Flomp! He's maybe going to have to sit here for a minute to catch his breath before talking is a thing. ...And possibly put his head down, he's not lightheaded or hot-in-the-bad-way but he's definitely dizzy from all the wobbling around - which was really not helping with keeping his balance - and his stomach is unhappy with him in a way that's right on the edge of nausea. Ugh, and he still has to burp but he's also still worried that it will be an apple juice burp so he's holding it in. 

Eventually he manages to phrase a couple of questions about what he's supposed to do with his abs to keep his torso from lurching forward when he tries to lift his leg, and the instructions definitely said to engage his glutes but doing that makes him feel like he's about to fall over backward, and he thinks maybe he's doing something wrong with his lower legs because his calves are getting so tired... 

Merrin and Halthis will do their best to answer haltingly and confusingly phrased questions! 

"Kalorm, do you want to try again? Keep going, or turn around and go back to your bed?" 

"Keep going!" Kalorm has managed to catch his breath, to about the point that he ever can right now, and he can actually give it some volume. It's very satisfying. 

Then they'll hoist him up again and he can "walk" a bit further! 

He's still wobbly but he's wobbly with somewhat more confidence now! This actually helps by itself; all the pausing and freezing was breaking his flow. He makes all the way to the wall, and then turns his head - which would totally have made him lose his balance and fall if not for all the safety equipment - and beams at Merrin. 

She hugs him! It's not like he's going to fall over! "That was definitely a cookie. Uh. Want to sit and catch your breath, and then decide if you're up for walking back or if you want a ride?" Kalorm is visibly very out of breath - and his heart rate is up at 150, even with nearly full weight assist walking is still an intense cardio workout for him - but she doesn't think he's otherwise exhausted. 

Kalorm will definitely collapse into the offered wheelchair! 

"Want. Walk back," he manages after only a few seconds. "...Rest first. And. Thirsty." 

Merrin slides her chair over and sits beside him, so she won't be awkwardly standing over him and also because she is so done with anything that takes effort. "I'm not surprised, it's normal to get thirsty after exercise! I...am kind of worried that your stomach was already unhappy and I'm worried that if you drink more right before exercising then you might vomit. Could you, uh, go with a few ice chips for right now, and you can have a full cup of water to drink once you're in bed and resting?" 

Glare. "No. Water. Ice in water." 

Glance at Halthis. "...Okay. I know being thirsty is uncomfortable. Just - please try to go slowly, and stop if you're having any nausea or stomach cramps?" And she'll bring him his cup with ice water in it, and a table on magnetic-lockable wheels so he doesn't have to hold it up the entire time. 

Actually Kalorm is really annoyed about all this micromanagement of his right to DRINK WATER and so is going to do his best to chug the entire cup in one go! (Also, he really is incredibly thirsty.) 

He cannot quite manage in one go, because his arms are even more tired after using them to hold the grip-bar walking aid. He gets it in four rounds of gulping, and...okay, possibly that was not the best idea...but it's fine, he will be fine if he just holds still and takes deep breaths for a while and maaaaaybe puts his head down on the table for a minute. He's allowed to do that. Nobody can stop him. 

Nobody is going to stop him from resting if he wants to! There are, however, like eight prediction markets on different variants of "will Kalorm vomit on Merrin before making it back to his bed" and Merrin's potential reactions to this.  

Okay, it's been five minutes and Kalorm does not feel great but the wheelchair is not actually very comfortable and he has, again, caught his breath as much as he's going to. He very badly wants to be horizontal, and - probably he's figured out the walking thing enough now to make it back in one go? And then he can lie down and close his eyes and it'll be okay. 

Right. Stand up ughhh having a digestive system is terrible. Step forward. It's really noticeable that he has to tense his abs to keep his balance and his stomach does not like that. But, while walking may be terrible, he's...sort of figured out how it works? Something has fallen back into place and started making sense again, and he's not very steady but he can take steps forward without - mostly - feeling repeatedly confused and stuck. Substantial willpower is going into keeping his stomach under control, but he's making much faster forward progress than before. 

About halfway there he does burp, involuntarily, and tastes apple juice in the back of his throat, but other than that it's just a burp. He feels slightly better. At this point, his aching back and a cramp starting in his side and the burning exhaustion in his calf muscles are causing him a lot more distress. 

Bed! He reaches it and...stares sort of blankly. He is more than ready to collapse into a horizontal position, but it's all the way down there. 

Now does not seem like the correct time to push him super hard on that! They’ll use the lift equipment. “Kalorm, we’re going to put you back in bed, okay?” 

Kalorm is UNHAPPY about being touched, but will reluctantly allow it as the quickest path to being HORIZONTAL. 

…Lying flat is really not better on the nausea front. Kalorm closes his eyes and tries to take slow deep breaths.

Kalorm definitely looks like someone who is feeling miserably awful right now! 

"I think you'll be able to catch your breath better with your head lifted a bit," Merrin says. "I'm going to raise it to 45 degrees, okay? ...And, um, I'm going to put a bag right here where you can reach it, if you think you need to vomit." She tucks it into the bedrail-pocket with the lip balm. 

...Kalorm had just been mulling on the necessity to scope out the location of said bag and figure out if it was in reach, but now that Merrin's BROUGHT IT UP there goes any chance that he's going to allow himself to need it. Now he has to fall back on the power of SHEER STUBBORNNESS and lie perfectly still with his eyes closed, fully focused on ignoring the nausea and really quite painful stomach cramps, because throwing up would be LOSING. 

It's a very very miserable next forty-five minutes. Kalorm would kind of like to actually take a nap, but he's way too distracted by feeling awful, and he has to stay on guard and very carefully manage each time his body decides to reattempt burping.

But, eventually - it feels like about a week later - he's feeling a little better, and the cramps are easing off, and exhaustion wins out. 

Kalorm is an utterly ridiculous person [admiring].

Also, Merrin does not actually have the patience or emotional energy to watch him worriedly and be on call for instant bag-grabbing help for that length of time! She does for, like, five minutes, and then spends ten minutes refreshing Treatment Planning screens without successfully processing any of the numbers on them, and then goes back to reading fanfiction. 

From many rooms away - still in Default Hospital, though the percentage of his family still staying on-site at this point is more than halved - Khemeth watches with nonzero concern. 

It's been almost six days since a certain very unexpected conversation with his boyfriend during which he noticed certain facts about Merrin and also, apparently, about human psychology. He still isn't quite over resenting the fact that he didn't successfully manage to notice this sooner.

He hasn't talked to a Keeper about it yet. It didn't seem urgent; however helpful it might hypothetically be for Merrin to have some "masochism"-related stress relief, this cannot realistically be arranged while she's firmly committed not to leave Kalorm's hospital room. Especially given that she doesn't yet know this is a thing, and is neurodivergent enough that it's hard to predict exactly how she'll react, except that she's definitely easily embarrassed. Having that conversation with her sounds fraught under any circumstances, but especially if it's during a briefly-snatched moment of dubious privacy in Kalorm's hospital-room-suite. 

Also, to be fair, he's had a lot to do. It's now ten days into Kalorm's hospitalization. Things are finally looking up, but even just three days ago, his entire family was fraying under the stress around him, and for all Khemeth's efforts to translate and relay and cajole and generally smooth things over, it wasn't at all clear that they were going to get through this ordeal without at least one irreversible interpersonal rupture. Finnar has been furious with every one of his close family members on at least one occasion, and with Khemeth in particular on a lot more than one occasion, and the thing about Finnar is that he takes his commitments seriously and this VERY INCONVENIENTLY INCLUDES anything he says in the heat of anger; once he's said something, whether or not he would have endorsed it beforehand while in a calm mood and if it were presented in the best light, he's certainly going to refuse to ever back down from it now.

Even worse, Finnar kept ending up as the initial point of contact on important relationships with various experts and Venture Capitalists, because he is not at all shy about proactively contacting someone whose name he just saw on an interesting study, even if it's 4 am and Khemeth is definitely not awake to vet his messages, and trying to manage it at that point takes about ten times as much effort as it would if Khemeth could have intervened at the start. He doesn't think they've horribly offended anyone - at least not in ways that couldn't be remedied by applying more money to the situation - but it's been easily the most wearing week of his life.

Meanwhile, Nerdel is hurt that Kalorm hasn't asked for her since he woke up the most recent time, even though this isn't at all surprising if you think about it for more than five seconds, and Khemeth has been trying to soothe her feelings about that. Kurthin had an enormous argument and day-long falling-out with Finnar over some obscure point of disagreement on the biochemistry of long-term memory consolidation, and while Kurthin is approximately the one and only person who Khemeth is >99% confident Finnar will reconcile with - usually after a highly predictable 18-24 hour cooling-off interval - he was still upset about it, and Khemeth strongly disprefers being in the middle between Finnar and, well, anyone, but especially Kurthin, but also Khemeth is the only person in the immediate family who can interact with that situation and mostly avoid making it worse. Ranthir managed to lose a lot of money by making the predictably questionable life decision of trading while sleep-deprived and wanted to process that. Mallor finally gave up on really spending any time in the hospital at all nearly five days ago, but still keeps messaging Khemeth directly wanting updates, because Khemeth is apparently the default person who LITERALLY EVERYONE INVOLVED IN ANY WAY considers a reasonable default point of contact. (Unless they're a medical expert in an obscure relevant subdomain, in which case he WANTS to be the point of contact but they're instead talking to Finnar, who has been more obvious than usual about the fact that he considers Khemeth to be not that intelligent, and it's getting quite grating.) The twins are the least dramatics-prone, but someone needs to be paying them any attention, and even Nerdel hasn't been keeping up on that. 

He's so tired. 

Khemeth has been– not ignoring Merrin, she's a critical member of the interpersonal system that he needs to track and keep in some kind of vaguely stable configuration – but she's also one of the components of this situation who is definitely not going to set anything on fire, metaphorically or literally. 

(He really wishes Finnar hadn't gone ahead with setting the stupid boat wreckage on fire. Not that he really cares about the compensation-fees one needs to pay to burn anything, but especially plastics with potentially-toxic fumes, in Default – but Kalorm is going to be upset and furious when he finds out. It just...still didn't seem like one of the top-priority decision points to be pushing Finnar on, and, well, it won't really burn any trust between them that wasn't burned a decade ago.) 

Khemeth was expecting staying at Kalorm's bedside for days to be bad for Merrin, he's not in denial about that, but - probably not in a way that would leave any lasting damage? If anything, he expects Merrin to hold onto this story with pride in five years' time, she is definitely the sort of person who takes a weird amount of satisfaction in succeeding at things where the main requirement is tolerating a lot of misery, despite being completely unwilling to acknowledge when she does unusually well at literally anything else. Anyway, perhaps more relevantly, he is really quite sure that Merrin isn't going to manage to cause any lasting damage to anyone else in the vicinity, which cannot be said for his family members.

Khemeth could have helped, at the cost of not even all that much effort. Merrin is a lot more legible to him now - seeing her interact with Kalorm has been rather informative - and if he had cared to intervene more directly than just betting on Merrin-related markets and dropping the occasional recommendation in the side-discussion thread, he could have made all of this substantially easier for her, even at the point when Kalorm was still unconscious. If he had cared to visit in person last night, he could probably have finessed Kalorm into giving Merrin permission to go home. 

But it wouldn't have been good for Kalorm, not really, and all the other close-to-Kalorm people who could have mitigated that would have paid a much steeper physical and psychological toll for staying overnight in someone's hospital room, and everyone in that pool is running low on cognitive and emotional slack to begin with. Khemeth is willing to own the fact that, faced with this particular set of constraints, Merrin was not among the top fifteen people whose in-the-moment welfare and experience he was optimizing for. 

It's okay, it's fine, he can make it up to her later by finding her a nice compatible sadist since APPARENTLY this is a THING and, knowing that, one: Merrin makes far more sense as a person, and two: he is going to be so good at setting her up with a compatible sadist so she can have all the stress relief she's more than earned after the past ten days AND get paid for it

Khemeth is so tired. But nothing else is on fire right now, even metaphorically. None of his family members are currently not-on-speaking-terms with any of the other family members. Finnar just collapsed after working himself to the point of exhaustion and so will predictably be out for six hours and not taking any actions that Khemeth might want to intercept. And Merrin herself is starting to look pretty frayed under the stress. He...should probably do something about that. 

On the camera footage, Merrin isn't looking at her most frayed, at least not right this second. Kalorm just got his noon antibiotics, along with a just-in-case dose of the stronger anti-nausea drug, because he only recently stopped looking miserable and actually fell asleep per his EEG reading and he definitely needs to rest some more before they push him on anything.

She’s leaning back in her chair with her feet on another chair, alternately reading forum updates on a fanfic discussion site - she’s caught up on her favourite fanfic, which never happens, normally she never gets days in a row of being not-actually-busy but too brain-fried or distracted to do anything productive - and text chatting with her mom. Irris is potentially going to be assigned to Kalorm’s case as a student rehab tech once he’s downgraded from ICU-acuity status, which she isn’t certed for yet. 

…If he goes to talk to her in the room, especially with Kalorm asleep right there, Khemeth is pretty sure that Merrin will be too stressed and socially frazzled about it to engage at all. His mental Merrin is coping fine at this exact moment, but it’s a fragile state, and she’s managing it largely by tuning out the presence of everyone except Kalorm. 

It’s otherwise the best time he’s likely to have for a while, though, and possibly all day. The prediction market activity is rather halfhearted today relative to past days, since Kalorm is no longer the most interesting case in the hospital (which is a VERY GOOD THING), but there’s still enough bidding activity that he roughly trusts the 80% estimate that Kalorm will sleep for at least another 110 minutes. Merrin will predictably be much less distracted - and more able and willing to think about the possibility of leaving - if Kalorm isn't at that moment needing anything from her, and is unlikely to in the near future. 

He could start the conversation with her by text chat. It's not ideal, he has much less high-fidelity input on her reactions and more of a delay if he can only watch the camera footage, but - it doesn't actually seem like there's an alternative that involves having the conversation now. 

(Also, as a side benefit, he can do it from his bed. Khemeth has been pacing himself - he hasn't hit a wall of exhaustion again - but he's setting the pace at pretty much the maximum he can sustain without risking collapse, and energy he spends on going a place is energy he can't spend on thinking. 

He messages the current Personnel to check this. 

(Khemeth has apparently not been keeping up on all of the backchannel discussion, because they've been talking for days about how to gently nudge things to get Merrin HOME where she can REST even just an hour or two sooner.) 

Anyway, sure, if Khemeth thinks that opening a text conversation with Merrin now is better than waiting until a more convenient time - which seems plausible - then nobody is really going to argue against it. Does Khemeth think it's important for this to be private, or important to have someone Merrin knows in the conversation-channel as well even if they're not participating, or what...? 

Khemeth considers this. 

Consideration: his mental Merrin will find it harder to navigate if it's not a 1:1 conversation, she does more social modeling than median (less so in an emergency, but Khemeth thinks that this doesn't - relevantly count? Emergencies are probably actually less bad for Merrin than this, not in terms of exhaustion but in terms of other internal-Merrin-resources that are drained.) Anyway, his model of Merrin would end up trying to navigate how Khemeth felt about Personnel and vice versa on top of the conversation itself, while in no way having the cognitive bandwidth or emotional capacity for that. 

Consideration: Merrin will also find it incredibly socially uncomfortable to get an unexpected private message from Khemeth. Merrin does not think they have that kind of relationship, either in a work or a personal context. 

[I think you should contact her, inform her that you're pulling me in, and then start a group-discussion thread that makes it visible when people opt out. Then you can leave it exchanged a handful of messages]

- he frowns at the last section, bouncing it at his (rather hazy and underspecified) mental model of the current Personnel, and then sighs and deletes it and starts over. 

[You can leave either after the sum of messages from Merrin and myself exceeds 10, or when I tell you privately, whichever is sooner.] 

That's really specific but in a reassuring way. Personnel will get that set up. Probably best to go with very simple and straightforward; Merrin is known to be below-median verbal fluency at the best of times and she looks so fried right now. 

[Khemeth wants to message you about Kalorm's treatment plan. I'm opening a group chat] 

Who's sending her messages, that's going to take cognitive capacity she needs for other things is her instinctive response, because usually it's true, but right now Merrin is actually...kind of bored? 

She minimizes the fanfiction forum and toggles over to the hospital message board, and..... uh. Okay then. 

[Noted]