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nightlogs2023-11-30 02:51 pm
millenyal_pink) wrote in nightlogs2023-11-30 02:51 pm
Entry tags:
The Quiet Of A Room With No One Around To Find Me Out [Open]
Who: Elle & you!
What: Elle has been hiding since Halloween night. She's fine.
Where: Her room, the infirmary, or the kitchen.
When: Post-Halloween event, aftermath of meeting the Baba Yaga (content warnings below apply to this thread!)
Warnings/Notes: limb loss, dismemberment, self-inflicted injury, references to cannibalism
Elle doesn’t want to admit that she’s avoiding everyone, but every day she fails to leave her quarters is a day that makes that fact harder to ignore. In the aftermath of Halloween night, it’s been all too easy to fall back into her tried and true coping mechanism: isolation and making sure it’s no one’s problem but her own.
a. Elle won’t be leaving her room anytime soon, but there’s plenty of reasons to seek her out. Maybe they need to ask her something, maybe they heard the elves or yetis gossiping about how she was in the infirmary on Halloween, or maybe they just haven’t seen her recently and decide to visit. She can only hope that Jack and Loki have kept quiet about the whole thing.
If someone knocks on the door, she will answer it, but she’ll only open the door enough to stick her head out, keeping her left side blocked from view. She’ll greet them with a casual “what’s up?”
She looks exhausted.
b. Inevitably, the food and medical supplies Elle hoarded before people got back from Burgess is has run out. She doesn’t have much of a choice but to leave.
Elle decides to venture out early in the morning, ideally before even any ‘morning people’ have woken up and after even the ‘night owls’ have gone to sleep. She plans to hit the infirmary first, then the kitchen, and hopefully slink back to her room unnoticed. Her arm is covered by a heavy blanket thrown over her shoulders, so hopefully if she does run into anyone, she can make the interaction short and get past them unscathed. She’s silent as she sneaks through the halls (which is not very helpful if she ends up in someone direct line of sight), but noise is inevitable as she rifles through the medical supplies and pantry respectively. Anyone passing by those rooms will be able to hear that someone’s up and about.
c. Let me know if you have another idea!
(( action or prose is fine, will match style ))
What: Elle has been hiding since Halloween night. She's fine.
Where: Her room, the infirmary, or the kitchen.
When: Post-Halloween event, aftermath of meeting the Baba Yaga (content warnings below apply to this thread!)
Warnings/Notes: limb loss, dismemberment, self-inflicted injury, references to cannibalism
Elle doesn’t want to admit that she’s avoiding everyone, but every day she fails to leave her quarters is a day that makes that fact harder to ignore. In the aftermath of Halloween night, it’s been all too easy to fall back into her tried and true coping mechanism: isolation and making sure it’s no one’s problem but her own.
a. Elle won’t be leaving her room anytime soon, but there’s plenty of reasons to seek her out. Maybe they need to ask her something, maybe they heard the elves or yetis gossiping about how she was in the infirmary on Halloween, or maybe they just haven’t seen her recently and decide to visit. She can only hope that Jack and Loki have kept quiet about the whole thing.
If someone knocks on the door, she will answer it, but she’ll only open the door enough to stick her head out, keeping her left side blocked from view. She’ll greet them with a casual “what’s up?”
She looks exhausted.
b. Inevitably, the food and medical supplies Elle hoarded before people got back from Burgess is has run out. She doesn’t have much of a choice but to leave.
Elle decides to venture out early in the morning, ideally before even any ‘morning people’ have woken up and after even the ‘night owls’ have gone to sleep. She plans to hit the infirmary first, then the kitchen, and hopefully slink back to her room unnoticed. Her arm is covered by a heavy blanket thrown over her shoulders, so hopefully if she does run into anyone, she can make the interaction short and get past them unscathed. She’s silent as she sneaks through the halls (which is not very helpful if she ends up in someone direct line of sight), but noise is inevitable as she rifles through the medical supplies and pantry respectively. Anyone passing by those rooms will be able to hear that someone’s up and about.
c. Let me know if you have another idea!
(( action or prose is fine, will match style ))
Re: A
"Alright, come on in."
Elle's room is classily Christmas-y, with fairy lights, snowflakes, and various baubles, but the color scheme is mostly varying shades of pink, gold, and white. This is slightly undercut by the bloodied bandages in her trash can and a small hospital's worth of a medical supplies sitting on the desk.
Elle's injury isn't hard to see. On her left side, about where her elbow should be, her cardigan goes limp.
She sighs and gestures her right hand to a pair of dusty pink chairs in front of the fireplace which have matching side tables. "You can put that down over there."
Re: A
What does catch her by surprise is the limp sleeve of Elle's cardigan. Interestingly, where Stacia normally lets such things show on her face -- surprise, empathy, sympathy, all that stuff that makes her so good at endearing herself to people -- what Elle will see is Stacia's expression go from deliberate false-innocence to practiced mild neutrality.
Ooh. Oh boy. She hadn't expected to run headlong into that trigger. Easy there, fight-or-flight reflex.
"Hm," she says, her voice faintly abstracted as she scrambles to handle her reaction, "I guess we'll need to get you a little table and chair to eat at, since your desk is busy. Maybe painted wrought iron?"
no subject
"Good thought, but I can't stand the holes in wrought iron tables. I'd prefer something solid. Maybe a painted wood? I'll have to rearrange things to make room."
As Elle speaks, she crosses the room and sits in the armchair to the left. If Stacia sits down, she won't be able to easily see the injury.
"Alright, what kind of soup?"
no subject
Elle's question gives Stacia an opportunity to refocus onto the food she's brought. She glances down at it, then back up to Elle -- who has positioned herself in such a way that her left arm is more out-of-sight, which does make things easier.
"Chicken noodle," she says, a little wryly. "If you were hoping for something Russian to go with the theme, you're going to be disappointed; my parents were never big on 'stuff from the Old Country' in my upbringing."
no subject
Stacia can have a personal detail as a treat.
"Yeah, I think I'm done with authentic Russian cuisine for a while," Elle says with a wry smile. She thinks she's funny.
She carefully lifts the tray with one arm and sets it in her lap. As she gets it situated, every so often her movements stutter when she goes to use a hand that's no longer there.. She recovers quickly-- it would be barely visible to someone who's not paying attention. She doesn't allow her friendly expression to change either, other than the minute tensing of the muscles in her jaw.
no subject
"Well, Christmas isn't an inappropriate motif, given the circumstances," she says dryly. "But I'd bet we're going to be allowed to redecorate as much as we want, provided we don't add to the work being done before Christmas."
She sighs and gestures. "So, what are we doing about this situation? Do I need to yell at anyone?"
no subject
"It happened on Halloween-- the arm was chiminage."
Other people might not get what that means, but Stacia does. It's context that makes the situation simpler in some ways and more complicated in others. An entire limb is a high cost for a deal with a Spirit.
Elle hasn't done a lot of chiminage herself-- the Bastet have a different relationships to spirits than the Garou and the examples she's seen from her pack mates have been pretty extreme. She knows that offerings are often less significant, but you don't go half-way when dealing with a Spirit like that.
"I'm going to go off on a limb-" she says sarcastically, then snorts at her own unintentional joke "-and guess you're familiar with the Baba Yaga?"
no subject
"Yeah, I'm familiar," she says. "Fun fact, my middle name is 'Vasilisa'."
Because there's not being big on stuff from the Old Country and there's children's stories.
no subject
This is the hard part, framing it in a way that makes her decision make sense. She doesn't think she needs to justify herself, but life would be easier if Stacia at least understands why she made this call.
"So we made a deal of our own. Loki and I both sacrificed something valuable, Jack was let go, and we walked away with the macguffin he was trying to get in the first place and without making an enemy out of the Baba Yaga herself."
no subject
"Okay, moving on from the obvious consequences," she says, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the arm Elle has hidden from her, "someone needs to give Jack a smack upside the head if he's being so careless that he almost got eaten by Baba Yaga. We're all lucky that you and Loki arrived when you did, or else it would have been a whole ordeal to find out what happened to him; not to mention he's the last local Guardian. Bunny seems to be fitting into the hole his alternate left, but that's not the same thing."
no subject
Elle can still fight-- probably better than a lot of the others-- but the injury gives her a good excuse to keep a closer eye on Jack.
"He seems to get that he can't do everything by himself, and that he doesn't have to try anymore."
She hesitates before speaking more, unsure of how much more she can say without breaking the trust that Jack gave her.
"He's trying not to advertise it, but I do think being the only Guardian has taken its toll," she says carefully. "If you do end up going out on missions with him, watch his back for me? He's pretty good at keeping it together, but the more he pushes himself the harder it is to bounce back."
Stacia can probably (definitely) tell that Elle's holding back, but she also is likely to respect that Elle is telling her what she can and asking for something that she thinks is necessary.
(If she's also pointing Stacia in a direction where, if she dug deep enough, she could start to figure out that something more is going on with Jack, that's not on Elle. Stacia's observant and clever enough to put the pieces together herself-- whether she pursues it right now is her own choice.)
no subject
"Okay, I trust that you're gonna ride his ass on delegating, so I'll stay out of your way on that," she says, not even grudgingly. Elle has demonstrated that she's capable of people-management, and it's pleasant to not have to do everything herself.
She cocks her head to the side, considering Elle's words and the careful way she's using them. It's the way she talks when she's told someone that she'll keep something secret. That's not strictly ideal, given the subject of their conversation, but Elle's a cat. It's safe to assume that Elle knows when a secret needs to be secret and when it needs to be not a secret anymore.
"Yeah, I'll keep an eye on him," she says. "Should I let Bunny know to keep an eye on him too?"
no subject
"No, I don't think so. That would makes things too complicated right now."
She loves Bunny, but he's stretched thin enough already. The stuff he's doing is too important for him to lose focus. If he becomes suspicious, or found out, that Jack's hiding something about his health, he will not react well. Right now Jack needs to back off of his workload, not get completely shut down. He'll go to Bunny in his own time.
Hopefully.
"If things go to far, we'll see about calling in Bunny ourselves, but I don't think they will." Which is mostly true, and only partly wishful thinking.
no subject
"So presumably that means we're keeping the 'keep an eye on Jack' between us if we don't want Bunny catching wind of it?"