sojournerdeep | [Location - Arrival Plaza] [Open] New Blood

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[Location - Arrival Plaza] [Open] New Blood

The smell of blood surrounds Brier as she regains consciousness in a strange room. Everything is sticky, her head hurts and it takes her a moment to realize that other parts of her should hurt as well. She opens her eyes and looks down, through the rip in the shoulder of her shirt and jacket, but where there was a wound before she passed out, now there is none. Exploration of her gut yields the same conclusion. Nothing there but a scar.

She scans the room and notes the lack of windows and doors. Fear stirs her stomach - and then she hears the voice, welcoming her.

- - -

Brier slides the comm unit into a pocket, though she still doesn’t feel quite comfortable with the device and stands, heading for the door.

As Brier steps out, into the corridor, she rubs her hands on the legs of her uniform, trying to reduce the stickiness. It doesn’t help. Half to mostly dried blood is everywhere on her uniform jacket and the shirt, undergarments and skin underneath. It’s on her arms, her hands, and a small smear is on her head, where she put a hand to the pain there.

She lingers at the door for a moment, when she sees there are others outside, embarrassed by the state of herself. But it isn’t as if she can hide in the starkly decorated, windowless room forever. She steps outside and walks into the plaza, stareing at the surroundings with wide eyes.

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One of the crowd is a pretty woman in her thirties with outdated, permed hair--not that this has any particular significance to the likes of Brier Delman--sitting on a bench with a canvas bag next to her. She doesn't notice Brier immediately, being too occupied inventorying the contents of her bag: first a vegetable, then what looks like a box of eggs. When Brier moves towards her, she glances up and blinks. Not at the girl, but at the blood.

For a moment she looks liable to shy away. Then she gathers some kind of rural courage and smiles, with some little concern, up at Brier. "Are you lost, dear?" she says. "Do you need a doctor?"

Brier notes the woman's expression before she speaks, and shrinks a little - thought it's not as if she can hide the blood. She looks guilty when the woman asks about a doctor and shakes her head, quickly.

"Oh no. I...I don't know how. But the wound has healed." She tugs at the tear in her jacket at the shoulder to show the woman the faint scar. Usually Brier would not show her skin in such a manner, but she is so nervous and the fact that the wounds simply healed is so confusing and alarming that she is not quite thinking straight.

She looks down. "I'm sorry. I know I look alarming. I'm sorry." She tries again to wipe the blood on her hands away onto her pants, with the same results.

Edited 2016-09-22 00:04 (UTC)

"Oh--that's been known to happen." The woman relaxes. The assurance that one isn't dealing with a mortally wounded person appears to go a long way. "With new arrivals, that is. You're new here, aren't you?"

She pats the bench next to her in what is somehow both a reassuring and industrious manner. "Why don't you sit down, dear? You look like you could do to catch your breath."

Brier nods in response to the question of being new. "So showing up just after being wounded isn't very strange?" She wraps her arms around herself and looks at the bench.

"Are you sure? I might get something on it." she says.

She looks around the space again.

"I...didn't die, did I? This isn't...." she struggles for a moment, feeling it somehow blasphemous or at least taboo to suggest aloud that this might be the afterlife, "Some sort of purgatory?"

This is a customarily odd question to ask a stranger. Instead of raising an eyebrow, however, the woman just sits back and considers it. "It's possible," she says. "It's something people have brought up before. But not everyone remembers getting hurt. As far as we can tell, there's no reason not to believe the tutorial," she says with a sympathetic half-smile. "We really might be on a spaceship. I don't know what to think either."

She pauses when she sees something in Brier's expression. "Spaceship?" she repeats. "Do you know what that is, honey?"

Brier clearly doesn't think it is so very odd to wonder aloud if one is in purgatory. She nods at the woman's answer, with no clear understanding. At the question she looks down, adjusting the collar of her uniform and shakes here head. No. She doesn't know what a spaceship is.

The answer might not be surprising. She rather like something out of a fairy tale - not something a main character would wear, but something a bit character would. At least, she would, if she weren't covered in blood.

"I didn't much understand the tutorial." she admits, very softly. "I listened, but I didn't really understand."

Edited 2016-09-22 03:19 (UTC)

The woman nods, though is evidently a bit out of her depth here; it takes her some more thinking to muster an explanation. "A spaceship is a ship that flies between stars and planets, out beyond the sky," she says after a moment. "That's where the tutorial says we are. It says we've been taken to this ship. I don't understand it very well either, but other people seem like they get it."

"Probably it would be no use explaining it to me any more that that anyway." Brier says. "But I think I understand, enough."

"It doesn't matter anyway, really, does it? Wherever we are, it's where we are." She takes a deep breath. "No use lamenting it. Where do people here eat?" She asks. "I've got a terrible headache. And I need to wash my hands."

"Oh, of course," says the woman, who brightens a tad. "As a matter of fact--"

***

Brier is shepherded off--through a peculiar garden with what looks like an asymmetrical gazebo, over a path of reflective tiles--to a small building attached to the main building; this, the woman explains, is what passes for a restaurant in these parts, and she is the one who runs it. "I'm Norma," she says in passing; "What's your name, honey?" And she takes Brier around the back (inasmuch as there is a back: the floor plan and kitchen are rather open) and presents her with a sink, liquid soap and rag included. Norma eyes Brier in case indoor plumbing is a revelation to her as well.

Brier follows the woman, eyes downcast "Brier Delman." She answers. "Thank you for your kindness, Ms. Norma." She glances up and looks around herself when the introduction is finished, and her shyness leaves her momentarily to be replaced by wonder at the garden.

"It's like no place I've ever seen." She says, following Norma into the restaurant.

Brier does indeed look to be unfamiliar with the workings of a sink. She reaches down to unbutton her jacket, revealing a shirt which is even more ripped and bloody than the jacket was. She glances over at Norma, an unspoken plea for help.

The door opens with the little dingle of the bell that Norma has hung from it, and here is a man, middle-aged, looking into the restaurant with an expression that might to some degree match how Brier is feeling. Sort of dazed, that is-- even if it can't be seen by Norma or Brier right now, standing in the back at the sink as they are.

Harold Finch stands looking in, holding the leash of a large dog in hand, gazing at the empty room.

"...hello," he calls after an awkward pause. "Is anyone here? The-- the computer said this was an... eatery?"

Edited 2016-09-23 06:23 (UTC)

Norma is in the middle of demonstrating how the faucet works for Brier's benefit when she hears the new customer's voice; "One moment, please," she calls out, and takes Brier's jacket off her shoulders and tosses it aside, leaving Brier to the sink.

She looks a little stymied by the situation, but comes out a few steps to the kitchen side of the counter and manages a smile for the man's benefit. "Yes, this is my restaurant. Go on and sit down if you like, I've just got to--" What she's 'just got' to do she doesn't elaborate on, and instead goes back to Brier's side to help her with more washing up. Sitting down at the counter would indeed afford an alarming view of the two women, the one bloodied and the other getting bloodier with every moment.

Finch nods faintly, still stuck in a mode where processing isn't fully happening. He takes a few steps, forgetting to ask if the dog is allowed. Something about the sound of running water, the sense-presence of two people around a sink, draws his gaze up (how many times has he enacted that with Mr. Reese, washed out a wound or a scrape-- of course, clearly this is not that, it's just a dish being washed or--)

--the visual impact of dark red stains makes the breath wheeze out of him. Finch makes an involuntary noise, then says-- "Bear, zit--" before hurriedly hobbling in the direction of the two women, face aghast.

"Are you alright? Is she alright--? Should I call a doctor," Finch manages, fumbling for the new strange sleek phone he'd been given, before coming to the unhappy realization he has no idea what he'd call or if there are doctors. He stumbles to a stop, staring at the bloody stains on this shy-looking young woman, scanning for injuries with rather more urgency than a simple passerby might evince.

(Detective Carter, she's barely been buried a week, and John, John is hurt, John is missing, John is God knows where--)

"I'm not hurt!" Brier says holding up up her half washed hands. His fear radiates and notches up Brier's own. The raised hands tremble.

From the small tears in the cloth, the pattern on the cloth of the blood radiating out and down from a place in her shoulder, and another from the lower left side of her stomach, one could surmise that the blood is probably hers, and that she probably lost a lot of it. Enough that her statement might seem very improbable.

On the other hand, this is a somewhat improbable place.

"I'm not hurt," she repeats. "Norma says that it happens sometimes when people come here. Wounds heal. The wounds are gone." She does not favor him with the view through the hole in the shoulder of her clothing that she afforded Norma.

"I'm...sorry if I scared you."

There's some blinking, and then some awkward subsiding, and a throat clearing, at least from Finch-- as he registers there really does seem to be no source of the injury, however much blood there is.

"Ah. Right," he says faintly, and takes a little step back, glancing between the two blonde women sheepishly. "Sorry, I-- saw the blood and-- please, don't let me-- interrupt."

Bear whines from over there; Finch shuffles back that way, and sits down heavily in one of the chairs, his hand absently going to the fur at the dog's neck and burrowing in for what comfort it may provide in this unsettling moment.

Brier swallows. She looks down, away from Norma, away from the man she has upset and scrubs her hands vigorously, slowly, and with effort uncovering the white skin underneath. She continues to scrub until it is pink. She rolls up her sleeves and scrubs the arms as well, until she hits patches of clean skin on both arms. When she is finished she reaches up to turn the faucet back off (she may not know a lot - but she learns fast.)

"I'm sorry." she says, for the umpteenth time. "Thank you very much, Ms. Norma."

"I understand why I alarmed you." Brier tells the man, looking down, her hair falling in her eyes. "The wounds were very bad. But they're gone now."

"I hope I didn't make you lose your appetite."

She thinks about her own appetite. She knows she should be hungry. She knows she should eat, but her stomach won't seem to settle. She reaches to but a hand on it but shies away from doing so, remembering the blood on her shirt.

"And this is where people eat?"

"Why don't you have a seat, dear," comes Norma's response as she pilots Brier by the shoulders around the counter and into a chair, a couple chairs away from Harold Finch. "This is what passes for a restaurant around here--but don't worry about paying, that's not how it works," she adds, going back around the counter. "Here, I've got some pie, while I heat something up. Do you want tea, either of you? Hot tea?"

She doesn't wait for answers, just disappears briefly into the back and leaves the two of them in awkward silence.

"Tea would be lovely," Harold answers on automatic, taking comfort in the offer that speaks of something so familiar and normal.

"I'm afraid I don't have the slightest idea what's going on. Besides what the-- the voice said when I... got here."

He looks between the two ladies as if hoping some answer will materialize from either of them.

"Ah-- my name is Harold," he offers. He looks as though he might offer a hand to shake, but 'Norma' is busy with tea and the pale blonde girl is just a few seats too far.

Bear 'solves' this, for a certain value of 'solve' -- he bounces to his doggy feet and comes up to Brier with a plaintive doggy whuff and an inquisitive look, as if he too wanted to ask if she were alright.

"Bear, stop that-- he won't bite you," Finch hastens to reassure the girl. "Bear! Hier!"

Brier smiles, though the smile is weak. She reaches down to pet the dog.

"We had dogs. My family." she says. "He seems sweet."

"I'm Brier." she says. "I've only been for a few hours."

She scratches behind Bear's ears and glances up at Finch. The curiosity in her eyes does not travel so far as to move her to ask a question. Instead she waits, eyes on the man, for what he chooses to share. She takes in his posture and tailored clothing and begins to formulate an opinion on what sort of person she is dealing with.

"Oh, yes, well, he-- he is sweet," Finch says, a bit at a loss, allowing the petting-of-his-dog. Bear relishes the hand skritching at his big blunt head, sitting there with a doggy grin that shows a lot of teeth and a big lolling tongue.

"It's nice to meet you, Brier," he offer carefully. "I think about an hour, here. It's quite... quite the shock, isn't it. You... arrived injured?"

Brier tilts her head, frowning. "I was injured before I came. I don't exactly know how it is I arrived. I fainted."

"Do…you want to hear? I don't imagine it is a good thing to talk about while eating. But I can explain."

"Were you doing something important?" she asks him. He looks important to her. "Do you know how we got here?"

She smiles at Bear. "Good boy…" she whispers.

Finch leans an elbow on the counter and carefully places his chin in his hand to face the young woman (girl, he's tempted to think) -- carefully, because what would be a casual posture from anyone else is a stiff, awkward thing for him. "Injured?

"I would, yes-- if you don't mind explaining. It might be meaningful, if there's some-- common thread in all this."

He smiles a faint toothache smile at the idea he was doing something important. "Walking my dog. And no, I'm afraid I have no idea.

"He likes to be scratched on his chest."

Brier slides out of the chair and lowers herself to the floor, reaching to scratch the dog’s chest, smiling. Her expression sobers as she looks back at Finch.

”I was in a fight.”　She says. She looks down at the hole in her shirt. "He was better than me. We both knew it. We both knew it was a fight I couldn't win, but I had to. Otherwise he would have..." She trails off, her hand on Bear stilling.

"He stabbed me. In the shoulder. And then, when I tried to keep my feet, in the gut. I fell, then. There was so much blood I was sure I was dying..."

She stands and sits on the chair, not meeting the man's eyes. "Then I woke up here, and the wound was gone."

"I am not sure what kind of common thread there could be, there, but I am not always very smart."

Oh, Bear is very happy you're joining him down here, friendly human! Have some face licking.

"Bear," Finch scolds absently, the scolding not even making it into his tone as he listens, brows drawn together. He looks rather pale-faced at the mention of stabbing, and he is silent for a handful of seconds in the wake of Brier's soft concluding assessment.

He hesitates a moment, then asks cautiously, "Are you... religious at all? This would seem to qualify as a near-death experience for you."

Though not for him, and Finch rubs his hand absently back and forth on the counter, thinking.

Brier nods, quietly. After a moment she agrees aloud "Yes. A near death experience."

She bites her lip and casts about for a change in subject "The place where you are from, does it have...spaceships?"

"Ah, well..." Finch twists a little on the stool, peering out at what can be seen of the landscape.

"Sort of. We have--" he pauses, as he registers Brier's tech level, judging by her clothes at least, may be well back of his own, hang on, reassess...

"...we have vehicles that can leave the earth," he says carefully, "and fly up in the stars, and that's the literal definition of a 'space ship,' but it's nothing at all like all of this."

Finch tries for a game, reassuring smile. "I don't know how much you know about boats? If you ever made a toy boat with a leaf and a twig, and then compared that with a real ship that carries passengers and cargo... I think that's about what my 'space-ship' is compared to this place.

"I'm guessing you don't have spaceships where you're from?"

Brier smiles, very slightly and shakes her head. "No. We don't have spaceships. Even the leaf-and-twig kind."

She rubs her arms and says, carefully, "I am worried. I have a lot of questions and I am not sure I can bring myself to bother Norma. Do you have any idea where we are supposed to go to sleep?"

"I would think that worry is a very valid reaction to this place," Finch says drily. "I'm rather worried myself, so we can be worried together, if you like."

He fusses a bit with Bear's collar, then glances up at the question. "I'm... from what I've gathered, you simply find a room you might like and, well, appropriate it. Squatter's rights, haha. There doesn't seem to be rent, or hotels, or anything of the sort. So... just, um, select something that makes you feel safe, I suppose."

Harold's face reflects that he's somewhat aware of the absurdity of what he's saying. He gamely tries for a bit more:

"Perhaps you might find something close to-- Norma's-- restaurant. That way there'd be someone close at hand if you had problems. Did you get something like this when you arrived?" he asks, pulling out a very sleek little smartphone from his pocket.

Brier listens. She's so tired. So very tired, after everything with Xanti. It feels like it was a million years ago from were she is sitting, in this strange alien place, but she can still feel, and smell the sticky blood on her undershirt.

She nods and takes out her device. "I am not sure just how to work it. It talked to me a little though. Before."

"I am not sure anywhere here would make me feel very safe, but it seems like a lot of people settle near here. If I can go anywhere, it might be smart to go further.

"I wonder if they have b..." she trails off before saying the word 'baths'. As alone and unsure as she feels there are probably lines she shouldn't cross discussing with a strange man.

To Finch's eyes, the device Brier has is clunky and primitive-looking, and he's privately glad his own is the smart little thing it is-- but he says nothing of that, of course. Instead he offers a smile that he tries to make reassuring. It feels rusty on his face-- he's still reeling from being whisked here, and from the week he'd had before here-- but there is nothing like the crisis of another person to distract you from your own griefs. That's a motto that Finch has wholeheartedly been living the last few years.

"I do know a little about machines like this," he says carefully, "if you'd like me to try and help you figure out how to use it?

"Would you find it easier if you could use it by talking to it, and if it talked to you?"

"Do you think it's important? Do you think I will need to go on using it?"

She offers it too him. "I am not sure I would ever be able to use it properly on my own. But being able to talk to it might help."

"...yee-ees, I think you should.... try and get the hang of it."

Finch clears his throat. How does one express the significance, the usefulness, of instantaneous communication to someone who's never had it at their fingertips? Hmmn.

"If you should wind up hurt or lost," he says carefully, "you could use this to call someone else-- myself, or Norma, for instance. Even if just for a safeguard against, say, falling and wrenching your ankle, it's worth learning how to use, I'd think.

Finch takes the device, starting to maneuver through the screens with only a moment's orientation as to her item's particular interface.

"If you think so." Brier says. "I'll do my best."

"Thank you. For your help." She sighs, leaning on her hand. "I'm very sorry, but I think I may need to go find a place to lie down. Mr. Finch. When you are finished."

Finch offers her a sympathetic smile that is a little weary in its own right. "I completely understand. I'll try to make this quick."

Fortunately, the interface is simple enough by Finch's standards. He elicits a few voice commands from Brier to calibrate things, but in short order he's passing the phone back to her, after explaining how to send out messages.

"Get some rest, alright, miss Brier?"

Brier nods and smiles as she stands up, device in hand. She gathers her bloody jacket and heads off to find a place to sleep

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[Location - Arrival Plaza] [Open] New Blood

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