(mini-event) IS THE DOCTOR IN?

[vestigemods]

IS THE DOCTOR IN?

OCTOBER 8TH

► SEMANTIC OVERVIEW

This mini-event takes place in the hospital (town location 5), also featured in the dreamscape of the latest Test Drive Meme. The hospital supposedly has three floors + a basement:
FLOOR-BY-FLOOR OVERVIEW (DROP-DOWN)


• 03 - This uppermost floor appears to be a regular modern hospital wing untouched by apocalyptic disaster, with various tidy patient rooms + an empty nurse's stand. Further down the hallways sit various offices. At a glance, it's difficult to tell from this floor that the hospital is run-down at all... Aside from the way the stairs have crumbled away, at least.
  
• 02 - Good question. you can't even fucking find the second floor. The elevator doesn't stop there, and there's no door on the wall in the stairwell where a second floor entry should be. What a shame - the signs say that's where you'd find the cafeteria.
  
  
• 01 - Basically what you see in the header pic: a very run-down hospital floor, consisting of messy/dirty patient rooms, abandoned nurse's stations, and a check-in/check-out desk (with the corresponding front door, currently jammed but not locked). This floor also has a trio of operating rooms, but these seem to be locked up tight... A fact which some might consider a blessing in disguise.
  
• B1 - Primarily of interest is the morgue / autopsy room (powered + in functional condition), but this floor also contains locker rooms, a laundry room, a break room, and a handful of other rooms with locked doors and covered windows that Trace doesn't want to make shit up for just yet. Each end of the hospital has an emergency exit door, unlocked from both the inside and outside.
Aside from 02, all floors can reach one another via the stairs (aside from the gap near the top) and the elevator (once someone has brought it up to 03 the first time, it continues to run as normal).

Exit/entrances include the main entrance (floor 01, unlocked but jammed and needs to be opened via strength) and the emergency exits (floor B1, unlocked and unimpeded).

FLOOR 3 ► LEAVING SO SOON? YOU HAVEN'T BEEN DISCHARGED

WAKING UP

You wake in a clean white bed to the overly-hygienic scent of fake wildflowers and the morning sun filtering in through the windows. You're in a hospital room, a visiting chair at bedside, a television hanging on the adjacent wall. Perhaps you're in a private room and can wake at your own leisure. Perhaps your room is shared, and someone else is waking up in their own bed on the opposite side of the cloth divider.

You have no memory of how you arrived here in this room, nor are you entirely sure where this is. For most, a glance out the window is all it takes to get some semblance of a clue - the town's skyline stretches out before you, landmarks recognizable but unfamiliar from what appears to be your third-floor height.

At the end of the bed, you might just find your file. At least, it seems like your file - it lists your name, one or more injuries you don't recall ever having (or perhaps injuries you suddenly have but don't recall ever receiving), and a brief but alarming summary of the cause of the injuries. That's the worst part, the summary. It's almost always something you don't want to hear - you're careful and the injury was borne of recklessness, you value your mother most of all and were stabbed by her hand, or any number of possibilities all written down in carefully clinical terms. If you've woken up alone in a shared room, you might also find a loved one's file attached to the adjacent bed, similarly concerning in content and with no loved one in sight to reassure you that the tale the document tells is a lie.

Outside of your room is a hall with many other such rooms, their occupants stirring now just as you are. A nurse's station sits nearby, thoroughly abandoned. Just beyond that is the doors to the elevator and the stairwell.

But leaving this place isn't quite so easy.

Calling the elevator earns a polite ding! before the elevator doors open to reveal an empty shaft, cables extending downward to indicate that the actual elevator lingers far below. The stairs aren't much better - you have six, maybe seven stairs attached to the stairwell landing before a section seems to have crumbled away, picking up again against the opposite side of the stairwell a good fifteen feet farther down.

Those who can fly or even hover may have no trouble at all. For everyone else? Perhaps you can set to work on figuring out a way to climb down... Or maybe, with luck, someone who woke up in the basement might elevator their way up to your rescue.

THE HALLWAYS

Or, rather than beating your head against the metaphorical wall that is finding a way down from the third floor, perhaps you decide to explore the hallways. Maybe you think there might be another way out! (Hospitals don't just have one stairwell right? That's a fire hazard.) Or maybe you just want to know what else exists on this floor, for the sake of scavenging or even for your own curiosity.

The hallways are, for their part, all very much the same - but those who may have experienced this place in a dream will at once notice the differences. These hallways are well-lit, the room doors are largely unlocked (mostly rooms like the ones you woke up in, with the occasional supply closet), and no matter how far you walk there's no strange sense of distortion driving you to turn back.

At the furthest reach of the hallway in each direction (the points of the H that makes up the hospital's shape), you'll find a host of small offices. Most are unlocked, and the filing cabinets within contain a number of patient files... Some of which you may even recognize, the information within matching that which you gleaned from one of the spirits last month, were you the sort to try to chat. Many of them, it seems, were once patients here, though this is hardly the morgue and none of these files list any sort of cause of death. This is true of each of the third-floor wings except the northwestern-most branch - there, the offices have long since been emptied, cabinets empty of files, desks void of any long-abandoned signs of life. A single locked door sits at the end of the hall, shades drawn across the small door-window. A dim light glows inside.

FLOOR 1 ► THAT'S A YIKES FROM ME

WAKING UP (CW: NEEDLES IN ¶2)

Those who woke on the third floor woke somewhere clean, somewhere adjacent to peaceful. Those who wake on the first floor, however, have no such experience. Though you wake in a hospital room, arguably even on what was once a hospital bed, that's where the resemblances end.

In sharp contrast with those awakening almost pleasantly two stories up, you wake exhausted and sore in the joints, as if gripped by the early signs of some sort of flu. And that's those who are lucky. Many wake into a world made hazy by anesthesia which has only just begun to wear off, or perhaps even still linked to an IV filled with a questionable unknown substance. Yikes. Might want to hurry up and deal with that.

The condition of the room itself is far different than those upstairs, too. It's dusty, even smelling of mildew - or perhaps that's just the bed on which you've awoken. The room looks almost ransacked, cabinets half-open, medical supplies and utensils strewn about the unwashed floor. Rust dots any metal surface in sight, and no wonder, considering the various points of visible water damage along the ceiling and walls. If the lights in your room function at all, it's just one flickering fluorescent... Otherwise, the only light washes in through the dirty window and (much dimmer) from the dim and similarly-unsteady fluorescents lining the hallway outside the door to your room.

It's hardly a place that anyone would wish to stay in for long. In fact, you may be on your way out the door before you notice even the half of the health code violations in your immediate vicinity - but one item might catch your eye before you go. A file, dusty but conspicuously undamaged in contrast with the rest of the room. Perhaps it's on the countertop nearby, or on the floor next to an upturned medical station nearby. Some may not have files at all, a mercy considering what's inside: Uncensored procedural pictures of some sort of invasive surgery you don't recall ever having. No, wait - the memory is filtering back to you, extremely hazy but present, as if you woke briefly during that procedure before falling unconscious again. A search of your own body shows no sign whatsoever that such a surgery ever occurred. Was it real, or are you imagining it?

Either way, it's time to get the hell out of here.

THE HALLWAYS?

The hallway outside of your room is in similar ruin, covered in dust and dirt and mold, furniture upturned, wallpaper peeling and in some places even ripped away. A nurse's station sits abandoned, leaving you and (by the sounds of it) any number of others to wake up in alarm and distress and sort through your surroundings alone. Or... not quite alone, I suppose. You do have each other.

Follow the hallway in one direction and you'll find the main hospital entrance. The front door itself seems to be unlocked, but the automatic-opening mechanism isn't really functioning and it's... a little bit jammed into place. Might need a bit more arm strength (or a helpful co-abductee) to get that open. Otherwise, the area has an intake desk in predictably poor shape, next to which sits a stairwell and elevator. The elevator sits on your floor, waiting to take you either up or down... And believe it or not, it's the better choice, what with the stairwell missing about fifteen feet of stairs just below the third floor. You might also notice that neither the stairs nor the elevator seem to stop on the second floor. Huh. I wonder what's up with that?

Venture further into the array of first-floor hallways and you'll honestly just find more of the same thing you awoke to but often in even worse shape, walls crumbling away between rooms, floors stained with dried blood. Down one branch of the hospital's H sits a trio of operating rooms, but the doors are locked, the rooms inside entirely dark.

BASEMENT ► DOES IT HELP IF WE THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD?

THE FRIDGE

Here, you wake in the dark and the cold.

The dark is absolute, and unless your eyes are especially keen, you'll need to use your hands to get a bearing on your surroundings - and once you do, well. The news isn't great. You've awoken in what feels like a coffin-sized metal container, cold against the inexplicably bare skin of your back. If such a thing exists in your world, you might recognize that the container is chilled artificially.

Maybe you're trapped altogether, with no choice but to shout and bang on the walls and hope someone outside is close enough to hear - because unlike in the warped version of this very building that some walked in a dream, each and every one of these cells has been diligently sealed. But drawing attention may not be so easy... As you begin to bang and shout, you'll hear similar banging from your left and your right, from above and below you, the room outside your cell filled with a cacophony of fist-against-metal with nothing but your muffled shouting to guide whoever is nearby to the correct cell.

With luck, a rescuer (whoever that may be) drags the floor of your cell out into the open air of a dingy run-down morgue. You were trapped in cold storage, and here in the light you find that you've been dressed down to nothing but a flimsy backless hospital gown, a tag tied to your toe. Upon closer inspection, the toe tag lists your name, where you're from, and... a cause of death? Since when were you dead? Or perhaps you already knew you were dead and the cause of death isn't quite what you recall. Either way, the contents of your toe tag are disconcerting at best, abjectly alarming at worst.

Around you, the other locked fridge cells have gone quiet. It's almost as if their residents were raising a fuss specifically to keep your rescuer from finding you, giving up once their cause proves fruitless. Opening these cells will find corpses in varying stages of decomposition... Certainly in no state to make such a ruckus.

But on to more practical matters: Your clothes and belongings can be found in the laundry room next door. Let's see if you can make it that far without showing a friend or stranger the entirety of your bare ass.

THE TABLE (CW: MEDICAL/SURGICAL GORE)

Or perhaps you don't wake in cold storage. Perhaps you wake on the autopsy table itself, one of three or four spaced evenly under the flickering fluorescents of the hospital morgue. A thin layer of paper covers your otherwise nude body, and beside the table, a tray of autopsy tools (some bloody, some supposedly clean) on a rusty cart within arm's reach.

An eight-inch-long rectangle has been cut from the front of your paper gown, and you're quick to see why: Some of you have a 6-inch-long, clumsily-stitched surgical slice down the center of your chest, almost as if an autopsy was attempted but quickly patched up before it could be finished. The rest of you aren't fortunate enough to have the stitches - your surgical slice is still open and bleeding mildly. Whether stitched or unstitched, the wound isn't any kind of life-threatening, having missed all vital organs and arteries... Not that it's terribly pleasant regardless.

If you (or a helpful friend or stranger) want to patch that shit up, there are plenty of supplies to bandage the area for now, or even a needle and surgical thread to stitch that up properly. Shame there's no anesthetic.

Once you've achieved enough relative chill to actually care about your prevailing near-nudity, your clothes and belongings can also be found in the laundry room next door. Maybe try not to bleed on them?

MOD NOTES

• This is a catch-all log for top-levels pertaining to October's Is The Doctor In? mini-event on the 8th. Go ahead and utilize vestigenet for any event-related network posts you'd like to make - characters inside the hospital are welcome to find their phone on their person, at bedside, or somewhere nearby.
  
• You're welcome to have your characters visit and explore the hospital on any other day henceforth, since this is now an unlocked location and will be added to the Locations page, but this is the only day on which people will be waking up here. Please utilize the October Catch-All for all non-event hospital threads!
  
• Characters who don't wake up here can still get involved if they have some reason to come join the fun. Maybe someone from inside texts them for help, or maybe they're walking down the street and see movements in the window of a building they know is supposed to be locked. Go ahead and wing it re: why they're there, honestly.
  
• Most of the accessibility obstacles are meant to induce drama, not limit threading capability - as such, feel free to (for example) assume that someone has already brought the elevator up to 03 or pried the front doors open on 01 if you don't want to fuck with those obstacles in your own threads!
  
• A few bits of exploratory intrigue have been peppered through these prompts. One of them is specifically what I was referring to when I mentioned 'exploratory subplots' back in the August Bulletin. If your character would poke around in suspicious places, by all means, hit me up on the questions top-level for more info!
  
• Being ambiguous about this since the prompt itself was under a CW, but if you opted into the 'questionable unknown substance' aspect of Floor 1's waking-up options and actually want something to come of it (as opposed to it just being some sort of alarming fake-out), hit me up and I'll toss you some side effects.
  
• If you want to have your character wake up via the fridge prompt in B1 but either don't want to fuck with a rescuer or want them to be able to get out and help someone on the table, feel free to say that the morgue fridge cell doors open on their own after a while, averaging on an hour but I'm not picky.
  
• Any questions can be directed to this top-level or, for a quicker response, to Trace on discord/plurk.
  
  

Comments

You Know

[snowflicks]

[How he ended up in here is anyone's guess. The Technicians most likely he assumes. A fair assumption as far as he's concerned. Anyway, Song Lan wanders the halls of the basement, looking for a way out, listening for others who could be here as well.

In danger or otherwise. It doesn't take long for the echoing sound of banging and muffled shouting to catch his attention. Following the sound he comes to a room that looks alien to him. Cold and uninviting. The banging doesn't let up, the shouting within not desperate, but still hoping for anyone to hear them.

They're in luck, Song Lan heard and he'll go to the door of the cold storage unit and give it a good hearty tug. With his strength it opens easily. Locked or not, whether on purpose or by age and rust, it stood little chance.

It can't warn the person that he's not here to hurt them, so unceramoniosly he'll pull the drawer out with the person on it. It's not until he sees their face that his quiet yet concerned expression changes. Eyes go wide, lips parting in shock.

Xingchen? But how?

It feels like his entire body is frozen looking down at him, unsure what to believe. His sight? Or what he knows is true?

Xiao Xingchen was dead.]

[daozhangs]

( one moment, he's banging at the metal walls. the next, the very floor on which he lies is in motion, sliding out into a light which (however dim it may be) is terribly harsh after such thorough dark, and his hand lifts briefly to shield his eyes before he quite registers the figure hovering above him.

the hand drops just enough to meet wide, incredulous eyes set in a very familiar face, and a relieved little grin blooms on his face. ) Zichen, ( he greets, perhaps more warmly than usual but it's not often that their reunion involves rescuing him quite so thoroughly.

both hands find the edges of the platform on which he lies, which now seems to hover just below zichen's chest in height over empty air, and he pushes himself upright. which is precisely when it occurs to him (by virtue of the rush of chilly air against his back) that whatever manner of paper-thin robe this is, they've dressed him in it backwards and haven't even done him the courtesy of tying it shut. his brow flickers in the briefest of scowls, and - ) Forgive me, would you mind turning away a moment? I'd like to fix this. ( with a hand lifting to tap fingertips lightly against the bare back of his shoulder, to indicate the robe nonsense he's awoken to. the precise matter of why he's dressed as such is one he'll get to, but only after he's fixed it and zichen has told him where it is they even are. )

a whole lot of words for: and then he turned around

[snowflicks]

[Zichen.

The warmth of his name spoken by Xingchen doesn't make this any easier. It's a dream in a nightmare. How was he even here right now? His mind reminds him that Jiang Yanli is here as well too.

Some how they're not all from the same time. Is that what happened here or... Xingchen's missing spirit cognition... did the Technicians some how bring him back that way?

When asked to look away for Xingchen's dignity he's afraid to. What if he turns back around and he's gone? Just a cruel vision meant to remind him what's lost. As if he ever could forget. Song Lan would never allow himself that, carrying the memory and continuing the path him and Xingchen hoped to achieve... it's all he had left.

He gives his friend the moment of privacy he needs, still quiet. He feels tense, like at any moment something will snap.]

good words tho

[daozhangs]

( though his request was followed up by a brief assessing glance around the room, zichen's blatant hesitation draws xingchen's attention back quite quickly, brow knitting just slightly as his mouth opens with intent to question ('zichen?') - but that's when zichen does indeed turn around, leaving xingchen to slide from the chilly platform with an odd feeling in his gut. something isn't right.

the notion lingers as he quickly slips out of the short-sleeved paper-thin robe and puts it on the proper direction, tucking one side over the other even as he lacks the means to properly tie it. the sound of his shuffling and the faint hum emanating from one of the overhead lanterns(?) (some sort of buzzing bug, perhaps?) feel overly loud in the silence of the room - which is when it hits him. there was no returning 'xingchen,' not this time. zichen has yet to speak to him. )

Zichen, ( he begins again, a note of concern creeping into his tone as he steps up beside him now (with both arms crossed low on his chest to hold the robe shut, of course). ) Are you not speaking with me? ( though it's outwardly as assured as any other attempt to problem-solve, there's the slightest unbalance to the words, like he isn't quite sure how to find footing with the notion that they're at some sort of odds, as rarely as it occurs.

but now he's looking at him properly, and oh but zichen is terribly pale. pale and... tired. years' worth of exhaustion, and all in the time since xingchen last saw him not yet a full week ago. the odd feeling in his gut has congealed to something dark and murky, because something is very wrong - but wrong in such a way that he lacks the proper context to even begin to guess at. a hot flare of frustration and an icy lick of fear both make bids to crawl down the length of his spine, but his lips press together just slightly and he douses out both in a moment. )

No u

[snowflicks]

[There's a heavy quiet as Xingchen takes care of things. He can feel the question that's not there, his friend is not blind right now. No... no Xingchen looks as he did not long before everything fell apart.

Before Xue Yang ruined everything the first time. Time was nothing here. The Technicians could do that.

Xingchen may be younger, but he can see. He's not blind. Song Lan's silence is huge as well.

Zichen, are you not speaking with me?

The question finally comes and he turns to his friend, head shaking firmly, mouth set in a thin line as his brows furrow. There's confliction in his eyes, eyes gifted to him by this same man. Eyes that look at him.

What can he tell Xingchen? Anything feels like too much. After yet another moment of silence that hangs too long, Song Lan turns to the metal slab his friend had been laying on. Fingers write out what he can't say, the words lingering long enough for Xingchen to read them before fading away.]

My voice has been taken from me. It's not your fault Xingchen.

[He means that. In every way possible. Though the context may be lost to his friend currently, he might realize what he means if he asks further questions.]

you get to help me get back in practice for young xc so sorry he's rusty

[daozhangs]

( the response he gets, though nonverbal still, is resolute enough to put xingchen just fractionally at ease. but whether or not he has angered his friend into silence, something is still very much incorrect here. this place, his state of undress when he woke - but also zichen, in ways that xingchen can identify and others that he can't.

but his eyes are drawn from the man before him to the cold metal bed on which he himself recently lay, where zichen's finger now dictates faintly-glowing words across the surface. his voice has been... taken from him. taken how? is it some sort of curse? but - 'it's not your fault xingchen.' xingchen's eyes lift from the words to his companion, then back down to the smooth metal surface, now void of any trace of writing. but still he looks at it for a moment, brow knit, as he balances that which he knows must be their priority with that which remains conspicuously unknown. because make no mistake, he knows zichen far too well not to notice that things are being kept from him. and deliberately so, as well. but even as that much is plain, there's so much to the man that is suddenly foreign to xingchen. so much that lingers unknown and unknowable, facets of this zichen which are not any part of the man he knows.

but they are daozhangs, and there are objectively far more important matters at hand.

so his eyes lift to zichen's again, all concern wiped away in favor of disciplined practicality. ) What can you tell me about this place and how we've arrived in it? ( he doesn't need to explain the bewildering unfamiliarity of most everything he sees, even here in their immediate vicinity. )

If it makes you feel better I never know wtf I'm doing as Song Lan

[snowflicks]

[They know each other too well, no words are needed to understand that there is a lot being left unsaid.

But Xingchen is right. There's a time and a place and right now they should deal with their present predicament before they discuss anything else. So that his friend poses a query about the where and hows of his appearance here. Song Lan can handle that.

He reaches into his robes to pull out the pamphlet he keeps on him, holding it out to Xingchen. Once he's taken it he'll still use the metal slab to write more words on.]

Faceless men who call themselves the Technicians brought us here.

They have great power that has gathered many people from different places and times.

We are here to suffer and die for their whims or cause they've not explained.

[It's a lot to take in, he knows. What he tells and Xingchen and the words in the pamphlet don't give much more details than that alas.]

[daozhangs]

( the item which zichen offers feels almost like parchment or paper, but it's even thinner than both, and it's inexplicably smooth. words are printed across the front - THE CONTAINMENT ZONE AND YOU. a place for containment. containing what, exactly?

but zichen has begun to write words of his own as well, so before the paper(?) is examined any further, he turns his eyes on those instead. 'technicians', the word settles oddly in his chest, foreign but nonetheless clear in intent. and then there's 'from different places and times', which he hardly has time to wrap his mind around before he's informed that they're here to die.

xingchen's mouth opens to speak but no words quite come, and after a moment it closes again, his attention turning back to the folded sheet in his hands. and he reads it quickly but diligently, lips pressed together just slightly until he encounters - ) It says that we're here to feed some manner of gods. ( human sacrifices, while unfortunate, aren't unheard of amongst more obscure doctrines, usually found in small villages along the fringes of the cultivation world. so these 'technicians' are religious, then?

but even that pales in importance when he reads the bit about death. eyes lift to zichen, sharp and bewildered despite his discipline. ) What does it mean, we'll 'come back'? ( he understands what it sounds like, but that can't possibly be correct. )

[snowflicks]

[Xingchen takes it all relatively well considering. His friend has to contend with everything concerning Zichen, or let's be real they won't deal with it, then this Technician stuff.

Let's not even get into Xingchen waking up in some weird metal wall coffin.

Zichen let's his friend read and take it all in. Their deaths feeding gods is an explanation, sure, but there's so much there unsaid. Much like Zichen and why he can't speak, why he looks older, different.

Xingchen's eyes find his, wild with questions, the usual calm determination gone. The cruel irony the Technicians have placed the young daozhang in and he doesn't even know. Zichen's eyes slide away from the ones that meet his, not wanting to give away the future and pain that are all there.]

Those who die here are returned some days after their death.

How they do it I do not know.

I have yet to experience it myself.

[daozhangs]

( returned from death. those who die here are returned from death. is this- some manner of necromancy? demonic cultivation, at a far greater scale than that of the yin iron? xingchen senses no such resentment in the area, but he knows far better than to trust so brief an assessment.

but what if it isn't necromancy? there is so unfathomably much even just within this room, with zichen, within the paper in hand - so much that he hasn't an explanation for. he can't even guess at once.

and so, a simple: ) Alright. ( which isn't to say that any of this is alright - but it does say that he's electing not to attempt to deal with it right at this moment. the paper is handed back to zichen, his gaze casting off toward the door. ) If I awoke here in peril, then surely others have as well. I'd like to see if anyone needs assistance.

[snowflicks]

[He understands, truly. There is so much here he doesn't understand, probably never will. It's easier to fall back on what they've always done.

Help the people.

They can handle things later. Maybe.]

I am certain you are right.
There could be many others like you.

Come then.

[He means for them to go together of course.]