Beejoux
It was weird, him being here.  This was weird.

Zeke, slouched at the desk, feet kicked up and crossed at the ankles, wasn’t sure why exactly he was there.  Granted, it wasn’t the first time he’d been on pod duty, but it had been a long time since he’d last sat there, monitoring the sleeping hopefuls.  Not since before Sunny had realized he was competent in the infirmary, and added him to the usual rotation.  Not since before the twelve to fourteen hour shifts, and the endless string of whining, or bleeding, or otherwise obnoxious patients he saw on the regular.  This was weird.

But, it was kind of nice.  At the very least it was quiet.  Mostly quiet.

{You are not paying enough attention to the machines, boil.}

They’re not doing anything, Laggy.  What am I supposed to be paying attention to?

He was reading, a notebook folded open over one knee, pen poised against it.  The book balanced on his thigh was something on aquatic beasties and haunts from around the world.  Something from the library.  Something he’d read before, actually, but now that he and Hattie were gathering research for a mission, one he’d felt the need to read again.

{What if one of the sleepers awakens?}

Then I’ll hear them.

A pause, the pen scratching the paper.  Then the corners of the Mist’s lips twitch in mild amusement.

You’re just bored.

And to that, there was no answer.  Only an indignant huff that served as confirmation.


When he roused, he knew not why. Nothing rang, no one called to him, and all semblance of routine wake cycles went abandoned long ago. He simply stopped sleeping. His eyes remained shut, even as his mind slowly worked through the motions of consciousness. His head ached, and he blamed the lurid glare of light for that. Temples pulsed and teeth pounded with the breadth of the migraine. He wondered, then, if pain was his caller. Did hurt wake him, or did he wake to feel hurt?

Metal whirred, and shortly after, he felt the puff of displaced air. The light grew brighter. Lex hissed through his teeth, a partial effort to ease the pounding (wasted effort, he learned). Finally he forced his eyes open, blinked several times, watched the motionless shapes and figures that composed an abstract of his surroundings. Stiff fingers raised to massage away the haze of sleep. He felt tired. He felt like he spent a lifetime beneath consciousness, with the way his ears rang and his legs ached and his back despised any thought of moving. He knew he wanted painkillers, and that formed his first motivation for trying to sit up -

Only to find he was essentially standing. Several more blinks restored some focus, and Lex gripped the sides of the pod. Stepping out became stumbling out, and he saved himself from falling by grabbing the back of a nearby chair. His own movements felt uncoordinated, new, and simultaneously worn to the bone.

Someone lingered here, he noted; he recognized the shape of a man lounging at a desk. More blinks brought focus. Yes, a man at a desk reading a book. He tried to speak, but his voice yet slept. Soon, detail sharpened out of blurry vision, and he noted that the man looked riddled with past injury. His whole arm discolored with the rippling bubbles of licking flame. Who was he?

He tried to speak again, and Lex only managed a cough.

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An alarm went off with the sort of perfect timing that would have been ironic or miraculous anywhere else, but managed to be irritatingly common place here on Deus.  Zeke sighed, Lagertha chortled.  Of course.  

At the very least, the indicating pod was close.  Pale eyes had lifted from a colorful illustration of a mermaid, to narrow on the outward swinging door to a pod that was no more than fifteen feet away.  Honestly, he hadn't though the ones closest to the desk were still viable.  Apparently he'd been wrong.  Despelling another heavy breath, the Mist closed the book, dropped his feet to the floor, set his research material on the desk, and stepped around it, towards the freshly hatched trainee, as said trainee issued what sounded like a pretty hoarse cough.

Arms crossing, he eyed the nameplate attached to the pod.  “Lexington Vondrasek-Laurent,” he read off, then made an amused sound at the back of his throat.  “That's a mouthful.”  

His attention finally landed fully on the dark haired trainee.  “Good morning, Sunshine.”  His tone somehow managed to be cheerful, deadpan, and mocking.  It was a skill.  “Congratulations, you're not dead.  Yet.”  He smiled pleasantly.  “Welcome to Deus Ex Machina.  The only thing standing between humanity and the forces of evil.  Did you have a good nap?”

Okay, so he could have been a bit more compassionate, but he was tired, and that really wasn't his scene.  

{You are as terrible at this as you are at bedside manner, boil.}

“I'd hold off on the trying to walk thing, at least for the moment.  Unless you like kissing stone.”  


For the first several seconds, Lex watched dumbly as the man who approached him made words with his face hole. The silence between them grew to an awkward extent while Lex's brain caught up with normal functions once again, and the pace of it felt torturous. Soon he started to link sonance with meaning, and through that, puzzled out the spoken phrases. He started with his name - the man knew his name. Lexington Vondrasek-Laurent. Lex for short. Someone tried to call him level once. Yes, progress. Progress loosed the wad of knots that bound their way through his stomach.

During the following increasingly awkward seconds, Lex slid himself into the chair with jerky, mechanical movements. His muscles hadn't yet roused and smoothed themselves into working order. He thought again about the name this man gave - Deus Ex Machina. Right - the family melancholia, the airport diner, the tip.

The death. Was he dead?

No. No, the man said he wasn't dead yet. The throbbing in his skull reassured him for the accuracy of that statement.

When he could work his mouth appropriately and manage vocalizations slightly above primitive, he tried his hand at talking. "Wie kennen…" He paused, cleared his throat. "How do you know my name?" Thick with accent as they were, Lex found them understandable. "What's going on?" And why does my everything hurt like a b***h?

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Ezekiel seemed entirely unamused by the long stretch of silence, the slow dip into the closest chair, and the German gibberish Lexington spewed at him.  He should have been sympathetic(not more, mind you, just sympathetic to begin with.  A little bit.  Even just a teensy hint!), he'd been through this before, he knew it was disorienting, but then he'd gone through a whole bunch of other things, and thus just didn't seem all that traumatic anymore, in the grand scheme of things.

At the the first question, Zeke lifted one hand to point in the vague direction of the name written out over the vitals display beside the pod.  Beneath that was she, gender, and a date.  That, he felt, was answer enough for that.

The second was a little trickier.  Or rather, it'd require more effort on his part to answer it.

“You've been in a suspended state, and have finally woken up again.  That means you've either got a partner that's ready for you, or the pod malfunctioned.  Hopefully the former, the latter would be very bad news for you.”  Another smile, but it didn't reach his eyes.  They were still empty.


"A partner…" What was he, a cop? Where were the answers he was promised by committing to this? A glance toward the pod confirmed nothing more than vitals and other inane information. The man who presided over him now was decidedly mum on… Basically everything save for what Lex asked directly. Was he some kind of assigned babysitter? If so, he obviously wasn't paid for his explanatory skills. "Tell me about zis partner.

"And gif' me your name. You already know mine." Between the headache and the lack of answers, Lex no longer held the patience for questions that allowed some form of autonomy. Part of him wanted to call for this man's manager, or supervisor, or anyone who might try harder at explaining past the fog of an outrageously prolonged sleep.

His surroundings suggested nothing of a hospital. His own clothes coincided with that observation. All around him sat more pods, full of people in some kind of dead sleep. The more he looked about, the more he realized he woke into some science fiction hellhole of a future. The people inside looked grown, or kept, or otherwise produced in a manner unnatural. A brief index of his memories confirmed that he still remembered Bristol and Sidney, his parents, his life full of shitty choices and dead-end, empty relationships. He remembered the early morning airport diner visits.

Lex remembered everything, but he never expected this.

"Someone told me I could join zis organization and learn somesing about zese… How do you call it…" Loose hand gestures searched the air for the proper word. "Feelings. Sensations. Like zere's somesing waiting for me to drop my guard. Who can I speak wis' about it? Tell me it's not you."

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“Weapon partner,” he clarified, unhelpfully.

{You are enjoying this.}

you sound surprised.

The valkyrie snorted softly, and Zeke proceeded to answer the rest of the questions von was tossing at him.  “Your partner has already been determined. They are crucial to your survival.  You’ll meet them shortly.”  He could have gone further in depth, but it seemed like things went easier when the supervising hunters refrained from over explaining something that sounded even more ridiculous than everything else they had to share, and simply pointed their charges towards the Cove stairs.

“I'm Ezekiel Young, intermediate Mist hunter.  You will learn what division you've been assigned to when you reach your dorm, there will be a coat and scarf there waiting for you.”  He plucked at his own coat.  Pristine white, gold trim, with swirling mist creeping along the back of it.  

“You've retained more memory than most, usually new trainees are a bit foggier on the details of how they got here.”  Von managing to hold onto his would save some time.  “In a nutshell, you're here to fight monsters.  That s**t you saw or heard all your life.  We keep those things from overrunning the earth.”  It was a never ending job, however it had been pretty quiet for the latter part of the year.


As Lex leveled a glare at the other man, he imagined Ezekiel's entire lower jaw melting off, followed by exorbitant amounts of blood. He found it helped somewhat when dealing with the hunter's clipped responses. Lex imagined the man derived a special kind of pleasure out of being particularly unhelpful, and that Lex's irritated responses fed that response. If he simply refrained from calling Zeke on his abstract hog s**t, then perhaps he'd resort to being helpful solely to finish the conversation and go.

For now, Lex learned a few more informational tidbits: he would be meeting with a 'weapon partner', whatever that meant; he has a dorm, he has a division presumably within the organization, and he's supposed to fight monsters.

Monsters.

So his mind wasn't full of s**t.

Or his mind was full of s**t and this a*****e chose to d**k with him.

Nonetheless, monsters.

Was this some sort of schizophrenic break? Such consequences became a concern when he first complained of the nightmares, hearing sounds, and seeing flickers and fragments of things unearthly. Lex half-expected it was - another turn of the family curse. Perhaps he even killed himself, and only recently awakened into the afterlife from a period of straight darkness. Or, maybe Zeke was right and he still remained in reality.

"... Let me make sure I understand you. I'm getting a 'weapon partner'. I haf' a dorm, it comes wis' a coat and scarf. I'f been assigned to a division zat I'll find out about later. And, I'm here to go fight ze s**t I'f been seeing in waking glances. Because apparently, I'm not schizoid. Or I'm suffering a psychotic break, you're not real, zis place is not real, and I'm probably locked up in an asylum. Is zat right?"

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Zeke just smiled benignly back at that unhappy glare, as if daring the shorter man to comment on the quality of the information he was being given.  Yes, it was obnoxiously clipped, but it was all accurate.  

So far.

The smile broadened some as Von parroted back what he’d been told, and then some.  “Yes, that's correct.”  He could have left it at that, given the poor trainee a break, but where was the fun in that?

“Although, if this was a psychotic break, and I was nothing more than a trick of the mind, would I tell you?”  Zeke actually sounded curious, features melting into thoughtful lines.  “Would I even know it?”  He chuckled, shaking his head as he lifted a hand to drag fingers through the short spikes of his hair.  “Wouldn't that be a ********’ trip, your whole life being nothing more than another jackass’s broken brain.”

He seemed to consider it a moment, then let his hand drop to clap it against the other.  “Whelp, either way, you should probably just go along with it, right?”  It wasn't like Von had any other choice in the matter.


"Of course you wouldn't." Any figment of Lex's mind would most assuredly carry the same rude and unhelpful demeanor that Zeke so readily adopted. "And you wouldn't really act on it, eizer - doing so would require an autonomy that could exist wis'out ze overarching governance of my mind. So you might know you're a figment, you might not, but you wouldn't actualize it regardless. But all of zat isn't very circumspect - it's still impossible to qualify zese statements more soundly. Considering it involves ze sick mind, and some way of reliably observing its inner workings." Lex sighed. He knew not how long he slept for, but he suspected he should feel ashamed of making that argument so soon after rising, especially when walking and talking proved difficult in the minutes since his emergence from the shell.

Lex rested his forehead on the heels of his hands. Stretching his shoulders forward loosed two deep pops. Stiffness and pain proved reluctant to leave him. "And it wouldn't change ze outcome. Just circumstances." There wasn't much point in fighting it, if he was actually hallucinating the lot of this encounter.

Dropping his hands, he looked up to Zeke. "So what would you haf' me do? Go to ze dorm, find zis weapon partner, polish your ******** shoes? Or are you going to continue your tradition of being unhelpful? Actually, if zere's someone else here…" Sitting up, he scanned the place, but found no others that looked awake and coherent.  <********. I guess I'm stuck with this a*****e.

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So the new meat had a sharp mind.  Another Lifer, perhaps.  Or maybe Death.  As to the speech itself, Zeke responded with a rather flat, unimpressed look, and brought his arms up once again to cross.  He'd wait, nut exactly patiently, for Von to finish speaking, then smirk.  “Nope, sorry Sunshine.  I'm all you've got for the time being.”  Really, Von should count himself lucky.  There were far worse folks he could have woken up to.

“If you'll follow me, I'll take you to where you'll find your partner.”  He made a sweeping gesture down a long row of pods.  “After that you'll be given a very brief check up, and a pamphlet of info every baby hunter should know.”  They hadn't had pamphlets when Zeke had awakened.  He'd had to figure a lot out on his own.  Not the critical, basic stuff, but the slightly less critical, but no less important information.  Like the importance of birth control(there was an entire section in the pamphlet devoted to that).

He didn't wait to make sure Von followed, just assumed he would.  The doorway they were aiming for was at the end of the row, and through there was another walkway that lead to a set of stone stairs carved into the floor.  It was dark inside, but there was dim lighting, both natural and unnatural, at the bottom.

“Head on down.”


Sunshine… Do I look like a ball of ******** sunshine to you? Note to self: wear darker clothes. As soon as they come out with something darker than black.

Lex rose, grumpily, and steadied himself on the back of the chair. The landscape still lurched at every opportunity. Zeke proceeded ahead while Lex waited for the earth to stop spinning, but the straight hallway afforded him a clear view of the other man. When he felt like his legs wouldn't melt beneath him and leave him army crawling on the ground, he stumbled through the sea of pods toward the other man's back.

Pod after pod stood at attention while he passed. Brief glances toward their displayed information confirmed names, genders, and vitals of all kinds. Some kept a very low resting heart rate while others remained immensely high, and he wondered then if those few suffered nightmares. He couldn't recall any dreams of his own since waking however, which he found unusual. His second observation established no particular alphabetized system. First names and last names intermingled without any obvious pattern. There wasn't a male ward or a female ward - which would become complicated on the status of some intersex individuals.

But Zeke afforded him little time to gawk.

When he caught up, he noted that the man was demonstrably taller than him, and that he sported some kind of logo on his back. It looked like a shitload of gold squiggles, and Lex couldn't make much sense of it.

Looking past him, Lex sneered at the dark descent. "Of course. Why wouldn't it be a dark and eerie passage. Fine." Lex started forward, then paused on the initial two steps. He considered saying something to Zeke, then decided against it with a shake of his head. "You're an a*****e," he mumbled to himself, loud enough for Zeke to overhear.

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“So I've been told,” was Zeke’s jovial response as he wiggled his fingers at the descending trainee.