trans_9 | I keep hearing voices, but I swear I'm not crazy (OPEN)

The obs deck seemed to be Alex's hunting grounds, which was generally a good thing for whoever went there late at night when they are feeling down. On one of the couches sat a man with a tier II shadow enveloping him.

While it wasn't exactly the sort of Shadow Alex usually looked for, but with the way that guy was gripping his watch, he looked like he could use the help. Alex walked around behind him, letting emotions rise in him. Fear, sadness, anger, until it just became a mesh of negative feelings. He took that and harnessed it into long tendrils of shadow that only his eyes could see, and began to approach Rei from behind. The tendrils shot out, grabbing onto the shadow as Alex got closer. He finally got close enough to eat the shadow, and so he reached out to absorb it, but not before it lashed out one last time and managed to cut him. He didn't even have time to attempt to summon his shield. The wound was shallow, but it ran from the base of his thumb all the way up to the opposite side of his arm at the elbow.

Alice squeaked in terror and hid in Alex's hood. Alex took in a sharp breath, but made no other sound. He lunged forward and managed to absorb the shadow on his second attempt, though he was sure that after he had made those noises- while feeling better- this poor guy would be very confused.

The dog noticed the young man long before Rei did. She titled her head as she watched it fight nothing, then began barking loudly when he started bleeding. For as innocent and sweet a dog as Fati was, she had seen the attack on Zokez II, and blood did worry her.

"Fati, shut up," Rei muttered, nudging her with his foot, not looking up. But she wouldn't. She just kept barking.

He repeated the command, but she wouldn't listen. He lifted his head out of his hand, and noticed she was staring at something. He looked over his shoulder and saw the injured kid. And while he was still in a pretty bad place himself, he was concerned.

"Uh... you okay, kid?"

Alex was glad that he had pulled back his sleeves before attacking the shadow. It saved his jacket from getting ruined. He had grown fond of this one, and it would take a long time to get used to a new one.

Alex probably would have loved to answer, but he was clutching at his arm and staring at it. It was really not bad at all, and considering all the other scars he had seen much worse, but little beads of blood appeared along the line. He managed to advert his eyes before, but the red caught the corner of his eye while he crushed the unsettling mix of emotions he had taken from Rei.

He could have managed each on it's own, but rather than being taken over by the shadow he had just eaten, he let his fear eclipse it. His eyes were glazed over as he stared at his arm, frozen. Physically, he was definitely okay, but he didn't even seem to notice Rei speaking.

Rei pretty much forgot about his headache when he saw blood. "Oh, Jesus Christ," he cursed, vaulting over the back of the couch. He reached forward to place a hand on the boy's shoulder, just trying to get some eyecontact or something.

"Kid," he said, "kid, look at me. What just happened?" There was no trace of panic in his voice, even though he was feeling worried about the boy. He was in the zone right now, focused and alert and not showing what he was feeling, concentrating on the situation at hand. The way the leader of the Guardians was supposed to.

The teen shuddered at the contact, but his eyes remained glazed over as he stared at the blood. Memories of the night he discovered his mother captured his full attention. In his mind's eye the cut was much worse than it was in reality, it was surely bad enough that he would bleed out, just like his mother. But he couldn't move, couldn't ask for help. He had no control of his own body, but rather seemed to be merely an observer, seeing through his eyes while some foreign mind controlled his movements. Some mind that was purely reactive, that did not, could not, get help on it's own.

Rei's voice was like a distant echo, like someone shouting from down the street. It wasn't he that Rei was speaking to, but some other kid, someone closer to him.

"Kid," Rei said again, voice calm but firm. He gently place a hand on each side of the boy's face, and carefully lifted it up, in an attempt to force him to make eye contact.

"I need to you listen to me," Rei said, "and I need to you answer. Why are you bleeding?"

Alex still shuddered at the contact. His eyes focused on the cut until it was out of his field of vision, snapping up to Rei's. His eyes were dilated in his terror and his breathing clearly shaky, even through the shuddering against the contact.

Rei's words still seemed an echo, but not quite as far this time. He was there, and he seemed to want to help.

"Sh-Shadows, th-th-the Sh-Shadow... I-i-it w-was f-f-faster th-than I-I th-thought..." His answer likely would not sound sane to anyone unfamiliar with his powers, but he was still being mostly reactive. He was past concern about how crazy he sounded, but that he was answering in the first place was a good sign. Something was connecting, at least.

Rei frowned. Well, that didn't work. Then, something registered with him - the boy's arms were bare under his jacket. That meant...

"Why aren't you wearing your plant suit?" He said, sounding not unlike a concerned parent. But he had good reason to question that - he'd awoken on the ship back when Stacy was still requiring the suits to be worn. After the Nightmare King craziness, Rei had come to understand just how important the suits were. If he hadn't been wearing one, the gashes on his back would have needed stitches and taken forever to heal.

If the boy had been wearing his suit, Rei could have just helped him seal the thing, and that would be that. Without it, though, he was wondering if he should make the kid go to the medbay.

Tears welled up in his eyes when Rei mentioned the plant suit. The ship, he wasn't entirely sure why he distrusted the ship, the it was obvious why he disliked the plant suits. They were alive, and they touched every inch of his body. Every inch. The only thing possibly worse was being naked, and he had even considered that.

Alex shook his head and pulled away from Rei, clearly upset by the idea of the plant suit. He clutched at his arm and pulled away from Rei as Alice moved to Alex's shoulder to press herself against his neck in attempt to help calm Alex.

Rei groaned as the young man pulled away. This was quickly becoming very aggravating. He just wanted to know what was going on.

"Look, kid," he said slowly, "I'm not going to hurt you, okay? I just want to know what's going on. And more importantly, I think you should get down to the med bay and get that arm looked at. Please, just trust me, and come with me, okay?" He reached out to gently take the boy by his upper arm on the arm that wasn't cut, to escort him to the med bay.

--------------

The first thing Rei wanted to find in the med bay was a sink. It would be easier to dress the cut if it was clean and he could properly see how bad the damage was. He led the boy over to one of the sinks, and let go of him.

"Hey, kiddo, I know you're all kinda catatonic or whatever right now, but could you wash your arm off for me?" He said, trying to be cheery and as nice as he could. If he could get the boy to act on his own, it would make all of this a lot easier.

Alex made a soft small scared noise as Rei pulled him towards the med bay but offered no further protest. He felt distant from everything that was going on, but that only scared him more. "It's j-just... j-just the sh-shadow, j-jus' th-the shadow... I-it's o-o-okay... I j-jus' g-g-got h-hit by th-the shadow..." He continued to mumble this as he followed Rei down to the medbay.

Once there he tensed more, straining just slightly against Rei's guidance, but quickly giving in though he began muttering, "n-no, n-no d-doctors... N-no d-doctors". He stared vacantly at Rei when he asked for him to wash his arm. Something somewhere must have clicked that that meant he was either already in a doctor's clutches, or that there would be no doctors involved, and that either way it was better to just follow instructions. He walked to the sink, and turned it on, sticking the thin slice under the cold water.

He clenched his teeth as the water ran into his cut and his arm shook under the stream, but he managed to keep it there for the few seconds it took for the already drying blood drops to be washed off. He jerked his now dripping arm back from the sink and stood there, lost as what to do next.

Rei didn't respond to the boy's ramblings. He'd figured out by now that nothing the kid said in his current state would make much sense, so it was best to treat his injury, then let him calm down. In his experience, it was much easier getting a coherent answer from someone once they were done freaking out over things.

Without a word, he gently took the boy's arm and held it up so he could see it. He turned from side to side, and examined the wound. He clicked his tongue. "Chk, this is nothing. Barely a flesh wound. You just bleed a whole lot, huh? Still, this should be fine. Hold on a sec."

He let go of the boy's arm and went to rummage around in the drawers. When he found what he was looking for, he came back to the boy.

"Okay," he said holding a roll of bandage clothe, "gimme your arm again. Last time, I promise. I just want to make sure the cut's covered, since you seemed to have lost your suit."

Alex barely responded, lifting his arm slightly so that Rei could grab it easier. His expression was still vacant, though his breath was a bit slower now and he wasn't shaking quite as much. He was still pale though, and looked like he could really use a glass of water or something.

Alice had not moved from his shoulder the whole time, occasionally trying to gently groom him, or licking at his skin, seemingly very upset by her precious master's state of being. She bristled a bit at Rei when he touched Alex's injured arm for the first time, but relaxed quickly when she saw he wasn't hurting Alex. Alex always bragged about her good intuition about people's intentions, and it was apparently a just complement, since she resigned herself to just tending to her master in attempts to calm him.

Rei set to work bandaging the cut, doing it so calmly it seemed like he'd done it a thousand times. Which he had. Not a thousand, maybe, but enough. He hadn't hardly even spoken to a medical doctor since he because a Guardian, and had mostly just taught himself first aid. He'd even requested that the other two learn it, as well. It was a useful skill to have.

"Okay," he said with a smile, as he finished up, "there you go. Now, are you going to tell me what happened, or should I just send you on your way to continue being like the quietest person in the whole universe?"

Alex stumbled backwards and sunk into an empty chair, burying his face in his hands.

A few moments later he groaned and growled, "Scheisse." Keeping his eyes closed he rubbed at his head, which was pounding, and petted Alice gently. As odd as it might seem, he was fairly familiar with the situation. He had been, where was it? The observation deck? Yes, and he had been hungry, though that hunger was now absent. Was this the man that he had been targeting? Judging by the purple hat, yes. After that, things got... muddled.

He lifted his face from his hands and opened his eyes nervously, wondering where he was. Upon recognizing the medbay he groaned again and ran the fingers of his injured arm through his hair. That was when he noticed the bandage. It was neater than his handy-work, and lacked the amount of tape he usually used. He looked around, dazed but finally alert to find the Mad Hatter standing not to far from him.

"I-I... er," He must have gotten injured by the now-absent shadow, and then the shadow's host must have seen and helped him. "S-sorry..." Why did he always manage to get himself in the way of other people? He should have just found a nice, safe inanimate shadow.

"A-are you okay? I... I w-was p-probably jus' e-eating your shadow... they f-fight back sometimes." Well, he gets points for consistency. He still probably didn't sound like he was making much sense. The pounding headache and fuzzy haze over his memory wasn't helping.

Well, the kid seemed to be coming around to focusing on things a bit more, and his cut was treated. Like simply putting on a different hat, Rei slid back into his carefree persona, letting go of that rare feeling of responsibility he had shown.

"Ah, so you can speak in full sentences!" He said, giving the boy a little sarcastic round of applause. "Though, you do seem to have Torgo Syndrome," he said with a grin, referring to the infamous character that always repeated himself from Manos: The Hands of Fate. He wasn't expecting the boy to get it.

He opened his mouth to say something else, but stopped. He had been about to brush off the boy's question of whether or not he was okay, since it seemed kind of random. But then he stopped and thought about it. Yes, he was okay, he realized. He hadn't noticed it, his brain going into responsibility auto-pilot mode, but now that he really thought about it, his headache was gone. The weird memories and feelings that he couldn't place were still there, but he wasn't feeling quite as crappy as before.

"Yes," he said after a moment, choosing not to reflect on it too much, "I'm just fine. What about you?"

The reference flew over his head, leaving him more confused. He then remembered: different universes. Who was to expect them to have the same names for every disease? Alex just shrugged, "I've b-been known ta speak in those f-from time to t-time. Also, b-been known ta have p-plenty of syndromes. O-or disorders." Alex looked down and off to the side, still feeling bad about making this stranger help him. He was smiling with his flat joke, but it was definitely a dark humour.

Upon being asked his own well-being, he tested his various joints, and wrapped his hand around the bandage with a slight pressure. Not even a wince. Yes, he could feel it, but it wasn't like it really hurt much. Of course he would loose it at something small. He drew himself from that line of thought. It brought him too close to the thought of blood, and that always led him unpleasant places. He looked up at Rei, looking more at his shoulder than his face and said,"I-I seem ta be f-fine..."

And yet again he averted his eyes back to the ground, reaching to scratch at Alice's head. More softly he choked out, "S-sorry... I shoulda b-been more c-careful."

Rei seemed to ignore the dark humor. He seemed to ignore almost everything the boy said. He was still wanting an answer to one of the first questions he'd asked the kid.

"Well then, now that you're saying more then like three phrases over and over, would you mind telling me how you got that cut? Because cuts just appearing on a kid out of nowhere is pretty poltergeist-y, and I think if there's an angry ghost that can throw stuff around on the ship, it would probably be to the benefit of the rest of the crew to know about it."

Alex would have answered if he actually had recollection of that question being asked the first time. Unfortunately that was rather hazy at the moment. Of course, repeating himself was something he apparently did a lot of when he was like that, even if it generally lasted longer.

He sighed, hoping that at least he wouldn't think him completely insane. "W-well, b-bad feelings... I c-can see them. They're th-these sorta dark amorphous forms th-that... well, they're h-hard to explain, b-but they make sense ta me... A-anyway. I need to e-eat them, or I'll starve, h-however much normal f-food I eat. I-it's jus' well, they fight b-back, both b-before I c-consume them, and then I h-haveta make sure that I c-can overpower the feelin', or it c-can result like this," he held up his injured arm, "or worse. B-but I dunno i-if it did this b-before or after I a-ate it..."

He scratches at the back of his head with a nervous laugh, "But y-you don' haveta worry. T-they c-can be gh-ghosts... but I h-haven't s-seen a tier five y-yet, an' I wanna k-keep it that way."

Rei listened patiently to what the kid had to say. He didn't understand all of it, but that didn't seem to be a problem. He saw the faults in time that no one else did, and could remember dozens of alternate histories that no one else could. He was rather open to believing in the strange, for the most part.

"Well, next time you go doing something like that, warn someone before you do, so if you get hurt, they know why." Warn before acting. That was an unwritten rule of metas, to keep people from getting hurt or confused. And it was a rule Rei completely ignored.

"By the way, what's your name, kid?"

Drawing his legs up he muttered, "yessir," to Rei. Alex didn't entirely have intention to follow this- he found it hard enough to talk to people without needing to explain the whole shadow issue, or that he only gained nutrition from emotions. Still, he must have sacred the shit out of the poor man. "I- I'm sorry..."

Alex continued sitting quietly for a few more moments before realizing that Rei had asked another question. "O-oh... Sorry. I-I didn't tell you?" He muttered to Alice it seemed, though loud enough for Rei to hear, "how m-much did I miss?" He rubbed at his head again, looking rather pained. That was the worst part of these episodes, the headaches. "A-Alex... M-my name's Alex."

"Well, depends on when you started getting catatonic," he replied, "I only noticed you when you were right up behind me and bleeding, and by the point you were pretty much gone to your own little world. Why? Does this kind of thing happen a lot?"

He paused, looking around the medbay for a moment. In his efforts to get to boy down to the medbay, he'd lost track of his dog. He'd only just thought of her, and realized that it would probably be bad if she was off wandering around the ship on her own. Fortunately, the dog had been smart enough to follow him down to the medbay, and was currently sniffing at a bin marked with a biohazard sign. Rei patted his leg and called to her, and she happily came trotting over.

"Good dog," he said, picking the small dog up and cradling her next to his chest. He didn't want her running around in here, with all the delicate and dangerous medical equipment. "By the way," he said to Alex, "I'm Rei, and this is Fati."

Alex looked away guiltily, "M-more than I'd like ta admit... It's c-called dissociative fugue. It's... hard to explain." He shrugged as if his entirely-too-serious-to-really-be-going-without-help condition was nothing of interest.

Alex pet Alice's head and said, "O-oh, this is Alice. She's a rat." He hadn't really noticed the dog before, but now that he did, he couldn't tell you that it was a dog. Nor did he realize that it was as alien to him as it was to Rei. He assumed that the dog was like Alice, and from Rei's home. "S-so... is F-Fati one of the sorta pets in your world?"

Rei shrugged. "Lots of things are hard to explain," he said, "doesn't mean we shouldn't try to explain them. It's how we learn or something like that. Basically, I'm saying that you don't have to worry about things that are hard to explain because we're on a giant plant spaceship and there is much weird stuff going on."

Huh, so there were rats on the ship. Or at least one. Rei was really hoping that was the last one, because he'd seen the fourteenth century. He knew the horror rats could bring down on mankind.

"Oh, god no," Rei replied, making a bit of a horrified facial expression. "I pity whatever poor planet has a bunch of these hyperactive fuzzyballs running amok on it."

Alex couldn't help but to laugh. He hadn't yet witnessed the dog's antics, but just the imagery of a bunch of clones of Fati running through central park. Alex would pity that planet too.

"I suppose you're r-right. But I g-guess dissociation sounds m-more normal than my shadow powers. A-an' that's saying something... B-basically my m-mind... checks out. I don' always remember the episodes. Usually they last a f-few hours... I g-guess you were lucky, or summat." He pet Alice as he spoke, letting her crawl down into his arms.

It said something about Rei that he didn't really pay attention to the boy's stuttering about his disorder, but he perked up at 'shadow powers'.

"So you're a metahuman, right? Do you belong to a guild, or are you just a civilian? What class of powers are you?"

Guilds of super powered law enforcement were so normal where he came from. Even after meeting a bunch of vigilante metas, went he met a meta, he immediately assumed they were like the ones from his world.

Alex stared at Rei, "I-I guess you c-could say I'm a metahuman... I don' know anything 'bout the rest... I'm a civillian, I g-guess, though I spend so much time in the g-government labs, I feel more like a sub-human...

"I... I dunno what it's like where you c-came from, but Shadow Eaters are the only 'metahumans' in our world, an' the government made us. We're sorta a poorly kept secret, basically. All sorts of laws against talking about it, curfew at night to help keep people from gathering as much to help prevent crime- which is totally outta control as is... W-we're not even c-called metahumans, I o-only know what you mean cause, well, internet." He shrugged. Internet was why he knew a lot of things. That, and nerds tended to like comic books, even if he had grown up without the pleasure. He had to educate himself on things like the X-men to function in his community, though he couldn't tell you anyone aside from the main cast of the Evolutions series.

Funny. The Doctor was looking for a bit of relaxation time.

The Observation Deck seemed like the obvious choice. Generally there were people there, the types that wouldn't mind socializing or would otherwise keep to themselves, sometimes bringing along projects and real food, games and wares. It was a good place to get information when it was required, and a good place to relax if you had to. The Media Library might've been the secondary choice here, but after the Doctor took over roughly half of it for his studies, he needed a change of scenery.

Seeing none other than Rei the anomaly and his dog, thus, did not immediately surprise or concern him. At least, not until he noticed the slack leash, his slumped posture—maybe Rei fell asleep? No, no, he was awake, delirious. Or...hmm.

As the Doctor approached he became acutely aware of an underlying mental disturbance, some sort of...psychic ripple, if you want to call it that. It was too early to tell for certain what was causing it, or what it was exactly, not unless Rei opened his mind a bit more to some casual probing. In the state he was in, however, and knowing his current relations with this Time Lord and his kin of sorts, having that happen seemed rather unlikely.

A basic examination would have to do. The Doctor walked up slowly, deciding first to pacify the alien puppy whimpering at him by the chair by crouching and offering an outstretched palm for sniffing and petting. Surely Rei would react if he started conversing with his dog, right?

“Hello. Come here, that's a good girl...”

Fati happily stood and moved closer to the Doctor, looking for treats or head scratches. It took Rei a few moments to register that his dog had moved. "Fati, come back, girl. Heel." Or whatever the command was to get her to come back. Of course, being as poorly trained as she was, he wasn't expecting too much of a reaction out of her.

He lifted his head out of his hand and glanced towards where she had been, then to where she currently was, sniffing the hand of the blonde Time Lord. He blinked, not really surprised the Doctor was here, as it was the obs deck, but he hadn't been expecting him.

"Oh. You," he said, though it wasn't angry or rude, like his usual attitude towards the Doctor was. It was just a statement of fact. He was feeling far too out of it to get up the energy to be upset over the Time Lord at the moment.

Fati was duly rewarded with some pleasant scratches and pats, just enough to keep the Time Lord in her good graces, before he moved on to more concerning matters. Those would, of course, be in relation to her very tired-looking master slumped in the couch, who was also apparently not being distasteful towards the Doctor and, therefore, only served to make him more curious and worried for his condition. He stood deliberately and selected a nearby chair, which he then proceeded to drag and park next to Rei's claimed couch.

Once situated, the Doctor found that he was capable of responding. He'd cut their greetings awfully short, hadn't he? “Yes, hello. Terribly sorry for interrupting whatever thoughts you may have been immersed in.”

That was, oddly enough, meant both figuratively and physically. The Doctor leaned forward innocuously, banking on Rei being too distracted to notice and move away.

“—How are things? Good?” He was shuffling around in one of his pockets.

Rei watched intently as the Doctor brought the chair over, not really sure what to make of the situation. About the only thing that seemed to register was Fati trotting back to him and bumping his hand with her head. He absent-mindedly patted her head, not noticing that he'd squished her antenna a bit.

"You're a lot nicer then the other you, you know that?" Rei said, the words sounding a bit jumbled as he tried to put the sentence together. Now, he'd never had much of a brain-to-mouth filter, but right now, it was pretty much gone. So yes, he was rather distracted, and didn't bother trying to move away from the Doctor.

"...I don't like it when people ask that, because you pretty much have to answer with 'good'," he muttered, just letting whatever thoughts came to his head come out instead of actually answering anything.

The default answer was, ”One tends to mellow with age,” but then the Doctor remembered that he was, in fact, the youngest of the group, and thus his excuse instantly became void. His mouth stayed parted for a moment as he came up with something different.

“...Yes, well, he has his reasons and I have mine.” That would do, that would do. The Doctor continued fishing through his pockets, a small pile of items beginning to collect upon his lap—a pair of small reading glasses, a magnifying lens, several used tea bags, a cricket ball and mallet, a screwdriver of the non-sonic variety, two ancient but still quite fresh dog biscuits (which he passed down to Fati), pocket lint, a plane radio transceiver—before finally retrieving what he was looking for.

It was a tiny disk attached to a length of string.

“Oh, you know formalities,” the Doctor replied absently, putting away his various items with one hand while unraveling the string with the other, “Serve no other purpose other than to break the ice—can you look this way for me?”

The disk was in the air, dangled in front of the blond Time Lord's eyes, deep, blue and unblinking behind the relentless pendulum, quite close now that he was leaning over the edge of the couch. Those eyes were friendly, calming and trusting, suggesting—Now, Rei, why don't you open up your mind just a bit more, if you would be so kind?

There was a psychic disturbance somewhere in that man's head, and the Doctor was bound and determined to figure out what it was. Whatever physical ailments were present—and there definitely were some, he could tell—could be better explained under mild hypnotic influence, wherein Rei might actually answer his questions directly rather than with brain dribble, as he was currently.

[ooc: Yay hypnotism! Er, kinda. If you need me to explain anything about it or I need to rewrite this because ONOES the Doctor could have access to his subconscious, email me or jab me on AIM later, I'll be on after work~]

Rei watched with furrowed brow as the Doctor removed the various things from his pockets. It made him think of something. Something he would have brought up even if he wasn't so out of it.

"Are you, like, Mary Poppins on top of being a time traveler?"

Because really, it was just like watching Julie Andrews pulling all that stuff from that single bag. Fortunately, he didn't follow that thread of thought much further, being distracted by the pendulum. He blinked a few times, feeling funny. He'd felt like this once, long before, when the psychic twins had probed his mind to try and understand why he felt slightly off to them. He'd fought against the feeling then, as he knew full well what they were, and didn't really want them finding important information about the future.

But this wasn't quite the same - the two had been invasive, trying to force their way into his head. But this was... so passive. So gentle. Not unlike Nanashi's slight mind control, it made him want to open up.

"Hmm?" The Doctor was tempted to furrow his brow in return, but that would break the delicate contact he was establishing, and that hardly seemed worth a random Earth pop culture reference that this incarnation didn't recognize off the top of his head. Maybe he would look it up later. The name was familiar, at any rate.

Thankfully Rei fell into the hypnotic trance fairly quickly and without a fuss. The Doctor snatched up his pendulum and stuffed it into the pocket from whence it came, careful to keep his eyes locked and his mind focused on something other than the nagging anomaly that was screaming him in the face. That psychic presence was far more complex than he'd first expected, with nuances that extended deep into the subconscious and even outside of it. Almost as if it was more than one disturbance.

Possibly because it was. No, wait—a disturbance and an imprint? An outside source and a scar, morelike, a database and a suggestion...Briefly the Doctor pondered delving deeper, putting Rei under for closer scrutiny, but there was also that physical ailment, whatever it was, thus there remained the chance that he wouldn't wake up. As much as the Time Lord enjoyed how cooperative Rei was being, he would have to wait until he was back to his old self before investigating further.

At least the suggestion was familiar, in a way. Perhaps it had something to do with Rei's paled, clammy complexion, his sluggish movements and related exhaustion; through the connection the Doctor was aware of a heartbeat much faster than what should be normal and a constriction of core body temperature—

Oh no. "...You've lost quite a bit of blood, haven't you Rei?"

Rei felt a little odd, having someone looking into his mind, though he wouldn't have been able to put it into words like that. He'd had very little interaction with telepathy before, and the biggest one was, of course, something he couldn't remember, it having been the event when his memories were partially erased. So for the time being, he just went with it, as one is wont to do when being hypnotized.

"Well, yeah," he said in response to the Doctor's question, the words reflecting his normal joking manner, but the tone a bit flat. "Sort of inevitable with vampires running around the ship." Or, at least, that's what film and TV had told him. He was lucky enough to live in a world devoid of the nasty creatures.

The color drained from the Doctor's face.

"...And the vampire responsible for this wouldn't happen to be Nanashi, would it?" Because that would be just like her, yeah? Surely there were other vampires around, but they kept to themselves, fed on blood plasma sludge from the Mess Hall and the occasional transfusion from the Medbay; Nanashi, though, it was obvious that she would try to keep to her old lifestyle as much as physically possible. That's all she'd been doing since she arrived here—certainly she adapted by learning new technologies, settling into the atmosphere and adjusting to the different cultures of the crew. But mentally she was still the medieval queen and warrior that she'd always been, refusing to help anyone other than herself. Selfish, selfish, selfish!

The Doctor had to work to keep his temper.

The the mention of the vampire queen's name, a rush of hatred came to the front of Rei's thoughts. There were few people he really, truly hated. He could even sympathize with some of his world's supervillains, if only because he could understand that humans could be driven to madness. But he hated Nanashi. She was cruel, spiteful. She used people like objects, and then claimed she could be friends with them. She made his skin crawl, and yet something about her kept him from saying 'no' when she asked for blood.

"Yes, yes it would," Rei said, voice just barely tinted with the anger that boiled in his mind.

The Doctor could not keep his temper.

"Rei, you need to come with me to the Medbay. We'll conduct a small examination, see if you need a blood transfusion or a mental block, and then we'll find a safe place for you to get some rest." His eyes narrowed, glinting with a combination of his righteous anger and Rei's hate boiling under the surface, solidifying the commands; yet there was some comfort being transferred over, that compassion expected of the Doctor working to calm the both of them, and an assurance that should not be expected of someone that previously looked upon this subject as an anomaly to be avoided and studied, not trusted.

They had a common enemy. And the Doctor was known for being flexible.

"Now you're going to wake up and you probably will not enjoy the fact that I've been giving you mental suggestions, but I need you to remember that we're working towards the same goal. I need you to trust me. Can you do that for me Rei?"

"Alright," he answered. For now, at least, he could trust the Doctor. There was no power in the universe that could get him to trust the Time Lord with the time stream, but Nanashi was a much different matter. He'd trust anyone that offered a chance to help him get free of whatever hold she had over him.

As the hypnosis lifted Rei blinked a few times, then shook his head, like a dog does when it's wet. More of his own personality came forward, now that he wasn't in that strange state of calm. Though, in his current condition, it wasn't all the bright and cheery attitude he normally had.

"My head feels... tingly," he muttered, running a hand through his hair. He wasn't all sure what just happened here. Last thing he really had a grasp on was that little disc going back and forth... He looked at the Doctor, eyes narrowed. "What did you just do to me? Ugh, wait, nevermind. I think that can wait. I... I think I might need to see a doctor. A real doctor. The medical kind." Well, the suggestion of going to the med bay was working, at least. Though Rei wasn't sure why he suddenly felt the need to see a doctor. He hadn't been examined since before he fell through time, mostly because he didn't want to get help in the wrong time period and accidentally be labeled as the first metahuman. Still, he suddenly got the feeling that it might be wise to seek help over the whole blood loss thing.

I keep hearing voices, but I swear I'm not crazy (OPEN)

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Minor ret-con o///o

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OOC: lol omg, Rei is totally the Mad Hatter

OOC: I knooooow!!! Alex will keep thinking of him as such, too.

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