Logs:Untouched by Death
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| RL Date: 16 August, 2011 |
| Who: Hypatia |
| Type: [[Concept:{{{type}}}|{{{type}}}]] |
| What: Murders don't hold the same intrigue for Hypatia anymore. |
| Where: Apprentice Dorms |
| When: Day {{{day}}}, Month {{{month}}}, Turn {{{turn}}} ({{{IP}}} {{{IP2}}}) |
| Mentions: K'del/Mentions, Seani/Mentions |
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| Murder was something that had always fascinated Hypatia -- in the abstract. Death was something she was comfortable with, relaxed around. She found it easy to discuss. Her mystery-tuned brain loved the challenge of exmaining a body to try to find the cause of death just as much as she enjoyed piecing together the cause of a living person's illness and making it better. Knowing why someone died made their loved ones better, and maybe even made all of Pern better, but it was also just interesting to Hypatia. All pathology was. Its presence, its inner workings. The whys behind the whats. And the pathology of death, and why people died, and why people were killed by other people, and how -- that was a pathology, and so it interested Hypatia. Abstractly. When she first heard there had been a murder, it was after she had knowing something was wrong. She had seen the chaos at the hatching party, the Weyrleader's abrupt departure. When the word 'murder' first settled on her ears, Hypatia thought that later she'd be excited. That she'd find some way to be involved. Initially, she was intrigued, but once the dust settled on her mind she wasn't really fascinated anymore. She was really kind of ill. The horrors of death itself was something that had never seemed a horror to her, something that had never touched her. She saw death often. She was raised with the spectre of death -- Haley's -- all around her. She pushed every inch of her parents' overportective (and indeed almost pathological) nature born of fear of her own death. The air of fear of the end of life around her childhood home, in her family, had driven Hypatia to her current work. That spectre of death had inspired her. And the idea of her own death still didn't bother Hypatia. But this idea of murder, the death of one human by another, not a mercy killing but a true cold blooded act -- it bothered her in a way she was almost ashamed of. These sorts of things weren't supposed to get to her. She was known for being sort of morbid and grisly. People spoke to her as if they were expecting her to be utterly delighted by the fact that someone was murdered right there in the Weyr, by the scandal of it being the Weyrleader's weyr -- and it made her sick. That reputation had never bothered her before, even if gossip about people's deaths always had and she'd always snapped at gossips. Now she had no energy to snap at gossips. Now she said nothing. She hadn't expected murder to bother her the way it did. She'd heard of other murders in her lifetime, and those had only gotten to her the way the death of her brother did -- almost as an inspiration to work harder. They had been the most terribly interesting stories. The things she'd heard about attempts on the life of Fort's current Lord had gotten her more interested in toxins. She had dreams of writing a manual of poisons -- for avoidance purposes. For the cataloging of antidotes. For Healer use, of course, to treat people who may have consumed something strange; it would make them faster to identify and potentially faster to fix, as well as faster to contain. Not, of course, to encourage poisonings (though I'han, once she told the greenrider of it, did accuse her of that). It had inspired her. But it had been far away. As had every successful murder she had heard about -- far away or long ago. She loved murder stories. She hadn't seen K'del's face in those murder stories. Hadn't known about the detail of a child's toy being involved. Hadn't been living in a climate conflicted by the influx of strange, potentially criminal refugees that were now Impressing all their dragons, including the newest queen. Hadn't known about the blood on the floor of someone's home, unremovable. The whispers of who the woman was and how she had died. What she had been doing. Where she had come from and what that meant (and some whispers of whether it was even a crime -- Hypatia may not have been the exiles' greatest sympathizer, but that was taking it too far). Whispers that the Weyrleader had killed her, though everyone knew that was really impossible. Sensationalizing always bothered Hypatia, but it had never before bothered her like this. This murder had shaken up her home. And for the first time, it had really hit home for Hypatia. She didn't feel so untouched by death anymore. |
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