trans_9 | Bad Handwriting and Everything [Open]

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Bad Handwriting and Everything [Open]

The upside to using paper and pen instead of data pads for taking notes on patients is that it's intuitive and you can fiddle with things. The downside is that, at the end of a shift, a lot of the notes have to be shredded for privacy reasons, and the details have to be entered into the data pads anyway. Despite his usual devotion to efficiency, Howard doesn't mind this. It's a nice way to review the day and cement anything he might have learned.

The Quarantine's mostly empty now, which is a definite plus. All those kids were getting Howard crankier and antsier than usual. He brought in a box of toys from the Warehouse, though he didn't bother to check the age ranges for them, so he hopes someone who cares a bit more will take out all the choking hazards before any of the children regress to toddlerhood. He doesn't want anything to do with children; he had enough of that back in that dystopian nightmare he called home. All they do is cry and scream and demand things and kill each other and eat all the food and lie and burn down buildings and generally make life unpleasant. Not that adults are always better, but at least someone's around to enforce order here.

He hums a snippet of Cliffs of Dover to himself, chewing on the end of a Tinker Toy, and starts typing in his notes.

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"I'd forget something and it'd bite me in the ass a few months later. There was a lot of stuff wrong with the FAYZ." He tilts his head at her. "That's why your whole cannibalism schtick bothers me, turns out. Zou and I talked about it a little bit earlier. One of the kids I used to hang out with, this guy Panda, he got eaten."

Not to mention that other kids are fairly low on a long list of things in the FAYZ that'll eat you. At least kids'll wait 'til you're dead. "You think you're going to be the one to save your universe? That's pretty presumptuous."

"Hey, maybe I could even bring some reasonable adults back," he says, but his glum tone says he doubts it. He wouldn't try to sabotage the war effort against the Ohm, but knowing he'll probably head back to the FAYZ has certainly disincentivized him.

"Yes, I understand that it's a rather strong taboo in the Earth culture that seems to have caught on here. Hardly universal, though. Some species would be horrified at killing an enemy and leaving them to rot." She casts a glance at Howard, but it's a neutral glance. She actually doesn't go around thinking about eating everyone - at least, not once she can put a name to the face.

Unless they've very well built, of course. Howard is still on the skinny and small side.

"I think every rebel group in the Empire contacted the Sissies at one point or another," she says, looking frustrated. "And they were all uncoordinated idiots. Choosing their leaders based on who had lost the most to the Empire (as though they all hadn't lost far, far too much), no backup plans, no treasury, no idea what they would do if they won, not that they would...we actually had one group insist that we should spent ten thousand lives to kill one regional governor. Because then one hundred planets would be free, you hear me? FREE! - for about three days, until the assistant governor took over. I just looked at them and thought, I could do better than this."

She frowns. "The adults might vanish too, unless you can figure out what makes people vanish at fifteen. I," she sighs, "I don't think there's anything I can suggest that would make it right. Unless you decide to go to another universe, or stay on Stacy if she gets fixed. Or jump back in time."

"Yeah, I'm just saying. I probably wouldn't have cared if it wasn't something that happened back home. But since it did, it's just like..." Howard pantomimes a very convincing shudder and a gagging face. Possibly best not to mention that Anwei's been making some cameos in his usual everything-going-to-eat-me nightmares. Their relationship is already strange enough to define, not quite friendship but some sort of camaraderie.

"Seriously? That's some of the dumbest shit I've ever heard. And why would you choose a leader based on who couldn't defend their own stuff? That's not just stupid, that's counter-intuitive." Maybe Anwei's sense of purpose isn't so silly after all, if that's what she's up against.

"We figured out how to stop it. When you turn fifteen, time slows down and you get tempted to ditch everything by a hallucination. I stuck around. Guess that was too much to ask of the people in charge." Why no, that's not bitterness in his voice at all!

"Guess I won't invite you to any of the better restaurants I know," she jokes. "Just as well. People would gossip."

"Ah, by stuff they meant family members, usually. Wives, children, parents: shipped to different counties or continents or planets, sent away for training or war...The problem was, after a few centuries of the Living People killing off anyone who raises their head above the mob, what you get are very uninspired rebels. There were - a few that showed potential. I helped where I could, but the math always hung me up. Aid these rebels, they'll destroy this spaceport...and this many natives will be worked to death rebuilding it. Every life spent repaid with five deaths or more. I usually gave them information. Ways of hiding and distributing what they knew. And I hoped that someday a leader would rise." And hoped as well that the leader would not be her.

"It might have been worse for them, you know. Maybe it's twice as tempting when you're sixteen, three times that when you're seventeen, and so on." She eyes him. "Or maybe you are stronger than all of them."

"Take Sampire instead. He might like it." He raises his eyebrows. "Gossip like...oh hell no. Don't even joke about that."

He shakes his head. "God, it almost sounds like everyone would be better off if the rebels got wiped out. Not because they're wrong, but because their mistakes punish everyone else." There's heavy disdain in his voice, even a little for Anwei for having aided that ind of idiocy, but then again he doesn't know everything.

"No, a bunch of people hit fifteen and stayed. Just not in the first round. Maybe it was different for them, I don't know. They tempt you pretty hard," he says, grinding his teeth down on the Tinker Toy and feeling splinters come loose. It's easier to just hate all the adults that left them. It's easier to just blame them and feel abandoned and unwanted than it is to not have anyone to blame at all.

She shrugs; depends on how he likes his clots.

"If anyone asks, just say that you're clearly much too good for me." She does not wink.

"They were wiped out, over and over again. But they kept coming back, just to be put down by the Empire or even by their fellow slaves. Someday, the Empire has to fall; after all, if it's eternal and unending, why is it the Ninth Empire instead of the First? I just hoped I could grease its shoes a bit."

"Easy with that," she said, reaching out at the sound of splintering wood. "Do you really want Stacy doing dentistry on you with her tentacles if you crack a tooth?"

Howard wrinkles his nose at the idea at all.

"So why didn't you be a tactician for them? Since it seems like all their strategies ended up hurting more than they helped. Or is that what you meant by information?"

He pulls back from her reach. "If you haven't noticed, Maw, I'm fine taking care of myself."

"I tried to teach them tactics. I smuggled every sort of manual and instructional vid I could find into their hands - how to evaluate a target, how to set up a free market, how to build weapons - and half of them immediately turned around and betrayed the other half to the Empire, in exchange for promises of wealth, or freedom, or just that nobody would get hurt." She makes an irritated noise low in her throat. "And they all ended up the same way, with their heads on posts. Screaming."

"Okay, okay," she agrees, pulling her hand back. That actually had been more of a gesture of trust than Howard realizes; put your hand too near the face of one of Anwei's kind, and you'll lose fingers. "I'm just a stickler for good dental care."

For obvious reasons.

"Screaming while on the posts? That's impressive." Hey, it's a big omniverse. It's a totally possible scenario. And God knows Anwei's world is weird enough for that to be plausible.

"Hard to suck the marrow out of someone's bones when you've got fillings, right?" he remarks, feeling nauseated.

"It was rather a specialty of the Empire, detaching heads and limbs and such and keeping the parts alive. Acids that dissolved everything but your nerves, leaving them exposed to any torture - well. All gone now."

Her right hand moves to her left arm and squeezes it under the elbow, idly rubbing back and forth.

"What? No, not if you have the fillings professionally done. But I've got eight more teeth than you do. Brushing them all the way back is a chore. And do you know how hard it is to floss when your teeth are all razor-edged? Sometimes I think you humans are lucky to have teeth that are good for more than biting through things." If she had been nibbling on that Tinker Toy, it would have been sawdust ages ago.

"Charming." He knows some people back home that would probably be way too interested in that sort of technology. But somehow, the presence of sadism, even on Anwei's world, still surprises him as often as it doesn't.

"Not to mention I bet dentists are really reluctant to polish your pearl whites."

"Clearly we should have been named the Charming People," she smirks, smiling.

"Oh, I always tip my dentists quite generously - they're doing delicate work in very close quarters." And she was trusting them with one of the prime identifiers of her species - a lot of Living People rituals and social observances involved the teeth. Even if she had chosen to leave her homeworld, she had been raised to judge her worth (at least in part) by the sharpness and brightness of the ivory in her mouth. Which was sad, when you really thought about it.

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Bad Handwriting and Everything [Open]

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