2019-05-08 - The first time's always the hardest.
Fresh off the bus, Baylee learns a valuable lesson about Gray Harbor (the hard way): This town fucking sucks.
IC Date: 2019-05-08
OOC Date: 2019-03-30
Location: Downtown
Related Scenes: None
Plot: None
Scene Number: 60
A Greyhound from Chicago to Seattle may not have been the wisest decision Baylee ever made. But, then, it seems like Baylee and wise decisions aren't all that well-acquainted, now are they? It takes days and days and days. Somewhere along the way, she makes a little friend - a guy in his early twenties, who might be a little smitten with her, but is also deeply stoned. He tells her how he's headed back to Seattle, where he's from, 'cause Chicago fucking blows. He also offers her some blow - cocaine, that is. Whether or not she says no, that's cool; he also offers to share some weed with her whenever the bus stops anywhere.
But the kid got off in Seattle, trying hard to get Baylee's phone number before their paths uncrossed forever. He gave her his number, anyway, in a folded piece of paper (that turns out to be a receipt from a gas station), and there's a joint in there, too. His handwriting is total chicken-scratch, but it says: hey call me sometime & here hope this helps you settle in
It's only two hours by real car from Seattle to Gray Harbor, but on the bus? It's a miserable four hour trip, and Baylee arrives at the bus stop downtown around three in the afternoon on a day that's appropriately gray and drizzling. That joint is burning a hole in her pocket, and it's not like it's illegal to smoke pot in Washington state. So the bus doors open, and no one's getting off here but her - everyone else is headed south down the 5 toward Portland and cities beyond - so what's it gonna be, Baylee? Time to smoke that bad boy and get acquainted with the new city?
The guy gets a number. But is it HER number? Only time will tell if he's brave enough to call it. Either way, blow and weed makes the trip go by a little better.
It doesn't even matter that she's a little strung out by the time she hits Seattle, the parting gift from the guy...what was his name? Who cares. He is now Guy. The parting gift from Guy is tucked away.
For later.
Later comes when she gets her bag, and it outside on the street, then she's looking around to find somewhere to tuck herself and light that joint up. It's been too long since the last line, and she knew that was a bad idea. Now the come down is going to be murder.
It's quiet right now. A couple of people are strolling in the adjacent park, but no one's really paying any attention to Baylee, so is anyone going to notice - or care - if she decides to light it up right here and now? The drizzle would probably dampen the smoke anyway, and there's just enough breeze that it would probably just dissipate anyway. So go ahead. Shoulder your bags, Baylee, and maybe try to figure out how to get from here to... a hotel? Somewhere to crash till you get your feet under you?
The bus stop has a little lean-to, even. It's the perfect place.
Plus, it's Washington fucking state. She could probably walk into the maternity ward, blow pot smoke at all the brand new babies, and the hippies would find some way to pretend that's fine, pot smoke is good for newborns.
There is probably a hotel, right? She probably prepared by finding one before getting on the bus from Chicago.
That'd be the responsible thing to do. But she fails at that a lot, and she huddles in the little lean-to, lighting the joint to start smoking it. While she's processing through the glories of just standing around smoking, she pulls out her phone to hunt for a ride and a hotel.
<FS3> Baylee rolls Composure: Success (8 7 5 5 4 4 1)
There is a hotel! It's super-trashy, but it's right down by the waterfront. Baylee might even have had the foresight to put it into her phone, which would tell her that it's only a short walk from downtown to Bayview, and from there to the Boardwalk. But her phone isn't telling her that right now. It's not telling her anything.
Right now, the only thing that seems to be telling her anything is that joint. And it's telling her that holy fuck! Turns out this weed is strong, like way strong. It hits her like a ton of bricks, dropping a fog over her brain so thick that she's actually dizzy. The world spins, the drizzle spins, the smoke spins, everything spins sickeningly around her. She doesn't puke, but only barely, and she may yet unbalance and eat shit on the sidewalk.
Stupid...fucking...phone.
Baylee hits it a few times, but then that weed hits her and with all the frace of someone who probably has ended up face down before she pitches herself to the side, and down. It's not the lightest of falls, but she ends up sitting instead of with a broken nose or chipped tooth, which is good enough.
"Fuck...What the bloody hell..." Baylee stares at the joint for a second, then squeezes her eyes closed as she starts to put her head down between her knees, trying to still the world that is spinning around. "Ugh..."
Around her, the first sense of something other descends, swirls around her where she sits on the sidewalk. Voiceless whispers manifest just beyond the range of her hearing, at first unintelligible, like too many people murmuring in a crowd, single words unable to be discerned. It's her mother's voice, "...just such a disappointment..." And her father's voice, "...not living up to her potential, and I simply won't have it..."
The voices of schoolteachers past - "Young lady!" - and her siblings, whispering worriedly - "Mum and dad are going to be livid!"
Doctors and their drugs to cure her addiction to drugs.
The boyfriend left behind in Chicago.
The kid on the bus.
Every voice she's ever heard in her whole life, and no amount of head-between-her-knees keeps them from pounding through into her brain.
Dimly, with shreds of sanity quickly threatening to fray, a question coalesces: What the FUCK was in that joint?!
That joint..that joint. It's going to be just too much, and she shouldn't be smoking it still, right? Drugs are what got her here, and instead of stopping she takes another hit from it.
But she starts to think better of it by the time her father's voice rolls back around, and that joint is thrown out into the street, "Fuck you."
A hand reaches for the wall of the little lean-to, starting to try and haul herself to her feet, "Fuck all of you. I'll show you." The voices get all the anger she's bottled up. Which isn't much. She's let it out plenty of things over the years, but that never seems to make it go away. "I'll show you."
Insisting on it, in fact, she tugs her bag onto her shoulder before she takes a step forward, the step careful in the way of someone that is almost 100% certain that the ground will move.
<FS3> Baylee rolls Spirit: Success (8 7 4 3)
The ground doesn't move. But the little lean-to... the wall... paint peels under her fingers, flecking off, and the metal beneath it grows rusty in a sickeningly visible way - something that should move so slowly as to be indiscernible happens visibly. The thing is aging in front of her, rust and peeling paint propagating outward from that point of contact where her hand touches metal.
The voices, they're all one voice now, blended into something monstrous. "You ruin everything you touch! Look, you're ruining this, and you just got here!"
And the cherry on the end of the joint hisses harmlessly out when it lands on the damp sidewalk. It's done what it needed to, served its purpose, FRIED HER BRAINS.
Baylee likes to imagine that she's a tough broad, she's been around the block. She has fought with crack heads over the last hit, and stolen from her family and survived. But the fact the paint peels away and the metal rusts right beneath her fingers is enough to make her scream a little. It's not super loud, but it is a startled sound as she stumbles away from the lean to.
"No..." Baylee shakes her head, glancing at her hands, then towards the lean-to, "I know this isn't real. This is in my head."
It's not a good look, talking to yourself in a new town, especially when you want to make a name for yourself in the right way. But there she is, shouting at nothing, her hands balled up into fists. "YOU'RE NOT REAL!"
<FS3> Baylee rolls Physical: Good Success (8 8 7 3 2 2)
"Okay there, crazy." That voice is real... isn't it? It's not a voice from her past, not all the voices from her past. Maybe it belongs to the guy walking his dog toward the park. Just a normal guy - right? Just out for a stroll on a damp day while someone is yelling at the bus stop. "This fucking town," he can be heard mumbling when he disappears around the corner.
Leaving her alone again. If he was ever even there. Maybe he wasn't real, and everything else is!
She balls up her fists. She screams. The paint-peeling metal wall of the bus-stop crumples, dents, like it's been hit with all the force of her denial. She can hear it bang and ding, the aged metal popping. And it feels so real, as real as the race of her heart, the strength with which she insists it's not happening, the way she can feel it crumpling in her stomach when the metal sheet dents and dings.
Her heart goes a million miles an hour, blood coursing. What if she has a... uhm... a thing! Whatever happens when your heart fucking bursts! What if she has one of those!
"I'm not crazy!" Right?
Baylee is usually pretty certain that she isn't crazy. But she's not entirely sure at this moment, because everything seems pretty fucking crazy right now. Insane, honestly. It's all really, really broken. She's broken! That's what is happening.
She really did hit the sidewalk, and now all of this is some kind of concussion dream. It makes sense....
Except for her heart, that is worrisome. Dropping dead the first hour she's in town would just be bad for business, so she starts to look around, heading for the park to see of there is anyone to ask about where the hospital might be in this one pony town.
Oh god, the park. The park with its carousel and the bright, bright lights. Everyone is staring at her and her dizzy, drunken steps. Mothers pull their kids close, and the guy with the dog whispers to someone he knows about "drunk fucking sluts" - and she's too far away to hear it, but she knows that's what they're saying.
"Hospital?" People keep repeating the word back to her like she's... well... crazy. Like it's some word they've never heard before, and then they just point across the park. Like, duh?
Tree-branches pop overhead when she passes beneath them, and droplets scatter her every time they move. But then they sway juuuust enough to part and she can see the sign, the sign everyone's been pointing to, on a tall building on the other side of the park: Addington Memorial Hospital.
It's what they always say. She tells herself that it is jealousy, but she knows the truth.
When the hospital becomes painfully obvious she heads towards it, steps uncertain, body leaning like the might just fall over and roll the rest of the way to the tall building on the other side of the park. But she moves forward, as fast as she can, heading for what is probably going to be a 5150 hold her first day in the new town. Which means she'll just move on when they release her in three days.
But at least she won't be dead.
<FS3> Baylee rolls Look Crazy: Success (7 4 3 3)
She goes in through the wrong entrance. Emergency is that way, the receptionist tells her, pointing down a long corridor full of fluorescent lights. The receptionist is so bored of telling people that, and she goes back to her normal job immediately, heedless of the crazies that wander in the main doors and get shuffled off to become Somebody Else's Problem.
The nurse at the emergency desk is equally busy, but she at least looks Baylee up and down before trying to stuff papers at her. But something gets through to that woman, some sense that there's no way this creature is going to be able to fill out anything, let alone hospital paperwork.
With a huge sigh, she rounds up an orderly and a nurse, and they try to ask questions at Baylee - questions that bounce off of her, questions like, "What'd you take? How much?" And they seem to be trying to get her to... go somewhere... a room... it's all very important, but she's still spinning, everything seems too dark, like when the sun suddenly passes behind a cloud.
The answers are probably not much help, since weed is very unhelpful.
She said that, right? It's hard to remember if she actually said it out loud. She thought it, though. Thought it. But she had to have said it, too.
Either way, if they are pushing her towards a room she tries to go there, she's not certain that she's moving very well at the moment, though. But she's putting her best foot forward, or trying to put a foot forward.
<FS3> Baylee rolls Glimmer: Success (8 5 3)
<FS3> Alex rolls Glimmer: Good Success (8 7 7 )
They want her to sign things. They want to know her name. They want to know what she took, miss? "Miss? What did you take?"
"Just page a doctor. She's high as a kite."
"Miss? Just sign here, okay? Just sign here and sit down." On this bed, and the nurse stays with her, watching her pensively, worriedly, until the curtain that makes this 'room' a space unto itself draws back again, and in comes...
...well, to Baylee, it's something new entirely. Maybe she's felt that kinship to someone else before in her life, that vague inkling that someone was special, that she was special, but this hits her as hard as that joint did. It's like a splash of cold water in her face, the sudden but certain sense that she's NOT ALONE and - perhaps more importantly - she's NOT CRAZY. Does she see it, or just feel it? Does she smell it, taste it, touch it? The clarity!
He says simply, "I'm Doctor Reyes. They told me you took something."
Baylee tries to sign, she really does. And she's really, really good at sitting on that...nope, she's not sitting. She's laying down on the bed now instead of trying to sit.
There isn't any further answers to what she took, not until the doctor walks in, and when he does there is relief that washes over her, "Weed...." Which is not usually strong enough to do something like this to a person.
<FS3> Alex rolls Composure (8 8 8 8 7 5 4 4 1) vs Baylee's Alertness-2 (7 7 6 6 5 5 4)
<FS3> Marginal Victory for Alex.
"Okay." Alex credibly believes that, just based on tone. He pulls one of those stools they have around hospitals toward this bed. The person that used it before him wasn't a fucking midget, though, so he has to pump the pedal to make it shorter, and the nurse tentatively approaches the bed while this is happening. Tentatively because drug-addled loons have a tendency to be flaily and dangerous, and she doesn't want to get cold-clocked while she's just trying to take Baylee's blood pressure.
Alex doesn't even have the benefit of a chart, so he just comes over with the stool - that he lowered but then didn't sit on - to take Baylee by the wrist. It's pulse-check time! "What's your name?" He talks very calmly, not condescendingly but... well, he's talked to a lotta fucking stoned nuts in his day; this is just a drop in the bucket.
"Baylee." It's a name. Right? It's not the full story, the full name. But he can tell she's not from around here, just that accent is enough to let him know that she is not from around here.
"I don't..." She starts, but the comes to a stop when the nurse comes over, and she gives her a narrow-eyed look, almost a warning look. But she's not flailing and trying to hit anyone, she even lets the woman take her blood pressure, but she certainly does stop sharing what has been happening. For whatever reason.
<FS3> Alex rolls Spirit: Good Success (7 7 6 2 2)
The nurse... the nurse isn't special. She's just a woman doing her job, going through the motions. She takes the blood pressure, she writes it down. She doesn't sparkle. But Baylee can still feel that the world has shifted somehow, broken into two halves, and people seem to have been forced into those two halves: On one side, there is the nurse; on the other side, there is her and there is this doctor.
And this doctor shares the (wow, that's super-elevated) pulse with the nurse, who adds it to whatever she's writing down, then he puts the stethoscope in his ears. "Okay, Baylee. I'm just going to listen for a second, and then we can talk. All I need you to do for me is take some deep breaths, all right?"
She can feel that it's not just the stethoscope. She can feel that he's doing something to her. It's not like the voices, not hateful and terrifying, just an inquiry that fires through her synapses, a question that tingles on her nerve endings: he wants to know what's wrong with her.
What is wrong with her?!
She doesn't even know at this point in time what is really going on with her life right now. But she does breathe when he wants her to, which probably means that she has to sit up while he's wanting to hear her breathe.
Oh that nurse, though. She's still fucking there. Baylee looks at her, frowning, "Bye."
<FS3> Baylee rolls Leadership (6 6 4 3) vs Tired Nurse (a NPC)'s 2 (8 6 4 2)
<FS3> DRAW!
<FS3> Baylee rolls Leadership (8 6 2 1) vs Tired Nurse (a NPC)'s 2 (8 7 6 5)
<FS3> Marginal Victory for Tired Nurse.
<FS3> Alex rolls Leadership (7 5 4 4 3 1) vs Tired Nurse (a NPC)'s 2 (8 6 5 2)
<FS3> Marginal Victory for Tired Nurse.
The nurse gives Baylee a look at her farewell, while she peels the blood pressure cuff off. She has no words for this mental patient, just a roll of her eyes and a retreat to the bedside, where she is so ready to start sticking this bitch with needles. Even when the shrimpy doctor asks, "Will you please give us a minute?" The woman is having none of it.
"We obviously need to run a tox-screen, doctor. She's clearly on something. I'll just go get Doctor Smith." Who we can all assume is Alex's boss and will come in here in a minute to swing his dick around irritably that they're not following whatever protocol is in this situation.
Leaving Alex to look at Baylee, in the relative privacy of a curtained off space, and ask, "Did you really take anything, or was it just...?" He thinks she thinks she's In the Know, obviously.
"Bitch."
Whoever Doctor Smith is, Baylee is pretty sure that she doesn't want to meet them. Which means she's trying to get to her feet again, frowning, "I smoked a joint. I'm not making this shit up...if it was fucking laced with something I don't know what it was. I just got off the bus, and I've ended up in this hell."
Alex sits on his stool, with his feet on the lowest rung, and a clipboard across his lap, giving him a place to rest the hands that he clasps atop it. The pads of his thumbs tap together a few times while he listens to that brief explanation. "Hmm," he says calmly.
The world is still broken. There's still a schism: Everything that happened to Baylee up to the moment that she got off that bus is on one side of this vast rift, and everything that's happened since is on the other. But at least now there are no whispers, no sense that something is fucking with her. Just this placid doctor who seems to be taking her at her word.
"We can check what you took, if you want. But I can tell you that you're fine. You're not on anything," to paraphrase the cunty nurse's assertion. "I'm going to ask you a few questions that might seem strange, okay?"
"I'm not crazy, either."
Baylee is very insistent of that, but she doesn't leave. Instead she just continues to sit on the bed, almost afraid that if she leaves this bed the whispers will come back. But if she doesn't leave, they might throw her in a room for crazy people.
Excuse Alex for one tiny smile pulling up the corner of his mouth. It's just for a second after she makes that assertion; he's only human, after all. But he puts it away quickly, nodding like he totally believes that, Baylee. Of course she's not. His questions are simple, and his asking of them is easy, like he's not pointing fingers or implying anything. "You said you just got off the bus. Did you arrive in Gray Harbor just before this," he nods to her in a hospital bed, the end of whatever it was, "happened to you?"
"Yes." Baylee replies as she reaches for her bag, starting to dig around inside it, looking for the ticket so that she can pull it out of the bag, offering it to him. It's proof, right? Proof that she just got here, and that she's not lying to him.
But it is also just a bus ticket. Maybe she got it from someone else.
Those heavy brows of his take a climb upward, getting stuck on their way across his forehead, while she's digging around in her bag. For a second, Alex looks back over his shoulder to the room outside the curtain, like maaaaaaaybe he's realizing that staying in here alone with Crazy wasn't his wisest decision. But oh good; it's just a bus ticket. He takes it from her, looking at it like it's totally relevant.
"So you got off the bus, and you smoked a joint, and...? What happened to you, exactly?" Better question, tacked on before he's done, "And has it ever happened before?"
"I got really fucked up from some laced ass weed." Which she's clinging to in order to avoid saying what else was happening.
But he said he believed her, right? She rolls her eyes, "I started hearing voices, the world spun around me and evidently when I touches the metal bus stop thing...it rusted. But I'm not. Crazy."
"No." Alex is just going to put the kibosh on the laced weed story right here and now. He shakes his head with a tinge of apology, like he's very sorry, but things just aren't that simple, poor child. The head-shake loses its apology when she insists she's not crazy, just affirms her assertion: he totally believes she's not crazy.
Hey, maybe he's crazy, too! He does feel a little off to Baylee, after all, so maybe it's just a matter of like finding like!
"And it's never happened to you before?" That was an important question, so he repeats it.
"No. I mean...."
Baylee pauses about that, thinking about it, then she shakes her head, "I've had bad trips before...and...But no. Nothing like this has ever happened before in my entire life. Never. I can honestly say that I've never touched anything and had it rust." But she doesn't say anything about voices. Maybe that bad trip was auditory.
Quietly, because there's nothing more than a curtain between them and all the prying ears in the hospital, Alex says just, "I can do it, too." He doesn't! But he could. (I mean, sometimes he can. Dice are iffy for him.) The point is: he shares this with Baylee and waits to see how the information lands, dark eyes all patient where they watch her.
Homeboy has bedside manner for days.
"Yeah. Okay." Maybe he is the crazy one. Maybe. She gives him this look that she is all kinds of not certain about what he's saying. But there is still something about him, and she looks like she might be reconsidering her doubt the a moment. She raises a hand up, thumb rubbing against her forehead, "I really need a cigarette....and this is all really crazy sounding. No offense, Doc."
<FS3> Alex rolls Spirit: Success (8 8 5 5 4)
There is something about him. First off, he's very pretty (if short), so let's just get that out of the way. But it's way more than that. And it's a thing that Baylee will notice when(if) she ever gets out of this hospital: there are people like him in this town. Not everyone - not the cunty nurse or the bitchy receptionist or the guy with the dog in the park - but they're there. She'll see them in the diner, on the boardwalk, crossing the street. The girl that runs the antique store. The guy that runs the B&B. The tattoo artist and the hairdresser. The boat-tour guy. They have that... thing... that she won't be able to put her finger on right away, but it sparks in her mind, like a word on the tip of her tongue.
And he's not lying. The bus ticket she gave him is clipped into the clipboard on his lap, and his hands are still over the top of it, laced loosely. Alex says placidly, "None taken, Baylee," and the thing rips in two, the unclipped piece caught by the hospital's air conditioning so it flutters off the clipboard and onto the floor next to his stool. "But I'm not crazy, either. And I'm not lying. If you've never noticed it before you came here? You will now."
He sounds - sorry. For her.
"Oh...great." Baylee looks thrilled by the fact that this will become something normal, now. She'll be crazy, and now there's no drying out and sobering up that'll get rid of this. But then that ticket just pulls apart under his hands. He didn't tear it, she can see that he didn't. Which just causes her to get off the bed, grabbing her bag, "Okay...whatever you just did..." She starts to take a step towards the curtain, looking uncertain and alarmed, "Since I'm not crazy and not dying...I'm going to leave now."
Alex should stop her. He should brace her for things. Warn her. But he only looks at her, with his kind and understanding eyes, and he nods slowly. "Okay," he says, swiveling on the stool so he continues to face her the whole time she starts to the curtain. "Do you want some advice before you leave?"
And go back out into the world with all its voices and its things that break when she touches them.
"Ugh...." Baylee isn't stupid. Despite all the stupidity in her life, and so she stops, her head tilted back before the turns towards him, "Alright, Doc. What's your advice?" Because right now, he's the only person that she's aware of that has any idea of what is actually going on in the world now.
Which is funny, because - out of all the characters right now! - Alex is so the least competent to be playing Obi Wan. But that's an aside.
This isn't strictly the advice part: "Take my card." He totally has one. Why else does he wear a spiffy doctor-coat if not to carry around things like business cards and spare pens (and to look important, but that's also an aside). Alex offers it out to her, pinched between index and middle finger.
This is the advice part, put with a look that hopefully impresses upon her the depth of the well into which she's fallen: "Be careful. There are terrible things - " He pauses, shaking his head minutely, a frustrated exhale through his nose. He's incapable of conveying the true gravity of this. "Just be careful, Baylee. If you need somewhere to stay, the bed-and-breakfast on Oak is pleasant. And the owner is," a drunk wretch, "not unlike we are. I don't know if there's safety in numbers, but it seems better than being alone. To me." He shrugs.
The card is taken, because right now he's the only lifeline she's got in the town that knows what is happening. Which is a frightening position to be in after the arrival that she had.
As for the actual advice part? She absently taps the card against her fingers, "I could use a place for a few days." Reluctantly, maybe. "Yeah, thanks...I'll go see this B&B out on Oak...Thanks, Doc. And I'll be careful. No more smoking pot for me." Even if there is really nothing the pot had to do with anything.
Is Alex going to get in trouble for this? For, like, not making her stay here and get her head checked? It's the ER, so people must stroll in here and then book out real fast all the time? Hmmm. "I don't think pot had anything to do with it," he shares. So if that was a joke? It went right over his head.
[Insert short-joke here.]
He just sticks with, "Good luck, Baylee." And looks really, really concerned on her behalf. Like how someone might look if they were sending, say, a kitten into a wolf's den. With a steak strapped to its back. And it wasn't just a wolf but a wolf riding on the back of a velociraptor. Who was also wielding a flamethrower.
tl;dr - the night is dark and full of terrors. 🙁
Into the velociraptor riding wolf den she goes.
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