maskormenacelogs | I read the news today, oh boy

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I read the news today, oh boy

WHO: Dana Scully and OPEN
WHERE: At work; around Heropa.
WHEN: Afternoon through evening, Oct. 3rd.
WHAT: A day in the life.
WARNINGS: Blood? Briefly? Dead things? Nothing much.

A. At work

[Dana Scully rolls her neck and sighs at the spare, unsatisfying crackle it produces. There's a familiar tension-ache in her shoulders and not for the first time today she wishes she could rub at them, but the congealed blood on her gloves is more than marginally prohibitive. It's amazing how much of a strain disassembling a dead body can put on a living one. A part of her, quiet now in the face of the startling inconvenience of it all, and a residual poor mood pooling over as the result of that, thinks it appropriate. All lives, even the shortest, have a scope of startling depth and breadth – no wonder they weigh on the shoulders, compress the spine, grind talus into calcaneus; impart, that is, some spare impact on physical space and time, though the spark is now departed.

Philosophizing along those lines is, generally speaking, kept for quieter moments, moments not here in the face of it, waiting on hours spent carefully reconstructing the last spare day of a life abruptly terminated. It should be chilling to remember how awful she used to find it all in light of how normal it is now, but she can't muster even that. Maybe it's that she's been too close to death herself to be as frightened of it as she might once have been, or maybe it's just emotional exhaustion, the well of that particular sort of sympathy run dry.

Either way, it's clockwork which carries her through the rest of the autopsy, meticulous clockwork but clockwork all the same, the motions so ingrained as to have become habitual, especially in standard cases like these. Finally, though, finally she can take up her tray of samples, roll her shoulders, and make for the lab proper, to work what once seemed like miracles. Now Scully is entirely too accustomed to the dead speaking.]

B. Out and about

[It's frightening, really, how quickly it's all become routine. Up at the prescribed hour, clothes from the modest wardrobe she's been able to assemble for herself, hair and makeup, an equally-modest breakfast eaten in her silent apartment, poring over the network and rarely, if ever, taking active part... then the commute, walked. Work, and then the hollow gap of hours which needs filling. Even that has become so habitual that it is, very occasionally, nearly possible to forget what it is that she's avoiding confronting in her apartment space, lived-in but empty, or full, perhaps, of absence; the distinction seems infinitesimal but isn't in the slightest.

Heels clicking on the sidewalk, then, in the weary drag from work to elsewhere, Dana Scully continues the long flight from that state suspiciously like grief which has haunted her since her arrival here. Not for the first time she wonders how bad a taste might be left in her mouth if she were to seek comfort in the church, how different it might be here from home. There's not much point, is the ultimate conclusion. It doesn't feel safe, and that ultimately is the problem with all of it. When one pins one's sense of home on a person, or the concept of a person, their absence prevents one from finding it again. It was a mistake, and she'd glimpsed as much before and carried on, but then she'd never expected to come here.

Now she's paying for it. Certainly she seems to be paying for something, something that weighs heavily on her bones, lowers her gaze as she walks to the middle-distance between herself and the ground in front of her, some invisible albatross.]

C. Café

[It isn't, of course, all unpleasant. That would be marginally more bearable, if at least she could be angry at all of it, if she could find no relief in a corner table in this small, dimly-lit café, in warm drinks and warmer smells and occasionally a slice of pie, for which she should probably feel guilty, but doesn't. Tonight she pores over a medical journal with no small amount of fascination – seeing theoretical concepts from her world made real here does hold a thrill – and sips idly at some concoction with far too much sugar and cream in it to be anything but savoured.

Occasionally she glances up at the sound of the door opening and closing, surveying newcomers with the distant curiosity of the distracted but not quite unconcerned. There's a residual wariness, a vague and subconscious expectation that something might, at any moment, go wrong in wholly unpredictable ways. Any stranger might come with a secret agenda. But that's nonsense here, isn't it? For all that she's lost, she's gained that much, hasn't she? There's never a great deal of certainty, but always she pushes her reading glasses back up where they've slid down here nose and allows her gaze to drop back to the page.]

((ooc: If none of these options strike you, feel free to throw something else my way.))

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[Hange has quickly become addicted to coffee. It's like tea, but more energetic. So she finds herself stopping to get some on her way back from a visit with Levi and Erwin. It's a little cafe, that's out of the way and quiet enough. She's still not used to any of this. The cars still make her stare, the electronics are still just beyond her comprehension. But she's adjusted enough to the point where she can wear their clothing, use their money, go to work. Or stop by and get a cup of coffee. She turns away from the counter, steaming mug in hand and looking for a place to sit and read her newspaper (true, she could use the online news services, but she was used to newspapers) and her gaze falls on a shock of red hair.

For a moment her brow knits as she tries to remember why that's familiar. Then a name and a face and a conversation pop back into her memory and she threads her way over to Dana's table with a smile.]

Dana!

[She sounds pretty pleased - she remembered her name.]

Mind if I join you?

[There come a matched few seconds of momentary unrecognition before a smile spreads across her features.]

Hange! Here, have a seat. Let me just--

[--move this modest stack of journals. She slips them back into her satchel with only a moment's regretful pause. There'll be more time to read. Better, anyway, that these last her as much time as she can wring from them. Distractions are precious. This meeting is, therefore, equally precious, and not simply because she'd liked Hange at their first meeting, as much as it was possible to like someone you hardly knew.]

There you are. I haven't seen you in awhile, how've you been? I guess we don't travel in the same circles.

[Not quite a smile; Scully masks the bitter joke with a sip of her coffee and slips off her reading glasses. In her case, she feels, the travelling in circles is absolutely literal. Hopefully her acquaintance hasn't fared the same way.]

[Hange is glad of the acceptance and she slides into the seat across from Scully with a large, friendly grin. Finding someone who isn't from back home who she can talk to is a bit rare, but she enjoys it. Making new connections - it's precious. And there's the knowledge that they won't be torn away from her by sudden death.

So she takes the friends she makes and treasures them. Because she knows just how fleeting life can be.]

No, not really! Museum curators don't really cross paths with...

[Wait, what does Dana do again?]

...what do they have you doing anyway?

Forensic analysts.

[A faint smile. Bodies and labwork.]

No, they don't.

[All the more reason to start now, surely. It's nice to be someplace that doesn't stink of death, formaldehyde, and a rank host of other chemicals, and it's also nice to be talking about unrelated things.]

Maybe we should; we're in the same business. So many of us trying to infer meaning and history from what people leave behind.

[A different scale, of course. A different scope. But still, there's something equally precious and important in their various types of learning.]

Actually, that's interesting; what kind of museum do you curate?

[Hange's forehead knits and she leans forward curiously.]

Forensic analyst...? What does that involve?

[But hey, she needs to answer Scully's question first. It's only fair.]

It's a history museum, actually.

[She laughs and leans back again with a shrug.]

It's not bad work, but I'm usually learning more then I actually know as I work. The history of this world is interesting - very different from home.

Labwork, mostly. The occasional post-mortem.

[Delivered with a casualness that suggests this is all quite par for the course by now. If anything, in fact, it sounds as though she's a bit bored, which in a way is true. The work can't ever be said to be boring, insofar as it matters, insofar as there are lives to be saved and all of that nonsense Scully would like to have let go of here but hasn't been able for a moment, but it's not quite on the same scale as the work back home was. There's no sense of being on the front line, of doing something that matters in a way that nothing anybody else was doing mattered. Maybe that's why, in spite of herself, Scully has been considering picking up work on the side, something more along the lines of what she used to do. Only... only she doesn't have Mulder's audacity, his relentlessness, least of all his willingness to permit himself to be made laughable as long as there was someone who was willing to believe and as long as it helped the people it was meant to help. Scully, shamefully (and there of course the irony), is not nearly shameless enough.]

You know, I think I'll have to stop by the museum sometime. I've been meaning to brush up on my history.

[A wry smile.]

This place isn't quite like my home either. I'd like to know where I stand.

[Whether or not what's presented there is true is, of course, another matter, but the fact that it's presented at all marks it as in some way important, and therefore worth exploring.]

You work with corpses?

[Hange leans forward, eyes glinting behind her glasses. That sounds really cool, actually. She never really got a chance to work with dead bodies. Mostly because titan bodies tend to vanish very quickly, but that's a minor, minor detail. Honest. Besides, Hange has a very healthy interest in anatomy - among other things. She tends to dabble. Ab it of a jack-of-all-trades when it came to sciences, really.]

I've been trying to catch up with all of their scientific advancements, but - I can't wrap my hand around some of it! It's like I don't even have the grasp of the concepts needed for me to actually understand half of it!

[She sighs and leans back with a wry laugh.]

It's... interesting. The history, anyway. There's so much that's gone on that sometimes I don't know where to start. It's like looking at some sort of weird, enormous storybook.

[Especially when "known history" only stretches back a century or so on her world. If she's lucky.]

From time to time. That's not new; I did my fair share of autopsies at home too. Maybe more than my fair share.

[Scully eyes Hange with amusement, wondering to herself whether this curiosity could be maintained at an actual post-mortem. Some people are enthusiastic before, but succumb, whether initially or eventually, to something... rather less than enthusiastic. Langley, for instance. He hadn't quite even managed enthusiasm, but, foggy as her memory of the event is, she does remember with some clarity that he had been violently ill only shortly after the autopsy itself had begun.

In this case, she suspects rather the opposite. Maybe there's something of herself she recognise, the capacity for empathy but the strong stomach of someone who's spent too much time around death. Scully remembers her rabbit, the shoebox and the maggots, and her smile fades.]

History is different. Harder, I think. Any one crime and you've got a handful, maybe a dozen people all tied up in something one way or another but history, history is... hundreds. Thousands. All these people with hopes and aspirations of their own, dreams, fears, wants, each one as complex as you or I; it's impossible to really know what happened, what they felt about it. The majority of them never had a voice, couldn't write or never had the opportunity, and how much you can trust the rest of them is arguable. In forensics at least you know somebody is probably lying.

[And bodies, as a rule, don't. There's something horrifyingly admirable about their honesty.]

I haven't had a chance to deal with corpses; the ones I'm interested in tend to vanish before I get a chance.

[Lots of history wrapped up in that comment. But she doesn't offer an immediate explanation. Instead, she listens to Scully talk about... history. She cups her chin in one hand.]

That's true. But I was... really more of a scientist and researcher back home. But the job isn't too bad. It's a lot of archive work. But you're right - history is written by people and people... well, people have agendas.

[Her smile might be a bit bitter.]

And most of the time, they want other people to listen to them and not question their particular interpretation of history - whatever it is.

[Vanish before she gets the chance? Well, the concept isn't entirely unfamiliar, so the arch to Scully's brow remains mild. She's encountered her share of bubbling, noxious sludge in places bodies by rights should have been. The further implications as to species remain best unspoken, of course. Whatever Mulder may believe, Scully has never been able to confirm with any certainty, in part because the bodies do disappear.]

Exactly -- but it's still good to know what we're supposed to believe, because chances are everybody else is supposed to believe it too.

[That, of course, makes the everybody else easier to understand -- and in this place Scully feels like she could use a bit of that. The attitudes of the natives towards state-sanctioned kidnappings baffles her more than slightly. She sighs heavily.]

Then again, depending on the thoroughness of the campaign of misinformation, God only knows how we'll find out what really happened.

[For Hange, giant corpses vanishing is a fact of life. One that she's recently found an explanation for, but still rather disconcerting and frustrating. She's trying to figure them out! They could at least stick around after they're dead.]

No doubt. Figuring out what they want us to know might help us see what they don't. Where are the gaps? What are they leaving unsaid? What's the overarching narrative? Who are the villains?

[Hange leans back in her chair with a little 'hmm'.]

And that - well, the truth has to be somewhere. Someone remembers. Or if it's not written down or stored anywhere, maybe it isn't the truth anymore. Maybe then it's just a legend.

Local histories? Sure, I've worked with those. There's usually some truth in there somewhere.

[Of course, in her case, 'local histories' usually means local myths and legends more than genealogies and accounts of past events. Still, they're tied together, often as not -- werewolf stories inextricably tangled up with a town's history, wendigos walking out of the cold nights of particularly bleak winters. There's something to be said for it all, even if she doesn't necessarily believe the particulars.]

I mean, the idea has to come from someplace, even if some colour gets picked up along the way.

Ah, you mean like myths and legends?

[She leans forward again, forsaking her mug so she can proper elbows on the table and fold her hands together.]

At least back home, we didn't have a lot to go on from before the titans. Here - they've got documents and records going back a thousand years! It's like night and day! Sure, they might not all be accurate, but at least there's something.

[Mirai figured she had one of two options: ignore her job, forget about school, and try to run away, or try to actually do something with her new life. It's not every day someone just hands you an opportunity for change like this, right? So she should make the most of it.

It's hard, though. She's still terrified, even without the presence of youmu. Which is still something she can't wrap her head around — if they're not here, where are they?

Anyway, tucking that thought away for another time, she finally makes her way to the lab after mustering up the courage to ask for directions. She's still in her school uniform, which is what she's been wearing since she arrived — the bulk of her money's gone toward buying food to hoard in her room — and it only occurs to her then that she maybe should have found something else to wear. Something more professional.

Oh, well.

When she reaches the entrance, she pauses and bites her lip. Does she just go in...? Should she knock?

Probably best to knock.

She knocks.]

[The knock provokes another wince, mercifully unseen, as Scully straightens up, one eyebrow creeping faintly upwards. A few seconds pass before she sighs, pushes away from the tray of samples she'd begun the slow task of processing, and pulls the door open. What she finds isn't quite what she expects. Young, for one. Younger than she'd expect anyone wandering around here to be -- and so for a moment she's silent, brow ever-so-slightly furrowed.]

Can I help you?

[No patronizing you lost? which aside from being rude is a functionally useless means of getting any useful information out of anybody; there are situations in which one may want to put someone on the defensive and watch them until they slip but this isn't an interrogation and Scully is more bemused than actively invested in the answer. The outfit, the age, the nervousness, all have set her oddly off-kilter, though it's hardly the strangest thing she's ever seen. Maybe not even the strangest thing she's seen today; odd occurrences do tend to follow her around, which if she were so inclined she might think was God, or maybe somebody less savoury, taunting her, because of all people...

Well. Best not to dwell on that. Certainly best not to dwell on better alternatives. There's enough guilt there to choke an elephant, and that, Scully knows, is an impressive amount -- she's necropsied one before.]

[That's such a loaded question. That, paired with the look Scully's giving her, makes Mirai fidget. Then she realizes she shouldn't be fidgeting, which only makes her fidget more because now she's embarrassed and —

Such a vicious cycle, this girl's life.

She tries straightening up so she can say this confidently, but instead she just sputters out:] M-my name is Mirai Kuriyama, miss! I'm supposed to be the new, um —

[She goes rummaging through her bag. Paper, paper, where's the paper? Muttering, mostly to herself:] Oh, where is it, I knew I had it in here somewhere, did I forget...?

[Scully, to her credit, manages a smile. It's been a long day, as days have tended to be since her arrival here, but that's no reason to be unkind, least of all to someone so young and so uncertain already.]

You're an imPort--

[First step of any investigation: establish a factual baseline. Read the documentation. In absence of that, at least talk to somebody.]

--and you've been given work here, I suppose? Do you happen to remember doing what?

[A bit of gentle prompting, mostly intended to calm the girl down -- her worry is alarming, and makes Scully feel... old, first and foremost, but also somehow messy, as though she's allowed some part of her life to bleed over into areas she never intended it to. This girl, after all, isn't within the demographic of people she'd like to intimidate. Most likely it has less to do with her and more to do with circumstances in general, which is understandable, but all the same...]

[For what it's worth, it's not just Scully intimidating her — it's the whole entire world. Mirai continues rummaging and um'ing and ah'ing until she finally realizes she's been asked a question, at which point she very abruptly stops and turns her attention back to Scully.

Right.

Be professional.]

Yes. I believe I'm supposed to be your new intern.

[Not for the first time, Scully finds herself questioning the wisdom of their kidnappers in meting out duties. Were it not for the fact that she'd already met a child working in a position she probably oughtn't, regardless of the level of her maturity, Scully would be suspicious of this new arrival, the convenient lack of papers. Curious, in fact, as to what might draw a girl to a task like this. She still is curious as to the logic behind assigning her here; she assumes, after all, that there must be one. No doubt it will become obvious with time. Still, she offers a shrug, pushing the door open wider.]

You may as well come in.

[There's not much by way of things that could be harmed by her presence here, at least not with Scully keeping an eye out. Delicate equipment, certainly. Works in progress. None of it that could be thrown off by something so delicate as a presence.]

May I ask your name?

[Truth be told, Mirai showed up here not even knowing what forensic science was, and she's still a bit iffy on the details. The setting she's found herself in tells her it might have something to do with dead bodies. And that? Does not sound at all pleasant.

Mirai nods and shuffles inside, careful to not look around too much or even move, then stiffly bows in greeting.]

Mirai Kuriyama.

[Things of which Scully might take note: the way Mirai keeps pulling the sleeve of her sweater down over her right hand. She's not just shy about her new tattoo; there's a bandage circling her hand she's trying to cover.]

Dana Scully. It's good to meet you.

[There's her warmth, dredged wearily up from wherever it was hiding. She offers her hand, though not just for shaking.]

Did you hurt yourself? I'm a medical doctor, if it's anything serious I'd be happy to have a look for you.

[Otherwise... what does a person do with an intern in a place like this? Scully can work with or around lab assistants, and she's had students, but this is a slightly different beast. She's no idea of this girl's level of education, in this subject or any other. No idea how much she's supposed to impart, either, and in what way. Living at the whim of the government, purpose apt to change at any given moment, is not a completely foreign state of being but that doesn't mean she has to enjoy it.]

[Mirai offers her other hand instead, hoping Scully will take that cue. Handshaking is foreign to her, but she gets its meaning — she just doesn't know that it's traditionally done with the right hand.

Which, for her, is really unfortunate.]

I-it's nothing serious. It's — [Her shoulders slouch as she wonders whether she should explain this or not. Scully's her new boss, Scully's a doctor, Scully might be able to be trusted with this, but...] It won't go away. It's not something that can heal.

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I read the news today, oh boy

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