Back at Dr. Marrow's office they strapped her down on the operation table and Vincent gave her a shot of sedative from Penny's claws just in case the shock didn't keep her down. He strapped on the Oculus to get a closer look at her before starting the examination.
Dr. Gast sat a ways back. Watching from a far as he usually did when he didn't feel right about something Vincent was dead-set on doing. "So... What happened to that bug thing we were chasing?" He asked. He'd purposely waited until they'd gotten back to the practice to ask about it, afraid that if he reminded Marrow in the car he'd make them go back and find it.
Marrow froze for a moment, confirming Eric's suspicions that he had forgotten all about the scorpion kid.
"I don't know." Vincent admitted, waving it off. "Probably got into the walls or something." He didn't bother looking to address, not that his assistant minded or was surprised. Instead Eric did what he usually did when Dr Marrow was too excited with something to be bothered with anything that wasn't the insides of another living creature, he sat back and watched waiting for the Doctor to either requires his assistance or discover something interesting enough that he actually started sharing information.
"Ooh!" Gast looked up and raised a brow.
"What'd you find?" Though he wasn't surprised when it took another several minutes before Vincent answered him, though it wasn't so much an answer to Gast directly as the Doctor just talking to himself.
"She's got extra organs!"Dr Marrow started excitedly.
"Extra?"
"Well maybe not extra. She probably needs them. Extra like we don't have them. Her biology looks almost identical to ours expect for these. They're small. At first I thought they were part of her Lymphatic system but they're not! They look like they're part of a separate system entirely!"
"So... what do they do?"
This question seemed to take some of the wind out of the doctor's sails. "I'm not sure... They don't seem to do much of anything... If I could just get one..." He glanced back at Gast who raised a hand to fend of the light of the oculus. "I need...Ah!" he found his trey in instruments to the right of his operation table right where they should have been.
"Hold on, what are you doing?" Erik asked, seeing him go for the scalpel. "I thought you said I only knocked her out."
"She's sedated." Vincent responded clearly not sure what the problem was.
"Well then shes alive! You can't just dissect her!"
"It's not dissection! It's an invasive procedure."
"It's organ harvesting!"
The two of them were so busy arguing they didn't notice the dim pulse of blue light that ran down her body before fading out as she began to wake up. She blinked a few times and when her vision finally cleared was met with the view of a man, the one from the school, standing over her her a blade yelling at a much larger man about whether or not to dissect her. She tried to move but found very quickly that she was restrained by the padded leather straps used in hospitals to hold down violent patients.
She felt weak. Sluggish. Her reserves were low. Panic shot through her. She may not have enough to get her out. Trying not to pull their attention back to her she summoned what little energy she still had and in a soft blue flash of light the restraints fell away. It took her a moment to gather herself. Her hands adopted a soft blue glow and she slowly sat up.
Eric glanced past Marrow who was gesturing wildly, blade still in hand. "Dr Marrow!"
"Wha-" He turned around in time to catch a quick glance of their 'patient' before he was sent flying back into Gast who, thankfully, was solid enough to keep him upright.
Marrow swore. He'd put enough of Penny's sedative to keep a possessed human down for hours. There was no way she should be awake! "Scalpel!" He called, not to fond of the idea of fighting her unarmed again. He had ended up vomiting outside of the school. This time he had his assistant with him so he didn't have to wait very long to feel the hilt of Excalibur pressed into his palm. "Dr. Gast. Could you wake up Penny please?" He was not going to be tossed around like a plastic bag in windstorm this time around.
Her movements were sluggish. She needed to recharge. Get a hold of something electric or get to some sunlight. As she slid from the table and faced him she realized that her situation may be even more hopeless then she thought as she came face to face with the blazing red blade of his long sword.
Vincent stood his ground before her, noting that her eyes and the markings on his body, he'd found many more of them on her when he'd prepared her for the operating table, they weren't glowing quiet as bright as they had in the school. He'd assumed the lights had gone out because she'd lost consciousness but the school had also been much darker, maybe the lights weren't as bright as he'd thought. The now slightly grayer markings traveled all over her body. Around her neck along the clavicle, down her back to disappear in her hair line, along her arms, her legs, her sides, under her breasts, along the crease of her groin and finally the two tracks joined in her suprasternal notch. He caught her eyes shift from him to the hallway he blocked before her feet began to glow faintly. She was going to run for it. He adjusted his stance. The message clear, she wasn't getting past him. It was times like this he started to consider getting some formal sword training. A consideration he would completely discard the moment his life was no longer in danger.
He wanted a fight. She didn't have to look too hard to see it, but she didn't have enough in her to fight him and get out those stained glass doors. She had to get away from him. Now. She lunged and at the last moment moved around him, or tried. Granted she wasn't as fast as she could have at a full charge but she hadn't expected him to move as fast as he did. She caught the blade in her claws, dropping her speed. The force sent the vibrations up her arm. It hurt but she didn't let go.
She was weak and it was obvious. Earlier at the school he could barely see her when she started moving and despite the lights in the office her claws were a lot less solid then they had been at the school. Maybe he had a chance of winning this after all.
She tried a few more time to get around him each time met with the same results. Sarriph didn't have the energy for a real fight and she wasn't particularly interested in hurting him. Her show in the school had just been to scare him away and now all she wanted to do was get home and sleep for the next week. A violent death would only attract that kind of negative attention her people didn't need. Luckily for some reason he didn't seem in a big hurry to do any major damage to her either. All of his blows were aimed with the intention to wing her, not put her down.
Finally she lost patients. She pushed his sword, which on it's last swing had actually cut into her claws nearly reaching the real flesh of her hand, and released a pulse. It wasn't strong enough to throw him but it did put him off balance long enough for her to finally move past him and shot down the hall as fast as her depleted body would move. The light faded from the soles of her feet and her wings appeared at her back. They were much less solid then her claws had been. They were barely formed outlines of what they could be with wholes taken out of them like they'd been chewed on. They flapped hard becoming sparkling blurs. She wasn't surprised but incredibly frustrated that she never actually made any real air. As she ran she did manage to drift for a few seconds every few steps before her feet hit the ground again.
"Dr Gast!" Marrow yelled. "Penny!" He had gone after her but it became quickly apparent that not only had the nausea from the earlier fight not fully passed but he was, once again, not in shape enough for this kind of activity. "A little help would be great!... NOW PLE-" He stopped when a little red blur shot from somewhere in the upper levels and dragged the woman to the ground. "Oh. There you are, Penny."
"Are you okay?" Eric asked, hurrying down the stairs.
"I'm fine." Vincent panted. "Penny can- Penny can handle it."
"...Can she?"
Sarriph threw off her attacker with another pulse. One she couldn't actually afford and her mistake became painfully obvious to her the moment it happened when she nearly blacked out. Not waiting to see what had become of her opponent she turned around stumbled towards the door. She no longer had enough energy to sustain her wings and even though she can sustain her speed it wouldn't do any good. As she neared the door her eyes locked a lamp sitting on an end table just to the side of the exit. A lamp electricity. If she could just siphon a little energy... she all but fell into the table and was immediately dragged down by an incredible force.
Enraged at being pulled away from her salvation Sarriph let out a screech and for just a moment her palms flashed a brilliant blue before she took her attackers head and pushed it right through the nearest wall. She didn't even register the sound of splintering wood or the feel of the structure giving way until it had already happened but she didn't have time to stay and check the damage. She could deal with the heat later. Struggling to her feet, she pushed open the door, lamp forgotten in her haze. She could hear the other two coming after her and all she could think about was getting through those doors before they caught up.
Sarriph pushed open the door and stepped into the cold night air and collapsed.
Penny pulled her head out of the wall with a little difficulty and dragged the woman back into the old church as Vincent and Eric caught up with the two. "Penny!" Vincent called frantically, seeing his 'anesthesiologist' drag the subject to the middle of the hall and hunch over her. "Penny, no! You can't eat her! We've talked about eating patients!"
Penny looked up at the doctors as they approached. It didn't look like she'd actually done anything to the woman besides from some damages that would have occurred during the fight. "I can't eat her." She repeated in her usual hollow tone.
"Right. You can't- Wait. What do you mean?" She'd never really taken that rule to heart before, having taken a bite out of more then one subjects since he'd found her. As long as he kept her fed it wasn't usually a problem but he'd found that if Penny, or whatever was inside Penny, decided to eat something she was going to eat it.
"She's not food." Penny clarified, standing up and taking the limp woman with her. She held out the patient, holding her out under the armpits like a little girl with a cat.
Hesitantly Vincent took his patient back eying Penny suspiciously. "Not food?"
"No." The girl responded decisively. "I'm hungry."
"R-...Right." He nodded, still taken aback by what she'd said. "Dr. Gast could you feed Penny please?"
Eric came back down the stairs, still dazed from the horrific experience of defrosting a vampire for Penny to find Vincent sitting back at the operating table with the woman, his head in his hands messaging his temples.
"Dr. Marrow?"
"I think we've made a mistake, Dr Gast." Vincent sighed, finally sitting up straight though he didn't take his eyes off the patient.
"She's not... human is she?" Eric asked. He knew Penny didn't eat people. She ate monsters. She ate the descendants of the creatures that crawled off the Archeon centuries ago. If this woman wasn't food to her... then what is she?
"No." Vincent hadn't yet shared with Eric what he knew about Penny. That she was somehow directly connected to the Archeon herself. That she was either one of them or a servant of them, whatever that might mean. He'd thought long and hard on the subject and what he'd learned from Penny since they've been working together and he'd come to the tentative conclusion that she may be some kind of agent of their immune system, like a wayward white blood cell, that for some reason left or was sent from the bodies of the Archeon to eat the parasites that used to live on those very same bodies. If Penny didn't want to eat this woman that could only be one thing. "But she's not one of them."
Eric didn't have to ask what he meant. He knew exactly what Vincent was talking about and he had to admit he'd kind of suspected as much. He'd seen a lot of crazy stuff since he started working with Vincent he'd seen demons, fairies, fish people, death gods, and whatever the hell the surgeons are and she... didn't seem like any of those things. "So then... What is she?"
"I have no idea."
