It's probably going to be dinner at some point? Marian is getting pretty hungry but she has no idea how to obtain food from anywhere except the cafeteria, and the void apparently did not think that Ensure was medically indicated for her.
If she's lucky someone will bring her food again. In the meantime, she's parked with her back against the void wall, reading Breathe! You Are Alive: Sutra on the Full Awareness of Breathing.
And in comes someone with two trays of food! Lucky her!
"Hi! I'm James. Holden. Has anyone filled you in on what this place is, yet?"
She sets down the book.
“- Oh, hey. Thank you! Uh, I - think I’ve got the basics by now? I asked people a lot of stuff. I…think I’m probably still missing a bunch that’d be good to know for, like, actually doing my job and helping the kids here?” As much as she can before she DIES, anyway.
"Well, I can try to answer if you have more questions, but I don't have time to run through everything I've learned in the past twelve years if you haven't got specifics."
Marian doesn't answer right away because she just shoved most of a bread roll in her mouth. She chews.
"- Sorry, I think my top question right know is - whether it's true that maleficers are inevitably going to go insane and aren't worth trying to help? I had a weird conversation about that with some of the kids from New York, earlier."
"... Yeah, I mean maybe if someone convinces them to stop early? But - I mean - "
"As I figure it, if you put people in a bad enough position, some of them are going to try anything to get out of it. And - once they've gone and killed someone, there's not really any turning back. We had a lot of people killed by maleficers last year. So, like, you've got to stop people from getting into that sort of situation in the first place, you can't really talk them down once they've started and they're killing anyone they come across."
He looks very upset about this.
...She really wants to vent to someone about the poor kid who came in earlier asking for drugs (which she GAVE HIM because she's out of her depth and probably a terrible person.) Medical confidentiality, though.
"Is it - so you can get magic from animals, too, right? And that's still maleficing but it's - well, it's at least less murder. Are people still, uh, salvageable at that point?"
"Honestly I have no idea. Bugs, sure, everyone does bugs - outside, there aren't any bugs here. Pigs - nooot really. Not that there's any pigs in here either. Rabbits, mice, meerkats? I don't know, there's not exactly a malia 101 class."
"...Huh. I - wonder if it'd be better if there were one? It seems like it could be sort of like, I don't know, abstinence-only sex ed or those anti-drugs high school programs that are just like 'if you smoke one joint you'll die of a heroin overdose in a sketchy bar bathroom' and then no one takes them seriously because they all know kids who smoke joints every Friday and are fine."
"The kids who pull Malia aren't fine though. They start to rot inside and turn into serial killers. There're some who've got hamsters or something that they're drawing from, but - they have trouble generating mana the normal way, and I they are starting to be - off - and even if they don't go all columbine on the place, it's still really bad for them."
"... Also the actual stoners in here die a lot more than the rest of us. It's harder to notice the mals coming in time when you're high."
Nod.
(Ugh, she...should probably check on traumatized maleficer kid and make sure he's not being eaten while he's too high to keep a lookout? She has no idea where he went, though.)
"What, uh, happened last year?" she asks James.
"Someone... was in a really bad position and killed someone for their room, then he killed some more people for Malia because he figured he needed to in order to survive - then the dead kid's brother killed some more people for Malia so he'd be strong enough to take revenge. And then all of this killing left a senior without a graduation alliance and three guesses what he decided to do about it."
...hug? hug.
"So, uh, that's why I'm pretty sure it's a good idea for all of us to - try to help people stay out of a situation that bad."
“…Yeah, that sounds right. I’m - still trying to figure out what I can be doing to help.”
"- For one, it'd be really good if I knew everyone knew I'm here? And, like, what sorts of problems I can help with, I don't know if last year's nurse had, uh, a similar background to mine. I was an ICU nurse, so I'm - pretty experienced with really serious medical emergencies, the issue is more that I'm not sure people would know to involve me? Oh, and also I seem to be pretty reliably able to get drugs from the void. Not always exactly what I asked it for, but something."
"Oh, that's really good information to get around! I'll let everyone know on Wednesday."
"Cool! I'm also in general interested in trading to get more supplies - and I'd like to talk to any of the alchemists and artificers in higher years who might be interested in doing a side project in exchange for, uh, whatever I can get the void to cough up. I don't know what's possible or safe with magic, but I really want some kind of basic patient monitoring, and - honestly it would be really neat to have some kind of buzzer system that people could use to call ahead, so I can get ready if someone's coming in seriously hurt? But I don't know what the options are, there."
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
