Days dissolve into the ether, condense like clouds and come raining back down…

[nowinprint]

In the halls of the Kashtta Tower - one rather rusted-out and old-blood-stained hall, to be particular - something is happening.

That "something" happens to be a door splintering apart and a ranting pseudo-Angel of Knowledge stumbling through the broken bits.

Dmitri Lang is gripping a pickaxe which shines faintly with clean gold light, and thus

Comments

[nowinprint]

"-since the invention of plaster. So whether or not you're the White, Walldalf, I! Shall! Pa-what?"

Dmitri pauses in a shower of drywall, spinning around so fast she takes a chunk of wall with her. She brandishes the pickaxe, staring down the hall until she sees another person, and then brandishes it a moment longer until it occurs to her that Tosh is not a monster.

"...Oh, that's REAL NICE, she yells at nothing in particular. "Yeah, I was just telling Dante that - hold on." The pickaxe lowers a bit, and she starts toward her. "You're actually - I mean, the hair alone, but I could - Toshiko?"

She does not drop the pickaxe. The pickaxe is her friend. But it does lower and Dmitri picks up her pace, jogging up with apparent disregard for the PISTOL, and stopping just about a metre away to scrutinize Tosh from apparently every angle.

"Sweet reticulated Rama, when did you get here?" She doesn't leave enough of a gap to answer in. "All right, guns, bad idea, can't find ammo around here for invectives or prayers, and are you real? That should have been the first bit. Come to think of it you'd better make sure I'm real - don't know if you've noticed this place, worse than Chicago, I swear, can't always tell, frickin' city'll try anything. It's like the French."

There's about a second-and--half pause.

"...or anime," she adds, consideringly.

[techniclybrill]

...Dmitri is making a lot less sense than usual for her. Which is really saying something. She doesn't have a holster on her, having just grabbed the gun off her desk, but she figures she can probably let it drop to her side for the moment. She's not planning on shooting Dmitri.

"Dmitri," she says slowly, "do you know where you are?" She doesn't look very well... but then, who knows where she's been for the past two months? ...and she'd feel a little more comfortable if the babbling Dmi would put that pickaxe down, but she'll take it one step at a time right now.

[nowinprint]

"Well, I was in the Silent Hill Historical Society. You'd love it, Tosh, you really would, except for the Ophan, and the other monsters, and it needs some renovation, most notably on account of the wall jobs that make the Schlachthof seem Garten, and there's the unfortunate situation with the tech and... the... you'd hate it, Tosh, you'd hate it a lot, but I managed to pick up this pickaxe-!"

She brandishes it.

"-and it has taken me through the walls to a lovely place, I think it was a hospital, and then it took me here, which I'm thinking Silicon Valley in the Silent Hill municipal. I'm hoping for Google. I always wanted to visit Google HQ. When did you get here?" She swallows, and her face pales a little. As it was pretty flushed before, it almost makes her look normal. "I thought - I mean, there was Dante, but he-"

She swallows again.

"I am going to hug you," she says, "because you are going to need it."

And she does.

[techniclybrill]

And Tosh hugs her back, because what else are you supposed to do in situations like this? ...Tosh doesn't find herself in situations like this a lot. Except, of course, since she met Dmitri.

"I didn't... go anywhere. We're in the Kashtta Tower." She pauses a moment, and then adds, "I'm a little surprised Owen didn't come to shout at you for attacking his walls."

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Tosh is refreshingly cool against Dmitri's skin. Somewhere in the back of her head, she's pretty sure the natural laws of biology and thermodynamics say things about that like Whoa... that en't right, but they can go screw themselves up the spiracles.

After a moment she breaks off to stare at Tosh again, blinking to make things make sense. After a moment of that, she Gets It.

"...you guys have a creepy hallway," she says. "Right. Ianto was blocking it off that one time, and..."

Then she Gets a different It.

"...you guys have a creepy hallway that leads to a hell town," she says. Reproachfully. Like, you know, they should do something about that.

[techniclybrill]

Dmitri's skin feels much too warm. Tosh keeps gentle hold of her wrist when she lets go, watching Dmitri for a moment with quiet concern. Well, that would explain the more-nonsensical-than-usual babbling.

"We... didn't really know what to do about it," Tosh admits. This hallway isn't really any of her concern except for, you know, staying out of it most of the time. "Would you like to go somewhere that's not the creepy hallway?"

Like the infirmary, for instance. That's definitely looking more and more like it should be a priority.

[nowinprint]

Tosh is holding her wrist. This is pleasant. Dmitri can learn to deal with that.

"As long as it's not a library, my herald of happy homes, I would be happy to accompany you to any location you desired. As long as it wasn't one of the ones on the... I didn't make a list. I was going to make a list. I have a map around... here... I think I've reinvented the concept of Sunderlandian cartography, and all I got was this stupid..."

She's rummaging in her bag with her free hand, and has apparently forgotten the "leaving the accursed hallway" part of their equation. Um. Ooops. After a moment, she pulls out a set of folded maps, each one bearing various scrawls and symbols.

"...eponym," she finishes. "We should get pizza. There's not a lot of pizza in Silent Hill? There was a bowling alley. I thought of Owen."

...would you like to see her maps, Tosh?

[techniclybrill]

...okay, Tosh is just going to start walking out of the hallway while keeping hold of Dmitri's wrist and hope she follows.

"We can get pizza after you see Owen or Juliet. I think you might have a fever." Or possibly she's turned into a demon since wandering into her hell town, but Tosh is going to go with feverish at the moment.

[nowinprint]

Dmitri blinks. Then she starts laughing.

Fortunately, it's a fairly normal laugh neither strident nor frenetic enough to qualify as hyseria. Unfortunately, she's laughing and there's really nothing funny about the situation other than her own case of the being out of it.

"Oh! Yeah. That. Fever. That's been around for a couple of days." She ambles along after Tosh, scratching the back of her neck idly with her pickaxe. "I kinda have a few dirty cuts on my. Well. They're not exactly wings. ...my wings came back in. Not exactly."

...now the laughter is getting a bit more unsettling, for all that it's getting quieter.

"Did I mention that I hate this town? That town," she asks, looking over at Tosh. "Entire thing. It's just a wash. I think, on balance, resort towns might do better business if they weren't designed so much along the lines of hell. But I was never that into marketing."

[techniclybrill]

"...I would imagine they would," Tosh says quietly after a moment, because agreeing with her just seems like a good idea. When they reach the end of the hallway, Tosh heads straight for the lift. It's not that she thinks Dmitri would fall down the stairs if they took them, but... well, it's much better to play it safe.

"In the future, you could always try not crawling through the strange hole in your flat..."

[nowinprint]

"What kind of angel of knowledge does that?" Dmitri asks, taking the advent of the lift to step in and lean back against the wall. And then immediately shift to lean on her shoulder, with a grimace. "Anyway, I was fresh out of lambs and external door access, and hey. Hey."

She pushes herself off the wall again, scrutinizing Tosh.

"You can't just be all 'Hey, Dmitri, welcome back from your vacation in Avogodro's level of Hell' and then not tell me the news. What happened? Big bad death of the firstborn? Was it remixed? How's Chicago? Coffee shop still open? Sears Tower still standing? Dominant species still in possession of opposable thumbs? What?"

[techniclybrill]

"I thought we might be able to wait until you weren't about to fall over." Which she realizes now was a silly thought, because this is Dmitri Lang she's talking about. Tosh sighs a little, though with a faint affectionate smile despite herself.

"I think the Coffee Shop was smashed by a piece of the Millennium Falcon. Which is in Millennium Park now, if you'd like to visit it when you're feeling better." She really hopes someone sedates and restrains her until then, though, because the idea of a feverish Dmitri let loose on Chicago is a bit terrifying, for a number of reasons.

"And the tenth plague was... No one died. We just disappeared for a day, had nightmares of home..." She looks down. She'd really rather not talk about her firstborn day. "I think Gwen got aliens over Cardiff or something like that."

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"Knowledge waits for no orientation, upright nor otherwise, my Maquisard," Dmitri says, cataloguing all that information in the prodigious filing system in the back of her mind. "Yes to the Falcon - opportunity of a lifetime - and bah to the plague, I say. Should have stayed home. Though, mind you, it wasn't exactly Pascal's Wager for the survival of Chicagoites, and - hey, what's that for?"

She pokes her head down to try to catch a glimpse of Tosh's expression, misreads her depth perception, and ends up bonking her on the forehead with her own forehead. Then decides that this is perfectly acceptable and doesn't move, especially now that the lift is moving and things might get confusing.

"No nightmares so bad they can't be banished by chocolate martinis, ball pits, and questionable but wholehearted golden-age sci-fi," she says, then blinks owlishly. "But I never got you guys a ballpit. Right. Bit out of my budget? You've got stuffed pandas, though, and Toshiko Sato if I find out you've been sulking since I vanished I will- I'll-"

She pulls back, flopping against the wall and staring at the ceiling, racking her brain for an appropriate threat.

"Abduct you to the National Air and Space Museum with a party bus and a Czech dancer," she eventually decides.

[techniclybrill]

There is no way to not smile at a threat like that. Tosh shakes her head a little and reaches for Dmitri's hand again as the lift comes to a stop. The hand-holding is probably not necessary, but it seems like a good precaution.

"I haven't been sulking. I tried to track you through the journal network, but that didn't work very well." She also spent a little while trying to help her not-girlfriend find her stupid best friend who Tosh hates, but that didn't go very well either.

The infirmary is not far from the lifts. This was probably intentional on the part of whoever chose the room for that purpose.

[nowinprint]

Dmitri does not question the hand-holding. Dmitri has worked with the Doctor. Dmitri is also trying to work out the logistics of traditional Czech dances in he limited space afforded by a bus' aisle, even a bus specifically designed to accommodate revelry, so she just curls her fingers around Tosh's hand and follows along.

"I had a friend once who wanted to go into artificial intelligence and find a wanderer who could program psychic memetic consciousnesses in order to install a semi-sentient search daemon into the journal network. I think this was her way of rebounding after her dog died. It was three years into development by the time I left. Still trying to work out what to name it. I was still rooting for Owney, but last I checked the frontrunner was Fetch. Sometimes I imagine that she decided to celebrate my disappearance by taking my advice and I..."

She trails off. A bit after that she physically trails to a halt, looking at Tosh with her head tilted to one side, and the relentless high spirit starts showing its spiderweb cracks.

"...I really missed you," she finishes.

[techniclybrill]

Tosh stops, though half because she's pulled to a halt by Dmitri, and smiles up at her. "I missed you too." She's been worried about her, and though she's feeling better now, she will feel a little less worried when they can get to the infirmary. "And not to harp on it, but we can still have a touching reunion while getting you medical treatment."