A note from Your Friendly Neighborhood Geist:

As promised, I present for your amusement Part 1 of wrapping up Doctor Trixie. There was more than I expected here, so I'm breaking it up into two parts, but this is settled and I saw no reason to keep it from you all.

Now, as I've mentioned to some of you in what is probably the worst-kept secret of all time, Ellie was made as a playable character for a Dark Heresy game, meaning that I worked extensively on back-story with (and borrowed a bunch of NPC's like the Inquisitor Lord from) the Game Master. He's supported me from square one (Ellie got an extra fate point, too!... Though I had to burn it last session...) and finally made himself a FanFiction account, so all hail TurnoftheSoul!

As always, I ask that if you read, you leave a little review, and in return I wish you all the best,

-G

Burning Bridges

Whatever Happened To That Hot Floozy Doctor? (Part 1)

You know that awful prickling sensation between your shoulder blades? That sure sense that something is watching and waiting just behind you, and if your back is anywhere but to the wall it'll manifest as a sudden, mortal blow in three… two…

That feeling hadn't woken Trixie Gunn in months. That was, of course, not to say that she hadn't felt it while awake: many times it was warranted, and many times it was not. "Warranted" is to say that there was legitimately something watching her. In the grand scheme of things, that "something" was almost always "someone" and "watching her" was invariably "staring at her posterior." To be fair, one could hardly blame those someones, considering that to even the most discerning of connoisseurs, it was one of the more lovely specimens aboard. "Not" was slightly more difficult to classify; since the time of her Sanctioning, the good doctor had ever felt (despite knowing it purely ridiculous) that some part of her that had been found wanting and excised during her training was lurking, waiting for a moment's weakness on her part to both attack her and cause a disaster the likes of which hadn't been seen since the unfortunate psyker incident of M.41.833 on Valetudor. The horror stories from the upper classmen on the hospitalier planet on which she'd done her residency were enough to assure her that offing herself was possibly the kindest mistake she could make.

The point was that, despite knowing that a great many people were watching her bum as she walked past and feeling a moderately disturbing paranoia regarding intangible forces assuaged only by keeping her back to the wall, that feeling of being watched hadn't woken her until now. Her eyes opened to face the darkness of her room, adjusted almost immediately, and focused on the shadowed figure standing at the foot of her bed. Detail subsequently made itself known as her senses divined more with each passing millisecond.

This was a man, wearing a black body glove, with broad shoulders and impressive arms and the sort of narrow waist that hinted of hard, compact muscle; he had been watching her sleep, and now he was watching her watching him; his stance was one awaiting attack, as though he expected her to hurl herself from the bed and attempt to claw him to death. This, of course, would have been ridiculous on her part, taking into account that first, as a biomancer, she had several significant alternatives to brute force; that second, as that she had been alone and asleep in her private quarters, she was wearing nothing more than a bedsheet; and primarily that third, if this man had wanted to attack her, he could have easily done so – perhaps fatally – before the sensation of him watching her had roused her. It was prudent for her to continue warily, but mortal danger was apparently not primary on the docket for tonight.

She carefully rearranged her sheet to cover her more salient features while propping herself up on an elbow and extended her psyche; telekinesis had never been a strong suit, but she had enough of a grasp of it to flick on the light switch from across the room. As she did so, her sweet backwater drawl broke the awkward silence with an almost businesslike, "Please, take a seat," and once light was forthcoming, she gestured to a storage ottoman pulled near the vanity bolted to the wall. The man didn't move, and she sighed, passing a hand across her forehead before raising her chin to wait for him to speak. She admitted there was a certain theatric flair to this entire ordeal but for the sake of the Throne, it was five bells into the middle watch and she had a complex surgery slated for five hours from now.

The man's voice was unemotional, had a baritone, full timbre that could (she was sure) be pleasant (if ever used for something other than frightening women in the middle of the night), from behind the blank mask as he informed her, "In six hours, crew absence will be noted. Two of them. There is no evidence. Even if you find evidence, there is no evidence." His hand lifted quite suddenly to the neck of the suit (causing her to stiffen with alarm for the better part of three seconds) and peeled the fabric aside to reveal the electoo of an Inquisitorial agent between tattoos of chains at his neck and further down his hard chest. One of her brows lifted. This was not at all what she had expected. "You're being requisitioned. I am to remain here without notice until such time as the ship makes port next in two weeks, where we will both disembark and you will begin your new service to the Ordos."

She regarded the man for a long moment before scratching a small amount of gound from the inner corner of her eye with the nail of her ring finger. "Right," she acquiesced, "so… not here for drugs. Outstanding." One might note that earlier mention had said the sensation of being watched had not woken her for months. The previous instance (and the two before that) had been one much like this, except instead of a mechanically murderous Interrogator standing at the foot of her bed, it had been some crewman or another addicted to opiate-like pain medication or this or that substance for its pleasant side-effects, demanding more of it. This was almost a welcome relief. Almost. She only wished he could have waited until morning and not interrupted her rest.

"Spare blanket's in the linen by the head," she indicated the direction from her door with a vague gesture, "You passed the couch on your way in. Make yourself at home and I'll wrangle some breakfast at a decent hour… you know, when normal folk wake up." She yawned heavily before adding, "And kill the light on your way out. Apparently you're good at things like that." She could tell that for all of this man's professionalism, the silence that ensued was stunned. Concealing a smug little quirk to the corner of her mouth, she quite deliberately lifted the sheet to shroud her shoulder, turned onto her side, and closed her eyes to go back to sleep.

After perhaps half a minute the light turned off and she heard the door slide shut.

The next morning when she rose, she had completely forgotten about her visitor. What she hadn't forgotten was that there was very little worse than performing spinal fusion surgery first thing in the morning on an empty stomach, so she threw a short, soft old robe about her shoulders to ward off the chill of shipwide-regulated temperature without bothering to tie up the front, left her sleep-tangled mass of blonde waves in its rats nest, and somewhat blearily padded her way to the kitchen. She cracked the door of the refrigeration unit and pulled out a carton of juice, lifting it directly to her mouth (it wasn't as if she had to share, and using a glass only created more dishes to clean in the end) before freezing in place. Over the edge of the carton, she'd seen movement and it was then that she remembered that there was a Throne Agent on her couch.

Said Throne Agent was still wearing the black body glove and matching mask, though the latter was pulled up past his nose (she supposed this was to facilitate ease of breathing while sleeping); he was half-covered in a pink and white paisley patchwork blanket; he was staring directly at her, and his mouth was hanging open. She lowered the juice carton slightly, shifting her gaze down her divested front as if to confirm the half-conscious, niggling theory that the entirety of her high, over-generous breasts, the Sanctioning brand in the hollow beneath one clavicle, her tight, tiny waist, and a wide stripe of smooth femininity, hip, and extraordinarily long leg was openly available for this stranger's perusal. She looked back to him to find his mouth still open, still half-masked, still with a pink blanket, still motionless and gripping an armrest on her sofa, and she promptly allowed the absurdity of the situation win out. Her twanging laughter rang through the small space, causing the most interesting jiggling to ensue in the region between her neck and navel, and she set the juice down to avoid spilling it.

This apparently catalyzed the man to pull the mask down (with vehemence as if he had been the one exposed), and lift his chin, turning his face directly forward to regain his composure. Of course the good doctor seemed to find this reaction even funnier and bent forward slightly, laughing harder, covering half her face with one hand and pressing at a stitch in her side with the other. This had certainly never made the list of, 'anticipated life events for which to be prepared,' and even if it had crossed her mind, this would probably still be the best response. Luckily, after a moment she heard a chuckle from across the room, which soon flowed into a free, uninhibited, helpless, full laugh. For the briefest of heartbeats (as it went on for quite some time) there were echoes of hysteria, but they were gone before she had opportunity to truly be concerned, and the two finally gained composure.

"So," she offered, buttoning and belting the robe, "…eggs?"

The man paused, gave a nod, paused again, and at last drew his mask off. Her sharp turquoise eyes scanned his face for only a second and then she turned to the stove. As she busied herself mixing powdered eggs, back almost squared to the room, her eyebrows lifted and mouth pouted into an appreciatively assessing moue. Skipping over the fact that he had done a creepy sneak-into-her-bedroom-in-the-middle-of-the-night thing (in which, she was sure, she, too, would soon be trained, considering it was a very Inquisition sort of tactic), and that he had admitted to deliberately creating two absences in the crew (again, this didn't surprise her in light of Inquisitorial affiliation), that was not the sort of face one relegated to the couch with a battered, pink paisley blanket.

She pulled a spatula from a hanging rack, scrambling in some fairly potent spices that reminded her of home, and employed and unused section of the pan to grill slices of bread left over from her baking spree two days ago. In the meanwhile, she glanced over her shoulder at the shock of cropped black hair and chiseled features to find ice-blue eyes watching her in return with something almost like bafflement. As she turned back, a corner of her mouth lifted, knowing that sensation of a gaze affixed to her arse would ensue in three… two…

She plated the food and faced him with the sort of smile "that made men tend to do stupid things" (there was a sudden wrenching in the area of her heart and she brutally shoved it down to avoid bursting into tears). She approached the couch with breakfast (knowing that despite having been washed, that pink blanket probably still had the smell of clean little girl embedded in it, Don't think about it, don't think about it) and handed it to him, setting a glass of juice on the end table for him. Clearing her throat, she prefaced, "You already know'n all, but," she offered her hand to shake, "Trixie."

He stared almost perplexedly at her hand for a moment and she realized as he did that one of his eyes was augmentic. She bent slightly, a twinge crossing her brow as she began to inspect the reconstructive work done around it, but he interrupted her by taking her hand with a glance up, an almost roguishly charming grin, and "Gavin. Gavin Hortz."