Sera looks around, somewhat stunned at the former corpse-room’s… lack of corpses. The faint smell of smoke gives away some of what probably happened, and the small amounts of soot and ash on the far end of the room give away more, but the fact remains that the room is clean, more or less. She eyes the bookshelf, something that wasn’t there when she stormed out last time she was here. Sera came in here when trying to find Vey, to ask for Vey’s help in changing her bandage, or maybe even taking it off, but finds the skeleton sitting in its chair, staring upwards at the stone ceiling, oblivious to her.
She wonders if maybe she should try and surprise it, or just start talking, or what, but decides against all of her potential ideas and just sits down at the chair a few feet away from Vey at the table. She mentally goes over the contents of the papers in front of Vey, and notes how few blank ones there are left, and she begins to piece together what might have Vey troubled to the point of ignoring her. Her ears twitch as she notices that the blue pinpricks she saw in Vey’s ‘eyes’ earlier aren’t present right now, which probably means that Vey’s ‘eyes’ are closed right now. Her first instinct is to try and test this theory, so she turns and tries to lift up her left hand to just above Vey’s skull, but finds Vey’s hand around her wrist before she manages to get her elbow above her shoulders.
“You looked like you were thinking about something, I wanted to know if your eyes were closed.” Sera explains her thought process immediately, and Vey releases her hand the moment she stops talking. She notes that Vey hadn’t been even remotely forceful, only doing enough to stop her from moving her body awkwardly, but not enough to actually restrain her.
“I don’t have eyes?” Vey’s voice sounds about as confused as its artificial tone can, and Sera lightly chuckles, before the sharp pain of her breath pulling at the wound silences her.
“You sort of do… S’like two little points of light in the blackness of your eye sockets, they move around when you’re focusing on stuff…” Sera tries to explain her theory on how Vey sees things, to which Vey immediately turns to face her head-on.
“I’m focusing on your eyes right now, what do they look like?” Vey asks, and Sera can indeed see the two little points of light exactly ‘looking’ into her eyes.
“They are definitely pointed at my eyes right now.” Sera answers, and she watches as the two points shift around in the sockets to be slightly off-center two the lower right side.
“I’m focusing on your shoulder now, what do you see?” Sera wonders if Vey really hadn’t considered this stuff before, since it sounds genuinely intrigued.
“The two little dots are definitely reflecting what you’re focusing on… Those dots are probably why my instincts can still tell when you’re looking at me, even when I’m not close enough to you to actually see them.” Sera adds another theory on top of her confirmation of Vey’s focus, and she sees the skeleton nod to itself.
“I can’t actually close my ‘eyes’ as you call them, but I can stop focusing on looking at specific things, so the blue dots you see represent what I’m focusing on…” Vey’s voice trails off, and Sera sees the dots vanish entirely, when something clicks.
“Just now, as you stopped speaking, they disappeared, you were thinking about something, right?” Sera begins to feel a little excited at this development, a little bit like… Like I’m useful.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“I’d like to borrow you for more tests on that later, but what did you come in here for now?” Sera freezes, she’d completely forgotten that the actual reason she was here was to embarrassingly ask for help with the bandage, so she simply points to her right shoulder with her left hand. “Alright, let's go back to your room, I’ll take a look at it.”
Sera mentally sighs in relief as they walk through the hall, and she recognizes for a second time that there is significantly less undead now than there was before, and she steps over the pool of dried blood in the doorway to the ritual room. Her dried blood. She realizes with a shiver, but Vey’s footsteps approaching behind her reminds her to keep moving instead of thinking about it. She tries sitting down on the edge of the bed, but Vey stops her, and guides her to the center of the room with one of its skeletal hands at her bare sides. Its bones are cold, but not cold like corpses… Why? The more she thought about it, the more it felt weird that she wasn’t colder overall, she is still naked from the waist up but for the shoulder bandage, and yet she doesn’t have the goosebumps or occasional shivers she used to have when naked in the dungeon.
She quickly loses the ability to form such coherent thoughts as the embarrassment of Vey’s hands gently unwrapping the bandage and the occasional mild pain and discomfort from the injury beneath dull her mind. She winces as some of Vey’s clawed fingers brush against her skin harmlessly, anticipating a scratch that never comes. Once the bandage is removed, she tilts her head down to look at the injury for the first time, and she sees that Vey is also fully focused on it. It is still definitely a puncture wound, but it's clearly one in the later stages of fully healing now, it isn’t dried blood or blood clots anymore, but actual scar tissue and skin filling out the damaged portion, with only a small glimpse of the red flesh beneath in the very center.
Since it’s that far along in the healing process, Sera realizes that the sharp pain she feels when she tries to use her right shoulder is probably because of the bone being bruised, not because of any permanent loss of functionality. She also feels that it is probably ok to wear actual clothes over the bandage now, but before she can voice her opinion to Vey, she finds the skeleton examining more than just her injury.
Vey has decided to take this opportunity to compare both of her shoulders, the injured and uninjured, and compare them to its expertise of skeletal structures. In Vey’s opinion, the ‘fleshy’ part of the wound was the most serious aspect, and if it is healing as well as it appears to be, there is no issue, but seldom does Vey have an opportunity to examine Sera’s body while she is standing as opposed to laying, and naked as opposed to clothed, so it attempts to make use of this by tracing a finger up her humerus, to the joint at her left shoulder, across her clavicle, then gently back to her other shoulder, and down her right arm.
Vey notes Sera’s face appears to be strained, and her cheeks are very red, but as she hasn’t said anything yet, Vey continues. It circles around to her back, and compares her shoulder blades to the knowledge it has of fleshless skeletons, then puts both of its hands on Sera’s body, one on either side of her neck, and gives voice to the test it wants to perform on the elf.
“Try and lift your arms to the side, stop at the point it starts hurting on either side.” And at Vey’s instruction, it sees her arms start to rise. Her left arm makes it to being about level with Vey’s hands, but her right only makes it about half of that distance. “Repeat that test, but this time I will put my hands over your shoulders instead of your collar.”
--
Sera might’ve called what followed a physical examination, the type that she’d had to do for the healers at the temple when she turned fourteen, save for that Vey seemed to have no regard for her level of embarrassment, and seemed for more interested in learning how she works rather than taking any actual measurements of her health. She finally asked Vey if they could stop when Vey finally came back around to the front of her body. Answering questions and following instructions was straining enough with those cold hands touching her from behind, but the sensation plus the feeling of being watched was simply too much to bear when applied from a frontal angle.
She was somewhat thankful that after the ‘check up’ on her injury, as well as quite a few aspects of her muscular and skeletal structure that are completely unrelated, that Vey had allowed her back her shirt(actually, shirts plural, though Vey refused to tell her where it got more). Vey also began allowing her to do pretty much all of the same things she had been doing before that day as well, like cleaning the dirty furs, watching Vey research, and generally being bored, but at least now she could be bored and fully clothed, as well as mobile, as opposed to how the skeleton had been keeping her as of late. Progress is progress. She supposed.