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Mixtape Ghost N
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Nicole watched out of the window of cab as she rode with Doctor Crawford. Apparently all the terrorist activity had people spooked, or maybe Lost Haven was just smaller than the two cities she had lived in, because there didn't seem to be many people out and about for the....morning. She grimaced and tried again. For...uhhh...eeiigghhtt? She felt a dull throbbing start up behind her eyes and nearly gasped. It was the first thing she had felt since what she was informed was called Pax Metahumana. She had almost forgotten what pain felt like, but she was only able to be fascinated by it for scant moments before it disappeared. She'd have to investigate that later, though she was annoyed that she would have to wait to figure out the whole time thing.
She did less sitting than she did leaning in the cab, with her right elbow resting on the bottom of the window and her chin on the meat of her shoulder, forearm and wrist folded up and over her face. Only her eye, nose, and the right side of her mouth weren't also covered by her ebon hair. She was irritated about having so cliched an 'angsty teenager' look, but aside from the unflattering and bland grey sweats the police had donated to her, she didn't have anything any more. The bike gear she had been planning to use for a uniform was lost in the bombing, what little she had had in her pockets was now scattered and lost in the bullet-scarred lawn of a wounded youth center, and everything else had been left behind or destroyed a month ago.
She was surprised to find herself okay with that, or at least not bothered by it. After all, she was basically the robot from that old movie her dad had loved, though she kept her skin (and she doubted some hydraulic press could do what a sniper round hadn't). Still, while she felt it would be nice to have clothes, there wouldn't be much of a point to nice ones the way her life was going, if that last fight was to be a trend-setting encounter. The lack of being able to do anything useful had bothered her more than the fact that her old life, and any reminder of it aside from her own memory, which struck her, as she thought of it, as rather rude to her family. But they were dead, and there was nothing she could do about it, even as powerful as her 'ability' was.
Shifting her head, she looked furtively through the screen of her hair at the man now in charge of her well-being. Doctor Crawford had at first seemed completely frazzled and ridiculous, a middle-aged man who didn't even know how to comb his hair, or was too much of a genius to care. But during the trip, while he had gone on at length about her powers and what they might mean (something Nicky had not bothered paying attention to for what seemed like the fifth or sixth time), he had actually managed to neaten himself up a bit. He must've woken up incredibly early from a phone call from the police and come down as fast as he could, and was now attempting to correct his look for the day. But he reminded her of someone she had known in school, geeking out hard about anything that was in his field.
She had to admit, she had heard some wild stories, but considering what her father had told her and her sisters about the media, she wasn't about to believe everything she heard. Most of it seemed way too fantastical to be true even now, knowing what she did about her exhaustive search for information about Icon and her own seeming indestructibility. But listening to Crawford speak, if anything she had missed some of the cooler stuff. He also seemed excited by the fact that magic was apparently a thing, but since Nicole had very nearly rolled her eyes out of her head when he mentioned something about fairies, he had dropped the subject. Still, he seemed to know his stuff, and her inner little girl fought for a while about riding unicorns before her mind would drop back to normal daydreams.
She looked back and noticed they were now in what seemed to be the worst part of town. She had thought it weird that the cab driver had looked at them with some sort of judgement when Crawford had requested a ride to Crown Ridge, wherever that was, but thought nothing of it. Now she understood. It reminded her a lot of the nastier places she had been warned away from as a kid in Manhattan, and picking up a disheveled older guy and a teenage girl with borrowed clothes from the police station and driving them here must have set off a lot of warning bells in the guy's head.
They pulled up to one of the less run down buildings and stopped. While they got out and Crawford paid the driver, Nicky examined the building. While it was faded, and had what seemed to be the ubiquitous graffiti on a lot of the surface, it looked fairly well maintained. That didn't cut down on the strikingly familiar look that the architecture had. Her face darkened as she realised this was one of the old asylums that had gotten closed down years ago, now relegated to ghost hunting shows. But this one had obviously been repaired and converted. The sign outside declared that it was the Oppenheimer-Lashley Institute of Science and Medicine, two names she didn't recognise at all, but whatever it called itself, it couldn't qite erase the foreboding and chilly look it had. The rest of the neighbourhood was similarly well-cared for despite the 'bad' feel the area had.
Crawford gestured her inside, and they walked across a slightly weedy lawn and through front doors that looked more appropriate to a prison than a science lab, made of high-carbon steel bars and reinforced glass and opened by way of a keycard. Inside, a sleepy security guard waved them through as soon as he saw Crawford's identification, and they made their way through a maze of identical, sterile white hallways. Periodically there would be a corkboard with announcements, notices, or messages, and Nicky would have to nearly walk into her escort before she stopped trying to read them. Occasional glimpes through a window would show people in labcoats and safety goggles doing what she had always imagined science labs did. Lasers, chemistry sets, and whiteboards full of equations seemed to be everywhere. Up two flights of stairs and they entered more of an office area, and Crawford steered her into his own office, which looked like any psychiatrists office, though the sheer amount of superhero literature seemed to throw the feel off.
“Apologies for the mess,” he said, sweeping a few comic books from his desk into a messy stack and setting them on a bookshelf that also held numerous books with dusty covers and indecipherable titles. “Have a seat! They're working on getting you a room set up and a security card so you're not locked in, but for now I'm afraid you'll be in here or at one of the labs. Don't have enough funding for a hotel room.”
“S'okay,” Nicky said, taking a seat on the offered chair. “Like I said, I don't sleep.”
“Hmmm. That may actually be more of a problem, then. I'm afraid we don't have much to occupy a teenager during off hours. We'll see about...well, why don't we start with that?”
The doctor pulled out the notebook he had had in the police station, and while he copied some of what he had onto a whiteboard on his wall, he continued speaking to her.
“Don't mind me, I'm just organising notes. Tell me, Nicole, what interests do you have? Hobbies? Sports? Do you like video games?”
“I played soccer and volleyball in middle school. I was okay, I guess. I liked playing. Video games are kinda dumb, though.”
“A sportster, eh?” He glanced back at her and held his gaze for a second too long. Nicky felt like she was being judged by her coach again. “We actually do have a gym here, but we'll be visiting that today anyway, and it might take up a good portion of your time.”
He stopped talking for a few moments, writing some sort of equation on the whiteboard and plugging in a few numbers from his notes. Nicky had no idea what he was trying to do. He stepped back from the board and crossed his arms, one hand stroking his chin, and stared at it for several minutes more, looking at her occasionally and shaking his head.
“I'm afraid I can't draw any good conclusions yet, though my hypothesis remains for now that you've been somehow destabilised.” There was that word again. Nicky didn't know if she liked it or not.
“I suppose we'll have to start with a baseline, though. Let's head down to the medical wing and see if we can't figure out what's going on physically.”
To Nicky, that sounded promising, almost as if he was looking for a cure, which she would take, if only to get rid of the fuzzy feeling in her head. She followed him out of his office and down to the second floor, and into what looked like a physical therapy room, something she recalled after a nasty ligament tear in her early sports years. Two people in scrubs and a woman in a lab coat were talking when they walked in, and the woman looked up at them, then gestured to the two others and they walked off to gather equipment. The woman met them halfway across the room and held her hand out for a shake, which Nicky begrudgingly obliged as she introduced herself.
“Hi! I'm Amber Grisham, head doctor here at the facility. You must be Nicole!” The lady's voice was squeaky with excitement, but she looked almost bored the way her eyes drooped. Nicky started as she realised the woman had what she knew as 'stroke face'. Her blonde hair was silvered in places, even though she looked like she might have made it to her thirties.
“Doctor Crawford called ahead and told me some of what was going on, so I've been looking forward to meeting you. Let's get started, eh?” Crawford nodded and leaned against the wall with his ever-present notebook, while the two nurses or techs or whatever they were rolled up an EKG machine and a couple of other bits to an exam bed. Nicky hopped up onto the bed at Grisham's prompting, and her face grew extremely warm as she realised one of them was a guy as he gently attached the blood pressure cuff to her arm with a well-tanned hand.
“All right, let's see,” Grisham muttered almost to herself as she watched various machines get attached to her young patient. Nicky started to feel her skin itch as no one did much but pay attention to her for a few...minutes? Hours?
“Huh.” Grisham glanced at the techs, who both shrugged.
”What's up, Doc?”
“Well, we're not getting many readings on you. Your blood pressure isn't reading, and the EKG is all over the place. Your heart rate is apparently one constant beat with no down stroke. Brain activity is negative or positive. Body temperature is reading as...am I reading that right, Steve?”
The tech nodded. “Somewhere between thirty-two and a hundred and seven degress Fahrenheit, it won't settle, though your skin temperature feels normal, if slightly cooler than I would expect. Let's try a blood sample?”
Nicky waited for the inevitable, and was not surprised that the needle bent before her skin so much as dimpled.
“Um.” The techs looked stumped, and Grisham had less spunk to her step and voice. Nicky figured it had been at least half an hour based on their faces.
“Well,” said Grisham, “I don't suppose you've got to pee or anything?”
”I haven't needed to do anything like that in months.”
“Menses?”
Nicky flushed again, glancing at Steve, who remained completely professional, if flustered by the lack of results. ”Uhhh. No. Nothing.”
“Alright, guess we're going to have to go with older methods.” The doctor picked up a scalpel. “Doctor Crawford tells me you're bullet proof, so I'm going to test that. Is that okay?”
”Feel free. A guy stabbed my eyeball this morning, so I think we're good.”
Grisham blanched, but shook her head and resumed. “Okay. I'm going to attempt to make an incision on the end of your finger. Tell me when you feel any damage.”
The woman tried every pattern of cutting she could think of, it looked like. Fast, grindingly slow, point first, light shaving. She moved up to Nicky's arm, then tried to cut a lock of hair. Absolutely nothing, though she had to suppress a laugh when they had to switch out scalpels when the first one went dull.
The doctor sat back, staring at Nicole, obviously thinking hard. Her brow didn't furrow, but Nicky imagined it might've if it could. Finally, she looked up at the techs.
“Okay, so I can believe she's undamageable. It's not any sort of reflexive ability that I can tell, Next we'll try fatigue. Carol, would you mind getting the weights? Steve, the air measure, please.”
Moments later, they had found out Nicky's maximum curling weight at forty pounds, and had her breathing into a little tube to lift a ball while at the same time doing the arm curls. She was supposed to let them know when she started feeling tired. She had no idea how long it had been before they signalled her to stop. At this point, Grisham was staring at her with some cross between admiration, fear, and wonder.
“Well, if were possible with our current technology, I would say you were the best robot facsimile of a human I'd ever seen, but even that would run out of juice eventually. Did you notice how long it had been? Doctor Crawford said you had problems with your sense of time.”
Nicky looked around and found that Steve and Crawford had both disappeared, and that it was getting late if the sunlight outside the windows was any way to judge. ”No, not really. If I try and figure out time, I get a headache.”
“Interesting, that's the first time you've actually acknowledged...well, we'll come back to that. You were straining to lift that weight, but it's been almost four hours of constant exercise and your breath hasn't even quickened.” The woman ran a spindly hand through her hair and stared out the window for a moment before turning back to her subject.
“Honestly? Medically, I am at a complete loss. There's some specialised tests I'd like your okay to do, things like laser spectrometry, an MRI and CAT scan, infrared and ultraviolet analyses. But that's going to have to be later, because I have other subjects I need to work with.”
”Is any of that going to help you figure out what's wrong with me?”
“Wrong?” Grisham's eyelids twitched, the most expression Nicky had seen in them. “You're the most healthy person I have ever met, I think. There's no telling what happened to you from a medical standpoint, if that's what you mean. Unless you think all of this is bad?”
”I can't...” Nicky realised midsentence why Grisham was sounding frustrated suddenly, and flushed deep red. “Sorry. I can't help but think I've been cursed, you know? Like, no sleep, no food, no anything. All I feel is pissed off, bored, or depressed.”
The older woman's face softened slightly at the corners. “Well, considering what Crawford said, that's not surprising, really. I would say you've probably got moderate to severe PTSD, and that can't be easy. But I wouldn't think of this as a curse, or a disease, or anything like that, Nicole. Applied correctly, I can see your accidental gift here being very useful, especially in cases like rescuing people from fires where the normal rescuers can't go.”
She stood up, holding out a hand for Nicky to help getting off the table. “Not really my field, though. You should talk about this with Crawford. He's helped quite a few figure out what to do with themselves after they developed powers. I'll help you figure out the limits, but he's the one to help you with direction, and with dealing with what you've already been through. He's waiting for you in his office, by the way, said he had some news.”
Nicky nodded, and began heading across the room. Behind her, Grisham called out, “I'll see you again tomorrow! Have a good afternoon!” And for once in a long while, she thought the person saying it might actually mean it, and was surprised to learn that she might actually do so.
