thebastion | 231 [ VERY BACKDATED]

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231 [ VERY BACKDATED] | [ closed ]

Who: Duke
Open: Closed
When: 231 (so after WE ARE ALIVE boozelog the sequel )
Where: training building.
What: Duke was a stupid, and is getting in a bit of trouble for that
Format: log? Action? ALL OF THE ABOVE???
Warnings: Colin, possibly language, IDK

Duke would never admit to actually... avoiding, someone else here. There's reason for why the knight hadn't been at the party after the successful return to the bastion – not liking to drink, still being a bit sick. Or at least Duke was fairly sure that the tightness to breathing was an indication of being a bit sick still. Of course, this was the day after the party – clearly this not being around could be "I drank too much and everything hurts". Only the knight isn't in the hospital and...

.... Yes, Duke is a bit terrible at this denying avoiding thing.

But Duke also remembers that Colin had had to help when it was time to evacuate ... and that when Duke had first returned to the hospital after coming down with something else, he'd been a bit .. pointed about not doing anything too strenuous.

Going out into a dangerous mine with two other people probably fell under that.

So the knight stubbornly pretended this wasn't hiding, and tried to remember beginning stretches. Slow and breathing steady stuff, just to see if that could help stiff lungs not.. be so stupidly stiff. Sure, the top floor of the training building wasn't really meant for this, but avoiding any dust seemed like a good idea.

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Colin makes it a point of knowing where to find people when he needs to. He also makes it a point of knowing how people behave when they're likely to be unnerved, as it makes outfoxing them easier.

So it should come as no surprise to Duke that his attempt to evade Colin is going to come up woefully short. The fact that he doesn't make a sound when he approaches might be something new. The fact that he can watch Duke through floors and walls definitely helps him in sneaking up on the knight.

All it takes is Duke turning her head for a moment. And then, Colin's there, right next to her, looking down at her expectantly.

"Hello, Duke," he says in a level tone.

Not fair. Not fair at all. Duke can be surprisingly quiet for someone in armor, but not quite this quiet.

So Colin's sudden appearance gets a cut off "What the-" and the knight completely loses track of what she had been doing in an aborted flail of 'something surprised me, gotta prevent it from being an ambush' mixed with 'Okay, there went my balance.'

So Duke sits a little more heavily than usual and blinks at Colin once or twice. "How do you get up stairs that quietly."

"If I told you, you'd be ready for it next time," Colin says, grinning down at her. "You've been busy."

His posture isn't threatening, and he's not convey much in the line of body language. Besides that damnable smugness that's always about him, anyway.

"Out of breath?"

"... Would be the point." Duke retorts. Of course she would be ready if he told her, that is sort of why she would like to know.

"... A bit." Yes, a bit guarded. She was trying to work on that.

"So, are you going to try and make excuses for why you went out when your lungs aren't ready?" Colin asks, his tone leveling out into something more serious again. "Or do you just want me to berate you blindly?"

He seemed to be ignoring the friendly banter about his sneaking skills, now...

Y e a h. That's generally a sign that someone's not happy - when the banter goes away. Duke grimaces, settling into a bit more comfortable of a sit.

"Restlessness is about all I can think of." Yes, Duke, right after you can't run to escape a collapsing bastion, you're restless and decide to go out exploring.

"If you want to get yourself and other people killed, there are better ways," Colin says, looking down at her. "You're better than this, Duke. 'Restlessness' is another way of say 'I have issues but I don't want to talk about it.'

He turns away and starts gesturing as he talks. "And that's fine, when you're down in the dumps, or when you're pissed off about work, or any other menial day-to-day stuff," he tells her. "But when everyones' lives are on the line, an excuse like that isn't good enough. I LET you go because I thought you might have known your limits..."

He stares down at her with intense focus. "Do you?"

Duke's eyebrows go together for a moment. "It wasn't on that trip, that's for sure."

After that's out of her mouth, she is fairly sure it wasn't the right thing to say. So for a moment her lips press together firmly, because maybe continuing that thought isn't the best idea.

Of course, the other side to that is 'I already put my foot in my mouth, I can chew on it a bit more.' He was sort of getting after her for not talking, so here are some more words. "I might not be fit for much swordplay, but the magic I use isn't much of a physical drain. I did fine on that, even with the winded walking up the hill."

... Why yes there is still deflection there. 'Fine' was because they just had to deal with a small nest of rattle-tails, and Duke knows it, considering how some of the others had come back.

"I get that white magic can cure a lot," Colin says, shaking his head and staring down at her. "But not when the patient is being a thick-headed dope! If you keep this up, we're not going to be able to put you back together. WALKING is at the very periphery of what you can do right now!"

He's monitoring her vitals even as he speaks to her. "You keep pushing yourself, you keep saying to yourself, 'Oh, I don't feel so bad any more, I must be better.' At least I hope that's what you're saying," he says. "But you're not. Your body is still not recovered from everything you did. Every time you push yourself, it means it's going to take longer. And it's going to take more medical supplies to get there."

Edited 2014-10-28 05:37 (UTC)

"So I'm supposed to sit on my ass and look pretty while everyone deals with the Skyway and Bastion's power trouble?" A bit of a sign that she's getting frustrated - or is letting it clear that she is already frustrated - that slight bit of harsher wording. Yes, healing isn't just sitting still, but it feels like it.

She doesn't know what to say to that rest. Its like picking at a cut, she supposes, which makes her feel a little stupid.

"YES. And believe me, right now, you DON'T look pretty." Colin says bluntly. "I get that you feel useless, I get the you don't like feeling like this, I get that you want to get off your ass and pull your own weight. But if you keep this up, the only weight that's going to get pushed is a wheelchair, because you won't be able to move yourself!"

"You are a machine, and you have been pushed past your tolerances. You need to cool down, you need maintenance, and you need to get back into operating condition," he tells her, hoping that his words at least make sense to her. "Every time you push yourself into the red, you BREAK a little more, and it takes even longer to put you back together."

Edited 2014-10-28 06:09 (UTC)

They sort of do, after she gets over the slight startled moment of being told that no, she looks terrible (still). On one hand, yes, she did sort of expect the normal coddling of sick people. On the other, Colin was here because that didn't really work, and because he was Colin, she really shouldn't have expected it.

But yes, Blastia technicians existed for a reason, and while its a little hard for her to wrap her mind around - she isn't Captain Schwann, she isn't literally part machine - she gets it after a bit of thinking.

The twitch on the useless is pretty obvious. Yep. Head of the nail there.

And she can't really think of anything to say. She notices when she's pushed too far by not being able to breathe, this isn't quite like, say, a broken arm (other than it wasn't like a broken arm in the way that she could fix the broken arm easily ) where it was much easier ( and more familiar) to tell how well healing was going.

"This.. is something I haven't had to deal with." Okay, get that out of the way. This sort of being sick? If she'd studied healing magic properly, she'd know how to deal with it, or what to expect, or ... everything else. Its slow, going from just books. "I don't know the... edge of the red, other than 'oh, I can't breathe'."

"In machinery, stresses are a problem," Colin explains, watching her. "Machines that need to run hot have indicators. The 'Red Line' is where a machine can no longer safely operate. You can push a machine into the red briefly, but only briefly. If you keep running it red, it will break, and it will be more trouble than it's worth to repair it."

He shakes his head and moves to sit down near her. "I can tell you haven't dealt with this before," he says. "But even people who have usually push themselves a little. You... if you'd just taken it easy, laid back, and rested like you were supposed to, this would have been clear in a little over a week. But you keep pushing it, and what your body should be using to recover is instead going towards keeping you from keeling over."

"Believe it or not, I don't want to be here chewing you out," he says, rolling his eyes. "But you keep pushing yourself way past what you can take. Living beings aren't meant to be sick like this, for this long. Eventually, you may not be ABLE to recover. And then we're all going to be screwed, because I'm not about to let you die."

Okay, that makes sense. Turning red is not a good sign in ...almost everything that isn't grown food, at least as far as Duke knows.

"There was only so much time I could spend sleeping. Or studying something I could barely practice." She really should have asked for things to do. But part of the problem is that thinking about it, she had mixed up the breathlessness. This wasn't the 'you're untrained, and need to build endurance up' this was 'you're sick'. When coughing got rarer, it was harder to remember.

She is trying to think of a reply to that when what he said sinks in. Startled confused Duke, sitting right here. Because keeping people away, to keep a lie intact, tends not to get people attached to you in ...quite so firm a way.

"That sounds quite a bit like 'willing to break the bastion to prevent someone from dying', worded like that." She heard it wrong, right?

Edited 2014-10-28 07:41 (UTC)

"It means that I'm not willing to let a little thing like reality get in the way of the path I've decided to put myself on," Colin says matter-of-factly. "And yes, I would spend a great deal more resources than I should to keep you alive. And I'd probably call out whatever gods are out there to make things right."

He smirks, his unique brand of cockiness shining through. "Usually, when I pick a fight with a divine or infernal being, it's for something a little more than a stubborn illness," he says, lifting his chin proudly.

"But the point is... When you're sick? You're gonna be miserable," he continues, shaking his head. "Until you're not miserable, which is the sign that you can go out again and do something foolhardy."

"A little thing like reality." Duke repeats that as dryly as possible. Reality isn't terribly little, in the knights opinion. It was a lot smaller than it once was, to judge by the sorts of places and people who ended up in the Bastion, but it had been quite a bit bigger than Duke had previously thought, with just Terca Lumireis to explore. A question that would be putting her foot so far in her mouth she would be bent in half comes to mind, and she goes over his words again to double check. No, it was kept alive, the question wasn't relevant anymore.

It is still terribly confusing, that Colin seems to care so much. Like a healthy - wait she is physically sick - reasonable adult, Duke pushes that confusion aside to ...ignore until someone got unhappy at her for ignoring things. Taking on deities - which so far had mostly been confirmed to exist in the bastion, is something else that Duke doesn't know how to deal with. Colin you are going into the crazy category, finally.

"Should I find a short flight of stairs, and if that makes me feel miserable, I only get to pace in circles?" Rather than in, say, circles about the bastion? Because most of the time she doesn't feel what she would call miserable. Annoyed maybe but-

"... Or maybe my scale of reference is off..."

"You've never heard someone utter the phrase 'Small World'? Where do you think that comes from?" Colin asks, his tone far too innocent to take seriously. "Reality need only be as large and imposing as you let it be."

Still, her second comment makes him arch his eyebrow. "What you need to do is the following, in this order of priority. Sleep. If you can't sleep, drink water and nibble on bread. If you've had enough bread and water, and you can't sleep, read something or watch something until you need another drink or you need to sleep," he tells her. "Rest does not mean do less. Rest means you do as little as possible. Your body needs to be doing nothing at all so it can recover its strength and make you well again. You need around a week of that. And yes, it's going to be awful and boring. The alternative is worse. How do you feel about spending the rest of your life that way?"

He leans forward and puts a hand on her shoulder. "Believe it or not, I do wanna see you actually get better so you can go out to your heart's content," he tells her.

From being able to walk across half a continent in two weeks. That's where Duke thought it was from. But his tone isn't exactly one that she wants to get into a comparing where sayings came from... conversation? Even if it would be a lovely distraction.

... No walking around? Uggghh. "Awful and boring is right." She makes a face. Yes, she would prefer to not be stuck like this... forever and ever.

"Do string games count as reading or watching something?" She grimaces again. "Doing as little as possible, yes, but when I was... attempting," because yes, she had gone out and walked around in the hospital like a dumbass. "I would want to do more than turn a page and scribble. Unless you think that's going to change." The problems with active people?

"Anything you can do without getting out of bed, or that winds up with you breathing heavily," Colin says. "No weight lifting. No situps."

He keeps looking at her, a curious look crossing his face. "You'd think you never got sick as a child," he adds.

"... So I could do like.. blacksmith puzzles. Regular puzzles. String games." Rubbing her face because this... really sounds like a pain.

"As a child was thirty or so years ago." But she tries to think for a moment and... y'know, nothing really comes to mind. "Sunburn is a bit different from 'hello you can't breathe proper'."

"Never caught a cold?" Colin asks, arching an eyebrow. "Never ate something that hadn't cooked long enough?"

He has a little trouble believing that...

"They never stopped us from running around when we had snot dripping everywhere. It was... maybe a 'come over here and let me get that', or 'here, have some juice'." She crosses her arms, thinking.

"And even when Duke was horribly distracted during cooking, we never really got sick for more than the evening." Stomachs of iron, apparently.

... Ignore that, Colin.

"You must have had a very healthy family," Colin says, studying her. He's moderately certain she didn't mean to let that one slip. Still, no sense prodding her about it now, she's still on guard from his prior shenanigans. A trick like that needs to be sprung fresh.

"Is that why you're having so much trouble staying in one place?" he asks her, watching her. "Or is it something more?"

"Apparently." Yes she hadn't meant to say that. She isn't sure if she's relieved or uneasy that Colin has said nothing about it. Duke sort of stopped telling people she was a twin after a bit.

"... Even when I had to desk knight things, it wasn't 'stay there until its all done', I could go and hit things." Because Duke wasn't that much of a procrastinator when it came to paperwork.

"Your commanders must have hated you, come report time," Colin told her, grinning. "But... consider this practice for it, it if nothing else. And if that doesn't work... Consider it a time to plan what you're going to do when you're better. A little preparation time never hurt anyone."

"I worked on reports before it was 'get them done by tonight'." Duke retorts. A little, at least. Like an outline and a draft or something.

She has to stare at him for a moment. Practice for it? Did Colin want her to go desk-knight here- Although she goes thoughtful after a second.

".... I could work on that second." Lists. Lists will happen.

"That's all you need to do," Colin says. "You can't exercise your body, but your mind is still your own private playground. And if you can't imagine what sort of trouble you can get in with just your mind, you clearly haven't been a soldier long enough."

He sounds amused with that.

"S'why they try to keep us busy." Duke sighs. ".... You probably don't want me wandering around finding stuff before settling... I suppose in the hospital again?"

Then again, Colin found her easily enough here, might not matter where she holes up.

"You can rest in your apartment, it's not as though we need you hooked up to anything," Colin tells her, shaking his head. "All that matters is that you take it easy."

He smirks a little wickedly. "And plotting for what you'll do when you're feeling well again," he adds. "I know all about what soldiers are like when they get cabin fever.

"... Good point." And it's a lot easier to have all the stuff she wants easily found when its.. her room. Duke makes a face back at him - Yes, she will pretty much want to do All The Things after she's better.

Starting probably with cleaning her apartment. Now that Duke thinks on it, who knows how much of a mess it turned into after the Bastion tried falling apart. .... Of course, Duke doesn't have that much to fall either. "...I did leave some things in the hospital though."

"You keep making that face and it'll get stuck like that," Colin tells her, that smirk not vanishing from his face.

He moves to get up then, and holds a hand down to her in offering. "I can get the things from the hospital," Colin tells her. "You fending for yourself is a fairly old means of getting a little more activity out of someone before you're confined to quarters. You need to head back to your apartment with as little in your hands as possible. What did you leave behind?"

She makes a different one at him instead. "It could be better than being told I look like a statue in uniform."

She eyes him then takes it. So he totally caught her. "Books, a change of clothes. Notepad. You grabbed my sword that day so it here."

"You're about four hundred years too young to pull that one over on me," Colin says, smirking. "Plus, my wife tries it all the time. If I'm not going to let her get away with it, you've got no hope of it. And anyway, there's no shame in being a statue in uniform. Lots of groups value a good military bearing."

Helping her to her feet, he smirks. "But getting stuck with that face would get in the way of that in an unpleasant way," he says. "I can think of hundreds of better expressions to be stuck with."

"Only about four hundred?" Ah, so that's why Colin is so good and ... knowing she'd doing this sick thing wrong.

"Being stuck with a smile would look creepy after a while. And it would probably start twitching, which isn't quite stuck." Duke steps over to gather up her sword, because yes she did bring it with her did he expect anything else, and double check the room to see if she left anything else here.

Doesn't really look like it.

"I could have said a thousand, but Pearl gets upset when I get THAT arrogant, so I try to keep my boasts within my own lifetime," Colin tells her.

"I recommend you not think on it too much," Colin adds, referring to the 'stuck face' commentary. "That's where some nasty horror memes propagate and fester."

... Colin, you're making her head hurt now. Do you know what Terca Lumireis doesn't have? A race that openly says 'sup, we have a super long lifespan'. Duke rubs her face firmly for a moment.

"Do I want to know what a meme is?"

"Probably not," Colin tells her. "The definition is a lot more bunk than most people care to deal with. Suffice it to say... it's the nature of good horror stories and amusing images all at the same time."

Colin smiles then, and he nods to the stairs. "Let's go, you need to be sitting down and relaxing," he says.

"... How is it a set of beds?"

Yeah Duke isn't getting it. But yep, stairs down. Yay, onward to getting stircrazy!

And yes, she will take the stairs at a bit of a middle pace - carefully earlier, then the sort of quick step that looks hazardous but generally doesn't feel that way when you go down.

"Figure of speech," Colin corrects, shaking his head. "Basically, a lot of words meant to puff up a definition of nonsense."

Colin doesn't expect that Duke will take a tumble, but he's going to walk close behind her just the same. One, he'll be able to grab her if she falls... and two, if she tries to run, he'll ALSO be able to grab her.

How rude, Duke isn't that much of a small child.

Although Duke does pause at the exit of the building. "I'm going to guess that you, or someone, is going to end up showing up with food." Part to 'make sure Duke is behaving and staying put' and part because Duke's apartment hasn't been stocked up with stuff while she's been hiding in the hospital.

If Duke were a small child, Colin would be carrying her back to her quarters rather than letting her walk.

"That's right," Colin says. "Three meals a day, a couple of pitchers of water."

Not that he hasn't already proven that he can pick her up. Thank you for not embarrassing her further.

"Fairly sure I have a pitcher. ... Or just a bunch of mugs." Speaking of mugs- "Can I make weak tea?"

"You can make tea, so long as you don't have to go outside and pick your own herbs," he says, smiling. "Just don't brew anything strong that will keep you up. I doubt you'll sleep all the time, but you don't need any assistance in staying awake."

Don't you worry, Duke. If Colin decides to embarrass you, you'll be healthy enough to make him pay for it.

"Whatever I have that isn't strong, gotcha."

Not sure if that's reassuring. Maybe it is.

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231 [ VERY BACKDATED] | [ closed ]

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