Verso

Chapter Nine - In which the patients feeling fine...

The bleeping sound from the monitor. The tannoy system overhead paging Doctor whoever to whatever place. Footfall, movement, voices. The swish of the door to her room what seemed like every half an hour for the nurse to check on her. And the smell of antiseptic, or clean with a hint of something not so much, like a fresh cotton shirt on an unwashed body. It was an assault on the senses and likely to drive her insane before the evening ended, let alone the whole night.

Arin Rae hated hospitals, even the thought of them. Realms of weird smells, suffering... death. She hated it, it turned her stomach. In fact, she hated everything about the medical profession. Well...she reconsidered, maybe not everything. Her eyes roved around the room taking in the alien surroundings with a sort of morbid curiosity. She shook her head causing a throb behind her eyeballs. Arin screwed up her eyes and pulled one of the masses of pillow from behind her dropping it over her face. The world vanished into a grey, dulled hum that smelled of clean cotton. She let out a sigh of relief. It felt cool against her warm cheeks and after a few seconds the throb in her head eased gently too. Here at least, under the pillow, she could forget her surroundings... forget the day from hell. Here under the pillow she might find some respite, if not some sleep.

===

Outside the room, observing his very odd patient through the glass and grey blinds stood one Doctor Gregory House. He leaned on the nurses station and watched her a few moments longer, blue eyes shifting to the room opposite where the mermaid now lay reading a magazine, seemingly unaware of her stressed companion. All of the other visitors were gone for the afternoon but that didn't mean they couldn't visit one another. She was in bed, sure, but her legs worked fine she could go into the room across the hall. Yet the mermaid didn't so much as look across at the kiddo, with her head under a pillow. A universal sign of stress.

He stood, contemplating. The present situation put him in mind of something that always irked him in rpg's. The quest where two paths were presented to the player with two distinct rewards. However, choosing one would mean forever sacrificing the other. In this instance, he had two rewards to aim for. The answer to why she had decided not to sue the hospital, and the possibility that she had something of diagnostic merit wrong with her. Only he was the sort of player who didn't settle for half measures. Invariably he would reload his game time and again and try different options in order to circumvent the rigid rules the developers had coded. It was few and far between that any had bothered to think of a solution worthy of his intellect. In which case he was left with only one option in order to get the prize, cheat. House liked to apply this logic to his medical puzzles too. Now all he had to do was work out the walkthrough for both this girl's prizes.

House pondered his next move. To progress down either path he would require information. Except trying to tease it from the girl had led to the door being slammed in his face and then locked. So he was going to need some picks. With this in mind, he pushed open the door and entered the bright pink room. The mermaid looked relaxed and though slightly pale, healthy enough for a near drowning victim. She glanced up and frowned at him without recognition as he neared the foot of her bed and feigning interest picked up her chart to look at it.

"Hi," he said in an upbeat tone that seemed to make her relax, "I'm Doctor House." He glanced at her then back at the chart, flipping a page to see the notes on her file. Save for the way she had ended up here, her history and everything else was straightforward. Ordinary, boring. He put it back and stepping nearer began to read the monitoring equipment. Her blood pressure and temperature were good, the pulse right...O2 stats were still low. His eyebrows quirked and he glanced at her again, "how are you feeling?"

Robyn smiled apparently deciding he wasn't a threat. "Good thanks...well, like, better anyway. I mean I'm Like totally embarrassed and all that...god i know right? I mean who falls in a fountain? So last year in the drama dept right? And in front of all those people. So embarrassing but I mean my chest like feels better. Still have a bit of a wheeze and a cough though."