite sane. Sometimes far more sane than some of the lunatics he encountered in daily life. “Repeated exposure changes a lot of minds.”
But if Aleksy was right, and his sister caused someone to become a werewolf, then was that not a direct usage of… What should he call it, magic? In that case, were humans capable of using magic to an appreciable capacity? DId manifesting magic require exposure to Other Ashdown to frequency? There were too many variables to test, too many permutations of events to culminate in an explanation. Alois didn’t want to think about it now - not with the remnants of a headache still stewing.
“I take it this s**t has always been happening here, then. So is your sister going around and turning people into Teen Wolf for shits and giggles? Not that I could fault her for that, but…” But a thousand questions whorled and demanded answers where none were given.
Aleksy smiled, all smug with victory. Like ******** would Aleksy be lying about s**t like oh by the way there’s a magic ******** bullshit realm on the other side of like, everything. When he told lies, he liked to be believed. “Don’t know,” said Aleksy. “Haven’t seen her. She does not make a visit with me. Only wolfman piece of s**t and Eve and ******** know who else.”
He paused, and his frown made its way back onto his face. “She is… hm… same-born as I. Twin? Twin. Eve is to say she is stuck. Lost. In time.”
”At least she knows how to make things interesting.” Alois managed another sip of the coffee. Aleksy wasn’t touching his; maybe it was too much to lift cup to mouth? That’s what nurses and boyfriends were for. “This town would reach lethal boredom levels without her.” Lost to time, though - what was that supposed to mean? Frozen in her aging process?
“I don’t know how to make sense of any of this. I’m going to get Finn to take me back into Other Ashdown. See what I can learn there. Here, it’s just more mysteries. More questions.” His hand came to light on the table, the nails touching down before the skin. “It’s better to go to the source, oder?”
Aleksy narrowed his eyes. “This is opinion,” he said. “Stupid opinion. Still opinion. Let magic be, maybe take nap. Go in force, with one who knows. Da?” He inched his hand across his lap to gather up his 3ds. There were a lot of chores to do in his town if he was going to utterly destroy Thorne’s perfect a** at this. “Not me. I am not making with that bullshit.”
Alois laughed. “I’ll let you chide me if I come back alive.” Alois rose then, and tossed his coffee cup into the nearby garbage. Nothing else was present there - another indication that the patients were mostly unconscious.
“I’ll let the nurse know you need a sippy straw on my way out.” After giving a short wave, Alois paced out of the strange room, casting glances at the unconscious occupants as he walked. It was a strange place, certainly, but no stranger than Other Ashdown. No stranger than the job faire, from whence most of the ICU’s denizens came.
Shibrogane
