braaaaains?

[zomboligist]

WHO: Ravi Chakrabarti
WHERE: Behind the Inn
WHEN: May 23
OPEN TO: OTA!
WARNINGS: (Please warn for adult content or anything triggering) Gravedigging, brains, zombieism talk

---

It's probably alarming, but in the early hours of the morning, Ravi has been out with a shovel, digging up graves that he'd once put bodies into. It had been something he's been wary about ever since Major started showing symptoms, because maybe if he could somehow find old brains, he could at least keep Major off the animal ones.

Unfortunately, days of digging in the exact place he remembers the corpses being yields nothing but dirt on his face and frustration. He needs to figure out some sort of solution that's more viable (and horrifically gross as it sounds, tastier than what they're doing). Unfortunately, replicating myelin is a strange idea to begin with and that's with a postulation that the myelin is what's causing the zombie to be fed.

So here he is, another early hour, trying yet another grave site that he thinks might be the location of one of the bodies he'd performed his autopsies on. If this is a bust, then he's going to have to resort to trying to lure the new animals into a trap of some kind and hope that possibly, the brain chemistry or the effects of one of their new friends can help to keep Major fed without him resorting to wanting to hoard nuts for the winter every single time.

Sticking the shovel in the ground, he wipes at the sweat of his brow, having dreadful flashbacks to the days of their delightful tainted utopium searches and he knows, more than ever, that this is absolutely not the sort of life he wants to keep on repeating.

Grateful it's hardly sweating season, Ravi stares at the large mess he's made, realizing he'd started far too late today and he's definitely appearing to audition for town gravedigger with absolutely no intentions of taking that job, but honestly? He's just absolutely too worn to do anything but stare right now, because the emptiness is too much to handle.

Comments

[dann_0]

Danny has never been a guy who gets up early on his own accord. But with Steve missing and a new place and everything he is uneasy enough to wake up early. He turns a corner and comes face to face with something that honestly looks quite weird. He stares for a long moment and then takes a step forward. "'ey"

[zomboligist]

This is clearly not the situation that Ravi wants to be found in. Actually, it's probably a good thing that the grave is empty, but at the same time, that also could look like he's planning something, which he is most certainly not.

"Hi," he starts, trying to gauge exactly how suspicious he looks. "Would you believe me if I said I was just taking up gardening?" he quips, trying to keep things genial and light.

[dann_0]

"Farming might have been a better bet if it wasn't for the fact that that looks exactly like a grave and I am a cynical new york cop." New Jersey actually. So he had seen his share of these. He glances around. Half expecting to see a body ready to be dumped in it.

[zomboligist]

Ravi ought to get right down to facts so that he doesn't get in absolute trouble, though if he does get marched to jail, he hopes that his one phone call to Helen will be able to bail him out. "If it helps, I'm a frazzled Seattle medical examiner?" he offers.

"I think this might have been before your time, but I had to examine a few bodies," he explains. "We buried one of them here, I think. I'm trying to figure out if they've come along to our brand new world."

[dann_0]

Danny studies him for a long moment. He has a feeling that isn't the entire story but that is what further questions are for.

"Yeah? Doesn't seem like they have. Why did you think they would be?"

[zomboligist]

"We all came through to the new village, why not the corpses?" It's maudlin and extremely dark to think about, but the more Ravi's been ruminating over the idea, the more he genuinely thinks...why not? "I mean, do we have to be breathing? And if they're not here, what does that mean? Did they actually ever die or were they just pulled from us?"

He's not going into the whole 'and I might need their brains for my zombie best friend' part, because that's just awkward.

[dann_0]

"But the rest of us came through the fountain. Could it be that they are on the bottom of the fountain?" He frowns, thinking about it. "Though my gut feeling is that they were just pulled from us."

[zomboligist]

"If there are corpses stuck at the bottom of the fountain, I really don't want to think about the water quality that we're coping with here," Ravi says, making a face as he thinks about that. "I was really hoping they'd have come through."

"I'm dealing with a medical issue and I could have used the...well, the cadavers," he says, aware that this is all morbid and terrible, but it's the truth, at least.

[dann_0]

"Yeah, maybe we should go check it out." He frowns. "What could you use the bodies for? Anything going on?"

[zomboligist]

Ravi gives the other man a wary look. "This is very personal before we even get to know each other's favourite drinks," he jokes, but that's just to cope with the nerves of the fact that he's going to have to talk about it and he doesn't like that fact.

"I've got a friend here and he's got a condition that didn't appear until we came out of the fountain again," he says, trying to be blunt without talking about zombies and coming off like a creepy weirdo. "Wherever we were, it was in check. Now, it's not, and if I want to make a drug to hold off his symptoms, I could use some..."

He gestures to the grave, figuring that will say it all.

[dann_0]

Danny frowns at that. He has no idea what kind of condition would require old corpses. But he figures it isn't unheard of to use bodies to do research. "Yeah? How bad is the condition? Does he need any help?" He honestly sounds very worried there.

[zomboligist]

"I mean, he gets a bit squirrelly every now and then," Ravi deadpans, which is hilarious to him, but given that Danny doesn't know about the fact that Major is existing on squirrel brains and taking on some of the traits means that it's a wasted joke.

"It's not good," Ravi confesses. "Left untreated, the patient," he says (not subject), "can often slide into a compromised state. That's what I need to avoid."

[dann_0]

"Compromised state?" That has him a bit confused. The very careful language means Ravi is leaving something major out. "How do we avoid it? The last thing we need right now is that."

[notsocommon]

It took Helen a little while to find Ravi but once she had, she watched him for a few moments and tried to assess precisely what he was doing before simply coming out and asking properly. With him, normally, what was expected and what was true were usually on the opposite ends of the spectrum.

"Now, before I offer to help you dig to the mantle of the earth, do you mind telling me what we are digging for?"

[zomboligist]

"Only because you're my girlfriend and you already know several of my weird habits and personal backstory can I say this," he disclaims before he goes into the actual explanation (which is a lot to say given that he's already out of breath and that did nothing to help).

Wiping at his brow, he gets more dirt on it, but at least he's made progress. "This is where I buried one of the bodies after I examined it," he explains. "Only, I'm digging in the wrong place or it never came with us, which only brings up more questions."

[notsocommon]

"If an animal got to it, surely there'd still be bones or remnants of flesh. It wouldn't simply be gone," Helen said, frowning a bit as she knelt down to examine where Ravi had been digging.

"But for it to simply to disappear? That makes absolutely no sense. Then again, we've lived here long enough to understand that logic goes right out the window. Do you think you're misremembering the grave site?"

[zomboligist]

Ravi leans on the shovel, peering into the hole with a worried furrow of his brow. Animals would have definitely left pieces, and hungry zombies would have turned on their innocent roommates before getting here, which makes for a puzzling problem.

"This may not be the first grave I've undug," he confesses. "This is my third morning coming here, just in case I forgot, but I promise, I paced the exact same number of paces." There's a more worrying issue here. "I really needed those bodies," he admits. "Not in a creepy serial killer way, more in a scientific research capacity involving organs."

[notsocommon]

"You're not going to hear an argument from me about scientific research," Helen said, waving off his fears about the activity being creepy or untoward. She'd done her own exhumations back in the day, after all, so she couldn't be calling the kettle black.

"Why would the bodies have disappeared? Do you think they were part of the dream we were in, the one we woke up from a few weeks ago?"

[zomboligist]

"Either they stayed behind or they're one step ahead," Ravi says, because that's about the only options that he can think of. "No, wait,' he amends, "There's a terrifying third option in which they've been moved by our evil overlords." The reason he doesn't like that one is because it doesn't help him in the least.

"I need their brains," he confesses to Helen. "I really didn't want to have to go around hoping for another tragic accident, but they're not here and I'm back to square one."

[notsocommon]

"What sort of examination are you going to perform on said brains?" The fact that he wanted them was neither here nor there - if there were brains to be had, Helen was happy to help provide them. Science was science, after all, and she didn't consider it a desecration of the dead to do some sort of post-mortem excavation. Others might have moral or religious compunctions holding them back but she wasn't the sort to have either.

"I'm trying to decide if the new equipment we received would be useful in such an endeavor."

[zomboligist]

"Major has been having some issues," Ravi says, seeing as they're in public and he wants to be cautious about blurting out 'my best friend turned back into a zombie and I don't know what to do yet'. "The sort of issues that have been making him a bit squirrelly."

Literally, that is.

"I need to help create some kind of synthetic replacement, for his little habits," he says, which means he could really use a brain to figure out the equal material.

[notsocommon]

"Hmm, and obviously no one is going to volunteer to provide for those habits," Helen said, reading between the lines. It did create something of a real ethical conundrum, how to supply Major with his needs without harming anything sentient.

"We do need...yes. I know this sounds completely illogical but is there a chance that we could find other bodies? Bodies that aren't from...our settlement, possibly?"

[zomboligist]

"If they are, I think I might be more worried," Ravi confesses, because that's just a very strange thing to volunteer for. It's not like he can start sneaking little pieces of brain matter, either, which means that he's stuck between a rock and a hard place. Or, rather, in this case, he's stuck between a zombie and an empty grave.

"If we could, I could do some tests. Ideally, I need to synthesize a component of the brain for long-term feeding without having actual brain matter," he says. "I've no idea if that's even possible, but I have to try, for Major's sake."

[notsocommon]

"Damn. We need to find these bodies, then. Perhaps we can widen the net, some? Surely they can't have just disappeared. I know there were two deaths here in the time I've been here," Helen said.

It was a mystery, like so much else about this place, and one she intended to solve. "We should make a grid of the known territory and start searching."

[zomboligist]

"I've already done this for about three days, but these were definitely the places," he insists, reaching over to pick up the little stones that he'd set up the last time around, waving them like they're going to tell a story instead of just sort of being there.

"I even marked them!" Which means nothing if the bodies have been stolen. Is there a strange underground city beneath them? Is that something Ravi should be worried about? Should they have tried tunneling?