"Still..."
Val looks away from Orphan and doesn't say anyhing else for the rest of the ride.
This is for adding a Search Category to the thread.
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Occultation
"Still..."
Val looks away from Orphan and doesn't say anyhing else for the rest of the ride.
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As they near Val's place, Orphan says, gently, "Your friends died and you're still alive. It's called survivor guilt, and it sucks worse than just about anything in the world. It also really sucks when shitty things happen even when you do the right thing and try your hardest." After a brief pause, he adds "Been there, on both counts. The best thing to do, though, is keep going, and work on doing even better in their honor."
"Looks like we're here," Orphan says, when they arrive where Val told him to go. "If it would help to talk about some of what happened, and what you're feeling, I'm glad to listen. Or we can talk about something else, or nothing at all. Let's see about getting you cleaned and fixed up, though."
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Occultation
They head up the stairs to the third floor apartment. It's late enough that everyone else in the building is either gone out for the evening or asleep. Val's place is one of those small, one-room apartments done up in mostly whites and reds. There's a small kitchen with just the things someone who probably doesn't do much eating in would need. The balcony would probably have a great view of the parking lot below and the other apartments across the way in the daylight. It's got the compulsively neat appearance of someone that lives alone and adheres to a strict schedule. The room smells faintly of mint.
Val takes off her ruined jacket and looks around for someplace to put it before giving up and keeping it with her. She goes into the bathroom and comes out sans jacket but with a big toolbox with a painted red cross on the side.
"I really need to take a shower and get the worst of this stuff off me. You can make coffee from the blue tin if you want, or there's some Sencha tea in the green tin you can make if you'd like that instead. You'll need to use the strainer, my mom doesn't believe in tea bags, but she insists on drinking the stuff so I keep it here for when she visits..."
Val realizes that she's starting to babble, and waits until Orphan answers before doing anything else.
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Orphan heads into the kitchen and says "I'll make some coffee, because I'll be staying up tonight on guard. Go ahead and take your shower, but be careful. Some of those cuts are pretty deep, and they might restrict your motion, and they could open back up if you stretch too much. If you need any help, I'm here."
Suddenly realizing that he's been thinking about Val as a fellow warrior and forgetting that she's a teenage girl, Orphan stammers a bit. "I - I've had training in basic combat medicine, so don't worry, I'll be all professional and all that and..." Realizing he's rambling and probably sounding like a dork, he turns to get the coffee going and just says "Well, go clean up, and when you get done, I'll have the first aid gear all set out and ready to go."
After getting the coffee going, he opens up the toolbox, clears off space and sets out the equipment he thinks they're likely to need.
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Val's in the shower for about fifteen minutes before coming out in a pair of grey shorts and a shirt.
Orphan gets up and goes toward the kitchen again. "You need to get some fluids in you while we are doing the first aid. What would you like?"
"There's some OJ in the little fridge that should work, if you don't mind" She moves over to her med kit. "I've got some good news though, most of the damage is to my arms and legs and back. It's mostlly just bloodloss, but the wounds look clean enough. How much medical training you have?"
Orphan opens the fridge and pours Val some orange juice. "Basic combat first aid, plus a fair amount of practical experrience. Plus some basic Life magic... not enough to heal you, unfortunately, but enough to see if there's anything we need to be worried about, and if there was any infection building, I think I could slow it down at least until we have a chance to get you more thorough care." He brings her the OJ. "Here you go."
Val takes some pills out of the kit and rips open the vaccum seal and downs them with the OJ , making a face at the horse pills. "Thanks. Alright, no offense, but I'm just a little too jumpy to be comfortable with someone else sticking me with needles right now, even if they are sewing me up. Could you just check for infections and pass me anything I ask for?"
"Absolutely," he says. "This will take me a moment to do the spell and to concentrate on your biological aura."
"Cool, could you pass me that ointment before you start? I don't want to get scars from this. I mean, how could I explain that at work?"
Orphan smiles and passes her the ointment. "Hopefully that will be the least odd thing you need to end up explaining at work that results from your being Awakened, but yeah, no scars is good."
Spoiler
As he studies her aura for any sign of infection or any injury that might be more serious than it appears, he asks "So, what sort of work do you do?"
Val starts applying the antiseptic ointment to herself in a vert professional manner. "Paramedic actually. You know, I was wondering how that works actually. I've met nine other Mages, or ten including you. Only three of them had any kind of jobs, and I'm sure one of them was a pot head, and I have no idea if you have a job. How hard is it to keep one now that all this is going on?"
"It can get to be pretty hard, really. That's one of the tough things about being Awakened. It doesn't follow any set hours. Plus, maintaining connections with sleepers puts them at risk. So, most of don't do typical sorts of jobs, when we maintain jobs at all. I hope you won't take this the wrong way, but you look awful young for a paramedic. How old are you?" he asks.
Val is about to ask 'what kind of risks?' but then she remembers... the Zombies
Valkyrie's voice gets tight. Obviously she's taken it the wrong way. "I'm twenty seven. I'm just so short, that if I wear my hair in any other way, or if I'm in anything other than the uniform, I look like a fucking pre-teen. I have three brothers and you know what? They're all like six and a half feet tall, lucky bastards. Nobody takes me seriously and I've had to claw through all kinds of bulshit to get the amount of respect that I've got at work already."
Orphan maintains his smile, but puts his hands up. "You don't have to claw through anything for me to take you seriously. What you've gone through is more than enough for me to know you've got what counts. For what it's worth, people think the opposite of me. I'm only nineteen, but I look older. My mentor says that's because I take things too seriously all the time. Anyhow, the good news. No sign of infection or disease of any sort, so we can just get you patched up. As to work, I've never held a job other than Burger King for a few weeks when I was sixteen. That's when I Awakened, and I've traveled a lot since then."
Valkyrie finishes up with the ointment, with just a little more force than is absolutly necessary. "Could you pass me the suture kit please."
He passes her the requested kit.
"So... do you know about the Paths, and what yours is? Did your mentor get around to telling you abut that sort of thing?"
Val starts on her legs with the kit. "When it happened, I was responding to a Police shooting downtown..."
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It's kinda bizzare, sewing herself up with quick, neat little stiches. The ointment she had applied earlier was a combonation antiseptic and anesthetic. While it made the whole sewing yourself up thing managable, she was still sewing herself up with a needle. She winces at each insertion of the needle into her skin.
"Anyway, when we got there, the shooting was over. One of the officers was down though, and my partner and I ran over with our kit to stablelize him. Only he was my," a short pause while she clips off a suture, "He was someone I knew. So I'm doing everything I'm supposed to do, we get him into the back of our wagon and I'm monotoring his status when something goes wrong. I'm still not sure about what happened, but he was suddenly bleeding all over the place and he was dying right there under me."
Val takes a deep breath and starts in on the parts of her back and side that she can reach. "Then something happened, but I'm a little fuzzy on the details. I remember what I think was these three women coming for my.. for the guy. They said something to me, I said something back and then I gave them something, but I don't remember what it was. Then I did something to him and he stopped dying. He wasn't getting better or anything, it was just like death was taking a break for awhile. I passed out, and when I came back I felt so tired and I had this horrible headache."
Orphan just sits quietly as Val tells her story, and as she casually sews herself up. He didn't need magic to see the telling and the sewing were connected somehow.
As she finishes, he nods."That's an Awakening, alright. The 'fuzzy stuff'....Do you remember going to a tower of some sort? Maybe the three women taking you there?"
She's up to her arms now, leaving only a few places on her back that she can't reach on her own. "Nope. Passes out and woke up in the hospital. I asked around about the guy we brought in, and he was doing fine. Once he was on the table they were able to fix him up. Whenever I tried asking about what the complication was or how he survived it, I'd get funny looks from the hospital staff and then it was like they couldn't believe that either of those things happened."
He nods again. "That's one of the really weird things about Awakenings, from what I can tell at least. Afterward, you question what parts of it were real and what weren't. My mentor, he says all of it is real, especially the parts that are mutually exclusive. What you went through, though, it was all real. You really did something to save that officer. So... since then, have you gotten any sense for what sorts of magic you do? Do you heal people, make them healthy? Or does your magic interact more with Death itself?"
"Well, after things got sorted out, it was suggessted that I take a week off from work to relax," she snorts, considering everything that had happened since then. "And shortly after that this guy calling himself Starling happened to bump into me. He told me some things and brought me to Tyria at the Museum. She didn't like my description of what happened and put a bunch of different sight spells on me, then she cast some things and asked me to try doing the same thing. She said I'm a disciple of Death, an apprentice of Time and a Initiate of Matter. She also called me a Moros and gave me an overview of what that means."
"She called it a Mystery Play, whatever that means"
"It's like an ordeal you have to pass through, as part of your Awakening. Some people just go to a tower, some people just have this big, strange, life-altering experience that changes them completely but is completely invisible to the fallen world. Some people's Awakenings have parts of both. Like mine, I had to confront some things from my past and let them go in order to get to the tower."
"Here's the big question, though... all that stuff about being a Moros, the stuff with Death and Time and Matter... have you started to get a sense about what that stuff means to you, or what it means about you?"
"Well, Tyria talked about psychopomps and she pointed me to some books about them. It's kinda interesting, and I picked the name Valkyrie because it's kind of already what I do. Beyond that I haven't really had much time to absorb it all."
She clips off the last suture on her arms and, except for her back, she's all pink and red and stiched up. "Alright, I can't reach some of these on my back. How good are you at sewing?"
"I can manage," he says. If you hand me that ointment and pull up the back of your shirt, I can take care of your back."
Val does so before talking "Thanks. Anyway, what about you? I'm sitting here getting sewn up and just going on and on about myself. What brings you to the city? What was your Awakening like? What do you do?"
Orphan rubs a bit of the ointment into her wounds and the area around them, then wipes his hands clean before starting to stitch her up. "Well, I'll start with the Awakening."
As he starts to do the stitching, he focuses on doing as good a job as he can, hopefully not leaving scars.
Spoiler
"My dad ran off when I was four. Just up and left during the night. That sort of messed me up, so I became one of the trouble kids. I didn't trust people, I wasn't a team player, and when I got older, I got myself in all sorts of trouble. Got into drugs, hung with the wrong crowd, got into... well, religion, and all sorts of stupid stuff. Then my mom died. Car accident. I was sixteen."
He continues stitching, somewhat surprising himself how well he does while talking about something that used to upset him so much.
Val sucks in a breath.
"I was looking through her stuff, and I found all these letters from dad. She'd said all along he loved us, it wasn't his fault he had to leave, all that. I never believed it. The letters said that, and there was a lot of stuff in there I didn't unerstand, and a lot of him saying my mom shouldn't tell me the truth, it was best I don't know, I wasn't ready, it was for my own safety. I didn't understand. I was too used to being angry all the time. So I sought him out."
"I went there planning to get in his face about abandoning us, and to try to kick his ass. But it turns out he was a mage, he'd left so my mom and I would be safe, wouldn't be dragged into the stuff our kind gets into, or get targeted by his enemies. And just when I was getting in his face, some of those enemies attacked. A bunch of shadowy guys with big, long knives and creepy grins."
"Then out of nowhere, my dad has these swords, and he lays into some of these guys, telling me he'd clear a path and for me to run. But I stand there like an idiot, and one of these guys clocks me in the head, and when I shake out the cobwebs, I'm not there in that alley with dad and the creepy guys any more. I'm on some path in the woods, like almost a jungle on each side, one of the path leading into darkness and nowhere, the other to a tower."
"And this voice was in my head, telling me to choose between walking the path others had set me on, or choosing my own Fate. It felt like I'd already been down the one side of the path, the one that didn't lead anywhere, so I went toward the tower."
"And along the way, I ran into my dad... not with the swords, but the way he was when he ran off when I was a kid. He told me that since I'd come to tell him off and kick his ass, I should go ahead and do that."
Orphan ties off one set of stitches, cuts the suture, goes on to the next, careful to line things up well, not cause any unnecessary pain.
"None of that seemed important any more, though. It felt like I needed to move on, get to the tower. And I did, and Iit was all made of brambles and thistles and thorns, and I had to cut my hands to get in, but I did, and then I used the blood to sign my name in this book there, and then I get all woozy and I'm back in the alley, and one of the creepy guys is dead but the others are dogpiling dad."
"I remember thinking, I must be crazy, having visions, and I should be scared, my head is hurt, I've got blood on my hands, these crazy ninja guys, but I knew that I didn't have to be afraid... that I'd made the right choice and luck would be on my side for a little while."
"So, I pick up the dead guy's knife, and go try to save my dad. Pretty soon, the other three knife guys are dead. And like in a movie or something, my dad's dying, but he had time to tell me he really did love me, and somehow I understand that what he'd done really was the right thing to do. So we were able to say our goodbyes, and I've been able to let go of most of that old pain, and my dad's mentor - my mentor now - he showed up with another guy. My dad's mentor sent me with the other guy, but I knew I was supposed to study under my dad's mentor, and after a year, I sought him out and started doing just that."
He finishes up the last of the stitches. Not quite as neat as Val's own, but not bad.
Val was impressed. She got 3 fuzzy women and a concussion. Orphan got a Kung-fu action flick.
"I don't know if anyone's told you about Legacies. They're kind of like ways of magic that change your soul, let it be what its supposed to be. Well, anyhow, Typhoon follows this legacy my dad was on, and I'm on it too. And as part of it, I was sent out on my own to find my way and learn about myself while staying true to my duties as an Arrow. So, for the past year I've been wandering all over the US, ending up where Fate tells me there are some mages needing help. And that's how I got here, and how I happened to come by and find you."
He shrugs. "Beats Burger King, that's for sure."
Val pulls her shirt back down and turns around. "Well, you know what they say; "May you live in interesting times'. So, what's next?"
"I think next you should get some sleep. I'm going to stay up, just in case the Guardian shows up, and just to make sure whoever controls those zombies doesn't come trying to finish the job. I don't think that'll happen, but better safe than sorry. Then tomorrow, we go to this museum, you tell the people in charge what happened, I introduce myself to the people in charge.
"We make sure your friend is laid to rest honorably, and hopefully we can find someone that can heal you up, then we go look for whoever or whatever is responsible for your friends getting killed. Sound like a plan?"
"Yeah."
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