sixthiterationlogs | braaaaains?

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.

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"If I had a brain," he says, shooting her a glare to preemptively warn about any Wizard of Oz-like jokes, "then we could be isolating areas to see if it's something specific. Given the visions and personality traits taken on, I would assume it has to do with the frontal lobe. Though, the flashbacks and memories are in the limbic system," he says.

So, that's a no-go when it comes to figuring this out, not that he thought he'd get anywhere close.

"Makes for a difficult experiment to carry out. What I wouldn't give for my library back home," Helen said, sighing a bit. "I'm certain I have to have collected a book on this subject at some point. Zombies aren't unknown to me."

She gestured a bit with her hand. "Not Major's sort, naturally, but in general they are known in my world."

He'd take actual physical samples over a library, but honestly, books would be helpful. "You don't think that we could offer up a prayer to the strange gods of this place and see if they'd give us a library, Beast-style? I mean, if they want to woo us as the beautiful princess we are, it's only fair," he insists.

Helen laughed in spite of herself and found herself nodding. "You know, it would be helpful if sometimes those care packages we get actually had books in them instead of just clothes and pets."

Helen didn't particularly mind the gift of clothes - she'd much rather have anything to wear but the scrubs - but she wanted books and tools to help her get out of this place.

"I'm fairly sure they're promoting illiteracy, but then, I'm just grateful anytime we do get something." Ravi has noticed the lack of books, which is a bit suspicious because that means they don't want anyone here to have knowledge. If they don't have any knowledge, then how are they supposed to know what to learn and do.

Or, maybe, that's the point. "I mean, you could always just start writing the books. I think that'd be a fairly good 'up yours'."

Helen laughed a bit. "I've never written a book before. My friend James did, of course - he ghostwrote for Arthur Conan Doyle. I just want to write scientific things, though. I'm afraid I don't have the creative bent."

Helen squinted a bit at him. "I need to start writing down everything I do, everything we find in our research."

"I've been taking notes on what we encounter, but honestly, that doesn't get very far when my lab rats aren't showing many signs of why things are happening. I can create differences," he insists. "I can't exactly explain how it works, though."

"Also, Conan Doyle? Really? So he's a hack?"

"Absolute hack," Helen confirmed. "He didn't write a damn thing about Sherlock and Watson and it's Watson that's the clever one with deduction and not Sherlock. Imagine that? I'm sure your entire life's just been upended."

"I mean, it's not so wild to believe," Ravi admits, given that he never could understand why a super-genius would want someone at his side that wasn't as clever, even if it hadn't been spelled out. "I'm actually not really a Sherlock Holmes reader myself," he admits.

"More of a Game of Thrones fan," he confesses, even if it's not quite Clive levels of fandom, which he doubts anyone in Seattle could compete with.

"Game of Thrones? I don't know that one," Helen confessed. "But, then again, my life shortly before coming to this place didn't leave me a lot of available time to read and I never cared for television as a medium."

Perhaps it made her old-fashioned but there were worse things to be.

"Don't worry, we could spend a century here and it won't be finished," Ravi assures her blithely, because that's just the truth. He wonders if that's driving Clive mad on a daily basis, because while Ravi is a casual fan, he also doesn't do the cosplay as much as Clive apparently had.

"Television is okay, but gaming, that's what I really miss," he insists, sighing with the loss of such a critical part of his life.

"One of my...well, I'd sort of taken him in as a son, of sorts, but one of the men who works for me loves video games. I'd never really picked up on it, though. I used to attempt to try my hand at Mario when Henry was young but I never got the hang of it."

Helen laughed a bit. "I'm showing my age, naturally."

Ravi wrinkles his nose at the comparison, seeing as he loves video games as much as anything, but the comparison to Helen's son figure isn't exactly something he wants to think about for very long. "So long as we don't get into awkward territory here with regards to me and this son of yours, I can live with it," he promises.

Otherwise, then he's definitely going to need a therapist to help out with some of this.

"Seeing as how everyone is younger than me and I didn't raise you? No, we're fine," Helen said, laughing a bit. "I tend to just tell people I'm thirty-nine and be done with it. It avoids uncomfortable questions."

She brushed her hair back from her face a bit and peered at him, curious. "What is it about those games you like so much? Sell me on it."

"It's an escape into another person and another reality, but at the end of it, you still get to check out and go back to a normal life," he says, thinking that ought to be the selling point of just about any hobby. "It's like here, but if you got to opt at when you got tired of eating the same fish for four days in a row because no bigger venison has stumbled across the place."

"Thirty nine really isn't so much of a difference from me anyhow, unless you had me when you were all of eight."

Helen snorted a bit. "I did not give birth that early so, no, we're fine there. My age has always been something that made...relationships difficult. It's one of the things that's nice here, though, because I don't have my immortality looming over everything."

It made it possible to have a relationship, for once, and Helen was grateful.

braaaaains?

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