What the hell? (essentially open)

[Anonymous]

As the sudden flicker of a cold, harsh light jolted him awake, Kav groaned. He kept his eyes firmly closed and waited a moment for the headache throbbing at his temples to subside – only when the drumming pain had lessened slightly did he stir, moving his head to the side so that he could open his eyes a fraction and see where in hell he was. The light was blinding, and he made another small noise of pain as it lanced through his skull, sharp as a knife. But he knew that if he closed his eyes again the problem wouldn’t go away – and so he opened them fully, wincing in the beams of the fluorescent bulb, and took in his surroundings.

He was in the most nondescript room he had ever seen. Everything was grey – from the smooth lino floor to the steel door at the far end. Next to the door there was a large mirror, and Kav made a mental note not to do anything stupid while he was here: he was undoubtedly being watched through that mirror. The mattress underneath him was comfortable enough, and the sheets had an eerily well-worn texture – someone else had been sleeping in this bed until not-too-long-ago, of that much he was fairly certain. There was a toilet and a small sink in the corner, which emanated a strong smell of bleach.

Kav sat up slowly, and immediately wished he hadn’t. A roiling nausea took hold of him, and he had to stagger to the toilet end empty out the contents of his stomach into the bowl – whatever they had dosed him up with to knock him out and get him into the facility was giving him a pretty strong reaction. When he had stopped vomiting, Kav paused for a moment, clinging to the toilet bowl as the world spun around him. It took a long while to stabilise, and when it did, and he was able to think with a clear head for the first time since he had woken up, he realised that something was very, very wrong. It was as if someone had removed half of his sight, hearing, taste and touch, and he couldn’t understand what was happening. He could see, he could hear, he could feel the cold porcelain underneath his fingers…but there was something missing, something which felt as if he were drugged into a stupor.

Then he realised: it was missing. That thing which he had always thought of as his seventh sense, the thing he had been relying on since his childhood…it was gone. For the first time in his 23 years, Kav was experiencing what it was like to be a normal human. The knowledge filled him with a kind of terror he hadn’t felt in years, but he knew he couldn’t give anything away. He was alone, helpless, and entirely at the mercy of the people in this place…whatever this place was.

Kav turned his black eyes to the mirror, which he took to be two-way, and looked at it with a burning intensity. “Where am I?” he asked quietly, his voice hard as steel – hoping someone was out there to answer his question.

[Anonymous]

Neel always tried to get a look at the new subjects.  His ongoing, chiefly silent feud with Tetra aside, it wasn't really an exclusionary move.  He simply wanted to gather as much data as possibly, and their sample was all too often biased, restricted to ex-pilots chosen precisely because they were defective or unable to control their abilities.  Neel's research, by contrast, demanded that he seek out functional psychics.  It didn't particularly matter what shape they were in; dead worked just fine, and he had done quite a lot with a few of those whose ejection from the military had been perfunctory--and posthumous.  

But this one was interesting.  Subject 2460187291, 23 years old, strong telepath.  Middle-caste, he had somehow managed to evade detection as a psychic until only recently.  Really, he was the ideal subject--for Neel in particular, even if it would require some finesse.  Preliminary reports indicated that his psychic abilities were entrenched, tied to the rest of his homeostatic brain function.  Neel had helped with the wards and the cocktail of stabilizing drugs they had given the subject, versed as he was in isolating psychic phenomena from normalized.  And that was the key.  A subject whose telepathy was fully integrated with normal brain function--it indicated neuronal growth, not just pruning, which had, in his experience, been the typical telepath's pattern.  They moved toward further modulation, isolation--not integration in this fashion, which normally marked the less successful, newer, more erratic telepaths.  According to reports, that was not the case here.

He wanted a look inside that brain.  Just a meta-EEG to start with.  A verbal interview to establish parameters.  He scratched idly at the join between plate and skull, his posture and position half-forgotten, as most of his physicality typically was.  It had to be; if he didn't isolate the mental, the pain returned full-force.  

He leaned against the two-way glass mirror, one hand leaving an unprofessional, ghostly imprint; then the subject turned toward him and addressed him.  The eye contact wasn't perfect, skewed maybe ten degrees to the right, or he'd have suspected the man could see through walls.

Slowly, he reached over to press the panel that would turn the opaque mirror transparent, and allow him to speak to the subject--without fear, of course, of psychic manipulation.  "You're in the Thanatos Research Institute of Metaphysics, in a containment cell.  You are a subject of study."  He didn't feel the need to soften the blow.  Subjects would deal with the facts as they would.  Often they themselves filled in the palliation of reassurance, or the bitterness of irony.  "I'm one of the researchers here; you may call me Dr. Macario or Neelam or Neel, I have no particular preference."

[Anonymous]

Kav felt sick. Fear was making his stomach knot and his heart pound in his throat, and it wasn’t a sensation he was used to. When he had been before in situations which were less than in his control, he had always been able to use his psychic talent to get himself out of it – but now he didn’t have that safety net to fall back on, and it was the most terrifying experience of his life. There was a heart-stopping moment after he spoke when he worried that nobody was outside the room at all, and that he wouldn’t be told what was going on now, perhaps at all. Kav had never been this alone before, never felt the all-encompassing silence which now descended in his mind. He was used to hearing other voices as background chatter, but now there was just…emptiness.

He hadn’t known how little other people heard, before.

The glass in the mirror seemed to crystallise for a moment, and then it became just a transparent pane with a man behind it. For a moment, Kav reached for the man with his mind – but then felt an almost physical blow of disappointment when he realised that his mind wasn’t going to be able to tell him anything about this man. That scared him the most – he’d been used to relying on his senses, and how he was going to have to muddle through without them while he tried to work out what the best way to play this man would be.

Oh yes, Kav was going to play him. This was just another mark, and this was just another situation he could get out of – the idea that he was stuck here went against every single one of Kav’s principles, which were all geared towards self-preservation. He had no seventh sense – well, it was time he started using the six he had left.

Neel – Kav had resolved to call him Neel, since any attempt at intimacy was worth it – was going to be tough. There was nothing about him to suggest any interest in Kav besides the professional, and he looked as if his thoughts were on something else entirely. Kav had seen stranger things than people with metal plates in their heads, so he paid that little mind, more focussed on his annoyance that he couldn’t tell what would make the other man tick. He was irritated, too, that this man had probably just seen him throw up – if there were any chance he could use his looks to get out of this one, it had probably been diminished by that alone.

He paid little attention to the name of the institute, and filed it away for consideration later. But the fact that he was a subject of study? That was interesting. His quick mind had already deduced that his current lack of talent seemed to suggest that it was being suppressed, and now he could hazard a guess as to why. Interesting, but not interesting enough. Kav got to his feet and went to the glass panel, standing so close to it that, had the mirror not been in the way, his nose would almost have been touching Neel’s. “What have you done to take away my talent, Neel?” he asked, managing a trace of an ironic smile. His breath misted the glass. If he had been able to, he would have implanted here a suggestion in the other man’s subconscious about what it would be like to feel that breath on his neck. As it was, Kav cursed his inability and kept his voice at the low, reasonable tone he had been using. “Don’t you think we could talk better if you were in here with me?”

[Anonymous]

"What have I done?"  Neel didn't move.  He was used to patients' rage, frustration, attempts at manipulation, and the key to it all was the same.  He ignored it.  Once he had made himself into the foil, he could easily see how his subjects' psyches rebounded into themselves.  The psychological was not a large part of his work, but he had learned to classify many of the stances, so-called, of the new patient.  There was anger, defensiveness; there was denial.  Some attempted to coax or coerce, some tried to establish some emotional bond (Stockholm Syndrome ran rampant, though he was loath to acknowledge the part he played in it).  Some tried to flirt or ask for special favors.  The poses interested him insofar as they involved the flexing of certain psychic contours.  

Subject 246018729 would probably reach peak psychic efficiency while attempting to charm.  His body language, while aggressive, somehow extended an invitation which Neel recognized principally from television.  He tried not to rock back instinctively or cringe away.  That would be very unprofessional.

"I could tell you, if you like," he said instead.  "At least as much as I know.  Our methodology in full, sadly, is beyond the grasp of one neurobiologist."  He touched the pad again and the window went opaque.  Maybe he would go inside and run the damped EEG scan: the wards wouldn't affect basic brain configuration, and later he would get a few aides to help him wrangle the man into his lab, where he would be able to view the undamped telepathy.  It was always dangerous to decontain a psychic; that generally had to wait a few weeks, at the least.  

He entered the room through a doorway, fortuitously designed, which would allow access only to researchers keyed into the system.  It shut behind him in any case, and he turned to face Subject 246018729, watching him thoughtfully.

"This is better.  Are you a curious person, 246018729?"  Neel unclipped the EEG helmet from his belt.  "I experiment on myself, too, you know.  I think it's very interesting.  You'll probably like it here rather more if you can explore the possibilities of your mind as well.  They say that the unexamined life is not worth living.  I think that's true, don't you?  Take a seat."  He gestured toward the bed.

[Anonymous]

And there was what Kav had been waiting for – a glimmer of discomfort, however slight, in the eyes of the strange doctor when Kav used an inherently inviting posture. That was something he would have to work on. However tiny the reaction had been, the small flinch had been there, and it showed that this was a man who would probably react badly to something like – for instance – flirting. And flirting was something Kav was very, very good at. After all, he’d had a lot of practise. Kav didn’t want to crowd the man, so he took a step back when he opened the door and walked into Kav’s cell.
   
So Doctor Neel was a neurobiologist. Kav didn’t know exactly what that entailed, but he could guess that it was something to do with the brain, and the physical aspects of the brain. Not a psychologist then, although he could very well have some of the same training. A clever man, but Kav knew that it was possible for someone to be so clever that they didn’t know which way was up. Sometimes intelligence was achieved at the expense of common sense. He didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but Kav’s main aim at the moment was to gain information about where he was, and what kind of person he was dealing with.

Kav remained carefully still as the other man made his way into the room, watching him with his habitually bored-seeming stare. There might have been a flicker of a raised eyebrow as Neel addressed him by a number instead of his name, but he was in no hurry to correct the other man – let him use his numbers if he wanted. Kav had been known by many, many names in the past, and this was just another one. Sometimes he even forgot that Kav wasn’t his real name, but every now and then he would remember and that fact would remind him of his real identity: he was a conman. Nobody would ever know his real name unless he wanted them to.

Well, this one certainly was an oddity and no mistake. Kav tilted his head slightly to one side and watched with a slight smile of amusement as the man seemed to be chattering – but he tensed up when he saw that Neel was holding something in his hands which didn’t look particularly friendly. It looked like a bicycle helmet rigged out of a mess of wires, and for a moment Kav wondered if making for the door was a viable course of action. But he knew with a sinking feeling that he had heard the lock on the door slide across when it had shut behind the doctor – and that meant that he was hardly likely to finish this session without that thing on his head, doing something he didn’t want to think about.

Such was Kav’s prowess at keeping things hidden that not a trace of these thought processes crossed his face. He looked almost completely relaxed, and regarded Neel with his dark gaze as if he would see into the other man’s soul. He had to resist the urge to go over and straddle the other man’s lap, just to see what he would do. Maybe that could come later. It was probably something he should save for when he wanted some entertainment.

“If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll stay standing,” Kav told Neel, leaning against the wall behind him. “I’m all for exploring my mind, Doctor Neel, but there are things in there you don’t need to catch a glimpse of.” Simply because he couldn’t resist, he lowered his voice to a warm purr and murmured: “Although there are other parts of me you can explore whenever you want…”

[Anonymous]

Generally, subjects weren't quite so chipper.  This one was obviously in the denial phase of acclimation--not entirely surprising.  He lounged against one wall, performing nonchalance.  Like some, but not really like most, he was defensively posed, nearly impossible to read; and Neel had never been good at reading people.  He had instruments for that.  The subject also had the arrogance of physical comfort, in his own being, in the world, something like Neel's brother.  That was one of the more difficult dynamics to destabilize.  Physical comfort bled over into mental.

Neel sighed and rubbed at his neck.  He hated enforcing, but what had to be done, had to be done.

"I was trying to keep things pleasant, but in fact, when I make a request, you have no choice.  If you resist, I can bring the guards in to restrain you."

Neel frowned, brows nearly meeting over his nose.  He didn't like to put things so bluntly; often, it affected the subjects adversely, skewed his data.  All sorts of things influenced psychic readouts.  The EEG should be safe, though.  It was only a preliminary scan, mapping modules and normalized activity.  In his lab, he'd be careful to use the proper combination of sedatives, hormonal relaxants, and brain stimulants.  This subject clearly needed chemical help, or he would.  Some didn't, but those were mainly the damaged ex-pilot candidates.

"It isn't an intrusive procedure."  He kept his voice calm, nearly to a monotone, in order to defuse the attempt at social familiarization.  He wanted to add, perhaps because he watched too much bad television, much as you might prefer that, but it was an amateur's mistake to sink to the subjects' level.  Instead, he raised the EEG scanner and hefted it, demonstrating its light weight.  "It's only a scan.  Please take a seat."

It was no easy thing, striking the balance between officiousness and the kind of calm, matter-of-fact manner that led to easy subject compliance.  He had a feeling it wouldn't work so easily on this subject.  Once the initial scan was over, he would have to be careful to bring security with him whenever they interacted.  Neel knew the subject had strengths (physical, physico-mental, everything) he didn't.  But of course, in this situation it hardly mattered.  Science left no room for human value judgments.

[Anonymous]

Nobody had ever accused Kav of having a lack of common sense. He always knew which side his bread was buttered on, and he was always careful never to upset that dynamic. So when he was told in no uncertain terms by this strange, pale man that he would be restrained if he did not do as he was asked, Kav knew that he had no choice but to obey. At the moment no physical coercion was being used, and he could guess enough about Neel to think that none would be used if he did what he was told – so Kav pushed himself away from the wall he had been leaning on and went to sit cross-legged on the end of the bed, as close to Neel as he could make himself without physically touching the other man.

“You don’t need any guards,” he said as he walked over. “I’m not stupid, Neel – I’m not going to try anything.” It was the truth. Kav assumed that all of the staff here would be trained to assume that every subject was going to try and run away, but Kav wasn’t going to try anything of the sort. He’d already noticed the barely-perceptible thrum in the floor which marked this place out as being part of some kind of machine, and his agile brain had made the connection of machine with space station – if it really was what he thought it was, Kav knew that he was in a lot of trouble.

But he didn’t want to think about that at the moment, so he concentrated instead on what he could get out of his current situation. Kav had never been one for forward planning, and he wasn’t going to start such a thing now – he focussed on the present, not the future. After all, the future was malleable while the present was more under his immediate control.

All the same, Kav was beginning to get the sickening feeling that he didn’t have any control at all in this place.

Once he was seated, Kav looked at the scanning device in Neel’s hands and reached for it, turning it over deftly and examining it for any trace of something which could perform a more intrusive scan. True to what Neel had told him, there was nothing in the mesh helmet which looked like it would be able to really get inside his head – and so he handed it back to the doctor and sat patiently, waiting for the other man to put the thing on his head. “What’re you going to look for with that thing, Neel?” Kav asked, using the old trick of name repetition to attempt to break down barriers - not, he suspected, that it would do him much good. “If you’ve taken away my talent, won’t you have to give it back to me if you want to see it in my brain?” He still had that strange, disconcerting feeling that something inside him was missing. For a coldly frightening moment, it occurred to Kav that he might never get his psychic ability back – but that was something he really didn’t want to think about.

[Anonymous]

Neel nodded.  This subject was intelligent, and sometimes that worked to their advantage.  Telepathic skill and intelligence weren't always wedded to each other.  For that matter, they were almost never congruent.  When they were, however, he found the subjects more interesting than the ones he called 'lopsided'.  Brain modules tended to be better-organized in the intelligent.  Not in the hyperintelligent, but 018729 seemed to be more functional than most of those.

"Good choice."  Throw him a treat.

Once, in an unsavory comparison, he had heard someone--a superior?  Zachary?  Neel could no longer be sure.  He didn't remember who had said what, but he did recall the words, the experience; this someone had compared subjects to dogs, or other household animals.  Depersonalization was, perhaps, a hazard of TRIM.  It was also TRIM's strength, or so he had thought.  Organization as such was the essence of intelligence.  But he had heard...

Neel's mind was wandering, and he forced it back.  Soon he would need another dose of paracoximide, but that was for later consideration.  For the time behind, he gently took the EEG back from the subject and arranged it on his skull, then keyed in the sequence that would diagram the readings on his laboratory network.

"No," he added, absently, "your abilities are only inhibited.  This readout will only measure latent pathways.  Electrical activity isn't stopped..."  He paused to adjust the spread of the device, making sure the electrodes lined up properly.  What he wouldn't give to get some of his nanobots inside this subject's skull--but that could wait.  "Of course, the EEGs of some years ago didn't have this capability, but we try to stay cutting edge.  Look at me.  Please hold your head still."  He steadied the subject's jaw with one hand, leaning slightly away.  Personal boundaries.

He waited the requisite three minutes, then let go.  

"There."  With economical, if clumsy, movements, he removed the device.  "Not so bad."  Good dog.  Sometimes Neel disgusted himself.  Or maybe that was just the methamphetamine.

[Anonymous]

Kav had never been in a hospital in his life. He’d been a hardy, healthy child who had only rarely ever needed to see a doctor – and he’d never broken any bones, so hospitals had been off the list. As a result, he’d never undergone a scan of any kind, and so the idea of having someone putting something on his head that could look into his head was a disconcerting one. For someone who had never even undergone anything as minor as an x-ray, a head scan was a frightening thing. But he kept his head still while the strange helmet did its’ work. Whatever its’ work was. Uneducated as he was, Kav had no real idea that scans could show maps of the brain.

Well, he had to admit that Neel had been true to his word – the scan hadn’t made Kav feel any different than how he felt normally, and it didn’t seem to have got into his head in any fashion. But he was conscious of the emptiness where his talent used to be, and that aching loss was intensifying with every moment. If Kav had been blinded, he doubted that he would have felt the loss as keenly as he was feeling this one. It was if a whole half of his mind was gone, and he wanted it back more than he had wanted anything before.

Once the helmet had been removed, Kav considered for a moment what the best course of action would be for him to follow. He hated not knowing what he should do, hated this feeling of helplessness – and, as with any conman, he hated the idea that he wasn’t the one in control of this situation. He was used to guiding the mark into whatever course of action he wanted them to participate in, and he was also used to having unlimited knowledge of their personalities as a guide for how he should manipulate them. Maybe if he had his talent back, even for a second, he would be able to get inside Neel’s head…and then who knew what he could do?

But Kav had never allowed himself to think too far ahead, and he wasn’t going to do anything like that now. His motto was “never assume”, and he always remembered it at times like this, when hope threatened around the corner. “You say they’re inhibited,”, he murmured to the other man. “Does that mean you can bring my talent back if you want to?” He didn’t want to beg, disliked begging more than anything else in the world, but Kav knew deep down that if it came to it he would beg as much as he had to. Throwing a wry smile at the doctor, he shrugged his shoulders expressively. “It’s like you’ve poked my eyes out or something, Neel,” he said softly, leaning forward just a little.

[Anonymous]

In the halls of TRIM, a place that was always filled with the cold professionalism of an asylum, a beast stalked the corridors. An intelligent, hairy beast, covered in short, brown fur from his head to his feet, where it ended off in leathery, webbed feet whose nails clicked against the floor. His one dark brown eye and one glassy red eye- literally, for the red eye was mostly made of glass- looked down to the monotonous ground that he covered.

His metallic tail dragged noisily on the floor, making a few of the workers yell at him as he passed. He merely smiled- the extra layer of wax on the floor made sure there was no damage. His white lab coat moved against the floor occasionally, and he adjusted his pocket protector to make sure that his blue pen didn't bleed out onto his underlying shirt or his dark green pants. His eyes flew to the papers he held into his cybernetic hand, and he heard the gears whir slightly- he made a mental note to oil his arm again. It didn't give him too many problems, but it unnerved the patients.

Yes, the beast that had tromped down the corridors and made the janitors shriek was a scientist. A very short scientist, at less than three feet tall, with a very wide metal tail and half his face revealing a metallic beast beneath his fuzzy exterior. The platypus's bill had been split in half, and replaced with metal on the right side, as well as his eye and the rest of his face. But such things no longer perturbed him. Imer had long since gotten used to dealing with the heavier implants.

Moving to the holding area of the psychic patients, he quickly moved to get himself logged in, squeaking as he reached up to the keypad. Blasted things were made for humans twice his size- reaching up as high as he could, he couldn't even touch the bottom of the panel. Someone had moved it again.

Jumping up, he wedged his tail into the ground below him, using indentations he had made quite a few times ago to brace himself and give him the necessary height he needed to actually sign in and get to his patient. He was already late- if Neel had gotten there before him, Imer had no doubt that he would do something particularly harmful to the patient. What was he going to do this time, take the patient's brain apart?

He didn't doubt it. Already half-cybernetic, the platypus let himself down after he tapped in his identification, making his way to patient 2460187291's room as he pondered the thoughts of gaining psychic prowess. He was never too terribly interested in the idea- what good would it do him? So his brain didn't connect to the Network. Big deal. But the last thing he wanted  was to get redrafted into the military, let alone having to work with dragons that were enormous by human standards.

He suppressed a shudder as he made his way into the room, closing the door behind him a little too hastily. Squeaking more out of surprise than pain, he turned around, pulling his tail out from beneath he door before waddling in, pulling out his pen again and smiling openly at his patient.

"Hello, Neel, and... ah, patient 2460187291. He hasn't done anything to you, yet, has he?"

At seeing the machine, he raised the one eyebrow he had and turned back to the patient, shrugging apologetically.

"Besides the machine. But it's harmless. He's done much worse. Dr. Imer, here. Psychiatrist."

[Anonymous]

"Is it?"  Neel watched him in faint surprise.  It was rare to find someone so deeply attached to his psychic power.  Most of the subjects wanted nothing more than freedom, but this one was an interesting case.  He seemed to value his mental ability more.  The quirk, which he should have expected from the case description, only cemented his desire to do more work with 018729.  At the same time, it would mean he'd have to be very careful to control the testing circumstances.  Doubled dosages, possibly.  He would test some of the cocktail on himself, as always.  There was nothing like experiencing the effects of a drug firsthand.  After all, so many of measured psychic phenomena were subjective.  He'd want to conduct more interviews.

To put it like this was to ignore, of course, the niggling fact of his own psychology.  Neel was quite aware that he was susceptible to certain overenthusiasms.  The provenance of this sort of subject tickled one of them.  It was not foreign to him to sacrifice many things, health, freedom, happiness, for the pursuit of mental strength and power.  Psychic strength.  

What must his brain be like, to process so centrally through the psychic module?  Neel's need for drugs and his overwhelming desire to check on the results of the scan were pulling him out of the room, away from the subject; but the initial interview was valuable, too, and he wanted to finish it.  Later he would upload as much of his memory of the encounter as he could reconstruct.  More useful than notes, of course, and it really was one of the handier of his new capacities.

He had been staring into space, and realized only after a moment that one hand had come up to touch his metal plate; it was the shock of titanium chill that did it.  

"My apologies."  What else did he want to know?  It was always difficult to get the right answers, when the right questions were always the point.

A sudden interruption made moot his ruminations.

"Dr. Imer.  Welcome."  If only Dr. Imer didn't look so much like Klaus, from Weevil and Friends... sometimes it was a little difficult to take him seriously... that, and the physical clumsiness.  Of course, Neel was clumsy, too.  But he wasn't cute.

[Anonymous]

Kav frowned a little at Neel’s rather puzzled expression. “Isn’t that normal?” he asked, confused. He’d assumed that all psychics were as ingrained with their talents as he was – never having met another psychic for long enough to ask them about themselves (they were usually trying to cultivate a “don’t tell on me and I won’t tell on you” kind of relationship), he had no idea about such things. It seemed perfectly natural to him for such talents to be part of one’s daily thought processes, but then he figured that of course it would seem normal to him: he didn’t exactly know anything else, did he?

For a long moment, as Neel stared into space, Kav wondered if the other man was about to keel over and collapse. He had the same look in his eyes that one of Kav’s friends had always had before he had an epileptic fit, and Kav wondered briefly if he should ask if the scientist was alright – after all, he was holding the injured side of his head as if he were in pain. Before he had a chance to, however, the other man had come back into the present, and was looking – or was it just Kav’s imagination? – as if he wanted nothing more than to be elsewhere.

The door opening made Kav jump, just a little – having that thing on his head had made him a little edgy. He regained his normal composure soon enough, however, and looked at the strange creature who walked through the door with only a slight touch of apprehension. He’d seen anthros before in his life, and some of them had been even stranger than this one – mind you, there was something about them which always made him a little uneasy. Maybe it was some kind of subconscious instinct, telling him that humans and animals should not be amalgamated like that – but he didn’t actually have anything against them, however strange they made him feel when he was around them.

This one was interesting mostly because of his diminutive height (even sitting on the bed, Kav’s head was above his), and his metal body parts. Kav tried not to look at them for too long, guessing that such a thing would be rude – and the last thing he wanted to do was get on the bad side of one of these scientists. He was beginning to realise that they held more power over him than he liked to think about. “Kav,” he replied warily to the doctor’s introduction, offering his name even though he knew that Imer would never feel the need to use it. This didn’t seem like the kind of place where he would be permitted to have anything but a number.

“What exactly is going on?” he asked after a moment. This new doctor seemed a little more in the real world than Kav’s current companion, and more likely to answer questions. “Am I going to get my talent back?” there was no harm in asking, he hoped. Maybe he’d get a straight answer out of this one.

[Anonymous]

He'd gotten used to that odd look. Yes, he was short. Yes, he was used to being looked at. No, he didn't bother taking offense to it, anymore. What was the point? By this time, he never even bothered propping himself up to the patients' height, since it normally intimidated them. Not to mention that it was terribly uncomfortable for him to be balancing on one point, rather than his perfectly functional feet.

"Apologies for the tardiness, Dr. Neel. Can't be helped, sometimes- small legs." Letting out a sort of squeaking laugh, the little platypus slapped at his stout little legs and dug into one of the pockets, pulling out a small mint and popping it into his mouth. While his sense of taste wasn't as functional as it should have been, there was still a cooling sensation that he greatly enjoyed. It relaxed him before he started working with patients, and it beat out whatever god awful things his cohort used.

"Hope you don't mind me calling you by your number, Kav- I'll forget that you're patient 2460187291, otherwise! Now." Writing down a few notes, he looked up and smiled. Already he had gotten a satisfactory response, somewhat- not many patients freely gave out their names, since paranoia normally gripped them by this time, not to mention an inherent fear and distrust of the doctors. It normally proved difficult to get the slightest bit of psychological insight on them, since fear was a powerful mask for normal psychological behaviors.

"Well..." He tilted his head slightly at the inquiry, and scratched beneath his chin lightly with his cybernetic claw. He rocked back and forth on the balls of what little heels he had, aided by the weight of his tail (which kept him from falling over) as he readied to touch his pen to the paper again.

"You'd need to tell me your entire prognosis for me be able to tell you much of anything, I'm afraid. If Neel's done anything since your formal internment, I'm afraid I can't promise anything. Against protocol, see."

He shot a sidelong glance at Neel. It figured that he, majoring in the soft sciences of the mind, would end up working alongside a man that would prefer to hack the skull apart to get at the brain and stick it on a table. He didn't hate the man, nor dislike him, but merely wished that he would appreciate the simple subtleties of the brain's work, rather than the brain itself.

[Anonymous]

Well, it was obvious now.  He was obsessively focused on his talent, as addicted to it as Neel could, occasionally, admit he was to his paracoximide and methamphetamine.  A very interesting result.  He wondered what it had to do with brain reconfiguration.  He'd have to test pleasure receptors and the psychic module, they were probably intertwined by now.  And for that, he'd have to take him out beyond the wards.  Amazing what you could do to confine a psychic's reach, these days... he wondered if there were some way he could relax the perceived effects of his current cocktail.  With a mild hallucinogen, it might work.

But his own head was pounding now, and he had to hold it carefully still as he unfolded himself from the subject's bed, carefully reattaching the EEG to his belt.  

That number comment of Imer's, that was either some sort of psychological ploy (wasn't everything, with Imer?) or an alarming breach of protocol.  Admittedly, he had no idea.  He often thought Imer, and the rest of the psychiatrists, were rather more destabilizing to the patients than helpful.  246018729 didn't need psychiatric counseling; he would manipulate it.  Most did, or they found it entirely useless, because they were too damaged.  Neel's frustration grew in tandem with the pain in his head.

"Dr. Imer," he said, drily, shoulders hunched and arms folded across his chest, "I suggest checking the official records before you consult the patient."  He probably had, but Neel didn't much care for the absurdity of faked closeness between doctor and subject.  There was no sense in making conversation.  The subject would be less valuable to him if compromised by too much understanding of the system.  "As for 246018729's abilities, I recommend a cold period before initial testing, and strict magnetic resonance confinement during transport.  I'm going to file a claim for him myself, but the same protocols really should hold if anyone else uses him."

He sighed and felt one corner of his mouth twitch, a neuralgia he usually ignored.  

"Please send me a copy of your notes, Dr. Imer.  Good day."  Of course, here at TRIM, days and nights were entirely artificial constructions, and he didn't sleep anyway; but he couldn't think of anything more officious to say.  'Good day' worked well.  He nodded to the subject and, arms hanging heavily at his sides, made his way to the door.  Pushing it open, he exited.  For just a moment he paused in the doorway and turned back, watching the platypian doctor and the pallid patient, then let it shut and lock itself.  

Outside, he hurried to his lab, head throbbing with each long, loping stride, fingers twitching in the air in response to misfiring neurons he would be unable to control without corticodone, not that he liked the stuff very much... it would have to wait until he'd done a memory dump.  This subject excited him, he had to admit.  The strange congruencies; the addiction to his 'talent', the neural interlinkages--he wondered what the EEG might turn up.  He'd have to modify his sedation cocktail.  It was all very exciting, if only he could manage not to throw up until an hour after he had taken his medication.

Sometimes Neel worried that he was only a step away from becoming a subject himself, or if that was what he wanted.  Then he reminded himself that it was all a state of mind and his fears went away again.  After he had finished his analysis he would collapse for a half hour and watch Weevil and Friends.  That always helped.

[Anonymous]

“My ‘entire prognosis’?” Kav laughed at the idea. “Doc, I don’t even know why I’m here, let alone what they’ve decided about me.” One minute he had been at the training place, or whatever it was called, and the next minute he had come out from that week of exhausting tests and they had told him that he was useless so they were sending him away. That had been the extent of what he had been told – and Neel’s giving him the name of the place hadn’t helped either, since he hadn’t exactly said anything about what went on here. Actually, Neel hadn’t told him anything of real value, now that he came to think about it.

For a brief moment he considered trying to switch on the charm for Imer, but then he decided against it – after all, he had managed his whole life without ever having a physical relationship with an anthropomorphic creature (he considered it just that one step too close to bestiality, and couldn’t find any attraction towards the idea at all), and there was a limit to what he would do – even to get out of this place. Things weren’t bad enough yet that he would flirt with a platypus, even one who acted like a human.

Oh, and wasn’t this interesting? Kav watched in amusement as his very own Doctor Neel decided to scarper – he didn’t seem to take too kindly to anyone else having something to do with his patients. But then, Kav reflected, in the very short time he had known Neel (although something told him that he was going to have a very long time to get to know the other man, if he was going to be in here for the foreseeable future), the doctor hadn’t taken kindly to anything at all. Maybe he was just that kind of person. Kav wanted desperately to know what he was thinking (if he had done, he would have had a few choice words to say about the fact that he was apparently ‘addicted’ to a talent which meant as much to him as his hearing), but he supposed he would have to wait until his drugs wore off for that to happen.

“See you later, Neel!” Kav called after the older man as he left, infusing his tone with all the mocking cheerfulness he could muster. Turning back to Imer, he looked at him, suddenly serious. Meeting those inhuman eyes was strange (and there was something really odd about one of them), but Kav ignored the desire to gape. “Seriously, doc,” he began, shifting on the bed so that he was more comfortably facing Imer. “I don’t even know what this place is. All I know is that they said something along the lines of my talent being too much a part of my brain for them to train me.” (whatever that meant) “And then I turned up here.” Kav adopted a more plaintive tone: “You seem like a nice enough guy – can’t you give me any answers?”