trans_9 | Somebody needs a checkup

Oh, if only Miku knew what was waiting for her when she woke up. The mess on the omnicoms would have to be fixed somehow, after all. The young woman slept fitfully, shifting on the bed. Her head was full of static and snow, while in her dreams she hesitated in chasing her brother down the corridor that would certainly lead her to him.

"Mafuyu..." she murmured and tossed over on her side heavily. "Wait... wait..."

Jean's eyes widened a little seeing the redhead carrying in the smaller girl in and then lay her on one of the beds. "What happened?" Jean called out as she hurried over.

She didn't even wait for the redhead to explain, instead Jean began checking the unconcious girl's vitals.

"She's been fallin' asleep all the time for no reason," Tess says, looking concerned. "Somebody else ran—well, flew—inta her a couple days ago, but she got checked out here then and they let her go without any problems."

Miku sucked in a sharp breath and grimaced. Whatever she was dreaming about wasn't pleasant. "N... no...! No!" She pushed at Jean's hands and wailed.

Jean's eyes widened, and she looked over at Tess. "Has she been having a lot of nightmares?" she asked before turning her attention to Miku, her eyebrows furrowing as she looked over the fitfull girl.

"Plenty." Tess circles a little so she can watch Miku without getting in Jean's way, and her heels click on the floor. (Not that she had heels while carrying Miku, but they're apparently a sudden addition...) "Almost every time, actually."

Miku slowly settled down, but, the more Jean looked the more there were little things wrong with her. As if something moved under her skin, spreading bloody red here and there, and then invisible again.

In her dreams, she had found a safe place, but who knew how much longer she could stay there? "...Mafuyu..."

Jean's eyebrows drew together and she leaned in a little closer to the girl. Her eyes widened as she saw something red moving under her skin, appearing to spread out, only to disappear again.

She looked over to Tess again, her confusion clearly evident. "What do you know about this girl?"

"She's got a cat?" Tess says, trying to wring her brain for anything that could actually be relevant. "Everythin' she's told me has sounded pretty normal." She gives Jean kind of a helpless look.

The pattern showed up again on her hands, across her cheek, vanished down into her plantsuit, and the girl whimpered. It looked like red snake scales and sharp, pointed lines of a plant of one kind of another.

All she wanted to do was wake up. Why couldn't anyone wake her up?

"Thank you anyway," Jean murmured, turning to focus on the Miku again. She tried for a moment to wake her up with a gentle shake, but nothing.

Sighing she moved to the head of the bed and rested her hands on each side of Miku'shead before closing her eyes and concentrating. Suddenly Jean was able to hear what was going on inside of Miku's head.

For a moment all she heard was static and then a sort of ancient chanting that Jean wasn't able to place. But she couldn't hear any of Miku's actual thoughts, and that caused a slight frown to form on her lips. So she did the only thing she could think of. Wake up!! Jean telepathically urged the younger woman.

Deep in her dreams, Miku ran.

Crashing into old dressers, and clipping the edges of walls to get away from her ghostly pursuers, she raced for the doors of the temple. There was a voice telling her to wake up, and she was doing her best, she really was. The doors, old, wooden, smelling of mildew and rot, came into view. I'm coming! she called back, and pushed them open.

In reality, Miku woke up with a long, shuddering gasp and sat up, blinking confusedly. This hadn't been where she remembered going to sleep at all, but before she could question that, the skin of her face and hands changed from pale, to full on, bruised, and tattooed red. (http://www.cameraslens.com/fatalframewiki/images/4/4f/Mikustattoos.jpg) She grit her teeth and held her breath until the initial wave of pain passed, and with it, the tattoos.

A stone settled deep in Miku's gut. Something told her she had some explaining to do.

Woah. Woah woah woah. That is very not normal, and not something anyone would develop from just having a concussuin.

Tess takes half a step back before she gets proper control of herself again, and wobbles a moment before regaining her balance. For just a moment her thoughts were on the edge of spiking into pure panic, but concern for Miku overrode that.

Jean just stared at the young girl, watching as her skin changed into some sort of tattoo and bruised right in front of her eyes. She could tell the girl was in pain, though when Jean moved to try to help her, the tattoo disappeared.

Jean's eyes widened and she shook her head. "What exactly was that?"

Miku looked up and bit her lip. She could just flat-out lie, say she didn't know, cover up the fact that she would die soon. But...

She liked Tess and didn't want to lie to her. Miku's shoulders slumped as she came to her decision. She'd been doing so well at pretending to be normal! "If I tell you, do you promise to believe me?" Start small, after all, things were probably going to get a lot hairier as she went on.

"...I promise," Tess says quietly, and moves forward to take one of Miku's hands, heedless of any protests Jean might have. "But you have to stop hiding this stuff."

She has no idea what's going on, her face says, but she's still willing to accept Miku as a friend.

Miku looks at Jean and makes a judgement: she doesn't know the woman, but she helped her wake up. And if she laughs, there isn't anything but ~~crippling pain~~ Tess stopping her. And maybe Tess wouldn't stop her. "I... didn't have much of a chance to talk about it before, what with the... ah, zombies."

She reached up with her free hand and fiddled with the black choker around her neck nervously. "And I had thought that maybe it had gone away, but, when I'd went to sleep that night..." Miku swallowed hard. This was so hard to tell them, and it went against everything her mother had ever drilled into her head as a child. Don't tell anyone about your abilities, don't say anything about what you see. Don't. Don't. Don't.

"We went to an old mansion that was supposed to be haunted. The person I assist, Kurosawa Rei, and I took some photographs there, but, there was nothing to really expand on. A-afterwards, I started dreaming about someone," Mafuyu... "I thought, at first, I was getting the chance to see him again." I want to see him...

In the past, it used to be a... a kind of temple. People would go there and give their grief up to a priestess, who had it tattooed on their body. So much pain... "This..." Miku touched over her face gingerly, feather light. "Is my punishment for living on when I should have died. A... a curse. I'll just keep sleeping and sleeping until I don't wakeupandand..." Turn to ash... "It's going to kill me, you see. I'm... I'm sorry. I didn't want to worry you. In my dreams, I'm looking for a way to fix it... but..." There isn't anything yet.

Miku looked down at her lap and took a deep breath. "I'm doing my best." And it wasn't like there was anyone that could help her, anymore.

Jean was silent while Miku talked and explained what was going on with her. While she had told most of it, Jean knew she hadn't told the whole story, and those parts that Miku had left out? Jean had gotten due to her telepathy.

She pressed her lips together and with a simple telekentic thought, drew a chair over to Miku's bed and sat down so she wasn't looking down at her. "Miku, I'm going to try to help you... But first, I want to know if you are aware of how you woke up..."

Miku looked at Jean dead on, "I heard you. I was already trying to run for the mansion doors, but..." It had been that little push, maybe, the idea that someone wanted her to awaken that had been worth it. "Thank you, it helped." She wasn't sure if a voice in her head was a good thing, and in all likelihood, it wouldn't wake her up if Reika was really hellbent on keeping her under, but she appreciated it all the same.

She turned her attention to Tess for a moment, "I just... don't want you to think I'm crazy, or making it up... or something."

"I don't," Tess says, and squeezes Miku's hand. "After all this ridiculous—"

She wouldn't have believed in zombies, if some hadn't almost eaten her. But that makes it pretty hard to be a skeptic about anything else.

Jean looked between Miku and Tess, her eyebrows arching a bit. "Is it really that ridiculous? You're on an organic ship where zombie just tried eating most of the crew..." She held her hands up a little in a 'I'm just sayin' motion.

She turned back to Miku. "I'm telepathic, Miku... So perhaps you'd like to tell me the full explanation about what's going on with you?"

Miku frowned, "But I don't know the full explanation! If I did... If I had a better idea, or my research materials, or Amakura-san's research materials... I just..." Miku sighed and dropped her hand back down to her chest with a wince. Ow! Don't do that again. "I only know what I can find in that place now, or can piece together when I start falling asleep. I'll see things."

It's a stupid ability, it's stupid and I don't want it.

"...Ain't there anybody else around here who could help? Somebody who has experience with this kinda stuff?"

"Have you looked in the media library? There might be some of... Your friend's research notes, or even your own stored up there." Jean suggested with a small frown.

She pushed back from the examining bed and rose to her feet and moved to get one of her datapad's so she could begin trying to find out what was going on with Miku. Bringing it back with her, she took her seat again. "I'm not sure what we can do to help you, but of course we'll try," she offered Miku a smile.

"We'll start with some normal lab work and you can tell me everything you know about this condition you have and the abilities it gives you." Yes Miku, she'd caught that.

"And you," she said, turning to look at Tess. "Can tell me everything you observed when she fell asleep."

"I don't know how any of this works. I... I barely figured out the little... omnicom thing." Miku shrugged. It wasn't her fault this was far and away from anything she was used to. Even Yuu's laptop hadn't been this advanced, and it was brand new (for... 1988). "If my research notes are there, and maybe Amakura's..." She looked down and fumbled with her choker again, racking her brain for answers, piecing together information as best she remembered it without her notes. Luckily, she had a good memory for this sort of thing. Miku's voice was very soft and intimate when she finally started to speak.

"At home, they called the people who had the same afflictions as I did 'Lost Patients', they all appeared to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but also claimed to see a bruise-tattoo (check) and dream of a woman in a mansion, or their loved ones waiting for them. After a few days, they started to sleep more and more, and have nightmares.

"I didn't get my abilities from that... I was born with them, unfortunately. It's helped me survive so far, but only just. Sometimes I can... touch things and see memories, or just know when something is going to happen..." she trailed off and smiled a little sadly, "See and touch the dead -- which, by the way, I don't... don't really recommend. It hurts." Miku wondered briefly if she should tell them about the camera, lovingly put away in their shared quarters, safe from prying, curious hands.

She thought better of it. It wasn't like her camera was doing anything but capturing the ghosts in her dream, even if she hadn't had a real physical use for it yet.

The ship ghosts were... mostly docile.

"There's only been nightmares," Tess says, and takes a little bit of a step back, thinking. "I—hang on," she says, clicks her teeth, and mutters.

The helmet of the suit she's wearing slides shut, and her fingers twiddle at the air against her thighs. After a few long moments, the left panel of the helmet slides open again. "I'm searching my logs for any of those patterns I might have missed before."

Jean typed in notes from what Miku had told her and at the bottom typed in It all sounded so fascinating... Though not in a good way, obviously. She'd have to get McNinja in on the this and see what he thought. "We'll figure something out," she said, offering Miku a soft smile.

Jean's eyebrows furrowed and she looked over at Tess. "Your logs?"

"I record everythin'," Tess says distractedly—her other eye must still be engaged with whatever interface is inside that weird two-sectioned faceplate. "It's easier'n bein' selective. I'm not findin' anythin' so far but more nightmares, though."

Miku raised her eyebrows, "...Pervert." Her mumble almost too low to be heard by anyone but Tess, maybe. At least her tone was a little gentle. She turned her attention to Jean. "Well, I don't want to be a... an inconvenience to anyone."

Sometimes, Miku was too Japanese for her own good. Besides she was... almost sure she could figure it out. Perhaps if she fell asleep again, she'd find something in that library cache of books in the mansion.

Perhaps not. So many of them were so old and musty...

"Don't worry, you won't be an incovenience in any way." Jean smiled. "Besides I'm a doctor, my job is to make sure everyone remains health." She winked and looked back down to her datapad.

"Well it would be helpful to know what you observed during her nightmares, it could be helpful in figuring a way to treat her."

"I can—" Tess' teeth click and the exposed half of her face twists in a way that suggests subvocalization.

Jean's pad beeps up a request for a wireless connection. If she accepts, she'll find it transferring a neatly-packaged, well-edited video file over—short clips of the more standout nightmares (mostly in infrared vision, and a few well-censored to preserve Miku's modesty). Bits of mumbling nursery rhymes, one awkwardly-angled vignette (was Tess herself asleep at the time?) with Miku appearing to sleepwalk...

Somebody needs a checkup

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