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 Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2016 4:27 pm
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Other Ashdown made a point of upsetting standard expectations, so when Alois entered the moss-laden building, he did not expect to find the bustle of doctors and nurses treating patients. What he found within struck him as similar to the abandoned buildings he explored as a teen, where paint peeled from the walls and the ceiling fell with the heavy load of detritus. Indeed, cheap tiles stuck to one another and hung low as they prepared for their descent. Most looked covered in some kind of brown liquid, whether rot or simple dirty water, and Alois took care not to touch them. Within the corners and across great gaps in the wall he saw plentiful spiderwebs, and found himself similarly avoiding them, for he did not fancy getting covered in the creatures and treating bites at a later date.
First he whistled, and surprised himself with the shrillness of it. So much of the hospital remained so still that he lost perspective of his own sound. As he froze, he heard water dripping in rhythmic succession somewhere down the hall. Fleeting glances cast here or there confirmed still more moss and ivy, fed by the sunlight that streamed through the old, broken windows. Briefly he wondered how dark such a place became at night.
Then he wondered if he would’ve arrived at such a location if he got hurt while under Ezra’s care.
„Is zere anyone here?“ He ventured. Shirking his bag, Alois set the burden on the floor and dug through its contents for the purpose of his visit. When he found it, careful fingers closed around a feathered body. He hoisted the crow-esque creature up and held it outward, as if an offering to the ensuing emptiness of the hospital. „I haf’ somesing zat needs to be looked at. Is zere someone here who can tell me if it’s dead or alif’e?“
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Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2016 8:51 pm
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“Convenient.“
Alois was keen to observe, though not to act without reason. He caught movement in the creature’s body but made no attempts to release it then. Where no verbal response came for his inquiries, the building itself invited him onward. For a time, Alois stood in silence, and waited for some other sign of his intended path, but only the glow of the moss served as guide here.
Alois hooked fingers about the many legs of the bird and hung it from his hand like a dead chicken. Wings flayed out in full relaxation while he paced down the long hallway. It curved and he did not mind it, for he learned to suspend all expectations in a place like this. All manner of luminescence poured toward a pair of doors, so in he went with little else for obvious choice.
Should I be looking for a butcher, a doctor? A taxidermist like myself? Should I be looking for anything at all, or is even that assumption taking it too far?
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Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2016 9:18 pm
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Alois halted abruptly, taken aback when he found the basic assumption that there will be a floor here was violated so liberally. He edged backward and gawked toward the black depths before him. „******** sake, are you really tempting me like zis?“ He paused then, and waited for an answer that never came.
Why the hell not, he returned to his own inquiry. Daintily he extended his hand outward, the one full of presumably dead bird, and dangled the dark creature over the chasm. Still, the thing didn’t move. Every mischievous fiber in his body compelled him to just drop the bird, let it fall the stories upon stories into the abyss, let it shatter across the ground like a jar or splatter like a stuck pig, but he could not compell fingers to open up from their burden. Frustrated, he lowered his hand to his side. This is getting ridiculous.
The stairs were, perhaps, less shocking, though he still wished for an elevator to promote convenience. He started down the stairs, his hand touching the wall around which they bound themselves and -
He paused then, nails only a breath from the space. He knew the feel of thrumming texture beneath their tips, even if he could not recall it specifically. He left that feeling but a moment later and chased down the stairs with renewed interest in either reaching the bottom or leaving that stretch of wall to rot.
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Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2016 7:23 pm
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It was only in descending steps, Alois noted, that one recognized the innate heaviness of their body. With each step, his body threatened to shutn forward, to overtake the slightly developed muscles that were his calves and hamstrings and allow gravity to take the lead. Without assurance of a banister, he found no counterpoint to this descent. And thus, with every step, his body grew heavier and his legs protested yet more at the thought of bearing down again, and again, and again. Toward the end of the descent he noted that he felt his pulse quite keenly in the fast twitch of his legs, in the pounding of his feet. Bumbness spread where feeling was pulverized out of his soles.
But he walked, and he did so because there was no guarantee in a place like this that abandoning his efforts and returning would be met with any opportunity to return. Simply turning around might confront him with an endless climb upward, and no promise of any progress made. So he continued, for as long as the area responded to his presence it guided him through the express form of novelty.
And again he was greeted with it when he reached the very base. It grew obvious now that they remained no longer within a building. The creature held by its feet remained all but forgotten in the steady marvel of new minerals formed along walls, and spiderwebs to punctuate their glossiness. He spared little time in their examination for an innate hurriedness - perhaps illusory, perhaps not - urged him to continue, to dismiss these strange structures as less important to the goal of moving forward.
He found this sense justified when a calling urged him forth with more weight that before, and he proceeded in heed to the call regardless of his innate response against it. At once he allowed himself a glance back toward the brilliant cavern, where strange minerals beckoned him, and that remained his only examination of their forms. Instead he turned forward to the stone slab there, ornamented in an old tongue perhaps, and toward its form he was still invited. Alois reached it finally, and simple interest told him to take a rubbing of such markings, but first he needed to free his hands for the task. The prone form was then retired unceremoniously to the top of the altar, as he suspected the will of the building preferred. Hands then darted for the bookbag kept on him nigh ubiquitously, and within it he found enough scratch paper and charcoal stick to start the process.
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Posted: Sun Oct 23, 2016 10:28 am
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When the dais glowed to life, Alois immediately backed from it. Brilliance, he imagined, was activation, and he knew not what-
He saw the creature, woman and spider as it was, and noted that she spoke, but froze a moment in long thought over how he should respond - if at all. Was she talking to him? The dais? The bird he left behind? Alois couldn’t say, and half-expected that by responding he might call attention to himself. It made little sense to assume she meant him, regarddles, as the only thing that responded with any effort was the dais itself.
So he remained still, charcoal and paper still in hand, and his attention transfixed on the spider creature. Friend or foe? He wondered to himself, as if all the world could fall into two neat categories.
He wanted to leave, desperately so, but compulsion stayed his hand. He waited, a curse heavy on his tongue.
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Posted: Sun Oct 23, 2016 6:36 pm
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Alois blinked at the apparition, uncertain how she addressed him so. He distinctly disliked facing her, as her presence alone confirmed the reality of ghosts - and that, perhaps, the dead were not so quiet and amenable as he once thought. “Nope. I wasn’t calling you.“ Nor did he feel a particular need to have a conversation with a dead spider-woman. No, this looked more like something out of a bad hentai.
„Look, I didn’t ask to be tied to some dead bird-sing. I found it, it wasn’t rotting, and I sought it was weird. Zere’s no real attachment about it.“ Alois replaced the charcoal and paper in his bag. „I figured it might not be dead after all, and since zat’s no corvid I can recognize, I took it to zis side of Ashdown. Zat’s all. Just tell me if it’s dead or not so I can leaf’.“ Preferably before the skin-crawling anticipation of tiny arachnid legs on his body provoked sudden twitches.
„I’m not ze good samaritan type. Even if I’m… I don’t know. Nevermind.“
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