Nadezhda Serenskaya Snape

Nadezhda had received a phone call from a very weary-sounding vampire. Normally when this happened it was a case of ringing up Greta Helsing and telling her to go on up to the Moon and do something involving yelling and inhalers, but in this case...no. Personal involvement seemed on the menu.

She had sighed, put down her paperwork, and nipped out through the network of portals to London in late January (she'd forgotten how depressing the city was with winter-grime all over the pavement and that white diffused sky that promises but never delivers snow) and made her way to H.D. Hollister's. Night was still heavy in the alleyways and shopfronts, and she is glad to duck into the pub and relax at the warmth.

She asks after the boss.

....well, that was the saddest, sweetest abduction I've ever experienced. Not like when Crane did it. That was neither sad nor sweet, that was a killing offense.

Oh, poor Marginatus. Um. I think I learned something, though: it sucks horribly to love and not be loved in return, but it also sucks to be loved and not love back.

I think I'm going to try and make soup out of the giant barnacles we cleaned off the Semillon rack. To distract myself.

Come on over and be drunk and disorderly in style.

Due to amusing little antics, RL issues, and some complicated stuff that has been going on for a while now, N is now confidential.

Please do not take this as a personal slight, anyone. I have been meaning to do this for some time.

Nadezhda has been home from the Prince estate for a day and a night now, and while still trying to shake off whatever ungodly perversion of flu she managed to acquire, she is amazed at the calmness with which she has dealt with this latest upheaval in her life. The conversation with Thunder still needs to be had, and she isn't looking forward to that, but in general she feels remarkably stable.

She is currently lying on the couch in her office with a glass of brandy and the latest issue of The Lancet, trying to get up the strength to go and check on some of her experiments in her corner of the Nexus labs.

She's set wards and wards around the lab, and cleared everything other than the single exam table, cushioned and gleaming beneath the surgical lights. Nobody is around. If anything horrible goes wrong, she and Solice are the only ones who will be hurt.

*She paces. It's been hours, now; not like this was unexpected, but she still paces. Her cigarette is burning unheeded between her fingers, and her hair has extracted the sticks she's tried to put it up with and is trying, uncoordinatedly, to play air drums with them.*

[locked to Snape]

She appears with him in the pleasant clutter of her office, flopping into the chair behind the burn-scarred desk and lighting a cigarette.

"Sit down, would you? You look like a Lethifold's laundry. And have a drink."

*Nadezhda is sitting at the desk in her office, absently writing up notes on the General's progress, head resting on her hand, a cigarette smouldering gently in the grip of a tendril of hair. A lot has happened in the past few days, not all of it bad.

Leela's results have finally come back, and the nature of Hippolyta's particular latent ability has been revealed--and interestingly enough the effects of that latent ability when combined with the standing thaumic field of the Nexus--and of Nadezhda's flat--have already begun to be noticeable. Why is it, she thinks, that when Decepticons get turned human, they get turned into distressingly sexy humans?

That's not the only thing. And Smoky's been over a few times--she finds herself getting more attached to the djinni by the day. Except for the minor conflagration in the kitchen, it's been fairly smooth sailing. And her meeting with Osborn has borne stranger fruit than she could have imagined.

Both she and Hippolyta are now apparently capable of making cookies, since the kitchen people have come and gone and replaced the old electric cooker with a stainless-steel gas affair that looks as if it could exceed the speed limit, and the rest of the kitchen has been upgraded to match. She is particularly impressed by the nifty glass-fronted champagne refrigerator, which makes her feel somewhat like a rock star.

The place, in general, looks a little more spiffy than it normally does. Its occupant at this point is a bit of a letdown in terms of style: she's wearing a man's white Oxford shirt and a pair of dark jeans, toes with chipped green varnish on the toenails happily sunk into the carpet. She looks, in fact, like a woman who is not undergoing metric tons of angst.

At least not at the moment.

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I won't be able to post during the days any more. (damn coworkers and their lack of ability to balance work and messing about on music-download websites.)

Apologies to all with whom N is/was roleplaying. I'll still be available in the evenings and weekends. I'm hoping this is a temporary thing, but if it isn't, a) grr, and b) sorry.

Nadezhda et al.

Nadezhda took the distilled water from her flatmate with an odd expression on her face. "Thanks," she said, thoughtfully, and looked from Hippolyta to the tests.

"I want to run them again a couple more times," she said, "but it looks like the first set of results were way off base. The second lot show a possible on the virus, but a clear negative on the hormones. This is extremely weird."

Her suspicions were solidifying, but she wanted to make assurance doubly sure before she told anyone.

Nadezhda smiled absently at the fading chalkmarks on the door which now led straight from Smoky's room in the Temple to her flat, and went to make up the spare bedroom. Hollister had been warned; Hollister would just have to keep her noisier nocturnal activities a little more quiet for a while.

She'd blocked off the more dangerous parts of the flat when Hippolyta had been six, yesterday, and she was reasonably satisfied with the safety of the place. Going into the kitchen, she put on a kettle for tea.

Nadezhda couldn't help smiling. It felt odd, as if she was using muscles she didn't know she had. But the night had passed unremarkably, and the morning had treated them all well, for once.

And she had called for help from a comrade, and been assured of receiving it. There wasn't really anything quite like the feeling of having friends, she realized. Most of her life she'd had acquaintances. It was an interesting change.

She was catching up on a bit of desultory cleaning--doing some of the past three days' worth of abandoned dishes, for example. Now that she knew he would wake again, most of the fear had leached out of her, replaced with basic ordinary background-level worry.

Nadezhda had gone to bed at last, the Balvenie forming a pleasant amber cloud of insulation between her and reality, and had dreamed strange and not entirely unpleasant dreams of chasing something unseen down a maze of glittering circuitry, under a purple sky; of copper deserts baked beneath the blowlamp of a noonday sun, and of oil, thin and fragrant; she dreamed she was burning hazily in the sun, and that somewhere stars were shifting slightly in their paths through the vacuum, following commands given by a towering figure with a voice like the thunder of dark oceans.

She woke up and wished immediately that she hadn't, because the combination of thaumic resonance and ordinary garden-variety hangover was making her feel as if the top of her head was unscrewing itself. At least she was no longer glowing, she noted with some relief.

Slipping out of bed, she pulled a grey silk caftan over her head and twisted the rope of hair into a knot. The flat was silent except for the faint beeping of the monitors; not even murmured conversation drifted through the passageway into the surgery and office. I wonder where they went?

In the surgery she stopped, just inside the door, and stared. Where yesterday there had been tangled and half-melted wreckage, new and faintly gleaming limbs--almost identical to the original--caught the green light of the monitor telltales along their sharp and curving contours. The chest armour had not yet been replaced, she saw, but there were signs that Zhilbar and Max had worked their magic on some of the cerebral connections--the cranial dome of his helmet looked new, and she dimly recognized some of the delicate tools lying around as being used for complex neural-net interfacing.

By the Seven Perfect Gods, she thought, and then almost immediately Now...what?

She checked the monitors and the drip feeds out of habit; all the monitors were green across the board, and she could feel as she got close to him that the healing she'd done was beginning to progress on its own. Nadezhda had no idea how many kilothaums she'd poured into him over the past two days, or what the long-term results would be, but she thanked whatever had been watching over her that it seemed to've worked.

Much of the organic damage that can be repaired has been repaired now, and Nadezhda--glowing like a small and rather hairy spent-fuel rod--steps back now to allow the technological experts to take over. She remains in the room, however, unable to take her eyes from the proceedings.

Anyone who happens to be watching Nadezhda's surgery and ensuite office, and who has been there before, will notice that several of the more obviously magical items are either missing or have been reduced to a fine grey dust that smells strongly of burned tin. The jeweled firecrab egg, for example, is gone, as are three of the oldest and most vocal of the books of magic; her cherished vial of Veritaserum is full of dust, and the rutilated quartz crystal ball has cracked right down the middle.

If one then goes through into the surgery proper, where the evidence of last night's urgency remains in the mess sprawled over every ordinarily-neat flat surface, and has a look at Nadezhda herself, one might make an interesting connection. She is again bent over Grievous' open and defiled chest, both hands surrounded by the red light of whatever esoteric healing sorcery has so far been of use to her, but she is also at the center of a very faint blue-violet glow which vaguely and erroneously resembles Cerenkov radiation. It is in fact the effect achieved when light rays scatter as they pass through a very strong magical field.

Behind the blue glow her eyes are shut and her hair quiescent. She has been here all day, threading new capillaries through regenerated tissue, restructuring alveolar walls, forcing bronchial lining mucosa to regrow their cilia, reactivating islets of Langerhans, beginning to repair the shreds of the synthflesh sac that serves him for an abdominal wall. She has not paid attention to anything beyond the cells she is repairing; she has no idea how much time has passed.

In silence, the surgery prepares itself, equipment flickering to life, syringes and drug bottles dancing across the lab benches to arrange themselves on a trolley beside the table; the great overhead lamp stutters once and flares on.

Hollister's moving in. Which I'm really rather ungracefully happy about, given the fact that it's twice as hard to get maudlin and depressed when one is drunk if one has company. Plus, I've got loads of room and she needed to get off that tin can about four months back, to be honest.

I've cleaned out the second of the bedrooms--which has its own study/living room attached to it--and removed some of the more egregious witchy things from the kitchen and common area. As far as I know neither of us can cook worth a damn, but then again that doesn't really matter, with the takeaways down Curzon Street and the fact that neither of them are actually going to be using much in terms of money, what with my thoroughly illegal ability to convince people I've paid them when I haven't.

Still no word from him. I doubt I'll hear from him again, and I'm still Not Thinking About It. Seems to be working, sort of. No more drunken weeping jags.

And I do have to thank Osborn for giving me something else to worry about. Despite the unpleasantnesses consequent on slipping into certain rather well-locked libraries with a notebook and a jangling collection of warding amulets, I think I've got some decent information on the care and feeding of young djinn, and it's certainly taken my mind off things.

Only Derek and Jun can see this, right? Nyah.

*has cleaned up the lab and exam area comprehensively: stainless steel and pale formica gleam under the lights, which she has carefully calibrated to be faintly pink rather than stark blue-white; she is wearing her lab coat and arranging things on the bench, in sterile gloves*