un: Dankovsky | video

[thantagonist]

[Daniil posts live from a café near the museum. He has no patience for typing responses, and his own visage should explain why. His nose has recently been broken and reset. He looks exhausted and irritated, but he has a duty.]

I need a couple people to come down to the café near that absurd museum with the sewn up fruit exhibits. Bring a stretcher, we have a patient who could use some more urgent treatment.

[From somewhere offscreen, a voice that is distinctly not Daniil’s states:] This Etrayan shot me in an attempt to get information I did not possess. I would appreciate his removal from my presence.

Now- That’s not true at all. That is not the reason you were stopped. [Daniil now regrets making a video, but what’s done is done. ]

Comments

[levelshift]

.....

[Accelerator is silent for a few moments, before speaking up.]

You sound like my doctor from back home. He's the kind of person who'll tell you that no matter what happens - whether all your bones have been broken or your skin's been ripped off or your organs have been crushed - as long as you come to him still alive he'll save you.

[It's weirdly reassuring.]

[thantagonist]

He sounds incredibly talented. Fascinating. You wouldn’t know where to access his notes, now would you?

[Daniil’s singular interest has been activated.]

Have those things happened to you, by the way?

[levelshift]

Those would be proprietary to my city. There's a lot of red tape you'd have to go through to get access to them.

[Red tape he could get through with his position as the head of the city, no doubt.]

My skull shattered when I was shot, that's about it. He isn't a neurosurgeon so he didn't personally operate on me, but he oversaw the procedure and I had appointments with him when I was recovering.

[He is in fact, one of the 3 good adults in Accelerator's life back home.]

[thantagonist]

Is that so? Well, maybe someday.

I’m hardly a surgeon either. I had one in the place I was before this. A truly excellent surgeon. He was this enormous man, by all counts an imposing fellow with a murderous expression… but with incredibly skilled hands. They called him the ripper. There was some rumor that he was a serial killer, but then again, there was a rumor I was a vampire. People are idiots. But I’ve never even seen steadier hands in my entire life. An incredible person to have at one’s side, even if he did never graduate medical school.

[levelshift]

Why didn't he?

[thantagonist]

He joined the army. By choice or conscript, I don’t rightly know. I never asked, and he never told me.

[levelshift]

Well, if he ever shows up here it sounds like he'd be fucking useful.

[thantagonist]

It almost feels cruel to wish it on him, but we’ve been through worse together.

[He sighs, then huffs.]

Actually, I’m not sure which I prefer. No, wait, yes. This situation is more pleasant, if you can believe it.

[levelshift]

I can't. [He is extremely curious now.] What the hell do you mean?

[thantagonist]

Oh, just the situation I was in before was much, much worse. Trying to keep my head above water while a plague decimates a backwater town amidst riot and infection and a supply train that hasn’t visited in weeks. A place with no real hospital. Deaths in the thousands every day. Nowhere to dispose of corpses. Monsters crawl out of the earth. Then the Inquisition comes, then the military.

[His ears ring and it feels like his mind is trying to turn inside out trying to recall it.]

The violence here is ultimately avoidable and survivable. Hiding from a plague is impossible.

[levelshift]

I see. [He does, he really does!] I think people would be more scared of the fucking enforcers, and the tower since that violence is more immediate and upfront for them. But epidemics are way more fucking insidious.