Chapter 2: Help
A touch against his cold painful skin.
Sounds, finally. Voices closing in, perhaps.
The disturbing realization that something – fingers, most likely, but his sense of touch was broken enough right now that Vlad couldn't even tell if he was laying on a cold morgue slab, or under hospital sheets, so it all came to him as "something" without much more details except for the dull pressure – was tugging at his eyelids.
Light, finally.
He could – see.
Kind of. Everything was blurry, and the unpleasant feeling of a too-dry eye being forced into contact with air distracted Vlad from actually understanding what he was seeing for a moment.
A harsh light a flash of green shone right above him – but his body couldn't move, locked in rigor mortis place, and even if his instincts wanted to recoil, to flinch back, to get out of the light, Vlad could only be blinded, numbly aware of the touch keeping his eye open, allowing the light in.
Then the light moved away, and...
"He hasn't woken up since we've gotten him here?"
"No, Doctor Caparri. Doctor Jimenez says he should survive and wake up, but..."
"Hm. And that..."
A light push against something on his face, and Vlad felt a wave of pain – higher than the dull, repetitive, ever-present ache he'd been feeling since he'd become aware again, a cold dead burning acidic jolt – radiate from whatever had been touched.
He still couldn't powerless move, react, do anything at all.
Even his open eye wouldn't move to get a better look at the blurry figures standing over him.
Those who thought him alive unconscious, those he couldn't talk to or move to make them understand that he...
"...is why you wanted me to get a look at him, right?"
The closest figure moved away – just a bit, like they weren't, like she wasn't hovering over his frozen body anymore. She was still there, of course, he could still see her.
"Yes, Doctor. Maybe a dermatologist might do something about those rashes, so... It doesn't appear to be contagious, but it also doesn't go away. If anything I think it's getting worse."
Vlad wanted to speak up – to ask what were the symptoms, what the raw exposition to ectoplasm had done to him, what they intended to do about it, what could be done – but he couldn't even move his eyes.
If the doctor was a dermatologist, then something was wrong with his skin – and maybe that explained the pain he felt everywhere, because there was skin everywhere and all of it was getting corrupted like death and putrefaction a disease that nothing could stop antithetic to life itself.
But Vlad couldn't move, and Vlad couldn't speak, and Vlad could only feel the pain and the memories of death and the long passage of time as his awareness didn't allow him to actually be recognized as such.
The doctor and the nurse didn't notice he was conscious – how could they have?
he was like a corpse present but inconsequential
"What causes the luminescence?"
...Was whatever was on his skin rashes glowing? He could only think of one thing that would cause a glow in what Jack banzai!, Maddie and him had been using, and that meant...
That meant green pain death hurts help please ectoplasm was inside his body – infection cold toxic green eating at his skin, not merely exposition.
They needed to – to speak to Jack and Maddie these calculations aren't right and get them to take a look, to check what was going on. Who knew what putting death ectoplasm inside a living body would result in?
Vlad had to tell them – but his lips would not move, and his tongue would not work, and the doctor and nurse walked away, to where he couldn't even hear them anymore.