Outside the Dorms, Late Saturday Morning

[icecoldfrost]

Hank had a saying; what Emma wants, Emma gets. And what Emma wanted right now was her fencing sword, because being surprised in the shower by that... thing had not been pleasant.

From what she was picking up from the other residents, these things were everywhere. So off to the weapons locker it was, to get something sharp so that she didn't have to try and bludgeon the next one to death with her shampoo bottle.

And somewhere along the line she had acquired a Jack, who was being so very Victorian about this, and not letting her out of the dorms alone.

"I don't need a babysitter, you know. I know where the weapons lockers are."

[OOC: For the Victorian Terrier, plz.]

Comments

[bitten_notshy]

Meanwhile, Jack slowly opened his eyes, pain still slamming through his body.

"Zkurvysyn."

It would be a while before he was sat up, and quite possibly longer before he was back to English, but the meaining was more or less clear from his tone.

[icecoldfrost]

Emma was already shaking as she pulled the sword free and stumbled towards Jack, her skull pounding; part power-overload, part bleed-through from Jack's pain.

"Hey," she sad, kneeling beside him. "Are you okay?"

[bitten_notshy]

Jack opened his eyes and looked at her. "Love," he breathed -- well, he found his English.

For all of one word.

"No sé donde estoy. Soy mareado." And then back to Czech for //What happened?//

[icecoldfrost]

She had absolutely no idea what he was saying, but Emma knew it wasn't good.

"No, Jack, I need you to focus, please?" she urged, brushing her fingers over his head gently to see if he was bleeding. "Ah, ingles, sí?"

[bitten_notshy]

A large span of skin on Jack's temple was already going green-purple and swollen with a bruise, and a think trickle of blood came from a scrape at the center where he'd made impact with the table.

"Ingles?" he repeated sleepily. "No habla ... oh. English."

He pushed himself to a sitting position, gasping at the effort of it. "I'm hurt." He sounded utterly confused at this fact.

[icecoldfrost]

"I think you fell down, darling," she soothed, quickly putting a supportive hand against his back so he couldn't topple backwards. "You've got a nasty bump on your head, does it hurt anywhere else?"

That bruise was making Emma very, very nervous.

[bitten_notshy]

It did -- his hips where he'd hit the ground, his ankle from twisting it, and his stomach from nausea.

"I don't know," he said, because there was too much pain to catalogue, and lost focus again. "Usted es un ángel bonita. Did I ever say....?"

Oh, this was excruciatingly helpful.

[icecoldfrost]

No, no it was not helpful, because Emma did know what 'ángel' meant.

"You must have scrambled your tricksy little brain when you fell, if you're confusing me for an 'ángel,' Mr. Priest," she deflected. "Do you think you can stand up?"

[bitten_notshy]

"Not confused," he said, looking straight into her eyes, and he meant that even though he'd deny it to his last breath when his head was unscrambled. "I think ..."

He leveraged himself with one hand on the tabletop and rose with an enormous groan. "Why are we here?"

[icecoldfrost]

In her opinion, his brain was definately scrambled if he thought she was an angel.

"You don't remember?" Oh, so not good. "There were the gremlin-creatures, and you insisted on coming out here with me, so you could get your pistol while I picked up my sword. I think one of them tripped you."

[bitten_notshy]

"I fell down?" Jack was as broken and vulnerable as he got, and his natural accent was fading in and out of his voice. "I remember ... I woke up at the dorms. Gremlins. I found you and -- that's right. We went to the salle. I know we left the building. Not much else."

He didn't need to know more details to realize this could be very, very bad.

[icecoldfrost]

"It's okay, darling," she lied, leaning in to press a kiss against his cheek. "You've got a nasty bump, I'd be surprised if you weren't a little dazed. We'll get you to the clinic, and everything will be fine once you've had a nap and something to drink."

Which still posed the problem of how Emma was going to get him down to town, on her own, without him passing out.

[bitten_notshy]

"Right. Of course." Jack nodded dumbly and lurched away from Emma and toward the door, completely forgetting about any danger.

Shepherding him to the clinic without letting him get eaten might be a challenge.

[icecoldfrost]

"Jack!" Emma grabbed her sword and scrambled after him. "Stop! Remember? Monsters? Rawr?"

Jack was usually a challenge. This was simply going to be a different sort of challenge. But so long as he stopped calling her ángel, she would find a way to manage.

[bitten_notshy]

"Monsters," Jack repeated and stopped in his path, wondering at the word. "Right. I'm -- sorry, love."

He didn't seem to notice he was calling her anything odd, because his next words were, "How do we get past them?"

[icecoldfrost]

Emma just grit her teeth and moved forward, ignoring the pain in her leg where she'd been bitten. "Carefully, of course!" she teased, saluting him with her blade. "We'll go slow, and if you start feeling dizzy, tell me, and we'll sit down for a bit."

She peered carefully out of the door. "I think it looks clear."

[bitten_notshy]

"It does," he said agreeably, still not entirely sure what he was agreeing to. "I'm lucky to have someone like you to walk with me."

He was leaving off that he felt dizzy every time he moved. He wouldn't fall over. He didn't think. His gait was unsteady, though, and he leaned on her arm.

[icecoldfrost]

"You won't say that once I've made you walk all the way into town," Emma chided, slipping her free arm around his waist for extra support. "One step at a time, darling, and maybe we'll get lucky and get picked up by a rickshaw or some of the troopers."

She'd mentally yell for Raven, if she wasn't half-afraid that a teleport would make him worse, so one step at a time it was.

[bitten_notshy]

"One step at a time," Jack echoed in a sing-song voice. "Eaaaaaaasy does it, noooo need to rush... I can't rush anyhow..."

He kept on babbling like this for some time as they walked down the path toward the clinic. Luckily, there were very few gremlins along the way. "I think we're almost there."

[icecoldfrost]

Emma didn't mind most of the babbling, it let her know he was still awake and with her.

"Almost," she encouraged him. "You're doing wonderfully, darling, just another few blocks and we'll be there. See? There's the Park."

[bitten_notshy]

Jack nodded, looking lost in thought.

A few steps later he ventured, "It's very green."

A few more steps and, "Emma? Why does my head hurt?"

[icecoldfrost]

"Because you fell down, darling," she reminded him patiently. "We're going to get a doctor to fix you up, since you hit your head too hard for me to just kiss it and make it better."

[bitten_notshy]

"Oh," he said, as if remembering. "But I like it when you kiss it and make it better. I like it when you kiss me. Your lips are ... soft."

[icecoldfrost]

If he wasn't already addled, she'd shake him.

"If you didn't like it when I kissed you, I might be worried about why you kept kissing me," she teased. "But flattery isn't going to get you out of going to the doctor, Jack."

[bitten_notshy]

"I know I need the doctor," he said, in a moment of lucidity. "I have memory loss and I feel like I'm going to fall over any second. It's probably a"-- English, Jack -- "concussion."

"But" --and the lucid moment might have been fading -- "I do love you. Really."