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Post by Lancet && Jones on Jun 2, 2008 9:18:30 GMT -5
Several thousand years ago there were some very confused men in togas. They sat about on rocks all day with a confused expression on their faces and would occasionally say something enigmatic. And people would come and observe these strange men as they sat around looking confused. Someone decided to call them philosophers. A great deal of philosophy came from sitting about looking confused. One particular theory being the theory of the four humours.
And you can thank a confused, toga-wearing Hippocrates for that one.
The father of medicine, they called him. And they still do. Though he spent a lot of time sitting and looking confused in a toga he also did a lot of talking to other people who also wore togas, about why they were confused. And the whole thing got very confusing. But what he finally decided was that people got sick. And the sick people thought this was a very good theory and listened to it. He decided that it must be caused by the fluids all buggering about in the body. Being melancholic, phlegmatic, choleric and sanguine. And lack of sanguine humours tended to make people feel a hell of a lot more melancholy.
And didn't James know it.
He was a fairly tall, somewhat thin man, standing under a tree with a distinct look of distaste on his face. For such a beautiful night it was quite unnecessary, but for someone with such a severe imbalance of humours how could he possibly not be melancholy?
His hair was a brownish colour, brushed away from his face and slightly, but not quite, too long. His distinctive, sullen eyes were brown, and his deep brow was pressed low over them. His gaze was slowly changing, almost of it's own accord, from one of complete dismissiveness to a thoughtful face. The sort of confused expression people used to wear when they sat on rocks wearing togas. Only these days if you were seen to be wearing a toga you would probably be locked away in an asylum of some sort. He was dressed, instead, in a brown, rather inconspicuous suit, white linen shirt and a dark, olive-coloured neck tie. He didn't feel the need for a top hat. Placing a hat on top of his head made him too tall, and therefore he had never been that inclined to wearing hats. Especially the awful, tall, tower-like contraptions fine gentlemen had taken to cramming their brains into.
Either way, he was a rather normal looking man. Aside from the fact he was pretty annoyed that it was such a mild night. But he would have been more annoyed had it been a much nastier night. He always liked to have something to be annoyed about. It was a trait he thought rather beautifully British. And being a British man he would of course keep up the tradition. The moonlight cast a long shadow of the particular tree he was stood beneath, the slowly dancing leaves blurring into blue darkness across the actual path. It seemed he was the only person out at such a time of night.
Also, it was rather a strange occurrence that the man was out at all. Considering this particular sullen British man never usually left the confines of two buildings north of the Thames river. Those two buildings being a rather run-down Abbey and his home of number 13 Harley Street. Or rather his surgery. Of all professions, James Lancet had chosen to follow medicine. And of all aspects of the human body he could have chosen to become an expert in it was sanguine humours. Blood. How ironic. It was fate, therefore, that made sure he would become melancholy. And taking blood from others for testing eventually resulted in something rather rudely taking his blood for itself. How distasteful. And therefore he resigned himself to private study. Sitting at a desk looking confused. No, he wasn't a philosopher, most of the difficult thinking had been done for him. He preferred to think of himself as a doctor. Seeing as though that was what he was.
Philosophy was a load of tosh anyway, he told himself, and in a final act of hedonism he decided to return to looking miserable. |
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Post by Marieke DiGeorgio on Jun 2, 2008 9:57:03 GMT -5
There were some days when she truly hated her job. Of course, those were the bad days, the times that reminded her of a woman with silvery hair, and violet eyes. A woman who tainted her memory, whom she barely resembled. Those were the days when a teenaged girl would bring her a few meagre coins, tearstains on her face, asking her if she could help. The days when a child would beg safety from her own parent. They were the days when she didn't wonder if people like Dr. James Lancet had the right of things, when perhaps there had to be some hope that these people could be returned; days when she hoped she couldn't find her prey. The days when she wished that she wasn't so cursed good at her profession. The days when just as she was going out for the evening, her father would stop her, and ask her when she would be home. When he would say that he missed her,
Today had been even worse than one of those bad days. Most of those things had actually occured, except she had found her prey. A man so far gone in his infection that it was impossible to think he could be returned to his young daughter and her ailing mother. Marieke had been forced to kill him, to spare herself and the boy at his feet. Sadly, the child had also been infected, a lad who had yet to even reach an age of ten summers. Eight, at the most. She wanted to ask where his mother had been, or his father. But he was a parentless street urchin, a problem that was occuring more and more often as Infected parents were unable to care for their young properly, or at all, depending on their stage of Infection. That boy, she had picked up, and carried to Harley Street. There was no way she was killing a young boy, She simply couldn't.
Needing some sort of solitude, and knowing a place where she decided she could get it, Marieke had set out for Regent Park. It was a place typically populated with those who were infected, though they tended to leave each other to wallow in their own misery or greed respectively. The moon was rising steadily as the night grew darker and lighter, moonlight casting a soft glow upon Marieke. She'd not expected to kill this night, and her long brown skirts were stained with blood- not just that of her victim's of course, but of the boy and the other poor people the brute had victimized. The sleeve of her right arm was bleeding profusely, from a cut the man had delivered to her, when he'd shoved her against a house, catching her arm on protruding metal. It hurt like heck, but there was little she felt like doing about it now. Let a Vampire smell her, let them attack. She need a way to vent her pent-up aggression.
Reaching a tree, she placed the palm of her hand against the rough bark, surprised by how pale it looked against the dark brown of the tree. It was probably from the bloodloss, she surmised. Bloodloss was probably the reason behind her surly mood as well, though that was compounded as she rounded the tree, lifting her brown eyes just a few inches to those of another person. A man. He was familiar, and it took her a long time to place the face- another side-affect, she'd wager. When she did, she grunted with distaste and stumbled past him, catching her injured arm against the bark of the tree, cursing softly. Turning to cradle her arm against her body, she found herself looking up slightly into the face of Doctor James Lancet.
Not for the first time, she thanked God that she was a tall woman.
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Post by Lancet && Jones on Jun 2, 2008 10:14:36 GMT -5
Fate always had something to twist into your ribcage like a fork. Confounding variables that would cock up the most perfect experiment and turn it into a waste of time, patience, expense, and equipment from being thrown across the room. Strangely it was due to confounding variables that he had ended up in Regent's Park in the first place.
It was that woman again. He turned his head to look at her, his expression not changing much. He had a nasty feeling in his stomach that she wasn't exactly a friend. She'd been along his road, standing outside of his surgery plenty of times, and it made him uneasy to say the least. Not worried or frightened, just disconcerted by the fact he was being followed. It was something that brought a strange taste to his mouth. Maybe he should just scare her away, but by the look on her face she wasn't the sort of person who would be easily scared.
And with that always came the risk of people finding out what you were. And that was a risk he didn't exactly want to take. The Directorate would be in absolute uproar. His reputation would go completely down the drain and his theories on sanguines would be completely ignored. Forever. Another thing to be deeply annoyed about. He could smell the girl's blood, but he didn't feel at all hungry. His blood lust was quite amply satisfied by his nurse's kind donations. Not that she had much choice, if she wanted to remain of a short lifespan and normal, balanced personality. He felt a stab of guilt, but it quickly passed as he remembered he was staring at the woman.
His frown deepened ever so slightly, and he decided standing and looking was probably a bad idea. Plenty of good men intoxicated by alcohol had suffered the raging fury of a woman who did not wish to be oggled like an art piece. So he consoled himself with a single surly notification of her presence.
"Oh." He said darkly, his mood summed up in that single voiced syllable. |
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Post by Marieke DiGeorgio on Jun 2, 2008 10:28:47 GMT -5
"Oh."
It was possibly the most derisive and dismissive two-letter word she'd ever heard before in her life. Marieke wouldn't deny that she was a slight bit spoiled, and a good deal as imperious as the women of her class tended to be. Needless to say, she was less than thrilled with the tone of voice and the manner with which she was being treated made her more irritated than before, and it certainly didn't help that she was frustrated that she cared. Slowly letting her hand fall to her side, she shrugged off the pain, and ignored the small wince that caught in her throat. She took back anything that she might have thought about James Lancet being right, as she got caught up in an irrational fit of anger.
More worrying than her inexplicable desire to break his nose and give him something to be truly melancholy about, was the fact that those brown eyes of his seemed to recognize her. It almost felt as if he had noticed her out and about, and that bothered her as well.
"Well, Dr. Lancet....I'm amazed that you've actually left your humble abode. I had begun to think that you were little more than a myth, some sort of legendary saviour to the Infected."
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Post by Lancet && Jones on Jun 2, 2008 10:40:11 GMT -5
He laughed, but didn't smile. And it was only a single piece of a laugh that seemed somewhat disjointed from any other form of speech. Almost inhuman, and more of a singular bark.
"I've had it up to here with legendary saviours today, my dear lady." He said, though he gave very little indication of where the proverbial 'here' actually was, and consoled himself with a rather confused grimace. Something that happened very occasionally when men in togas thought they had come up with the answer to everything they had wanted, and it had turned out to have been something their wife had said about putting the cat out. True, he had spent a good quarter of an hour earlier in the evening trying to escape from a street preacher who had been adamant that he was going to go to hell for not believing in God. James had tried to explain that he didn't believe in hell either, but the persistent little man had all but followed him home until he had decided that it was probably unwise to leave Hyde Park when there were other, more easily susceptible people to convert to his truly structured belief system.
"More to the point, I think, why have you been watching my house?" He asked, a look of subtle inquisition deciding to creep across his otherwise unhappy visage. Not that it made much difference. He still looked too miserable to be of any use in normal conversation. But then he always looked like that. And the more irritable he looked the better the conversation, his pitiable acquaintances had discovered. A good few had deemed him to be a highly unlikeable man. But they were fools. |
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Post by Marieke DiGeorgio on Jun 2, 2008 11:28:14 GMT -5
She hadn't been called lady by anyone other than her father in such a long time, that her own low chuckle followed his short bark of laughter. "Have a run in with the friendly neighbourhood itenerant preacher?" She asked, a small smirk on her features. "With me he's left well-enough alone." She had to admit, she was rather amused by his facial expressions, and his demeanor as a whole. By that she was amused that he was so grumpy, but she really didn't want to spend more time with him than she had to.
At his next query, Marieke shook his head, surprised that he would bring it up so boldly and plainly. She laughed again, her laugh a pretty sound so incongruous with the setting that it was odd sounding. Marieke shook her head, turning her attention to her arm, sighing and producing a knife from her pocket with which she began to cut at her sleeve, tugging it painfully off.
"You're house is not what I am watching, nor am I watching you, Doctor." She frowned at the long and shallow cut on her arm, perfectly at ease with baring her bloody arm in Regent Park. At night.
She hissed softly as she pulled her fabric away from her open wound. It was a shallow cut, and that wasn't too bad, but she was pulling her newly formed scabs off, allowing fresh blood to scent the air. She was inviting danger, but she desperately needed to see to this injury- it needed to be cleaned and wrapped before she went home, because her father would not be please to see this.
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Post by Lancet && Jones on Jun 6, 2008 11:37:53 GMT -5
He laughed, slightly incredulously. It was always about intrigue and mystery. It seemed a good few people had decided that such things made them sound elusive. To James he found it another brilliant excuse to be annoyed and generally more grumpy. He had never really noticed it when he had spent more time in the social company of other human beings. But now he had decided he wasn't that much of a human any more, even though he still looked and felt like one. He was different and that was that.
And yet he noticed these things. His isolation driving him to find the tiniest thing to pick at. To distort into some excuse for his mood, when most of the time it was isolated depression, lack of serotonin and of course, melancholy.
"If you're not watching me or the house what are you doing? Taking a please ant stroll around the Cholera wards, taking in the fresh air of consumption?" He said dryly, his eyebrows raised slightly as his eyes flicked down to the wound at her arm.
"You should get that seen to before something takes a fancy." He said, sniffing indistinctly. He found himself less and less inclined to drinking any other person's blood. The purity of his caretaker's virgin plasma was as satisfying as twenty tainted humans. And as it was given willingly there was less resistance to his stomach. Distasteful as he found it. Another reason to be cheerful, or not. He sniffed again, casting his eyes over the rest of the park, and the shadows that flashed over the bluey moonlit grass. If it wasn't for the occasional cold breath, the night would be perfect. Or rather more so than it already was. And maybe he would have found something to appreciate for once. He ran a hand over his hair, eyes flicking back to the wound again. He could smell it, and it was distracting him from his train of thought. Which was highly important. Or so he considered it to be, whereas any normal human being would have thought it trivial. But his mind weaved mysterious webs, and most of them made sense in the end. |
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Post by Marieke DiGeorgio on Jun 13, 2008 11:04:48 GMT -5
The man was persistant, wasn't he? Marieke knelt to hack at the hem of her dress. She was going to have to stop at her home on Octavia street to change before she went back to the place where she lived with her father. Her housekeeper would shake her head, but Marieke knew that Regina loved her enough not to question what was going on in her young mistresses' life. Marieke knew that she worried though, and that made her feel bad, as she carefully cut and folded the cloth so that she wouldn't have to pick threads out of the gash later.
"Let's just say that I have an active interesting in your research on the sanguines and leave it at that, shall we?"
For some reason, Marieke desperately wanted the respect of this man, something that she knew she would never attain. She was a slayer, killing the very people that he sought to heal. Yet, Marieke had her own grudging respect for a man who risked the ruination of his career to do that which was, ultimately, what his career was all about: helping people. Sure, she personally thought that he was misguided, though she wanted badly for him to be right, and for herself to be wrong. All that to say, Marieke didn't want to tell him what she was.
Never before had she been ashamed of her profession. Marieke had never had the sensation of wanting to hide what she did because she was afraid that someone would look at her with sick loathing. She was stunned to realize that it suddenly mattered very much that this respect-worthy man not be disgusted by her. Very slowly, she pushed herself to her feet, lightheaded, she lost her balance, briefly falling against him. Flustered, and murmuring apologies, she righted herself, shaking fingers trying to bind up her arm so that she could escape this awkward situation all the faster.
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Post by Lancet && Jones on Jun 21, 2008 10:36:42 GMT -5
James laughed, and for once it didn't sound condescending or bitter. He actually seemed to smile.
"I'd been told I had people following my research." He said, a note of quiet self-admiration in his voice. "Never had anyone outside my house before though." He added, frowning slightly. He looked sideways at her. He could tell she was not just a girl who wanted to be a doctor, but someone who was interested in deeper things. It was not only the sizeable wound in her arm that gave it away, although that did help.
"It seems to me that someone so concerned with blood is not too worried about losing a fair amount of it." He said, folding his arms carefully, drumming his worked fingers on the sleeve of his suit. He knew of the slayers, the Juer Street house, and those that seemed to dwell there. Of course the Government would pick somewhere shady and quiet. All the operations the public might take umbridge against were set as far away from the grandeur of Parliament as possible. |
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