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WHO: Niska Elster
WHERE: On the path from bunker to village
WHEN: March 17
OPEN TO: All!
WARNINGS: She may get angry, but no true violence past the animal attack

It was always inevitable that this would happen, though Niska had been hoping that she might avoid it. She charged at night, she always wore her contacts, and the only person who knew her secret was someone that she knew that she could trust. Perhaps it had been human of her, but she had allowed herself the delusion that no one would discover her secret.

What Niska hadn't counted on was the giant warthogs that lived near the bunker and that one of these days, her luck would run out -- not that she believed predominantly in luck, but she did believe in odds. An animal attack was far from impossible and with the strange flurry of bio-luminescent activity, she should have been more careful.

She wasn't, that's the trouble.

In her haste to leave the bunker from her last coding trip, Niska had wandered right into the warthog's territory. While she hadn't been stung, clearly it had been riles and in its frenzy, pinned her to a wall, sniffing her before deciding that she hadn't been worth the attack, moving on. Grimacing, she checks on her clothes, her scrubs, but when she lifts her palm back up, it's coated in blue synthetic fluid.

She's bleeding from the scrape to her hips and stomach from where she'd been pinned to the wall, the blue of it soaking through her scrubs -- her very bright scrubs where she won't be able to hide it. She needs to get back to her house, but being the middle of the day, it means that anyone she comes across is going to see her.

If she lingers or takes too long a path, then she'll bleed out, because she has replacement fluid at the house, but she needs to get there. Forming a plan, she instantly begins the march back, hand protecting the bleeding as best as she can.

Yet, no matter how hard she tries, her fingers are still tinged blue. She's still limping. Deep down, Niska knows that her secret won't make it past today, but she does something very human. She hopes.

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Animal attacks have been on the rise with those strange lumiscent jellyfish and the local creatures are riled up, and so those new infirmary rotas have already come in handy. Today, Brigitte is on the porch and reading a book, hands gloved and scarf wrapped around her neck, not minding the chill. It's brisk and refreshing.

Which is when she sees the woman she considers a friend limping down the street, Niska's hand pressed to her side in the familiar way of someone applying pressure to a wound, her shoulders stiff. Gaze locked down the street and towards her house, rather than the infirmary. Brigitte drops her book and the legs of her chair tip backwards, before she manages to right herself and chair slams back down to the wood of the porch.

"Niska?" she asks, then: "Niska. What the hell's happened? Was it one of—"

She's already bustling and hurrying forward, intending to seize the blonde's arm and drag her towards the hospital, but Brigitte stops before even reaching her. Blinks at the bright colour: blue, blue like the late-winter sky above them. Toxins? Brig wonders, because the cogs of her mind are dragging, struggling to put something together that makes sense.

By the time she reaches the infirmary, the stain to her clothes is something that's impossible to hide. Her brow is furrowed and she stares at Brigitte from where she's trying to mask the wound, shifting a little and being grateful that it had only been a scrape and a bleed, not a puncture.

She could replace her fluid, but she didn't have the more complex parts and pieces if she'd been outright gored. She sees the precise moment that Brigitte sees the fluid.

There's no hiding this, not now. "I need to get to my house," she says sharply, because she'll need the replacement fluid she's received and a charge, just to ensure she doesn't shut down in the midst of it.

"Okay," she says automatically, obediently. Because even in this moment, reeling, Brigitte listens to practicalities and focuses tunnel-vision-like on the immediate problem. The issue right at hand.

And there's limitless universes at play in this village -- so who's to say that in Niska's world, humans just happen have blue blood? So she walks closer to the woman's uninjured side, and reaches out -- as if about to jot her shoulder under Niska's arm, help brace her and walk her back, but the blonde recoils. Jerks back from the contact, and so Brigitte remains at a distance and holds up her own empty palms. Like dealing with a skittish animal.

"Let's go, then," she says, voice surprisingly level despite her heart pounding in her throat. And starts walking in the same direction Niska had been headed; because she's a medic, and she knows to provide assistance even if she's struggling to process what she's actually seeing.

(The dawning understanding will come in a few minutes, anyway.)

Niska keeps a palm over the scraping wound, trying very hard not to make eye contract with Brigitte, as though delaying the inevitable will somehow make it easier when it arrives, but she doesn't truly think that's going to help.

Once the journey is done, she feels a bit weaker and she worries that she won't be able to replace the fluid herself, at least, not with the amount of skin she'll need to take up to get there. Eyeing Brigitte, she now needs to make a decision. "I trust you," she says, firmly, more of a weapon than words. "And I need you to help me without doing anything to me."

They're stepping inside Niska's house, and even now, Brigitte can't help but glance around and take in this first sight of the woman's living area. And she notices, of course, how bare and tidy it is: compared to Brigitte's chaotic room at the inn, all knick-knacks and crumpled clothing and scraps of paper, this is pristine. It could simply be the product of an obsessively tidy mind, but something about it feels more than that.

And then, Niska's words. The gravity of them. The inherent vulnerability. Brigitte nods: "Yes. Okay. Tell me what I have to do. Can I take a look?"

She's still operating under the automatic assumption that her friend is human, her own instincts ready to kick into the usual medical triage; even if those skills are going to be fairly irrelevant in a moment.

Niska feels a panic unlike she's felt in a very long time. She wants to believe that after she does this, everything will be fine, but she needs to make sure that she has something to defend herself with at hand. It's why she sits gracefully beside the worktable, opening a drawer that has her synthetic fluid, but also several other elements and something very sharp.

"I'll need to lie down and you'll need to replace some of my fluids," she says, thinking of the best access point. "By the charger, you'll need to peel back the skin and use the entry there. Then, I'll need to be stitched up."

Fluids could perhaps, generously, be interpreted as blood — but then Niska says charger, and Brigitte feels a strange chill plummet through her, her heart twisting in her chest, the realisation finally hitting that she'd been trying to ignore. And Niska gestures to her midriff through the torn shirt, and Brig sees the spot where the blonde taps into the electric grid of her own house. Distinctly neat and circular and valve-like and non-organic.

Numbly, she pulls up a chair (does she need to disinfect her hands? does that matter? it always matters but this time it might not matter—) and she sits across from her friend. Nods, once and decisively, with what she's hoping is a reassuring expression but instead comes out a little queasy. She looks at the container of synthetic fluid as it's handed to her.

It's just like a transfusion, she tries to tell herself, but that lurch in her stomach is so unfamiliar. She hasn't felt like this since the very first time she ever hit the battlefield.

"I—" A beat. There are so many questions (first among them: how), but she presses them all down in favour of focusing on the current problem at hand. "I. Okay. Lie down. I'll try not to spill any."

Niska hasn't blinked this whole time as she watches the other woman, hyperaware of the danger that's presented before her, overly cautious about what might be happening. If she needs to run, she has enough fluid and ability to get out, but it won't last long.

She needs the second set of hands to help with this, there's really no avoiding that.

Breathing steadily, she lies back and remains still. She's not breathing, she never has, but she always pretended before. There's no need for that now. "I won't need too much, but a small replacement before it's stitched up ought to do."

Brigitte's used to patching people up in battle: dragging them to the side, forcing them to sit still while she sews up wounds, wraps them in gauze. They exhale shaky breaths, hold a desperate lungful of air, bite down through the pain. Their chests rise and fall, quicker and quicker, they jerk away from a painful touch.

None of that here. Niska remains steady and even, but all rigid lines and edges, like a cat with its hackles on edge. Brigitte moves gently bur firmly: pouring in the bright blue liquid, her mouth thinned as she tries to watch, tries to gauge how much 'too much' might be. Tries not to let her voice shake. "Tell me when. If you can."

(What even is she?)

Niska has gone cold and dead through this. She no longer gives the illusion of breathing, no longer is acting human. There's no need. The discovery has been made and Brigitte will do as she wishes, which isn't for Niska to decide.

She tilts her head to the side to watch her, cautious to be attentive of her every move, just in case she elects to do something stupid that would require Niska to take action.

"That should be enough to function," she says, when some of her cognitive functions stop being so fuzzy and blurry. "You can seal it up now."

Seal. Like she's a container to be closed up, and lid affixed.

It's a good thing that Niska has all the supplies ready — she's extremely well-prepared and it seems she almost could have done this by herself, really, except that it had happened in public. Where she'd been seen. Where it had taken her too long to get back, too long to get woozy and weakened.

Brigitte takes the needle and thread. This part might have seemed familiar — she’s stitched up so many people with battlefield injuries — except that the elasticity is ever so slightly off, the skin of Niska’s stomach strangely human-like and yet. Not. Brig breathes; keeps her head bent over her task; doesn’t meet her friend’s eye, for a while. Until she’s carefully sewn up the wound and then immediately slides backward on her chair, moving further away from the other woman. Her hands are stained blue.

“What are you?”

She blurts out the question. Wasn’t able, at the last, to make it more tactful.

She feels pain, but she doesn't allow it to show on her face. This is the mildest of the pains that she's felt in her life and cannot compare, so Niska refuses to allow any of it to appear on her face. She keeps her eyes on Brigitte, not flinching or blinking.

There is no more time to lie.

She's seen too much.

"I am Niska Elster," she says, because that hasn't changed. "I'm a synthetic being created by David Elster to help assist with his family. I am not human, but that doesn't matter," is her clipped remark, because no matter what, that hasn't changed.

And then Brigitte is casting her mind back, distantly remembering when Niska said she'd worked with electrical engineering. I like to tinker around with machines, from time to time. Some coding, some building.

It isn't to say that she should have seen this coming, because there's absolutely no way she could have. Niska was too good at hiding it, too practiced and careful. But Brigitte's mouth thins, her own expression as visibly shaken where Niska's is cool and implacable. She pins her hands between her knees so they'll stop trembling, her spine stiff and straight.

"You're an omnic," she says numbly, instinctively falling back on the word for them from her own world. Self-corrects a moment later: "A robot."

"Yes." She's not unflinching in this, because she's feeling pain right now, both physical and an emotional component that feels awful, the worry that she's about to lose a friendship simply because of what she is. "I'm an aware synthetic being, one of four created. I feel as a human does. I feel pain, in all ways."

"I helped to distribute code to my brothers and sisters and woke them all," Niska shares proudly. "Robots," she echoes, with mild disdain for Brigitte's word, "like me."

In all ways. She catches that slight (but important) distinction. The hint that Niska might be hurting, too, even if it doesn't show.

But there's a chill down Brigitte's spine at the rest of Niska's words. Waking them all. Perhaps the omnic crisis started with someone (something) just like this: one spark, lighting the sentience and self-awareness in all the rest, a virus multiplying and multiplying until they all rose up. Thousands and thousands dead, four years of war, her father almost dying--

Her chest feels heavy and tight, the anxiety strangling. She doesn't often panic, but this feels like a looming panic attack.

"I'm-- I'm glad you're okay," she says, because that is still true, even if she can't sort out how she feels about the rest of it. She rises to her feet, a hand at her throat, hovering on the verge of just walking right out.

"Will you be alright, now that it's sewn up? Is there anything else I can do for you?" she asks stiffly, as if she's nothing more than Niska's physician. Medical care. Focusing on the logistics, rather than addressing the elephant in the room or how she feels about it. Brig's not sure she could even explain it herself.

Niska watches her with the unblinking eye of a synthetic who is no longer operating under the requirement to hide. Her movements are smoother, she's no longer stilted in any way, and she takes her time studying Brigitte. "Now that I'm no longer leaking fluid, I'll live," she deadpans, and it's meant to have some humour in it.

She lets her eyes roam over Brigitte, aware that this is not the easiest thing for anyone to get accustomed to.

"You can go," she says, calm and sharp, clearly displeased that she's been found out.

The sight of this new Niska is so eerie and uncanny: her mannerisms cut down to the bone, to the bare minimum required for efficient movement. Nothing extraneous, no human tics or fidgeting or restlessness. Spine straight, posture perfect. That dry-as-bones humour doesn't get a laugh out of Brigitte, but the side of her mouth twitches. A kind of weary, rueful acknowledgment that, at least, Niska tried.

She pauses on the synthetic's doorstep, her hand against the doorframe.

"Call if it gets worse," she says, over her shoulder. First, do no harm keeps looping in her head. She's not an actual doctor, hasn't sworn any formal Hippocratic oaths, but something still squirms at the thought of abandoning someone if they're injured, if they need help.

Even if she can't quite look at Niska just yet.

The door opens; she leaves.

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outside the infirmary

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i can edit if any of these living space assumptions are off!

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aaaand done? ow my heart