(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

[legbreakings]

That was very considerate of you. [ As you would expect from well-known heroes such as these two. Trying to play the part of the jaded sect leader or not, it is hard not to feel overcome by the same hero worship he had felt when their paths first crossed when he was a teenage boy.

Since he has Song Lan's agreement to accompany him, he starts to lead them further into the maze of dimly-lit corridors. There are noises sometimes, like something skittering, and the flickering lights hiss and crackle sometimes as they struggle with breaking down completely. All these ominous noises have him on edge, sometimes jumping at shadows only to find himself alone with only Song Lan for company. ]

Maybe we can find clues what happened here. Or what they did with us.

[snowflicks]

[Song Lan only wished that those who saw him and Xingchen and thought what they did was good would follow in their footsteps. It's not that he doesn't understand how it was social and political suicide for a sect leader, or those under them, to tread the same path as the two daozhangs... but was that really so important over the lives of the people?

It's much more than that. In fact he can even understand that lives would be in danger if a sect leader pushed back against the standard, but change would never happen if everything stayed the same. It's a difficult dance.]

There are many strange contraptions in the rooms.
They seem like devices for torture possibly.

[He's not going to assume, but...]

Xingchen was trapped in a strange metal hole in the wall.
There were many more.
Some had corpses in them.

[Song Lan will not think of the irony in that. He won't.]

[legbreakings]

[ That's the downside to Jiang Cheng, he may admire all he likes but he won't take the steps to place himself against orthodoxy.

He thinks about Song Lan's explanation for a moment, visibly shuddering at the thought of being locked up along with corpses. ]

That's a gruesome thing to do to a man. Our captors are vile, and they have a sick sense of humor. [ His lips twist into a sneer. ] If I ever get my hands on any of them, we will see who ends up a corpse.

[ But! That's not the point either. The point being that he still needs clothes and to find out why he is even here. ]

Let's find one of these rooms with the corpses. Maybe examining them will tell us how they died. I... Something strange happened to Wei Wuxian and I. They seem to have been interested in golden cores.

[snowflicks]

[Orthodoxy is familiar, "safe" to a point.]

They must be brought to justice.

[However that may be. In his youth he'd have been against the idea of death as a means of justice, but... after so much suffering and senseless murder could have been stopped, just by killing one man. His stance on the matter has shifted.

Definitely a case by case thing.]

Downstairs. Follow me.

[Maybe if they're lucky they'll find clothes for Jiang Cheng down there as well. Song Lan will lead the way, having come from down there not long ago. He wonders how Xingchen fairs in all if this... he wonders if he'll actually see him again.

This place could be playing a cruel truck on him after all. Once they're downstairs he does stop to write out:]

You mentioned golden cores.
That you and Master Wei had something done to you.
Do you think the Techs want to harness that energy?

[legbreakings]

[ Jiang Cheng is content enough to follow. Sect leader he may be but Song Lan has been exploring the lower floor more extensively than he has... and besides, he is Song Lan.

They pause so Song Lan can write out his thoughts about the golden core and he hums in acknowledgement as he moves to take the lead now, aiming for a metal door that looks particularly solid. That looks like a place you would be storing corpses behind, he thinks, and maybe clothes. ]

I... We hadn't thought of that, to be honest. I was so appalled and confused by the pictures that I didn't know what to think at all, and Wei Wuxian was shaken, too. But now I'm wondering. It is striking that they brought so many cultivators when from every other world...

[ The door is indeed as heavy as it looks and beyond lies an empty metal table, and on it, bundled up, something purple. ]

These are my clothes!

[snowflicks]

[That hadn't even occurred to him, even after asking Jiang Cheng about golden cores. What if that was why they'd brought so many of them from their home? If they could do this, what could stop them from some how taking all the golden cores and using that energy and power to do more wicked things?

The idea settled sourly in his gut as Jiang Cheng pushed onward into a room that looked suspiciously like the one he'd found Xingchen in. It wasn't, but it looked almost the same. No doubt someone else had been laying on the metal table at some point. Dead or alive.

Song Lan gives the Jiang sect leader privacy, turning his back to let him change, only turning around once the other man is clothed properly again. A relief for them both.]

Was your sword among your things?

[If so, no offense, but he'd appreciate his sword back.]

Does your core feel compromised at all?

[He'll write the words on the metal table now. Does anything feel off? If anyone would know how it would feel if their golden core was effected it would be Jiang Cheng after all.]

[legbreakings]

[ The sword. Right. The sword.

A little flustered, he hands the borrowed sword back with a respectful little bow. ] Thank you for letting me borrow it. It was very generous.

[ But the question about the core and being compromised, that has him scowling thoughtfully again. He is holding on to Sandu with one hand but the other hand is now placed over his golden core protectively. ] My core... I'm not sure. It doesn't really feel wrong but... I have memories. Flashes of memories and pain. [ He grits his teeth. It's hard to admit this but they need to discuss it if they want to figure this out. ] I don't know. It's hard to say what is real and what is not.

[snowflicks]

[With a bow Song Lan will take his sword back. Again he has two swords crossed over his back. He's glad they haven't had need for them yet.]

It is.
I have no memory of how I arrived in this building.

[He thankfully didn't come compromised like so many here did. Mostly naked and trapped or experimented on.]

If nothing was done to your core who can say what else they have done.

[Not to freak Jiang Cheng out, but-]

We are here to suffer for their cause after all.

[legbreakings]

[ Jiang Cheng sucks in a sharp breath, his face shuttering, jaw clenched tight as he is overcome once more by sharp, stark fear as he felt when he awoke upstairs in the grimy hospital bed - somehow stronger still for not knowing what had been done to him, or by whom. ]

We are here for that. We are their rats. And we must never forget that.

[ He makes a frustrated growling noise. He's so overwhelmed still. So... The harder he tries not to, the more he remembers the feeling of hands reaching into his body, where his core was... is... should have been... ]

Maybe we should just try to get out of here and come back another day to investigate.

[snowflicks]

[He doesn't like making the young sect leader uncomfortable, which he visibly is, but sugar coating their predicament in this place doesn't help either. Jiang Cheng seems to understand this well enough.

But he's clearly had enough of the hospital, so has Song Lan.]

I will help you leave this place.
But I must also stay to make sure there are not others.

[Song Lan can't just leave while Xingchen is still in the hospital some where. Once they're sure everyone is taken care of or does not require their help, then he will leave.]

There must be more to this place than we can understand of it now.

[That much he agrees with. Come along, Jiang Cheng. Let's head back upstairs. Hopefully there's a way out that way.]

[legbreakings]

Thank you. I...

[ He cuts himself off. Yes, he should offer to stay and help him continue the search, now that Song Lan has helped him find his sword and clothes, but today has been so much already, and what strength he had regained after freeing himself from the disgusting IV he had been hooked up to is waning again. Panic-fueled strength and raw determination will only take you so far.

So he just slumps, and nods. ] Thank you. I will come back and search this place properly. I have so many questions still. Just. Not today.

[ Today, he is ready to try and find his way to the ground floor so he can escape this place. ]