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Post by Vanitypirate on Jun 2, 2018 22:27:07 GMT -8
While the wounds still bled freely, it seemed that they had knitted together some from the last time Adeney had examined them. The edges had closed together a tad, and looked more pinkish and healthy than their festering, sickly state some hours before.
But that was the extent. The bleeding would still, obviously, need to be contained.
Audrey's eyes were open. She couldn't help it. She watched Adeney's and there was the sound of a river in her ears so clear it was like she was there-- there with this man in front of her, who kissed her lips and made her heart flutter. She felt his breath on her face as she did now.
She wanted him to stay-- she'd kick herself for not. But it was a moment she'd cherish, she knew, for as long as she'd remember...
...And then she was back in this dingy room. This wasn't her body. It was alien, and it ached all over.
She shivered again and watched Adeney.
---
Florence squinted at Audrey, and then set about stitching together the wounds alongside Adeney; two pairs of hands would hasten the mending process better than one.
She located her own needle and thread and began to suture what she could together.
"We are fortunate that this did not affect the procedure." She worked efficiently, but paused every now and then to glance curiously at Audrey's expression.
"Do you know where you are?" She asked the girl...
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Post by black379 on Jun 3, 2018 7:47:24 GMT -8
The tear through her shoulder was sewn up, to the best of Adeney's ability, and dressed tightly in gauze. Adeney's gloves were bloodied and he used his sleeve to wipe the sweat from his brow. He was still amazed that Silvant lived. The doctor wondered if he could have saved her in the first place.
He moved to bandage what was left of the girl's feet, but his focus was drawn to Florence and then intently to Silvant herself, awaiting her reply.
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Post by Vanitypirate on Jun 3, 2018 9:20:08 GMT -8
Florence delicately slid off one glove, and then the other, before turning to the table where her notes were kept.
She fished out a quil and ink and turned to a blank page towards the back of the note, hurriedly titling it as she listened to Audrey speak.
---
Audrey could only assume this was a cave of some sort: she had only known the world from far above, coolly gliding above the masses below. But the air was still here, and the sounds of their voices reverberated off the walls that had never truly enclosed her in this way, as they did now.
But the name of this particular cave came to mind.
Her tongue followed suit, maneuvering to speak in ways she could not readily comprehend: it was a reflex, it seemed, of sorts, as she willed herself to speak.
"It's... a..." Her eyes glanced over the lab equipment, the platforms they were raised on, and the windows. "A... lab..."
The Mask spoke again between frantic scribbles, "Do you know the year?"
And again, the words which had no meaning found some inexplicable response. The only reason being that she wished to answer.
"It's... four-seventy-seven... ad lumen."
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Post by black379 on Jun 3, 2018 10:41:22 GMT -8
Adeney nearly halted wrapping up the subject's feet as she spoke. She wasn't just alive, but intelligent. It perplexed and excited him, that the body seemed to retain at least portions of her memory. But what were the implications if she was more than a simple bird's soul in a human body? How much of someone is their soul, and how much of someone is their body?
"Do you know your name?" He asked her hurriedly, anxiously awaiting the response.
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Post by Vanitypirate on Jun 3, 2018 11:07:26 GMT -8
The Mask wrote hurriedly, and Audrey couldn't help but wonder why.
A name, though... she had a name, once. One that sounded sweet and sugary when spoken by her nest-mate and her babies. She recalled it clearly, and made to speak, again not knowing what sounds would emerge,
"I... am..." Audrey shivered again, "Aud-rey... Silvant."
The Masked One reached to plunge the quill into the ink, again, taking up writing. Something in her simple answer had excited her Kidnapper. "How old are you, Audrey?" Asked the Mask giddily.
The question, this time, perplexed Audrey. On... time: she was aware of the passing seconds, but she had only experienced a few seasons at most.
She answered truthfully,
"I don't know."
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Post by black379 on Jun 3, 2018 11:23:50 GMT -8
There was much Adeney couldn't comprehend about this. It seemed like a dream, unreal, that he could hear her voice again, hear her name. He so clearly recalled thrusting the dagger into her neck. The doctor felt dizzy and backed away to rest against the cabinet.
"How does she know? How is this... her?" Adeney muttered toward Florence, though quietly.
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Post by Vanitypirate on Jun 3, 2018 12:02:07 GMT -8
"I do not know..."
Florence squinted behind her lenses, ever-intrigued. It seemed that, for every new piece of information they found, it unearthed a dozen more questions.
Such was the hallmark of important research.
"How do you know this, Audrey?"
The girl was shuddering. No doubt she was in great pain, comparable to that before she had perished, Florence imagined.
It was her hope that the shock would wear off soon.
Audrey spoke, "I... remember."
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Post by black379 on Jun 3, 2018 13:14:16 GMT -8
Adeney snatched up a fresh cloth and dabbed at his forehead, though he left some marks of blood from his glove. He perched on the edge of the cabinet and looked back toward Florence and Silvant, shifting curiously on the table. It seemed that the bird's soul, perhaps every soul, was a catalyst for the body to work. A battery of sorts, that provided action for an otherwise inanimate character.
If this was truly Silvant, he wondered if she remembered her work, or their kiss. He wondered if she remembered dying, or...
"What is it you remember last? Before... waking up?"
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Post by Vanitypirate on Jun 3, 2018 15:03:45 GMT -8
Audrey's expression soured, and she looked as accusingly to Florence as she could muster in her bindings.
"She stole me." Her words were bitter. "I was going to feed my children and then she stole me."
Florence seemed unaffected by what she said, aside from scribbling it, along with others, into her notes. She fit smaller side notes along in the margins, and already the page was heavy with black ink.
Her beak bobbed up and down as she looked between the notes and Audrey.
"Do you remember the Warrens?" Asked Florence eagerly.
Audrey was less eager. Her face grew pained and she was silent.
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Post by black379 on Jun 3, 2018 16:09:50 GMT -8
He was puzzled until he realized that the crow must have been in there too. Adeney wasn't sure if any of it made sense, but likely they were just naive. No one had done this before, at least not that it was documented. As confusing and curious as this was for Adeney and Florence, it might have been incomprehensible to Silvant.
Maybe she could be convinced to suppress the consciousness, the memories and the mind of the bird. But Audrey would have to be reminded what had happened to her.
"Audrey... Doctor Silvant. Some people had been kidnapped. You were searching for them in the Warrens..." Adeney pushed himself off of the desk and paced next to the two women again. "You were killed."
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Post by Vanitypirate on Jun 3, 2018 16:49:02 GMT -8
Audrey's eyes welled up with tears, and she took a breath.
"I... k-know." She spoke shakily. Her arms struggled against the bindings again, but this time with the vain purpose of hugging herself. "It was... so... horrible."
Florence kept writing; the quill could be smoking at the rate it wrote.
"But... how? What happened to me?" The girl choked despairingly, "I'm alive now."
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Post by black379 on Jun 4, 2018 15:56:57 GMT -8
She couldn't understand the process if Adeney couldn't. To explain the mechanics of what he and Florence had accomplished, would only offer more questions than answers. Surely Silvant needed lots of rest to recover from her extensive wounds, let alone some existential crisis.
"Doctor Florence and I..." He motioned to the woman in the beaked mask. "Brought you back to life."
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Post by Vanitypirate on Jun 4, 2018 19:32:47 GMT -8
Audrey's dark brows knitted, perplexed, as she struggled to comprehend the meaning of the words.
She had never truly remembered dying, or the process of it. Distantly, she recalled sliding into a lapse of consciousness after a brief pain through her neck. But it felt more akin to sleep than anything else.
She blinked slowly. "...Why?"
---
Even Florence, in her lacking charisma, could identify many inappropriate answers to the question.
She 'hmm'd, and scribbled something else down in her notes, and spoke simply, "We needed you."
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Post by Bloodtrailkiller on Jun 4, 2018 22:02:41 GMT -8
/Lekalis/
His feet had started to grow heavy, for once, not from wine or sleep but from the mud and dust he'd scuffed up in his shuffling about the Estate.
Where Florence had been absent at the Abbey's Archives, Lekalis had scowered every corner and book-case hoping to spy a familiar crow-like beak and unintentionally teasing robed figure. Yet all he'd found were dust, ink, and papyrus.
Even after scowering the locale, he'd resolved to sit there stoically, thinking... But Tilly soon came to mind; gone were the days of waiting endlessly for Florence to arrive, there was more than one person needing him.
A Wife, and a Child at the least... Courcy as well, to a degree.
As Lekalis rose and made to race out of the Abbey, into the streets, his mind turned like spokes to a trebuchet, seeking a place to fling himself unto. Only brief passing moments inspired some distracted thought or the other; he'd dwelt so happily in solitude with Florence, that he'd let the past lie, finally resting. Much of his mind had delighted in simpler, selfish means... And now, he had to think of others once again.
Finding Florence wasn't so much to delight in his impossible fantasy, but to attend to his very real Duty. To Tilly, and to the Child.
With some hesitation, the Sanitarium was the most immediate place to check for Florence; it wasn't a pursuit he relished, but one that was neccessary.
He didn't know Florence to have any particular office or lab within the Sanitarium, but he did know she had an amusingly salacious tendancy to dwell in basements and undercoves or the like.
It still brought a smirk to his lips as he skipped up the steps to the Sanitarium and swiftly breached its premises; finding a nurse to lead him to the underbelly of the Sanitarium was difficult at first... But when he emphasized his role in the Hamlet, and his experience with the breach beneath, he found it relatively easy to find a route back to that initial breach from the Cultist and Warrens attack.
There were no guards, which was both worrying and relieving as Lekalis made a hasty descent downwards, into the dim depths below the Sanitarium... He had half a mind to strike a light with a match, before he heard idle muttering behind a thick door. If it weren't for his years of courtly trials, he might've mistaken it for a breeze or idle hum in the drum.
But there was hushed whispers indeed, the closer he drew to that woody door. Again, he fought a delighted smile as he heard Florence's rather stiff declarations... But, they were happy. Happier than he'd ever heard her, sides when she was broaching some new experiment. That much had his hopes waned, but his smile held fast, even as he noted a few other voices still.
He paused, a fair foot or so from the door, his boots and steps quieted as he neared. Lekalis straightened and looked over his person, middling in hygeine, he deemed himself presentable before knocking upon the door,
"Florence?" He called out testingly, as he made to push the door open carefully, presuming it wasn't impeded,
"Is that you in there?"
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Post by Vanitypirate on Jun 5, 2018 6:54:02 GMT -8
Florence stopped in her mad scrawling, and her beaked mask jerked to look towards the door with some level of alarm.
Until she recognized the owner of the voice, and her posture relaxed.
"It is my patient." She whispered to Adeney, before striding forward with purpose to allow Lekalis through the locked door.
She pulled it open, and even smiled, though it wouldn't be obviously visible through the mask. Her hand extended and reached to grasp Lekalis's wrist and pull him inside, shutting the door behind him.
And then she pulled him unto a stif hug, albeit quicker and more fluid than she wont to do.
"We have found a breakthrough in this day." She told him, releasing him from the hug, and pointed to Silvant,
"Behold."
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