wake up call (from hell) Who: Lina (+NPC) When: morning Where: Infirmary
As awareness crept back into Lina’s life, her first thought was that she really didn’t want to open her eyes. If she opened her eyes, she was absolutely certain she was going to puke. Her head was pounding, her stomach rolling, and overall she felt like she had really overdone it last night. She was pretty sure she was in for a hangover from hell.
Which was odd. Now that she thought about it, she didn’t remember drinking much last night. In fact, after checking in to the hotel she’d crashed almost immediately.
Oh, fuck. The hotel. Her eyes flew open, and she saw an unfamiliar male face looking down at her. Three things happened in very quick succession: Lina sat up, Lina punched him in the face, Lina rolled over and vomited on the floor.
“Augh! Ow! Ow! Oh, bitch! My fucking nose! I don’t even work in this department, what the fuck!”
Lina ignored that for now. The priority was hanging on to the side of the medical cot for dear life and trying not to fall into the puddle of her own vomit. That was kind of important. She felt vaguely as though someone had removed her brain, tossed it in a blender, and thrown half of it back in. The rest of her skull cavity had surely been filled with water, because the world seemed to be bobbing around her. She felt a bit like she was floating on a small boat in the midst of a very big storm. What. The. Fuck.
Things came back to her very slowly. She could vaguely recall waking up in her hotel room at five AM and panicking. She’d had a strong sense that she couldn’t leave, but she couldn’t say why. Naturally, she’d run for it. She just needed to run down the street to prove she could, then she could come back for her stuff. She remembered running. She also remembered both her feet and her eyelids getting heavier until she finally smacked into the pavement and everything went dark.
She looked back to the man in the room, who was walking in small circles and clutching his nose. Why? Oh, right. She’d hit him. “Who the fuck are you?” And then a follow-up question, “Where the fuck am I?”
The man she’d assaulted didn’t seem in any big rush to answer her. He’d been leaning over to check her when she sucker-punched him, and at the moment his own priority was something of the lines of ‘don’t cry like a bitch.’ He knew if any member of the medical staff came back here and found him bleeding and crying it’d be all anyone could talk about for days, but damned if he didn’t feel like she’d driven his nose all the way back into his brain. Lina waited for answers, not particularly feeling as though she could stand yet.
“Security,” he finally answered. “You ran for it and blacked out when you hit the barrier. Everyone does. Med staff needed lunch so they asked me to stay with you until you got back. You’re in the infirmary. And I think you broke my fucking nose.”
Lina blinked. “Well, then you shouldn’t have been fucking standing there,” she replied, as if this were obvious. It was the easiest thing to respond to, anyway. Barrier. Infirmary. What the shit.
The security guard snorted, and seemed to regret it immediately. For a moment it looked as though he would be the one throwing up. “You can’t leave,” he told her. “And I think you already know that. If you try, you’ll just end up back here.” She did know that, that was the bitch of it, and she couldn’t understand why. Every time she thought about it, her head fogged up and her stomach rolled all over again. Her face paled some, and a sheen of sweat broke out on her forehead. “Everyone handles the news differently. The theory is that the magic throws some people into shock.”
Lina opened her mouth to call him some sort of name, but was unable to find her voice. The rest of last night’s dinner was coming up at just the thought of ‘magic.’ Or maybe because she knew he was telling her the truth, and still didn’t know how she could know that. Lina leaned over and retched again. There was a great deal she would have liked to say, starting with how they couldn’t keep her here against her will and ending with how many bones she would break until they let her out, but she realized she wasn’t particularly threatening at the moment. Also, she didn’t think threats would actually do any good, which made no sense in the world. They’d always been something of a fallback for Lina, and a rather good one at that. She heaved again.
“We have basins for that, you know.”
Lina shot him a dirty look, and collapsed back against the cot. She didn’t respond, only glared at him. He looked as though he was trying very hard not to glare back.
“The sooner you accept this as being out of your control, the sooner you’ll feel better,” he said. “And the sooner you can go make a mess of your own room.”
Lina wanted to throw something at him. Instead, she fell back into an uneasy sleep.