(no subject)

[locum_tenens]

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.

Comments

outside the infirmary

[whipshots]

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.

Near to bunker - if this doesn't work, let me know

[killorder]

Sadly hope is not likely something this place has in good commodity. Not for those hoping to return home. Not for those hoping for their loved ones to arrive in this place. Not for Niska in hoping to avoid anyone else while she is trying to get somewhere safe. Despite being fairly easily distracted, and Cougar being back to himself, Jake is still trying to work out the newest mystery presented him - while avoiding the jellyfishy things until he has a chance to thoroughly examine the specimens he's caught - and so is heading for the bunker to go through the computers again to try and have some kind of answer as to how they can literally change a person's entirely personality. Having Cougar talking to him was neat, but he likes his stoic, quiet Cougar. And only a tiny bit because he likes being his translator for so much, and that they have that bond. The grunts and odd sounds of an animal though draw him off track, prepared with a slingshot and some of the small glass vials he's prepared for just such an issue. Except that by the time he gets there, whatever the creature would be is gone and all that remains is a person he knows... who doesn't look entirely well, and her hand is oddly tinged. Jake stops dead in his tracks, making an assumption of the coloring. "Did you kill one of those things? Or a bunch of them? Did you get bitten?"