Mavis thinks she's in love with empty buildings. Well, it was cool to see the people who used them too, but there was something about a place when it was still and silent like this, like a lucid dream of a playground world. She's walking up the side of what looks like an office building, sometimes tiptoeing where the glass would creak in warning under her weight. She liked seeing the reflections of things in the windows she walked on, the skyline and the clouds and the dim bits of the stars beginning to show. The sun setting on the other side gave a bit of richness to the darkness of this building's shadow, showing colors she didn't often see in the world.

The shadows were 'laying low' in her own shadows at the moment. They didn't like glass things all that much, and she couldn't blame them. With the funny shadows glass cast, the poor guys kept getting stuck or slowed now and then. That was okay, though, Mavis had some time to enjoy the quiet in her leisurely walk up this thing.

She loved the size of these buildings, too, and the make of them, inside and out. Where the hotel had been rough with its slightly craggy curves and niches, these buildings were standing with an alien straightness and smoothness that was almost wild, especially when she looked down. And while the hotel had been a huge construct, some of these were almost as big, or slightly bigger, and there were just so many of them...

It was kind of what she imagined jungles would look like. Johnny had once mentioned the sequoia forests in America. It'd be awesome to walk those some day.

Once she gets the view from the top of this building, gets a feel for the location, she'll go back to street level, where she'll hopefully find some clothing or fabric stores that hadn't been too scavenged yet.

. . .

"Now, see," Jekyll chided as he adjusted the table's overhead lamp, "We could've gotten this over with much quicker if you'd been more cooperative."

For a human, mortal and in his own hospital no less, the specimen had been very difficult to catch.

The 'volunteer' in question was bound to an examination table.

The regular restraints were reinforced by duct-tape and covered with runes in black marker, for 'precautionary measures' the doctor had said. Johnny thought one of the runes looked like a skull-and-crossbones, and if he looked for others, he thought he picked out smiley faces and what looked like a warped LOL, all the funny ones being drawn in red marker, but decided not to mention this to the guy who tied him here in the first place.

"I'm still not cooperating, and so not liking this." Johnny pointed out, squinting as the light briefly glared over his face before straining to follow it, lifting up his head to watch it warily as it was narrowed and focused to cast a spotlight on his chest, and the faint handprint on it, feeling the skin there get slightly warmer.

"Is that gonna burn me?"

". . . Yes, you're going to die slowly and painfully by being cooked alive so I can scoop out your ready-made organs for a goulash I can't eat," the doctor drawled before rolling his eyes, "No, it's not going to burn you. At least think of how much time and energy you've needlessly costed us both," Jekyll continued to mutter, concentrating, "Your wilful disrespect to scientific curiosity is shameful, really..."

There is a few beats of precious silence that the doctor enjoys.

"So...you're not gonna skin me?" Johnny finally asked.

Jekyll suddenly looked directly at him, an eyebrow raised, "Do you suspect I would have reason to?" he replied inquisitively, a shiny scalpel suddenly in hand.

The poor human shook his head quickly, eyes wide, "No, nope, not at all!"

The doctor promptly returned to his scrutiny, the scalpel gone just as subtly, "Then no."

A few more moments of silence, and then the boy keeps asking questions.

"So-o if I can do stuff with blood," Johnny puts out, seeming resigned to his current fate, "Does that mean I can do other stuff with it, besides keeping it from going bad?"

Jekyll paused to stare flatly at his specimen. The ghost never had liked it when the patients kept asking questions...

"What 'stuff' would this be?" he sighed finally, moving from the table to gather the necessary equipment.

"Uhm..."

Johnny lifted his head again to try and see what the doctor was doing as he rummaged around the room, but gave up, settling his head back.

"I dunno, like, would it last forever? Or could I make better blood, oh, or maybe take some of my own blood and make more of it?" Johnny lifted his head again hopefully.

"No, no, and hell no." Jekyll answered bluntly, looking over his shoulder to watch the boy's face quickly fall before submitting to sober resignment.

The doctor shook his head, sighing as he turned back to the specimen, "What you did to it, impressive though it may be, won't last forever. Sorry, kid, but if magic could do any of those things you said our fanged friends wouldn't have the stigma they did in the first place." he walks around, setting things in place while he talked, "Magic takes a cost on your body that just wouldn't be worth paying for such uncertain attempts. Blood is blood, neither infinite, upgradeable, or reproducible. Science though," Jekyll grinned fondly at the thought, "Science is an art unto itself. Came up with things like near blood and...what's it called...Blood Beaters, didn't it? Science is a magic limited only by the imagination! A~and maybe a few pesky laws of physics—but anyway! Who knows, maybe science will give us little water-to-blood machines. Like coffee makers!" He patted Johnny's shoulder well-meaningly. "Don't worry," he told the boy, smiling, "You'll be fine. You've got a leg up with what you've done, let's just see what it was you used... Now, tell me, during your last consultation we'd went over some of the 'cheat words' to focus things, and I remember you choosing 'drum' as your focus. Why 'drum'?"

Jonathan thought it over, rolling his head back on the table.

"It's what I always hear, I always hear drums when it comes up," he decides, "And that's not the word that worked. Um, it's a funny one."

He pronounced 'droim' for the doctor, who tilted his head.

"That sounded like Gaelic... Gaelic for 'drum'." he mused, "Interesting, and will be kept in mind for later note... Well, enough chatter, beginning examination."

Johnny grimaced uneasily as Jekyll took out a stethoscope before pulling on rubber gloves. Why would a ghost put on rubber gloves?

"This isn't gonna hurt, is it?" the human asked uneasily.

Jekyll grinned, looking down at his specimen.

"Not hardly." he replied cheerfully, finished pulling on a glove with a snap.

"Oh." For a moment Johnny is relieved, then tenses again in his restraints, "W-wait, doesn't that mean it wi—"

"Stop asking questions if you don't want the answers," Jekyll muttered impatiently, "Beginning examination."

Johnny's continued attempt to question is lost and confirmed with a scream as Jekyll phases his hand into the handprint on Johnny's skin up to the ghost's wrist...

. . .

Mavis likes the occupied buildings, too, of course, but prefers avoiding them now.

Humans, real, natural humans, always will fascinate her. But then she thinks of Ellie and the family back at the abandoned recycling center, all the bad things, the scar in her face, and she just wants to avoid the humans to keep that stuff at bay. Just watch, no more huge interaction, and she'll be fine. All she wants is Johnny, anyway. She wonders how he's doing, and feels excitedly nervous about her own plans. Okay, she's at what looks like a shopping strip in the street, now to find fabric stores...

. . .

"This isn't so bad, is it?" the doctor commented, as his hand shifted through the human's chest, "It's not physical pain you're feeling, by the way."

"It's. F-freaking. Cold." Johnny gritted out, unable to move an inch thanks to the restraints.

"You just think it's cold, now stop squirming. Hmm. Elevated heart rate and respiration. I don't suppose it'd be too much to ask for you to calm down a little?"

"I have a good imagination, then, and heck if I'm gonna calm down―what are you doing?!"

"I'm attempting to analyze your spell," Jekyll said idly, adding a methodically vicious twist to shut the boy up, "To make a proper diagnosis of what precisely is going on here. This'll benefit us both, so it'll be in your best interests to let me work. Now..." Jekyll's hand sifted past the mark, "This print here marks the application point―are you listening? Whatever, that doesn't matter. She applied the spell here, simple, not too messy, bet you hardly felt a thing, the crafty old cow. But from what...I'm...feeling..." Jekyll frowned, ignoring the human's protests, "Its original design was to be 'one-use' only, to protect you from something...big..." He finally looked at Johnny, who was in a cold sweat, eyes slightly rolling up into his head, "Any comments? Observations?" He snapped the fingers of his free hand in Jonathan's face, making the young man blink rapidly, "Data, data, data, kid, work with me here! What 'big thing' did this protect you from?"

Johnny's mouth worked soundlessly for a moment, and Jekyll watched stripes rise like a war paint tattoo from under his skin. Interesting.

"B-bomb," the human stuttered, "Might'a been a bomb? Explosion? The world rolled over. Can I go home now?"

Jekyll blinked, even as he looked to where the stripes were rising and writhing, outlining the handprint. Interesting...

"You were within the radius of an initial nuclear blast," the doctor murmured. "And you still live, and you're relatively whole and healthy. Someone wanted to keep you alive, for some reason. Hm. I appear to be disturbing your spell. It reacts to your sense of vulnerability, at first glance, or sense of pending death. But where is it centered? And what...?" he peered closer at the strips of blooming, subcutaneous red, a fascinated grin beginning to spread across his face, "Oh, this is interesting! It appears to be using your own blood to invoke itself! What would happen if I cut one of those stripes open? What would that blood do?" The scalpel was already in his free hand as he spoke, but then he tilted his head, "But...if it's utilizing your blood, then that means its nesting place must be," his hand phased through Johnny's chest cavity to clench, "Here?"

Two things happened.

First, Johnny screamed, his body spasming against the restraints as the runes on them began to glow and cause the duct tape to nearly liquefy.

Second, there was one, single one-two beat like a drum that was so loud and heavy that the room shook with a shockwave, rattling the walls and loose objects in cacophony.

BU - PU-U-UM-UM-um-um...!

After the reverberations died away, Jekyll blinked slowly from where he was literally plastered against the wall, the scalpel falling loosely from his hand. His other hand, the one that he'd been using for the inspection, was a mangled wreck, the spiritual latex glove an oozing mess dripping from it.

"It bit me." the doctor giggled, before slowly peeling from the wall to soundlessly land hard on his face, "Ow."

He got up, slowly picking up pieces of himself to put himself back together, wrenching with a wince.

"Ow. Okay, I think we can definitely confirm that it's in your heart, given its manifestation and that reaction. 'Drums', heh, that was quite the drum." he brushed himself off, paying no mind to the mess of his examination room. All sacrifices necessary for the sake of discovery. "And if I read that right, it has a base sense of sentience, at least enough to hate me, which should never happen to spells. This really is fascinating, Johnny, now could you tell me how that felt for―" Jekyll finally stopped when he looked properly at his patient, and blinked, "You?"

. . .

Jekyll circled the table carefully. The boy wasn't striped with 'paint' any more, but the handprint was fully painted with red, slightly oozing with it in fact, as a quick swipe indicated. Jekyll wiped his hand off and opened the young man's eye to check. The eye stayed open when he let it go, the eye staring blankly up at the ceiling, the pupil dilating lazily as the ghost watched. The doctor waved a hand in front of the patient's face, before closing the eyelid again.

He held up Johnny's wrist to check for a pulse, but when he let the arm go it stayed up, like a positionable doll. Jekyll had a bit too much fun with this, but then slapped himself, positioning the man more reasonably.

He felt the wrist again, and then the chest, and then stood back, looking down blankly and saying the first word that came to mind.

"Whoops."

He promptly made an about-face, gesturing, "Nurse, fetch me a defibrillator and a―" he stopped, "Oh, wait, that's right, I don't have a nurse yet." He shrugged. Not letting this stop him, he continued, "Dolores, do you remember where I put the defibrillators?!"

He hoped the young man's lady love wouldn't catch on too quickly. It'd be terrible to be hunted for manslaughter, or worse yet, sued for malpractice.

Still, it'd be interestingly ironic if that protection spell caused the boy to die from heart failure of all things.

"You'd better hope for your sake that you haven't killed him..." a voice murmured.

Jekyll turned back to see a figure suddenly standing over the examination table, and the ghost slowly grinned.

"Well, look what the black cat dragged in," he chuckled, but his eyes were cold and bright as he held a scalpel again, "Dropped by to see little ol' me?"

"No," was the reply, as It leaned over to see the handprint ooze blood, almost ignoring the ghost, "I'm just wondering what you thought you were doing to my investment..."