2022-03-12: Most Unwelcome Assistance
- Log: Most Unwelcome Assistance
- Cast: Loren Voss, Tabitha deVriese
- Where: Elam Base
- Date: March 12, 2022
- Summary: Loren's investigation into the cloudbear's health draw the attentions of Tabitha. She offers her own insight into the bear's wellbeing (and of course harrasses Loren).
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
According to the sign on the door to this particular clinic, located just off of one of the main hallways through Elam Base (southern Aqvy installation, situated on one of the many unoccupied islands among the Deku set), it's closed. Go pick up your bandages or medication from one of the other on-site clinics, is the implication, this one's closed, probably for cleaning. Most might just assume someone got violently sick or bled a lot in there or something, and go about their business.
But there are a few little things amiss. It's definitely occupied -- the light's on, and if one lingers a moment just outside the doors, there's the sound of drawers being opened and closed. Someone's busy in there, and probably not cleaning.
Add to that the fact that, if one checked what passes for his office space out here -- or any of the other clinics, or the main surgical theatre, or convalesence, or anywhere else, Captain Loren Voss, allegedly currently on duty at Elam, sure isn't here.
"There's nothing wrong with you. Why won't you eat?!"
...Also there's the fact that, uh, that's clearly him in there. To go by the agitated crabbing at something or someone else, themselves silent and unanswering of his general complaint.
"--Will you stop trying to bite me?!"
...Probably, something, then?
<Pose Tracker> Tabitha deVriese has posed.
One of the more exciting problems of being in a room above ground is that it is no longer possible to determine what opening Tabitha's going to use to get in! The door is closed and bolted, sure, but there's like, windows and vents and such.
Loren has no special reason to be expecting Tabitha, but that's the fun part of being with the Ministry. Operative deVriese' pretty face floats into view of a window that's a little too far off the ground for that. "Helloooo?" she prompts. "Loren! I brought you some pastries from that fancy place on Windfall! I know you're in there! Nobody whines quite like you!"
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
He is, to all appearances, fussing with something atop the counters. Something alive, by the looks of it -- it's small, white, furry, and once it wriggles free of his grip long enough to permit Tabitha view of its, neither a cat nor a dog.
It is, in fact, positively ursine in appearance.
It's in the next moment that she calls out to him, prompting him to stand up straight and jerk his head towards her so quickly one might wonder if he'd get whiplash. He gapes for all of a second more before throwing himself forward and trying to hide the creature that had been on the countertop, an action that is commendable but ultimately futile.
The creature slips from his grasp just enough to get its head free to start chewing in one of his ears. It doesn't seem to be very successful in this endeavor.
"Ugh," Loren sighs, rising from where he'd pointlessly leaned across the counter. "What do you want, deVriese?" Freed from its prison within Loren's arms, the bear-shaped thing scampers across the countertop. Free at last! ...There is definitely something off about its body, though. Tiny bears usually don't undulate. Or... lose entire pieces of their body, like they were a section of shorn-off cloud?
Loren's shoulders slouch in defeat. "Just... come in." He moves to open the window before she, like, comes in through the vents. Or under the door, or something equally as horrifying to him.
<Pose Tracker> Tabitha deVriese has posed.
"Aww!" Tabitha says, instantly putting all of Loren's ambitions to naught. "It's cute!"
Once the window opens, Tabitha does not, in fact, melt into 700,000 spiders and crawl through the atoms of the wall, instead swinging up and nimbly sliding in through the window. She holds up her hand and a bag flies in through it shortly afterward, with the bag of delights she has previously promised. Those she sets down on a table.
"I always knew you'd find a bear, Loren!" Tabitha says, with a grin, and then squats down next to the little beasty with a smile. "Why it's just precious! And...extremely weird! Why is it disassembling? This isn't escaped from the Non-Newtonian Biology Lab, is it?
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
So far he's successfully managed to smuggle it back to Filgaia, hidden it in his room here while trying to keep it healthy (or whatever passes for healthy for a weird bear thing), all without being detected*. Until now.
(*He's incorrect. Leah already knows about this development. One of these days he might figure to wonder why she's always one step ahead when it comes to knowing what's going on in his life.)
He backs away from the window almost as if he were expecting Tabitha to bite back or something equally horrendous; instead, she's quite taken by the little critter, which is busily investigating the pack of syringes left out on the counter.
Loren seems to sputter and choke for a moment, no doubt entirely unrelated to the remark Tabitha just made.
"...I don't know," he says to her, once he's managed to catch his breath. "I found it on Lunar. There were a lot of things like it there. But... it couldn't even defend itself. So..." He looks away, as if this were difficult for him to admit. "A-anyway, it's like it's partially a cloud, or something like that. It's just... how its body works. And... that's okay. But it's also part bear."
That's the part he's worried about. Does it need to eat? Should it be eating something? Is it something weird, that he can't get here? Should he have left it there, and let it figure out what it was supposed to be doing?
<Pose Tracker> Tabitha deVriese has posed.
The attentive audience will recall that Tabitha used to have a whole stick up her ass about how you can't actually be an alive human on Filgaia and have secrets from the Ministry.
My, how times change! Now the stick is hers!!
But she didn't actually come to harrass Loren about his new pet. She may literally just be here to amuse herself. That mission is accomplished as soon as she gets Loren to sputter in shock at her brazen tease, which awards them both with a big grin on her prominent lips. "Lunar, huh?" she says, idly. "Things are pretty weird over there. Could be anything. Still...I mean, if it has existed this long outside a Leypoint or, uh, whatever it is they have over there," she twirls her wrist, disinterested, "then it probably shouldn't be dependent on that density of energy to live, right?"
...she DID used to be a field researcher...! Sort of!
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Loren, on the other hand -- even knowing what he does at this point -- still thinks he can keep secrets. Adorable.
He in turn might glower at her, but it's already too late: Tabitha has succeeded in what she came here to do.
Which means that the rest of this -- his little friend from Lunar and all that -- is just a bonus, perhaps?
"Yeah. I thought, maybe it was a Seraph, or something, but it's just an animal." That is currently (permanently?) part cloud. No big. "At least, I don't think..." His shoulders slouch and he shakes his head. "...Anyway, it doesn't seem to be suffering, but... shouldn't it eat something? It's turned down everything I've offered it." Which, frankly, has mostly been mess hall leftovers so perhaps there's his problem? Or maybe it doesn't need to eat. Or maybe yet still again, it needs something other than material food.
He reaches out to try to pat its head. It immediately bites his hand.
"It has teeth," he remarks. "But they're like... clouds, or something. So it doesn't hurt." It's just annoying, especially since it seems to be so insistant trying to bite him.
<Pose Tracker> Tabitha deVriese has posed.
Tabitha cooes at the little thing, because it is attempting to eat Loren and that's adorable. "Git 'im!" she giggles, like talking to a pet.
Her big blue eyes turn toward Loren. "Animals aren't usually very subtle about needing food," she notes. "It's all they think about, really. Bears are normally omnivores, but if it's not having any lucky with your skin, it's not gonna be eating much meat of any kind..."
She seeks for his eyes. "Have you been feeling tired?" she asks, suddenly.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
He doesn't back away in horror or anything -- cloud-like substance or not it's still a small effectively toothless animal -- but Loren would be a damn liar if he didn't acknowledge at least internally the fact that Tabitha has, again, made him feel distinctively ill-at-ease.
"Yeah," he says instead, as she explains a little bit about animals. "That makes sense." He hasn't really dealt with them much, outside of that horse he'd used in the Aveh region that had tried to kill him, repeatedly, but it wasn't like it was ever subtle about it when it was hungry...
"Maybe there's something they were feeding it back there," he muses, going off in the wrong direction with this one initially.
Has he been feeling tired lately?
He looks no less than taken aback. "What? No! --Wait, you don't think that it's..."
<Pose Tracker> Tabitha deVriese has posed.
Tabitha shrugs, and swings a little smile. "The only thing it wants to put its mouth on is you, and it seems to be doing just fine," she says, and rolls a shrug through her shoulders. "It's a guess, at best, but it fits the data."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
That shuts him up. He just stares at her for a long moment, then sideeyes the bear, which is currently shoulders deep into an empty box he'd left on the counter.
"...That's messed up. Who would make something that would--" Loren shakes his head. "Maybe it's like a plant, and it's getting all its nutrients from water. It is drinking water." The little bear wriggles on the counter, trying to fit more of itself into the box; this isn't working out for it for a variety of reasons.
"...Anyway, what did you want from me?" he asks, back to eyeing Tabitha suspiciously again.
<Pose Tracker> Tabitha deVriese has posed.
Tabitha shrugs, and stands up a bit straighter, hips swaying into her hand. "Plants don't get their nutrients just from water," she notes, with an arch of her finely plucked eyebrow and an amused smile. "But one of the major components is sunlight, so I guess if he's been getting outside...based on its appearance, my first guess would be pulling in energy it needs from the air." She extends her pointer finger, waving it like a teacher's baton. "Both Lunar and Filgaia have what we would call Aero Ether flow, so if that's all it needs, it's fine on either world. Guess we'll see!"
She smiles, prettily at this conclusion, all straight white teeth.
Loren asks her a question. She blinks at him twice.
"Oh," she says, and her smile remains in place. "Entertainment."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
"I know that," Loren says, closing his eyes for a moment. "There's dirt and air and... stuff." His brother had kept a garden in his room, growing up; it's not a surprise that Loren had picked up, haphazardly, some of the essentials of managing plants. ...Not that he had much talent in doing so, but at least the last time he'd been home and looked in that room (because Lan had been in there) it had looked just as it ever had. Mirza must be taking care of them, he thinks, the thought surprising both for the suddenness of it and the force behind he.
He's never... really thought about the housekeeper too much.
"So you think it's eating the air? Well-- subsisting on the air," Loren corrects, flushing out of how beginning-student his phrasing had sounded just then. "I guess that makes sense. And it doesn't look unhealthy." But he lapses into silence, watching it continue to mess around with the box before -- finally -- it manages to wriggle its way out again.
It doesn't look like a starving animal. But is it okay?
Of course, there are more pressing matters than even this, and they mostly concern the person in the clinic here with him.
She'll be getting her money's worth with the expression he pulls in response to that remark.
"I'm not your entertainment, deVriese! Go bother someone else!" He gestures, as if to suggest she usher herself out the door, far too indignant to remember the important things, such as, oh. Exactly how much she outranks him now, technically speaking.
<Pose Tracker> Tabitha deVriese has posed.
Look she has finally been put in a position where she has to really accept that Solarians can sometimes be every inch as stupid as Farmer John and figured that 'growing plants' was actually a pretty obvious hole in many Solarians' knowledge. She finds herself nodding to Loren's somewhat incomplete summary of his information. "Yes! There is lots of stuff, in the dirt and sunlight."
"I think it's about as likely as anything. For all I know it's filtering microscopic motes of ether out of the Leyline." She rolls her shoulders, palms turning up in a dramatic shrug. "Until it decides it wants to eat or starts to look sick, the best I can do is guess wildly."
And then, Loren gets mad!! She titters behind her cybernetic hand, swaying her hips as she sashays toward the door. "Life is entertainment, Loren!" she laughs. "Really, if you keep scowling like that...!"
She spins on a heel and hops herself up on a countertop, crossing her legs with a high kick. "Your face will get stuck like that, you know."
That is apparently her way of saying 'I have decided to annoy you further.'
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
He rubs at the back of his neck. It... sort of makes sense, he guesses -- at least it doesn't make any less sense than things do currently. Still, he figures, he might as well try to keep checking to make sure there's not something it needs that he's not giving it.
Somehow the thought of turning it over to the labs to analyze does not comfort him in the slightest. Sure, they might be able to figure out if it needs anything, but it would also be the last he'd ever see of it.
...Not that he cares about its wellbeing or anything.
"Huh. I wonder if it might do better in a place that... well, I guess I'll work it out as I go along," he settles for, folding his arms over his chest. Freed from its box, the bear continues its investigation of the countertop. Eventually, no doubt, it will end up exploring the space beyond the countertop. At least the door is closed, or this might have the potential to become a comedy of errors.
He actually lets himself relax a little, for those few seconds when Tabitha struts towards the door. Good, she's leaving.
...She's not leaving, he realizes. His shoulders don't relax as much as they sag. He eyes her wearily from across the room.
"I just cleaned the counters," he tells her, stretching his hands wide, as if he were standing on the very precipice of despair. 'Can you not', he might as say.
The bear, sniffing at him, rears up to bite his finger.
On his face, frustration gives way to resignation. So this is his life now.