Adrenaline Is Not Always Your Friend

[kiyakotari]

Yet another snake crossover bit.



“What happened?” Jian asks softly, neck bent so he can see her arms as he tends them, using alcohol from the first-aid kit Emberley gave him to clean the wounds from the bug’s mandibles – but not the puncture marks from Dance’s teeth. Wren told him to leave those as they were, to simply bandage them.

“I was about to code,” Wren answers, and Jian doesn’t look up, but his grip on her wrist tightens for a moment, and the liquid-soaked sponge in his hand presses into the gashes harder than before. Excess alcohol runs down her arm, drips in the dirt.

“The bug’s venom,” she continues after a moment. “I think it was a paralytic of some sort, a neurotoxin. I think that when my system wasn’t able to neutralize it, my body started overloading on adrenaline instead, trying to counteract it.”

Jian nods, head still bowed. “And now? How are you doing now?”

“Shaky,” she replies without any hesitation. “I can tell I’ve overtaxed myself more than I usually do when I use…the boost…and I’m going to feel it for a while. But I’m doing better already. The feeling is starting to come back into my hands, and my vision is improving. My pulse is starting to get closer to normal.”

“I think,” Jian says calmly, voice pitched low to make it harder for their new acquaintances to understand him, “that when we get back to HQ, you should tell Laith about this new development, and have him check you out.”

Wren is silent for a moment. “I don’t like letting on more than I have to, about the alterations. Even to Laith.” It goes unsaid that telling Jian things does not count as ‘letting on’ anything.

“I know. But…this is obviously potentially dangerous. Three years ago, your body didn’t use adrenaline the way it does now. It didn’t…surge like this. I know it’s been useful, but-”

Wren nods. “Alright. I’ll talk to Laith.”

Jian doesn’t say anything else, finishes bandaging her hands and arms in silence. Wren is content to let him. When he’s done, he carefully packs up the remaining first-aid supplies and returns them to Emberley.

It takes three of them to get Dance back over to the Jeep. Wren wants to help, but Emma points out that she’d be more in the way than anything else, and she has to concede the point. In the end, she watches from the Chevy as Jian arranges things over in the Jeep, his instructions quick and sure and reminding her very much of the war, back when they were younger. A lot younger, she has to admit, watching him move and taking in the line of his back, the way he shifts when Dance vomits.

Emma is bouncing back and forth between the two vehicles, obviously concerned about Dance but also reluctant to leave Wren unattended, and Wren finally just gives in and stops trying to get the woman to go tend to her lovers. The fact of the three of them is pretty obvious, in Wren’s view. She suspected before, but after watching Dance’s tail as he woke up…well. There’s really no questioning it.

She thinks about Emberley, and the information that name brings to the forefront of her mind. She thinks about the story Darryl told her, years ago, about Eric Tseng and Martin Vail and the dustup with Zelin Corporation. She looks at Emberley, and wonders what, exactly, they have stumbled onto here.

Comments

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

I'm also wondering if the clash of venom and antivenom is like to set off new things in Wren's system.

Wren trying to make Emma leave her alone, that's cute!

I love the way Wren is watching Jian move around, how she thinks about him.

[kiyakotari.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think it's very likely. The adrenaline surges have been happening for the last couple years, I think. Getting more and more common when she needs the extra speed and strength. Kind of her body starting to push itself, test its own limits, so to speak. But I think this one - the venom really set something off this time, and the antivenom may have fixed it, but I think there may have still been some changes.

Wren spends a lot of time observing, even though it's not really a conscious thing. She analyzes a lot, and still thinks, even now, in a very dry, straightforward kind of tone.

I think Wren is a bit alarmed by Emma, and I'm not sure why yet. Not that she doesn't like her or trust her or something, but...alarmed.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

You mentioned that Emma sounds like a later augmented version of Wren. Maybe Emma's mods have clearly gone off in directions that Wren doesn't approve of, dislikes, or thinks are too extreme already?

[kiyakotari.livejournal.com]

Very possible! Maybe it's not even that complex - maybe it's just that Wren is recognizing those mods in Emma, and isn't sure how to respond to them. She's never met anyone else with the information storage/processing capabilities she has. As far as she knows, she is the first (and so far only) person whose modifications (experimental) went in that direction. Most mods in the WUNPO world have focused on the physical aspect of things, and anything else that happened was a side-effect. The facility that built Wren and Darryl was very outside the norm in expanding their work from the purely physical to the mental. And of course, in their world, all of it is still very experimental and not all that well received, and prone to all sorts of failures and unpleasant instabilities (this is why Wren is so reluctant to discuss her status as an altered human, because there's so much bad press and prejudice against them).

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Clearly somebody ignored the warnings and safeguards and charged ahead anyway, possibly in the same era, and opened the damn doors labeled, "DO NOT ENTER".
Typical. And probably while waving a smug flag of devotion to duty about it, too.

[kiyakotari.livejournal.com]

No kidding! The people who built Wren and Darryl were officially a non-governmental agency, but in reality they were funded (and run) by a branch subset of one of the WUN's programs. Darryl got...rather nasty, and took care of all their research he could find, but it's very possible that some notes survived somewhere, and became the fodder for a new generation of experimental subjects, which could have eventually given birth to Emma.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Which Wren certainly *knows* will piss off Darryl no end.
Makes me think Darryl (unless he decides to head for the hills!) is going to be right there in Drin's face demanding all the data he can give, possibly using techniques to provoke memory.
I also think Jian and Wrenn might be debating the risks of handing Dance and Emma over to Laith for some lab work.

[kiyakotari.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure Darryl is still around, actually. Getting a weird read there. He's out of contact, at least, at this point.

Remember, for this Wren and this Jian, it's been around fifteen years since the stuff happened with Zelin. For Eric and Emberley and crew, it's been maybe a year and a half. Some very strange temporal things happening, re the folding of reality.

Jian and Wren considering handing Dance and Emma over for lab work? I can see them snagging samples where possible, to send those over, but their style of investigation tends to be...well, they bend the rules a lot. Dance and Emma are people in their eyes, and unless those two do something to push them over the line into criminals, they're not going to turn them in. Both of them are pretty sensitive on the subject of humans being used for tests against their will, no matter how benign.

I get the feeling that, in the end of all of this, their official reports to their superiors are going to be very short, very circumspect, and not wholly forthcoming.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

It could be quite funny for the reader to be able to compare what happens to what they actually report it as later on.
I'm also thinking some of my story posts tend to be much more traditional-looking narrative, possibly not reportorial. They *look* like fiction, in spite of the use of present tense.

[kiyakotari.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's pretty much what I'm planning, with the WUNPO dossier. It'll be this kind of backwards view of the whole series of events, with some true information in it, but mostly incomplete or skewed in some way as to be nearly impossible to interpret correctly.

I think that the "traditional narrative" part is a good thing, as far as the tone of the writing itself. Obviously we're experimenting and playing around with a lot of this, but it's still a story that we're telling. It shouldn't read like reports - unless we're presenting a section AS a report, which is totally different.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Oh good--I was a little worried that the traditional narrative third-person thing- might seem a bit fuddyduddy. I've been keeping it a fairly tight shoulder-cam viewpoint, only what the narrator could observe.

[kiyakotari.livejournal.com]

Same here - I generally write a close 3rd person POV, restricting myself to the narrator's perceptions without actually going into 1st person. It's what I like to write, though I'll read bunches of other things.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

It would be fun to play with the results for Drin's samples.
I can see WUNPO tearing their hair out on that.